Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson (EPUB)

Description

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Foreword by Malcolm GladwellLimits are an illusion: discover the revolutionary account of the science and psychology of endurance, revealing the secrets of reaching the hidden extra potential within us all.”A voyage to the outer reaches of human capacity.” —David Epstein, author of Range”Reveals how we can all surpass our perceived physical limits.” —Adam Grant The capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in virtually every field. 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 as 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 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I’ve come to know Alex Hutchinson’s writing through his fantastic articles in “Runner’s World.” He had some serious chops as a Canadian runner but he’s equally (if not more) accomplished as a journalist. Hutchinson’s interests tend toward the science-y, geeky side of running, and those interests are on full display in “Endure.” It’s likely I came into the book with a bias, being a distance runner and having heard “Endure” mentioned on various ultra-running podcasts. I assumed the focus would be on long-distance running, but Hutchinson touches on endurance sports of various types, including mountain climbing, cycling, free diving, marathoning, ultra-running, exploration, etc. A real strength of the book is that the author is able to tie these sports together, along with a wealth of scientific findings and summaries of clinical studies, so seamlessly. He moves effortlessly between Nike’s 2-hour marathon project, Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile, record free diving attempts, Everest ascents, Antarctic treks, and “The Hour” (an all-out one-hour bike sprint that leaves its participants flailing in a pool of their own saddle sores, sweat, and tears). Hutchinson paints such a vivid picture of these efforts that you almost start to struggle for air along with the free diver or mountain climber. A lot of the book is arranged around these limits to human endurance, such as oxygen, heat, and fuel. The book springs to life when Hutchinson is describing mountain ascents or cycling races, but then just as quickly we’re back in the lab for…another study. There were many studies summarized in this book, studies where athletes were poked, prodded, given pills and placebos, denied oxygen, given pure oxygen, denied carbs, given extra carbs, EKGs, and on and on. I tried to keep everything straight, but after awhile it was difficult to determine what I was supposed to take from all this, other than that people often push themselves to the brink of exhaustion but rarely does anyone die due to a “central governor” in the brain that starts shutting things down if we stray too far into dangerous territory. By the time Hutchinson got to the study about the cyclists shown a video of an Asian woman who forces herself to vomit and then eats it, I was ready to be done with studies. I think Hutchinson accomplished what he set out to do, which was to provide a survey of various extreme endurance achievements and explain the science behind them, and despite my own bias toward running I thought the stories about mountaineering, antarctic exploration, and cycling were fascinating. I just wish the author would’ve focused more on the details of these events, maybe focusing on four or five, describing them in-depth, and scaling back all the studies, which for me just blended together anyway. I also have a feeling these studies are going to make “Endure” seem really dated in about five or ten years. I ultimately came away thinking the book was interesting but not always a page-turner, and there’s also not a huge amount you can easily take from it and apply to your own training/racing if that’s your goal for “Endure.”

⭐The breadth of coverage is incredible: time spans from seconds to months; distances from zero or hundreds of yards to entire continents, and ranges of volitional control from nearly total (breath holding) to largely passive (surviving extreme altitude without supplemental oxygen).Part of what holds this extreme diversity together is the notion, introduced by Tim Noakes, of a “Central Governor,” a self-defense mechanism that keeps us from harming ourselves. Some of the success of top athletes might be linked to an ability to ignore the urging to slow down and instead to keep going at full speed.The very long duration examples of endurance, such as pulling a sled across Antarctica, or an alpine-style month-long mountain ascent, are interesting as extremes but are obviously very different from a hundred meter dash, a marathon, or even a multi-day run. It’s not so obvious that there’s a “Central Governor” at work when the limits of survival are exceeded. Also one wonders what happened to the central governor while reading news stories of high school football players collapsing and sometimes dying during or soon after practice from heat stroke or overuse of muscles (rhabdomyolysis and compartment syndrome).The text is filled both with details of lab experiments and with stories of individuals pushing the known limits. Special attention is given to the two hour marathon along with other “barriers” which have been crossed, such as the four minute mile.The book as a whole is a handy compilation, made up in part from the author’s web posts at OutsideOnline. It’s great to have so much information in one handy package.

⭐I’ve been a long time fan of Alex Hutchinson, who has been writing his Sweat Science column first for Runner’s World and now at Outside Magazine. Being a skeptic of bad science, I have always appreciated his very thorough analysis of the research on all things running. When I saw that he was releasing a book on endurance, I was really looking forward to reading it. I knew that Endure would be thoroughly researched and after reading it, I am not disappointed.Hutchinson shares anecdotes–about all levels of athletes as well as some of his own throughout the book, which is divided into 3 sections. In the first section, he reviews the history of endurance and gives background on different theories regarding endurance, the second section tells stories of athletes who have pushed their limits beyond what we mere mortals would think is normal, and in the third section, he shares research into pushing beyond the limits. Hutchinson is a big believer in the power of the mind and he shares his thoughts on that as well.I completely enjoyed Endure and even if you’re not a science nerd like me, there’s something here for everyone who is interested in endurance. You might not find any answers, but then again, you might learn something that will help you run farther and longer. It’s probably not a pair of shoes, though.

⭐It was a good read, good for any young runner wanting insight and a perspective

⭐When you read books about leadership, athletes and Navy Seals, you understand that many things are possible with the right mindset. Hence “Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance”EnduranceReaching the limits of endurance is a concept that seems yawningly obvious until you actually try to explain it. He defines endurance as “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.” And the mind plays a huge role. However, the brain’s role in endurance is, perhaps, the single most controversial topic in sports science.Not dead, could have done moreHe quotes a coach’s observation about a second-place Olympic marathoner jogging around the track waving his country’s flag. “Do you notice he’s not dead?” he asked. “It means he could have run faster.”PacingStudies have found that we can’t avoid pacing ourselves: your “maximum” force depends on how many reps you think you have left. It also turns out that, whether it is 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.Body and mindWith the rise of sophisticated techniques to measure and manipulate the brain, researchers are finally getting a glimpse of what’s happening in our neurons and synapses when we are pushed to our limits. They found that 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.SmilingThe British military has funded studies of computer-based brain training protocols to enhance the endurance of its troops, with startling results. Even subliminal messages can help or hurt your endurance: a picture of a smiling face flashed in 16-millisecond bursts, boosts cycling performance by 12 per cent compared to frowning faces.Frame of mindAnother British study in 2012 showed that cyclists in a heat chamber went 4 per cent faster when the thermometer was rigged to display a falsely low temperature (26 instead of 32 degrees Celsius). The right frame of mind, in other words, allows you to push beyond your usual temperature limits.You are operating at 65%The brain’s task is to protect you. It is a survival machine. Read “Solve for happy“. Which is why pacing instinct is not entirely voluntary: your brain forces you to slow down, long before you’re in real physiological distress. So the brain plays a role in defining the limits of endurance. Most of us can summon about 65 per cent of our theoretical maximum strength.Switch of the safety switchFor example, the fact that people can dive to three hundred feet or hold their breath for nearly twelve minutes tells us that oxygen’s absolute limits aren’t quite as constrictive as they feel, that we are protected by layer upon layer of reflexive safety mechanisms.Change the settingsAverage strength increases of 26.5 per cent after hypnosis. So the question is how can you change the settings of your brain? Can you gain access to at least some of the emergency reserve of energy that your brain protects? There’s no doubt that some athletes are able to wring more out of their bodies than others, and those who finish with the most in reserve would dearly love to be able to reduce that margin of safety. But is this really a consequence of the brain’s subconscious decision to throttle back muscle recruitment or is it, as a rival brain-centred theory of endurance posits, simply a matter of how badly you want it?The science of anticipatory regulationThey found that the importance of any underlying physiological signal depends in part on how your brain receives and interprets it. The science of “anticipatory regulation”: getting your brain to use the knowledge that is gathered consciously, like an impending dive or a looming finish line, to activate or deactivate safety mechanisms that are otherwise purely unconscious. Endurance as second stage thinking. Managing a cognitive trait called response inhibition, which involves overriding your initial instinct, as a key.The other thingsThat does not mean that you can ignore simple things such as temperature, oxygen, lactate, calories, proteins, fat, dehydration, pain tolerance and mostly effort.So how do you improve your response inhibition and effort?Manage perceived exertionPain training (apparently pain is fundamentally a subjective, situation-dependent phenomenon)Train the brain to become more accustomed to mental fatigueTest your capabilities, whatever you’ve done before, you can do again plus a little moreCreate placebo effectsCreate lucky charmsApply acts of random kindnessUse drugsApply virtual reality (running against yourself)Training in resilienceTraining in non-judgmental self-awarenessTraining in mindfulnessAgain performance and mindfulness meetAll the techniques you find in most self-help books. Mind techniques to become a better athlete (or CEO). Teaching athletes that they can do more than they think they can. Knowing that their fiercest opponent will be their own brain’s well-meaning protective circuitry.In short, there is more in there, if you’re willing to believe it.

⭐This is a good and fairly easy read. In some of the more in-depth sections you may have to concentrate a bit, but that’s no bad thing!The book really asks two questions:1) What stops us from running ourselves to death?2) …And how can we push ourselves a bit closer?The general idea is that our brain acts as a controller and makes sure that although we can push ourselves into the red zone, we stop before we explode.The degree to which this is conscious or subconscious and how this management information is shunted about the body makes up quite a lot of the book.The other part is how we can push ourselves closer to our absolute limit. The author covers everything from the benefits of motivational words to playing metabolic tricks on the body and running electric currents through the brain.Unfortunately I came away a bit unsatisfied. The author himself points out that there seem to be a whole of ways to get a 1-3% boost. But these are not cumulative; using three of them simultaneously doesn’t give a 9% boost…The conclusion, then, is that the body holds back a bit more than 3% in reserve. You can access this various ways, but there simply isn’t much else available!(I guess that’s not a criticism of the book as such, it’s just a pity that the conclusion ends up being a bit banal…)

⭐I bought this book for holiday reading as a distinctly amateur and average runner, but aware that sometimes it is my mind that is my biggest weakness limit.There is no magic bullet contained within the book, but there are plenty of takeaways that will make you think, and perhaps change the way you think, about being an endurance athlete.It’s easy reading, but will it make me into a better athlete runner. Well maybe, because it reminded me that the foundation of being a better runner is training and resting. A lot of the rest is the icing on the cake, but good icing can make a cake.

⭐”I remind myself that my fiercest opponent will be my own brain’s well-meaning protective circuitry.”I wanted to read this book ahead of the upcoming Turf Games event as I know that mental strength is just as, if not more, important than physical strength in getting us through the challenges we set ourselves.It provided interesting stories of different kinds of athletes: runners, divers, cyclists, climbers. Travelling through chapters on pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst and fuel.Effort, belief and determination. “There’s more in there- if you’re willing to believe it.””The struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop”- Samuele Marcora.

⭐I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Like the author says, this isn’t a training manual. But as my daughter succinctly said when I gave her some highlights about the book, it teaches you about yourself and what can be challenged as possible. The conclusion is that it isn’t just biomechanics or physiological characteristics, but the mind, and ultimately, our belief that we could always achieve more than we thought possible.

Keywords

Free Download Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance in EPUB format
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance EPUB Free Download
Download Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance EPUB Free
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance EPUB Free Download
Download Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance EPUB
Free Download Ebook Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance