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August 26 - September 24, 2019
The limits of endurance running, according to physiologists, could be quantified with three parameters: aerobic capacity, also known as VO2max, which is analogous to the size of a car’s engine; running economy, which is an efficiency measure like gas mileage; and lactate threshold, which dictates how much of your engine’s power you can sustain for long periods of time.
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.”
What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
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.
Knowing (or believing) that your ultimate limits are all in your head doesn’t make them any less real in the heat of a race.
whether it’s heat or cold, hunger or thirst, or muscles screaming with the supposed poison of “lactic acid,” what matters in many cases is how the brain interprets these distress signals.
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.
human limits are, in the end, a simple matter of chemistry and math.
your brain forces you to slow down, long before you’re in real physiological distress.
the decision to speed up, slow down, or quit is always voluntary, not forced on you by the failure of your muscles.
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.
everything comes down to the perception of effort.18
the gold medal goes to whoever is willing to suffer a bit more than everyone else.
pain can be strangely satisfying to the highly motivated athlete.”
simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance; how you get fit matters: you have to suffer.
can you get faster by simply training yourself to better tolerate or block out pain?
All pleasure is alike, as Leo Tolstoy might have put it, but each pain hurts in its own unique way.
warm air is less dense and thus offers an aerodynamic advantage,
pain is fundamentally a subjective, situation-dependent phenomenon.
pain may serve a valuable function by telling you to stop and allow an injury to heal.
top athletes really push themselves to a darker place, and stay there longer, than most people are willing to tolerate.
“the end point of any performance is never an absolute fixed point but rather is when the sum of all negative factors such as fatigue and muscle pain are felt more strongly than the positive factors of motivation and will power.”3
double deca Ironman triathlon, which starts with a 47-mile swim, followed by a 2,200-mile bike ride and a 524-mile run, and takes about 20 days to finish . . .
in a long endurance challenge, the legs are merely unwilling, not incapable.
our brain protects us against our own excess—almost always.”
Top athletes, far from being immune to lactate, are actually able to recycle it into fuel more efficiently than lesser athletes.
“No one cares for the prospect that they might become a cabbage.”24
The right frame of mind, in other words, allows you to push beyond your usual temperature limits:
The human body is about 50 to 70 percent water, and it needs pretty much all of it.
while being thirsty virtually always indicates that you’re dehydrated, the concept of “voluntary dehydration” illustrates that, conversely, being dehydrated won’t always make you thirsty.
you can be “dehydrated,” at least in the sense that you’ve lost weight, without hurting your performance.
Avoiding thirst, rather than avoiding dehydration, seems to be the most important key to performance.
When it comes to quenching your thirst, perception—not just in your mouth, but in the cool flow of liquid down a parched throat—is, at least in part, reality.
not that you shouldn’t drink when you have the chance, but that you shouldn’t obsess about it when you don’t. “It’s one less psychological crutch,” he says, “to hold you back from a top performance.”
Endurance performance also depends on what types of fuel you have available, where it’s stored, and how quickly you can access it.
the fitter you are, for example, the greater the proportion of fat you burn at any given speed. (That’s simply because maintaining a given speed gets easier as you get fitter.
over the marathon distance, running at 2:45 pace relied on 97 percent carbohydrate fuel, while slowing down to 3:45 pace reduced the carbohydrate mix to 68 percent.
your liver, for example, can store 400 or 500 calories of glycogen for use throughout the body, compared to about 2,000 for fully loaded leg muscles.
Kenyan runners, who currently hold 60 of the top 100 men’s marathon times in history,
Another 35 times on the top-100 list are held by Ethiopians;
the brain relaxes its safety margin when it knows (or is tricked into believing) that more fuel is on the way.
your brain is looking out for your well-being in ways that are outside your conscious control and that kick in long before you reach a point of actual physiological crisis.
“Nutrition is a cyclical science,” Burke says. “You’d be surprised at how many ‘new ideas’ are simply old ideas reimagined.
You train to burn fat, House says, but you race on carbs.
I’m ready to attempt the unknown through faith by believing in myself,”
failure is either a choice or an act of self-protection.
all training is brain training, even if it doesn’t specifically target the brain.
