“There are many things Garmin cannot tell you. And luckily, for those many things, we have Alex Hutchison”.
So closes the foreword, written by Malcolm Gladwell, to this amazing book. I felt like this was an apt place to start my experience of reading and then rereading this book.
Alex H picks up the topic of ‘Endurance’ and what it means to endure. For all of us striving for something – a faster pace for our half or full marathons, a lesser painful trek, a more tolerable long flight stuck in economy class – to endure is to survive the experience with something left in the pocket for the next time.
He breaks the book up into some interesting sections
- Mind and muscle: the key theories pushing the definition of human performance limits
- Limits: mitigating factors that can make or break performance (it’s in our heads)
- Breaking the limits: can you truly train the brain to overcome the limits that the brain imposes?
Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s preeminent marathoner and Olympic gold medalist headlines the book. Alex begins the book with Eliud’s attempt to break the 2 hour marathon barrier 2017 in Monza Italy. Over the course of the book Alex takes us to the backstage of that event, the days months and years before 2017 and Nike’s breaking 2 lab where cutting edge science and research happens on the limits of human body.
Section 1: Mind and Muscle
In terms of the world of hard physical activities – and that is the world that Alex explores in his book – ‘Endurance’ is simply about the ability to not give up.
Alex takes the scientific experimentation driven theories of two physiologists who have slightly different view points to make a case of the various factors that support or debunk our abilities to “Endure”.
First of them is Tim Noakes, a South African physician and scientist, who argues that brain is the master controller of all that we feel. He argues that the brain decides when the body simply cannot take the next step. It does that based on a complex set of factors and feedback loops meant to protect the body from damaging itself terminally. Tim argues that a lot of people push themselves every day and don’t die. In fact, the number of people who die during a decidedly hard event are quite lesser than what one would expect if the brain didn’t exert a control.
A core part of Tim’s theories is the concept of fatigue. Tim argues that brain signals fatigue as a protective measure to prevent damage to body. Tim’s premise is that :
Let’s say you were a newbie hiker on your first hike somewhere. Chances are that you would be excited and moving fast, trying to stay with the guide (if you had one). At some point in your walk, you would lose breath and slow down. Now the next time you went for a hike (or maybe the third time) you would have identified a walking pace that would keep you breathing normally for longer and let you maintain a pace that was sustainable. Now obviously, you would have to find your pace every time you pick up a new activity, but the logic remains the same. The brain identifies your performance limit and keeps you under that.
First: the limits we encounter during exercise aren’t a consequence of failing muscles; they’re imposed in advance by the brain to ensure that we never achieve true failure.
The key question here is: Is it possible to operate ever closer to your performance limit, can you trick the brain to release the brakes until the very last moment when the brain finally lets go and you run to the final barrier?
Second: the brain imposes these limits by controlling how much muscle is recruited at a given effort level.
The body doesn’t use all the available muscles and keeps some for reserves. In normal activities the body/ brain assumes a certain level of effort and only exerts that, leaving some in the tank. Which would explain why one needs to do interval training if preparing for marathons. Interval training trains the heart to pump more blood into the muscles, getting ready for an all-out sprint. As the brain and the heart train, they calibrate the optimum effort for you without keeling over.
Alex H gives examples of situations where people have done things that they would never be able to explain. Like for example, Tom Boyle in July 2006, picked up a Ford Camarro weighing 3000 pounds in order to save a young boy who was caught in the front wheels. For comparison, the world weightlifting record is 1250 pounds. So how do you explain when you would be able to give your maximum effort and when your brain would hold some in reserve? Could you do it consciously?
The second Physiologist is Samuel Marcora, who also thinks that the Brain is where it all happens but just not in a way that turning a part on or off could let the body push itself more, or less.
Samuel believes in the psychobiological view of endurance. He argues that fatigue depends on a conscious evaluation of effort, driven by a voluntary understanding of how hard an activity might be. As a consequence, mental tiredness or fatigue can reduce effort even when the body is willing. Over repeated experiments involving physical and mental activities, Samuel proves that if, for instance, you went for a run after a long hard day of mental work, you would run slower than normal. Or you might just give up and come back home. Similarly, a body fatigued by physical exercise will be slow to complete mental exercises that would otherwise have been easy.
Section 2: Mitigating Factors Or Performance Limiters
What Alex H goes on to do is debunk myths associated with endurance. Myths such as lactate threshold, VO2 max, hydration or the lack thereof, too much calorie or not enough of it, role of oxygen, heat etc. etc.
I use the word myth not because these things don’t matter, they do. But because we tend to give them more importance than they might deserve. They aren’t excuses. They are more like factors that reduce our effectiveness, but they aren’t the cause of good or bad performance by themselves.
Together, these factors can define what might be a good day to attempt our best, but they aren’t reasons for quitting. The imperative to quit or not to quit, quite simply lies in our heads.
For the purposes of this review, I will quickly summarise Alex’s findings.
What Is Pain?
Pain is like a warning light on the dashboard. It instructs us to slow down, and in most cases, we heed the warning, without even realizing it. But pain is not an absolute limit. We can push through that given sufficient motivation. Obviously up until a point.
Diane Von Daren is a unique example of how pain isn’t truly a barrier. She is a world class trail marathon runner doing distances and climbing heights that we would truly be afraid of attempting. A curious thing about her is her inability to relate pain to the body. Another is her inability to decide how long she has been doing something. Brain surgery has removed a part of her temporal cortex, so she has no concept of time or effort. She keeps going because her brain doesn’t connect physical pain with time or effort. Often her runs and treks leave her bleeding and in physical jeopardy. But she keeps going.
What About Oxygen?
Obviously, oxygen is important. But what about oxygen is important? Is it greater % of oxygen in your breath, or is it the ability to breath faster and deeper? Is it a case of lung capacity, in which case a diver might also be a better runner?
There is a competitive sport called Static Apnea. It is simply defined as the ability to stay underwater for as long as possible. Stephan Mifsud currently holds the record for this sport: a mind boggling 11 minutes and 39 seconds. Imagine not breathing for that long. Does he not need oxygen?
Well, it seems that oxygen, beyond its biological purposes of energy production in cells, forms a part of brain’s physiological makeup. So, when oxygen levels in the brain drop, we are compelled by our neurons to slow down, which we do. This is a perception driven behaviour and not really the hard biological reason to stop. It is just one of the ways in which our brain is trying to keep us safe.
Heat
Heat is complicated. When our bodies heat up we slow down, like any good machine. Tests have shown that in athletes, a core temperature of 40.0 to 40.3 is enough to kick start exhaustion. It also means that ice drinks do really help if you are looking for something to up the performance at that point in time.
Another input to heat impacting performance is how hot we think or feel it is. Our perception of heat drives our performance almost as much as actual heat. If we believe it’s hot, we slow down too. One warning lesson here though: it’s best to not run or engage in endurance sports if you are on medication. Cough and cold medication impair body’s judgement abilities and lets us push past our natural barriers. Sometimes to our detriment.
To Hydrate Or To Not Hydrate
Funnily enough both can kill. I relate to this at a personal level as the slightest change in water intake for me leads to blinding headaches. Almost as if my body is precisely measuring how much water I am taking in. Which, incidentally, it is. Our bodies are almost 70% all water and literally run on water. When dehydrated, the body starts to pull water from everywhere to keep the core running, when that doesn’t work it starts to shut down organs. By that time, the damage to the body is almost always fatal.
So should we always hydrate? And if so, to what extent? That is where the science is complicated. For years Gatorade sponsored science pushed for maximal hydration claiming that we lose upto 2% of our weight in water which can seriously impact health. However, that science is now debunked. Years of testing elite athletes has revealed that we can get heatstrokes without being dehydrated and dehydration can happen without heat strokes as well.
One way to interpret the evidence is that if we are required to sprint for short distances, 30 minutes or less, then it simply isn’t enough time to dehydrate, no matter what is our normal capacity for drinking. However, we could get a heat stroke as our core temp could rise dangerously high given our metabolic rate. If longer distances come into play, then dehydration is a risk that needs to be managed, while your brain will manage your effort to keep core temperature in control.
The final word on hydration, the brain and our perception plays a role. In controlled circumstances, assuming our brain knows that we are safe, our endurance and our ability to push our limits increases where we can be dehydrated or suffer from heat strokes. However in races, marathons, high altitude climbing or desert crossing, our bodies regulate our water levels very deliberately – brain and bodies working together to keep us alive as long as possible.
I guess the core point of all this is – carry a water bottle with you if you don’t want hydration to be the excuse you couldn’t do your best.
Impact of fuel
Our bodies are machines, give it fuel, maintain it and it performs. Without fuel, after a point of time, it will stop. Beyond this the science is complicated. Again. Depending on the type of endurance activity, the end aim of participating, the duration of it, and the muscle groups most in use, the fuel has to be organised. We need to know what to ingest, how to ingest it, how to access it, and how long do we need it for.
Levels of glycogen in the blood or muscle are an indicator of our fuel capacity. Our bodies can convert glycogen to energy very quickly and help us sprint, assuming that our bodies are trained to sprint. In fact, if our bodies are trained to sprint, then they store greater amounts of glycogen than others. Hence the idea of ‘Carb loading’ before races. Glycogen also helps to maintain the muscle fibre as they contract and expand. This reduces muscle injury while we put our bodies through the effort.
Quoting the book – ‘Your muscles have a cunning self defense mechanism totally independent of your brain, the equivalent of your car’s maximum speed linked to the level of its fuel gauge. Muscles will prefer to burn glycogen before hitting the glucose in our blood.’
Across hydration and fueling, the concept of sports drinks is important to discuss. It seems our brain gets tricked if it can sense carbs being taken in via the mouth. So drinking a sweet drink, or a carb drink can give us a performance kick. At the same time, the benefits are strongest if we are expected to endure after a tough day. Almost like a drug boost.
Alex contrasts theories between proponents of easy carbs vs proponents of fat based energy sources to describe the extremes. LCHF – low carb high fat diets can be useful for long distance / ultra / high mountain climbers as the body can go longer without a fuel boost given that it is using its own fat reserves. However, the body needs serious training to move the needle in terms of its speed of fat conversion. It can take weeks or months of hard training before the body can speed up fat burning.
For the rest of us, stick to carbs – good carbs but carbs.
Section 3: Brain Training
We have all been there. When attempting longer runs, we hate the treadmill. The most common refrain is how boring it is. And it is true. It is boring. Our brains evolved on a changing landscape and constant stimulation. It hates being bored. But it seems that by training the brain to do boring activities again and again and again, we prepare it for mental fatigue when life challenges us. According to Marcora’s psychobiological theory, our conscious perception of effort often drives when we are likely to give up and its typically much before the body actually is unable to continue.
Alex takes his own example of attempting a full marathon (Ottawa) for the first time ever and mixing brain training and physical training based on Marcora’s theories. He shares how mentally he felt fine until the 35km and then his thighs simply started to stop. He says he felt like he could have run on for longer as his lungs and brain were okay to go on. Heart rate normal, breathing normal etc. but legs just wouldn’t move. He had reached his physical limits despite having pushed his brain’s limits.
Check out our blog on 8 Beginner Running Injuries and How to Prevent/ Recover
This brain training protocol has a name ‘response inhibition training’. Simply put, it means that our brains imposes limits based on what we think and perceive as hard effort. We train it to push the inhibition limit.
A series of experiments using FMRI techniques reveal some interesting things: when regular people, elite athletes, military staff are put through the claustrophobic machine and asked to do some brain activities, regular folks often start to panic. To study this even more, in some cases, the oxygen flow is restricted. FMRI reveals that a part of our brain called Insular Cortex, which monitors sensory inputs from the body, shows high levels of electronic activity in regular folks during situations of panic. However, the elites brain remains calm. If anything the insular cortex slows down even more. What it means is that the more our brains are trained to handle stress, the more they are calm in situations of actual alarm or panic. In that way, our bodies and our minds are a closely calibrated machine. When our bodies are put through stress, the muscle training extends to the brain. When our brains are put through stress, the body also learns to handle the stress chemicals better.
Is there a connection between brain training and anxiety? A brain function called Interoception deals with making sense of the stimuli and internal information that the body keeps sending the brain. Could we tweak it using tools like meditation and calm practice? Resilience researchers are seeking means to doing the above as it may have transformative effects.
Alex ends the chapter with the following words, “physical brain stimulation may or may not work, but the psychological benefits of it are undeniable. Athletes come back from the tests and training believing they have another gear, something more to give. And that makes a difference. “
Which, rather neatly, brings us to the last topic, Belief.
At the simplest level, belief boils down to the following: if you think taking a sugar pill will help you, it will. Does that mean that the sugar pill is serving a physiological benefit, not really. But your brain thinks it and acts accordingly.
Experiments with caffeine and placebos show that athletes who believed they were getting a caffeine dose during their workouts did measurably better than those who thought they were drinking a non caffeine drink. The reality was that everyone had a non caffeine drink.
Parlour tricks like smiling when running, breaking out into a jig, they are all ways to trick the brain into thinking that it is taking lesser effort and that we can give more. The brain believes it and lets us pull a little bit more from our bodies. It is similar to when the coach makes us want to do 500 extra meters after the promised 5000. The idea is that the body can give more, the brain just needs to believe it.
Think of belief as the icing on the cake. We work really hard during our training blocks, and you can think of training blocks as the days and months earning a college degree, the nights spent learning how to do your first project, the shouting we all got from our first bosses, the months of running preparing for our first ever half marathon. In fact, the training block is the cake, belief is what makes the cake more palatable. Knowing that the 2:30 I set for my first half was achievable was one thing. Believing that I could do a 2:20 was what I had to work on.
Alex ends the book with another personal lesson; that when we start something that matters, our fiercest opponent is our brain’s well intentioned protective circuitry. We face it all the time and the ways in which we break it, surprise all of us. At the end, when there is nothing inside the engine, we give when we believe that we have more to give.
Post script
Kipchoge ran a full marathon in 2:00:25 in Monza in 2017. As he put it, “the world is 25 seconds away”. It was the fastest a human had ever run. He broke it 2 years later in 2019 in Vienna when he ran the same distance in 1:59:40:2. It is not official, as the attempt was not to do a world record, but it was an inspiration to do more, to be more.
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