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

by Alex Hutchinson

all else being equal, the gold medal goes to whoever is willing to suffer a bit more than everyone else. Freund isn’t the only one to find that well-trained athletes can tolerate more pain; others have shown that regular physical training, especially if it involves unpleasant high-intensity workouts, increases your pain tolerance. But the link between what’s happening in your muscles and what you feel in your head turns out to be much more indirect than you might assume. “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. For athletes, the role of pain depends on how these different effects mingle together in their specific situation. Sometimes pain slows them to a halt; other times it drives them to even greater heights.