Endure summary

While the author was working on his PhD, he ran middle- and long-distance races for the Canadian national team. At one point, he noticed that he ran faster at the end of the race, even though this wasn’t part of his strategy. And it led to his wondering whether this happened to everyone.

In 2006, researchers Tim Noakes and Michael Lambert published a study of the patterns they found among the world’s greatest long-distance runners.

In 2013, Samuele Marcora traveled over six and a half thousand miles on his motorcycle, from London to Beijing, an endurance test that doubled as a continuation of his long-term study into the mental component of physical effort.

Indeed, the trip reinforced Marcora’s belief that the mind plays a big part in how much we can endure. In other words, fatigue isn’t just a physiological experience.

Veteran cyclist Jens Voigt has worn the Tour de France yellow jersey twice, having been in the lead in the race. But Voigt is also famous for his love of physical suffering. As he puts it, pain is just a weakness to be overcome.

Voigt’s perspective may sound extreme, but there are many athletes who would likely agree. And it’s probably this willingness to suffer that accounts for the fact that athletes’ pain thresholds have been shown to be higher than average people’s.

A good coach can be a valuable asset to any athlete. And if there’s one piece of advice that every coach will give, it’s to breathe, breathe, breathe.

This is extremely important advice because the amount of oxygen you take in directly influences how well you perform.

One of the more dangerous risks for athletes is heat stroke, which has proved deadly for both professionals and amateurs alike.

Avoiding it is one reason why athletes pay close attention to the temperature inside their body, otherwise known as their core temperature. But the other reason is that science has shown a very real link between core temperature and endurance.

As we’ve seen, the mind plays a bigger role in physical endurance than was commonly believed among previous generations of sports scientists. But in the East, the mind has traditionally been at the center of athletic mastery, especially in sports such as martial arts.

Only recently have Westerners begun to look to Eastern philosophies like mindfulness for insights into achieving higher levels of endurance.

We’ve all felt exhausted. But relatively few people know what the precise process is that causes us to hit a certain point and experience a full-body shutdown.

While scientists have spent decades looking into exhaustion as a purely physical reaction, neuropsychologist Kai Lutz was the first to think of looking at exhaustion from within the brain.