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

by Alex Hutchinson

Instead, he sees motivation, effort, and pain as distinct but interrelated factors that influence endurance through separate “processing loops” between various brain regions.

So, for any given time trial, the athletes had no way of knowing whether their brains were juiced or not; only the stopwatch would, in theory, tell.

Maybe, I reflected, the electrodes are beside the point. From Red Bull’s perspective, the goal of bringing its athletes together for these camps, whether for brain stimulation or breath-hold training, is to teach athletes that they’re capable of more than they think.

maybe that’s the real secret weapon: believing that you have another gear.

They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can’t, they regroup and try again the next day.

Stellingwerff emphasizes. “For me, a placebo is direct trickery, giving an athlete an inert substance and saying it is something else. I’ve never done that, except in studies.”

the researchers tested their subjects’ leg strength—which, in the end, is the most important recovery outcome. Sure enough, the ice bath significantly outperformed the lukewarm bath throughout the two-day recovery period. But the recovery oil was just as good, and perhaps even marginally better than the ice bath—even though the oil was, in fact, a liquid soap called Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser.

Chris Beedie, a researcher at Canterbury Christ Church University in Britain who studies placebos in sport, once had a group of cyclists complete a series of ten-kilometer time trials. The subjects were told they would receive various doses of caffeine before each trial, but they wouldn’t be told which dose they had received. As expected, the cyclists rode 1.3 percent faster when they thought they had received a moderate dose, 3.1 percent faster after a high dose, and 1.4 percent slower when they thought they got the placebo.10 In reality, all the pills were placebos. The performance boost, and associated changes in how much pain or effort they perceived during the rides, were entirely fueled by their own expectations.

surveys have found that the greater your interest in sports, the more superstitious you’re likely to be.

Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace.12 Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that continue to linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game.

“You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can.”

Using a clock that runs fast or slow, or lying about how much distance an athlete has covered, can help or hurt performance depending on the context.

But deception can take you only so far. Even if you have a coach who likes to play tricks on you, there’s only so many times you’ll fall for the old “extra interval” gag before you start holding back a bit in every workout.

To Burfoot, the real point is more general. Deception, he writes, “is not central to the phenomenon—it just makes for compelling stories with surprise endings. What’s central is strong belief.”

For athletes, the simplest way of acquiring justified true belief about your capabilities is to test them: whatever you’ve done before, you can do again plus a little more. But the question raised by Noakes and Marcora and others is whether, for most of us, such incrementally justified beliefs understate our true capacities.

A British field experiment found that self-talk training boosted performance in a grueling sixty-mile overnight ultramarathon.

it’s enough, for now, to know that when the moment of truth comes, science has confirmed what athletes have always believed: that there’s more in there—if you’re willing to believe it.