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

by Alex Hutchinson

In a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.

endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”

“A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”

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.

“I said, now hold on. What is really interesting about exercise is not that people die of, say, heatstroke; or when people are climbing Everest, it’s not that one or two die,” he later recalled. “The fact is, the majority don’t die—and that is much more interesting.”

Fatigue, in other words, ultimately resides in the brain—an

just as emotions trigger a physical response, that physical response can amplify or perhaps even create the corresponding emotion.

Seeing a smiling face, even subliminally, evokes feelings of ease that bleed into your perception of how hard you’re working at other tasks,

Mallory was the man who, when asked by a New York Times reporter why he was returning to Everest for a third time, had famously replied “Because it’s there.”

In 1990, the average top-100 runner had clocked in at just over 5ʹ8ʺ and 131 pounds; by 2011, those numbers had dropped to under 5ʹ7ʺ and 124 pounds. The reason, the researchers suspected, was simple: the heavier you are, the more heat you generate while running around. Tall people also have more skin surface area, which allows them to shed more heat by sweating—but the extra weight swamps the effects of the extra skin, putting bigger and taller runners at a subtle disadvantage.

The mind, in other words, frames the outer limits of what we believe is humanly possible.

Pacing, in Tucker’s formulation, is the process of comparing the effort you feel at any given point in a race to the effort you expect at that stage—an internal template that you develop and fine-tune from experience.

We often think of races as “painful,” but physical pain is completely distinct from the sense of effort—the struggle to keep going against a mounting desire to stop—that usually limits race speed.

In a sense, every stride you take during a race is a microdecision: will you speed up, slow down, or maintain your current pace?