If you’re looking for the midpoint between the muscle’s role in hoisting a car and the brain’s role in running an ultra, this is as good a definition as any: that agonizing point, about 600 meters into an 800-meter race, where you’re holding nothing back but can feel yourself slowing anyway. Runners have a phrase for that feeling, though it doesn’t show up in dictionaries: to rig, as in “I thought I was going to win the race, but I started rigging on the final turn.” It’s derived from rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body after death, and it’s one of those words that perfectly capture an
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