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

by Alex Hutchinson

the self-talk group lasted 18 percent longer than the control group, and their rating of perceived exertion climbed more slowly throughout the test. Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.

But there were two key differences between the groups. First, pain tolerance increased by 41 percent in the high-intensity group, while the medium-intensity subjects didn’t see any change. This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance. How you get fit matters: you have to suffer. Second, despite the similar fitness gains, the high-intensity group saw much bigger improvements in their racing performance, as measured by a series of time-to-exhaustion tests at different intensities. In one test, the interval group lasted 148 percent longer on the bike, compared to a mere 38 percent gain for the medium-intensity trainers. Intriguingly, the individual improvements in the time-to-exhaustion tests were correlated with the individual gains in pain tolerance, meaning that the cyclists who learned to handle more pain from the tourniquet test were the same ones who managed to cycle faster.

“anticipatory regulation”: your brain uses knowledge that is gathered consciously, like an impending dive or a looming finish line, to activate or deactivate safety mechanisms that are otherwise purely unconscious.

As you breathe more and more heavily, the carbon dioxide levels in your blood fall, which in turn makes the blood vessels leading to your brain constrict. (The same thing happens when you deliberately hyperventilate, causing you to get dizzy and eventually black out.) The resulting shortage of oxygen in the brain might directly interfere with muscle recruitment, or it might contribute to the sensation of fatigue signaling you to slow down or stop.

“For long easy training, it’s good. For day-after-day racing like the Tour, you have to eat the carbs.”

No sex disaggregationof the data here. No mention of how the diet affects not men aka women. Classic...

Once you accept that conclusion, an inevitable question looms: how do you train effort? The standard answer, and still the best one, is that you train your body. If you want running at 5:00-mile pace to feel easier, you should head out the door and run at 5:00-mile pace—a lot. Over time, your heart will get stronger, your muscles will grow more energy-producing mitochondria, and you’ll sprout new capillaries to distribute oxygen-rich blood. These changes will allow you to sustain 5:00 pace with less physiological strain, and they’ll also attenuate the distress signals that your muscles and heart send back to the brain. The pace will feel easier, so you’ll be able to sustain it for longer. Explaining the effects of training by talking about effort rather than, say, VO2max is a provocative shift in perspective, but it doesn’t really tell us anything new about how to train.

yes, self-confidence can make you try harder—but it can also work in more subtle ways. Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace. 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.

If I could go back in time to alter the course of my own running career, after a decade of writing about the latest research in endurance training, the single biggest piece of advice I would give to my doubt-filled younger self would be to pursue motivational self-talk training—with diligence and no snickering.

Self-talk, in contrast, just sounds like a fancy name for some generic and clichéd advice. “Tell yourself, ‘You can do it!’” doesn’t seem like a very rewarding payoff after reading 300 pages, no matter how impressive the supporting research is.