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

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance is by Alex Hutchinson and has been on my to-be read pile for months. Alex made the rounds on all of the running/training podcasts I follow, promoting his book, and being a total training nerd, I was really excited to learn some things! It's a really intriguing book, split into chapters of focus. The studies and examples used were sometimes hit or miss for me, as I have a hard time relating to some of the extreme examples of mountain climbing and similar scenarios, but it was really intriguing and I learned a few gems.

My rating: 3.5 stars

Summary from goodreads:

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 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.