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

From the National Magazine Award-winning Runner’s World columnist, frequent NewYorker.com contributor, and Cambridge-trained physicist: a fascinating and definitive exploration of the science of endurance and peak performance

From the two-hour marathon to the summit of Mount Everest, we're fascinated by the extremes of human endurance. How high or far or fast can humans go? And what about me-what defines my personal limits? According to a century's worth of physiology textbooks, the answers lie in the size of your heart, the capacity of your lungs, and the strength of your muscles. But a wave of dramatic findings over the past decade has completely overturned our understanding of human limits. Endure, from Runner's World and NewYorker.com contributor Alex Hutchinson, brings this radical new science of endurance to a general audience for the first time, leading to a surprising conclusion: It's the brain that dictates your limits-and that means they can always be pushed a little farther.

Hutchinson traces our attempts over the last hundred years to understand human fatigue, from the crude experiments of the early twentieth century (physiologists cutting the legs of frogs and electrocuting them) to the use of sophisticated brain imaging technology. Hutchinson presents a wholly new understanding of endurance, untethered from the traditional mechanistic view of human limits (like a car with a brick on its gas pedal, we go until the tank runs out of gas). Instead, he persuasively argues, a key element is how the brain responds to distress signals -- whether heat, or cold, or muscles screaming with lactic acid -- and we can train to improve this brain response.

Traveling to the forefront of the new sports psychology landscape -- from brain electrode jolts to computer-based training to subliminal messaging -- Hutchinson makes accessible a host of startling new discoveries. An elite distance runner himself, Hutchinson shows readers how they can use these tactics to bolster their own performance and get the most out of their bodies.

LIMITS ARE AN ILLUSION: A REVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF THE SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY OF ENDURANCE, REVEALING THE SECRETS OF REACHING THE EXTRA POTENTIAL WITHIN US ALL.

The capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in virtually every field'from a 100-meter sprint to a 100-mile ultramarathon, from summiting Everest to acing final exams or completing any difficult project. But what if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we're capable of?

Blending cutting-edge science and gripping storytelling in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell'who contributes the book's foreword'award-winning journalist Alex Hutchinson reveals that a wave of paradigm-altering research over the past decade suggests the seemingly physical barriers you encounter are set as much by your brain as by your body. This means the mind is the new frontier of endurance'and that the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought. 

But, of course, it's not 'all in your head.' For each of the physical limits that Hutchinson explores'pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst, fuel'he carefully disentangles the delicate interplay of mind and body by telling the riveting stories of men and women who've pushed their own ultimate limits in extraordinary ways.

The longtime 'sweat Science' columnist for Outside and Runner's World, Hutchinson, a former national-team long-distance runner and Cambridge-trained physicist, was one of only two reporters granted access to Nike's top-secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier, an extreme quest he traces throughout the book. But the lessons he draws from shadowing elite athletes and from traveling to high-tech labs around the world are surprisingly universal. Endurance, Hutchinson writes, is 'the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop''and we're always capable of pushing a little farther.