Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
by Alex Hutchinson
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance:
In a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.
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.
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.
This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance; how you get fit matters: you have to suffer.
endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.
turns out that, 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.
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.
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.
the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.
wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.
endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”5 That’s actually Marcora’s description of “effort” rather than endurance (a distinction we’ll explore further in Chapter 4), but it captures both the physical and mental aspects of endurance. What’s
Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.
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.
At low speeds, the effort is primarily aerobic (meaning “with oxygen”), since oxygen is required for the most efficient conversion of stored food energy into a form your muscles can use. Your VO2max reflects your aerobic limits. At higher speeds, your legs demand energy at a rate that aerobic processes can’t match, so you have to draw on fast-burning anaerobic (“without oxygen”) energy sources.
If you want to run faster, it’s hard to improve on the training haiku penned by Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner, the man whose 1991 journal paper foretold the two-hour-marathon chase: Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while22
To prove it, Marcora and his colleagues tested a simple self-talk intervention—precisely the approach my teammates and I had laughed at two decades earlier. They had twenty-four volunteers complete a cycling test to exhaustion, then gave half of them some simple guidance on how to use positive self-talk before another cycling test two weeks later. The self-talk group learned to use certain phrases early on (“feeling good!”) and others later in a race or workout (“push through this!”), and practiced using the phrases during training to figure out which ones felt most comfortable and effective. Sure enough, in the second cycling test, 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.
Worryingly, they gained even more strength from imagining themselves doing an evil deed—confirmation, perhaps, of a theory, long discussed on online running message boards, that the best way to run an 800-meter race is fueled by “pure hate.
Our brains are sending signals to our muscles; as we fatigue, those signals are getting weaker and weaker,” Putrino explained. “The brain is making a choice. But the brain’s opinion isn’t always right.
Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.
The mind, in other words, frames the outer limits of what we believe is humanly possible.
Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while
At low speeds, the effort is primarily aerobic (meaning “with oxygen”), since oxygen is required for the most efficient conversion of stored food energy into a form your muscles can use. Your VO2max reflects your aerobic limits. At higher speeds, your legs demand energy at a rate that aerobic processes can’t match, so you have to draw on fast-burning anaerobic (“without oxygen”) energy sources. The problem, as Hopkins and Fletcher had shown in 1907, is that muscles contracting without oxygen generate lactic acid. Your muscles’ ability to tolerate high levels of lactic acid—what we would now call anaerobic capacity—is the other key determinant of endurance, Hill concluded, particularly in events lasting less than about ten minutes.
This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance. How you get fit matters: you have to suffer.
In 1865, for example, a pair of German scientists collected their own urine while hiking up the Faulhorn, an 8,000-foot peak in the Bernese Alps, then measured its nitrogen content to establish that protein alone couldn’t supply all the energy needed for prolonged exertion.
brain-altering drugs like Tylenol that boost endurance without any effect on the muscles or heart.23
The Winning Mind Set, a 2006 self-help book by Jim Brault and Kevin Seaman, which uses Bannister’s four-minute mile as a parable about the importance of self-belief. “[W]ithin one year, 37 others did the same thing,” they write. “In the year after that, over 300 runners ran a mile in less than four minutes.” Similar larger-than-life (that is, utterly fictitious) claims are a staple in motivational seminars and across the Web: once Bannister showed the way, others suddenly brushed away their mental barriers and unlocked their true potential.
I tried to explain to her that every good race involved exceeding what felt like my physical limits. If I ran 800 meters as hard as I could in practice, I might run 2:10; in a race, I might run 1:55. Accessing that hidden reserve was anything but a foregone conclusion, and waiting to see how deep I would manage to dig was what made racing both exhilarating and terrifying. (I never did get a date with her.)
enduring the rack rather than submitting to the guillotine
Under normal circumstances, it’s very rare for people to reach the limits of their cold tolerance if they’re appropriately dressed,
Suddenly my obsessive calculating and endless strategizing seemed ridiculous and overwrought. I was here to run a race; why not just run as hard as I could?
