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November 17 - November 25, 2019
The data that we gather from our GPS sports watches makes this kind of thinking even more seductive: it encourages us to paint a simple picture of how and why our body moves through the world.
To their frustration, physiologists have found that the will to endure can’t be reliably tied to any single physiological variable.
endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”
This is why the psychology and physiology of endurance are inextricably linked: any task lasting longer than a dozen or so seconds requires decisions, whether conscious or unconscious, on how hard to push and when.
You judge what’s sustainable based not only on how you feel, but on how that feeling compares to how you expected to feel at that point in the race.
Instead, brain and body are fundamentally intertwined, and to understand what defines your limits under any particular set of circumstances, you have to consider them both together.
This plateau is your VO2max, a pure and objective measure of endurance capacity that is, in theory, independent of motivation, weather, phase of the moon, or any other possible excuse.
Your VO2max reflects your aerobic limits.
muscles contracting without oxygen generate lactic acid.
“There is, of course, much more in athletics than sheer chemistry,” Hill had cheerfully acknowledged,37 noting the importance of “moral” factors—“those qualities of resolution and experience which enable one individual to ‘run himself out’ to a far greater degree of exhaustion than another.”38 But the urge to focus on the quantifiable at the expense of the seemingly abstract was understandably strong.
ended up demonstrating that lactate threshold, the fastest speed you can maintain without triggering a dramatic rise in blood lactate levels, is a remarkably accurate predictor of marathon time.
“A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?”
starting in the late 1990s, a South African physician and scientist named Tim Noakes began to argue that this picture is insufficiently radical—that it’s actually the brain alone that sets and enforces the seemingly physical limits we encounter during prolonged exercise.
It took another two decades—and a handful of deaths—before the scientific community fully acknowledged the dangers of overdrinking during exercise.
the “central governor” theory.
First, the limits we encounter during exercise aren’t a consequence of failing muscles; they’re imposed in advance by the brain to ensure that we never reach true failure. And second, the brain imposes these limits by controlling how much muscle is recruited at a given effort level
the delicate balance between searching for food and conserving energy deep in our evolutionary past.
Noakes argued that physiologists’ focus on VO2max had “produced a brainless model of human exercise performance.”
In his view, the decision to speed up, slow down, or quit is always voluntary, not forced on you by the failure of your muscles. Fatigue, in other words, ultimately resides in the brain—an insight as relevant to motorcyclists as to marathoners.
The system Marcora used to measure perceived exertion was called the Borg Scale, named for Swedish psychologist Gunnar Borg, who pioneered its use in the 1960s.
Perceived exertion—what we’ll refer to in this book as your sense of effort—isn’t just a proxy for what’s going on in the rest of your body, he argued. It’s the final arbiter, the only thing that matters.
Recognize, Refuse, Relax, Reframe, Resume.
Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.
another cognitive process called “response inhibition”—the ability to consciously override your impulses.
The essence of pushing to your limits in endurance sports is learning to override that instinct so that you can hold your finger a little closer to the flame—and keep it there, not for seconds but for minutes or even hours.
That suggests that response inhibition really is an important mental component of endurance—and that it’s a finite resource that runs low if you use it too much.
Marcora’s idea, as he proposed back in 2011 at the conference in Bathurst, is that specially tailored cognitive challenges like the Stroop task, repeated over and over, constitute a form of “brain endurance training” that can give athletes an edge.
“Most of the people were saying they will die before they see a man running under two hours,” he admits when I ask what other runners in Kenya think. “But I think I will prove them wrong.”
For cyclists and other endurance athletes, though, pain is unavoidable, and how you handle it is intimately tied to how well you perform.
regular physical training, especially if it involves unpleasant high-intensity workouts, increases your pain tolerance.
“Pain is more than one thing,” says Dr. Jeffrey Mogil, the head of the Pain Genetics Lab at McGill University. It’s a sensation, like vision or touch; it’s an emotion, like anger or sadness; and it’s also a “drive state” that compels action, like hunger.
No one who had not done it could know what it was like.”
As Merckx would undoubtedly attest, top athletes are not immune to pain; they feel it like everyone else. But there were dramatic differences in pain tolerance:
it suggests that, at least in recreational athletes, pain tolerance is both a trainable trait and a limiting factor in endurance.
When Fausto Coppi, who set the record in 1942, was asked if he took drugs during his career, he said, “Yes, whenever it was necessary.” And when was it necessary? “Almost always.”
Without pain, in other words, they’re incapable of pacing themselves.
the “gate control” theory of pain,
The results suggested that the pain you experience in the extremes of sustained exercise is fundamentally different, from your brain’s perspective, from the pain you experience while dunking your hand in ice water.
Like a wounded soldier on a battlefield, or a kudu cornered by a hungry lion, athletes in the heat of competition exhibit a phenomenon called “stress-induced analgesia,” which enables them to ignore otherwise debilitating levels of pain.
doctors and pain researchers have concluded that pain is fundamentally a subjective, situation-dependent phenomenon.
critical power, which is the point beyond which your muscles can no longer stay in the sustainable “steady state” equilibrium
Trying to make a clean divide between “brain fatigue” and “muscle fatigue,” in other words, is inevitably an oversimplification, because they’re inseparably linked.
The results suggest that lactic burn isn’t literally the feeling of acid dissolving your muscles; instead, it’s a cautionary signal created in the brain by nerve endings that are triggered only in the presence of three key metabolites.
There is no limit more fundamental—to endurance, and to life itself—than oxygen.
scientists are learning to differentiate between when the body wants more oxygen and when it needs it,
His heart is beating every three seconds, and—worryingly—the urge to breathe has nearly disappeared. “You have to find the mental strength to continue,” he says. “I tell myself that if I feel pain, it means I’m still alive.”
the “mammalian dive reflex,”
The fact that people can dive to three hundred feet or hold their breath for nearly twelve minutes tells us that oxygen’s absolute limits aren’t quite as constrictive as they feel—that we’re protected by layer upon layer of reflexive safety mechanisms.
But if you strap a heart-rate monitor onto a seal, you find that its heart rate begins to plummet just before it dives into the water.
