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

by Alex Hutchinson

To their frustration, physiologists have found that the will to endure can’t be reliably tied to any single physiological variable.

This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance. How you get fit matters: you have to suffer.

The results, which remain highly contentious, showed that subjects reached higher VO2max values in the effort-based test than in the traditional test—an

Anxious people, he found, tend to overreact to negative stimuli, producing a distinct pattern of brain activity. Elite endurance athletes, on the other hand, display a completely opposite response pattern.

People have been shocking their brains for fun and profit since long before anyone understood what electricity was.

In 2013, physiologists Shona Halson and David Martin of the Australian Institute of Sport wrote an editorial in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance in which they argued for a distinction between placebos and “belief effects”—valuable opportunities to improve athlete performance, which should be enhanced and harnessed rather than suppressed.

In fact, Halson and Martin argued, the boundary between “real” ergogenic (performance-enhancing) aids and “fake” belief effects is much fuzzier than most people, even scientists, realize.

work. Sure enough, in one study, she found that simply saying “Here is your ball. So far it has turned out to be a lucky ball.” boosted golf putting performance by 33 percent compared to saying “This is the ball that everyone has used so far.”

Rigging the thermometer to display a falsely low temperature counteracts some of the endurance-sapping effects of heat.

The greatest endurance athletes in the world, I remind myself, share a trait with the eleven-year-olds in Dominic Micklewright’s pacing studies: they always have a finishing kick.