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

By Alex Hutchinson

‘This book is AMAZING!’ – Malcolm Gladwell

‘If you want to gain insight into the mind of great athletes, adventurers, and peak performers then prepare to be enthralled by Alex Hutchinson’s Endure.’ – Bear Grylls

‘Anyone who has ever felt exhausted, whether from heat or cold or altitude or pain or simply a loss of will, is going to find their own experience in this book.” — David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene

How high or far or fast can humans go? And what about individual potential: what defines a person’s limits? From running a two-hour marathon to summiting Mount Everest, we’re fascinated by the extremes of human endurance, constantly testing both our physical and psychological limits.

In Endure Alex Hutchinson, Ph.D., reveals why our individual limits may be determined as much by our head and heart, as by our muscles. He presents an overview of science’s search for understanding human fatigue, from crude experiments with electricity and frogs’ legs to sophisticated brain imaging technology. Going beyond the traditional mechanical view of human limits, he instead argues that a key element in endurance is how the brain responds to distress signals—whether heat, or cold, or muscles screaming with lactic acid—and reveals that we can train to improve brain response.

An elite distance runner himself, Hutchinson takes us to the forefront of the new sports psychology – brain electrode jolts, computer-based training, subliminal messaging – and presents startling new discoveries enhancing the performance of athletes today, showing us how anyone can utilize these tactics to bolster their own performance – and get the most out of their bodies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780008277079

Alex Hutchinson

Alex Hutchinson is the New York Times bestselling author of Endure, a longtime columnist for Outside covering the science of endurance, and a National Magazine Award–winning journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former long-distance runner for the Canadian national team, he holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia and a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge, and he did his post-doctoral research with the National Security Agency. He lives in Toronto with his family.

Reviews for Endure

[eg4209 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book, chock full of scientific research, that examines the research of body and mind that goes into endurance.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Over the past decade, I’ve traveled to labs in Europe, South Africa, Australia, and across North America, and spoken to hundreds of scientists, coaches, and athletes who share my obsession with decoding the mysteries of endurance. I started out with the hunch that the brain would play a bigger role than generally acknowledged. That turned out to be true, but not in the simple it’s-all-in-your head manner of self-help books. Instead, brain and body are fundamentally intertwined, and to understand what defines your limits under any particular set of circumstances, you have to consider them both together. That’s what the scientists described in the following pages have been doing, and the surprising results of their research suggest to me that, when it comes to pushing our limits, we’re just getting started.”

Journalist, physicist, and runner (as a member of the Canadian national team) Alex Hutchinson relates the history and latest scientific research regarding the limits of human performance. He is particularly interested in whether our limits are imposed by mental or physical factors. Woven in between the sports physiology is a narrative set around Eliud Kipchoge’s attempt to run a marathon in under two hours. He likens this milestone to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile.

This is a book for people who are avidly interested in endurance sports physiology and psychology. It contains fascinating anecdotes related to other sports such as cycling, mountain climbing, arctic exploration, basketball, breath-holding diving, triathlons, and ultramarathoning. The author creatively blends together these engrossing true stories with scientific data on world-class athletes. It seems the majority of people can improve through training the body, but once a person reaches world-class levels, the mind becomes an even bigger part of the performance.

The information is imparted in an easily accessible fashion, though it will appeal most to those specifically interested in sports performance. There is no simple answer to the question of what limits us – body or brain – but Hutchinson thoroughly explores the subject in a way that kept my interest from beginning to end.

[vpfluke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I got hold of this book because race walkers, including Canadian Evan Dunfee and Australian Jared Tallent, participated in a nutrition experiment, which was carb-free. This a good book on research into human performance, particularly sports. What food should se eat?, How do we train, intervals, routine? What are the limits of exertion and are they stretchable? What is the oxygen consumption. What does the brain think? What are our attitudes?