Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

by Alex Hutchinson

those with the high-dopamine version of the gene were far more likely to respond strongly to the placebo treatment—further evidence that those who do respond to placebos aren’t merely imagining the effects.

the greater your interest in sports, the more superstitious you’re likely to be.

evidence that what psychologists call “self-efficacy,” or a belief in their own competence and success, altered their behavior in ways that became self-fulfilling, like the aggressive racing of Kenyan runners.

“You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can.”

Burfoot concluded, which is why his super-workout consisted of five times a mile as hard as possible, followed by your coach telling you to do another at the same pace.

Race against a 2-percent-improved version of yourself and you’ll surprise yourself, a 2017 study from French researchers found; race against a 5-percent-improved version and you’ll soon get discouraged when you realize you can’t keep up.

Deception, he writes, “is not central to the phenomenon—it just makes for compelling stories with surprise endings. What’s central is strong belief.”

earned, transferable belief—if he can do it, so can I—also plays out at the very highest levels of sport.

only humans can make the abstract leap to virtual competition:

Knowledge, according to some philosophical accounts, requires justified true belief. For athletes, the simplest way of acquiring justified true belief about your capabilities is to test them:

Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while

bioengineered sports drinks and so on—amount to minor tinkering compared to the more elemental task of pushing your mind and body in training, day after day, for years.

You can monitor your speed by feeling the sensation of the bike and the rhythm of the road as the world flows past, or you can look at the speedometer.

by checking your power meter before deciding whether to speed up or slow down when cycling, you’re inserting an extra cognitive step that relies on an imperfect external estimate of how you should be feeling, rather than on the feeling itself.

the single biggest piece of advice I would give to my doubt-filled younger self would be to pursue motivational self-talk training—with diligence and no snickering.

endurance challenges are somewhere between a hobby and an addiction, a form of grueling self-test that has no particular health justification.

when the moment of truth comes, science has confirmed what athletes have always believed: that there’s more in there—if you’re willing to believe it.