Endure by Alex Hutchinson

Discover the revolutionary account of the science and psychology of endurance, revealing the secrets of reaching the hidden extra potential within us all. This updated paperback edition features a new afterword.

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.

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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.

Why I Picked It Up

In college, I majored in history, basically with a specialty in "history of science" because my favorite style of class was the one in which a specific professor just let us pick the books we wanted to read and present independent study-style reports near the end. So I got to read books that were already on my TBR, write a few papers, and present my findings.

I genuinely forget which seminar of his this was for, but one semester, I tackled the human limits of endurance. I talked about Extreme Medicine (linked below), and the major moments in exploration that led to specific medical breakthroughs; I read Endure and analyzed the way the body and mind work in tandem.

At the time, it just fascinated me, but I underestimated how much of a theme this particular thread would end up being for me—fatigue, endurance, the limits of your willpower.

As an interior, wordy, artistic person, it's always comforted me to also challenge my body in tandem because it's something tangible to "push past" that has the added benefit of shutting down any emotional or mental conflict for me. Verbal thinking is just one form; there's also muscle memory, visual perception, and other methods of experience that can tamp down when the words get to be too much.

There is no subjective in this realm: solely willpower and muscle and pain (although technically, pain is relative.) Especially in pursuing a long-game goal, I find it extremely comforting to have a gauntlet to point at and say, "I did that." Physical proof.

Plus, I need to be active for the sake of balance and capability and challenge and routine. Those endorphins hit. If I'm despairing, a walk, run, or workout is usually an energy-giver—or a method through which I can run myself to collapse and finally, actually sleep after.

Related: I actually just looked up my paper on the subject, and there's something so satisfying about reading old academic work that analyzes—or sets up the foundation for—some of the same questions I encounter on here.

Bonus fun fact: My brother-in-law is a sports scientist, and actually studied similar factors and data at Clemson and UT Austin. Now, he works on similar programming for the military instead. His realm is fascinating!

What It's About

Endure centers around Nike's quest to break the two-hour marathon barrier, but incorporates other questions and relevant research too. In it, Hutchinson talks about the warning signals pain sends to the brain, and how what we can do is as much mental as physical. Scientists have attempted to find the center of all this, and it's a natural curiosity: how far can we go? How many of our limits are self-imposed?

Of course, there are other factors that transform the literal capacity of each individual body, beyond genetics, willpower, training, etc,. As the description says: "pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst, fuel." Some, science can help us with; some means we are destined to fail. Some people are made for it, and some people make themselves into it, and the winner is likely some lucky combination of both (lucky said in the line of those who make their own luck.) Still, we can never fully control absolutely every random, external factor either—race day, testing, judging. Whatever the end result boils down to.

As Hutchinson describes, the role of the brain in endurance is still controversial. How much of physical challenge is literally physical?

For example, studies show that the limits we encounter during physical exercise aren't true limits; rather, the brain stops directing intention and energy to the area of the body it feels are close to its limits of familiar. So you feel that panic—the need to stop—long before you've hit your capacity, when your brain directs your body to stop its production. It's not a choice per se, but you can still try to get around the instinct. As the scientist in charge of that experiment puts it, people are looking for an off switch when in reality, "it's a dimmer control." Whether you're successful or not is another matter.

“The most controversial claim is that this pacing instinct isn't entirely voluntary; your brain forces you to slow down long before you're in real physiological distress.”

There's also a lot of energy utilization centered around your anticipation of an ending. Part of why I revisited this book to review is that knowing I had an endpoint in my revision made that last 5-10% take on an absolutely sluggish, exhausted quality.

But the key is that my effort didn't change. I didn't slow or lose my ability. It was just as hard as it'd been when I was cranking at a much higher output, but the light of closeness at the end of the tunnel made the process feel much worse and more mentally strenuous. (Other books and articles I've been reading address this too—that our brain blanks or panics at this precise moment of almost.) It's why each revision has only gotten harder, despite my agency's edits only getting (if anything) less strenuous.

I thought of this today because I'm back into running. Yes, my mile time is just as bad as you might expect for a gal who pivoted into other forms of exercise after burning out on racing in 2020, and in some cases, I'm generously calling it a run at all.

Depending on whether it's a good run or a bad run, I still feel the exact same, but my watch will tell me wildly different pace times. It's the same feeling and same amount of push, but with different result. So then my challenge becomes knowing when to override the feeling of "STOP."

“Perceived exertion—what we'll refer to in this book as your sense of effort—isn't just a proxy for what's going on in the rest of your body, [Marcora] argued. It's the final arbiter, the only thing that matters...[but] there are a lot of ways you can alter your sense of effort, and thus your apparent physical limits, without altering what's happening in your muscles.”

We know this but don't always stop to think about what this means: that getting mentally fatigued increases your sense of effort and thus reduces your mental endurance. And we can look at that physically, mentally, emotionally, etc,. too.

Capacity is relative in all realms, so it can be dangerous to go by feel instead of the repetition that changes those same signals. You can only boost your capacity by overriding the panic button, but that has its own calculations.

Similarly, the book evaluates a lot re: limitations and pain tolerance while training elite athletes. It sounds basic, but is good to note. Getting better at something doesn't boost your pain tolerance; rather, you have to suffer in the process to boost your pain tolerance, regardless of ending skill. And those with better pain tolerance had better performance overall; as they encountered less pain, their fatigue levels dropped, making them better at their chosen pursuit. So if something causes you pain: do it. Everyone has a domain that challenges them in this way, and confrontation is usually the only option that forges you.

But then the book then goes into the pros and cons of dulling pain through other methods. Do you want to numb the body? Rewire it? Is there a way to hack this? Are different people just wired for pain and fatigue differently, and how can you boost your capacity? Can you get around the pain element, or does doing so limit you in other ways? In what ways is pain good for us?

And it also talks a lot about the placebo effect, which I've always loved, and how self-efficacy is a self-fulfilling prophecy (one of my major beliefs, as someone who seeks ultimate control over myself and my limits.) Performance is often fueled by expectations; if you think you can endure, you can go longer and harder and faster too. Belief alters your behavior.

“Self-confidence can make you try harder—but it can also work in more subtle ways. Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace. Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that will linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game. Even doing a good deed—or imagining yourself doing a good deed—can enhance your endurance by reinforcing your sense of agency...What's central is strong belief.”

What I've Been Mulling Over Lately

Recently, I've been thinking about fatigue and endurance and willpower, obviously. Individual limits and grit. How a dose of delusion—and a willingness to accept pain long past when others quit—is absolutely crucial to what I do, and is that really helpful? Are we just working backwards from the endpoint? If it works, it was worth it. If it didn't, then it's not. (I'm perpetually fascinated by hindsight bias and how we create narratives of ultimate control.)

from my book

I've had a vested philosophical interest in knowing for myself whether articulating weakness creates it or whether suppression is best, and analyzing the link between what's exclusive to my internal vs. external modes, because science has started showing that it all leaks eventually. For me, I notice the physical impact of my mental state most profoundly in my sleep and eating habits.

Endure balances all of this gracefully, for sure. It expresses that we have much more capacity than we anticipate and all that matters is how much pain we can withstand.

But, throughout my personal challenges, I've often worried about the possibility of a Pyrrhic victory, which is a consideration Endure weighs too. I want to be extraordinary, and (horrible of me to say out loud) I absolutely know I can and will be if I stick with it the way I do now, because I am leaning in to my purpose and my gifts and standing up to everything that's hardest for me. But I am also trying to be more aware of what I bury, and how that will eventually resurface. Mitigating the cost of the long game, where I can. It might sound silly to make the physical comparison, but it helps me a lot in my evaluation of any sort of mastery.

What Endurance Feels Like

I got onto this particular flavor of thinking largely because of a POV I read expressed by Haruki Murakami in Novelist as Vocation—one that I've always believed, but had never read articulated by another writer: that building physical endurance helps your work, and vice versa.

“It’s because I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life...What I mean is, I felt very strongly that paying close attention to what the body is feeling is, fundamentally, a critical process for someone involved in creative work. Whether it’s the emotions or the brain, they’re all equally part of our physical body. I don’t know what physiologists say about this, but to me, the lines separating the emotional, the mental, and the physical aren’t all that clearly defined... What’s needed above all to stand up to that deep darkness, and confront daily the various dangers inherent there, is physical strength. I can’t give figures to express what level is needed, but the point is, it’s far preferable to be strong than not to be. Still, when it comes to writing novels, I’m able to maintain the mental toughness needed to sit at a desk for five hours each and every day. This mental toughness—or at least the greater part of it—isn’t something I was born with; it was acquired. I obtained this by consciously training myself.”

He emphasizes the necessity of strength, and how building it in the realm of the physical is what helps you in the realm of the mental (or vice versa.) On one hand, I know so many people who quit too early. But I'd also be naïve not to acknowledge that there's a significant cost in learning how to override your panic, and that's why your signals can blur so heavily. Just because you endure in one realm does not mean it doesn't cost you in another.

It's not just the pain tolerance to withstand a punch, which Hutchinson points out in Endure. That's easy enough. It's that real self-control comes from both pain tolerance and elapsed time, which is why endurance is different:

“What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.”

Endurance is the sign of repetition in the practice of suppressing and silencing the body's internal alarms, which makes the sign of a great athlete. Of greatness in general. And time has a tendency to make our limits visible.

Apparently back in 2020, I wrote about how the resolution to this depends on where you think the answer lies on the spectrum of the mind-body relationship.

“This assertion introduces a moral element to coaching, researching, and performing elite athletics. How far can you push the body, and how far should you push the body? To a certain extent, this question forces one to decide where they fall on the spectrum of the mind-body connection. If you believe that limits are inherently internal, you can push an athlete until their mind can no longer handle it—but perhaps exposing them to unnecessary psychological trauma. If you believe that there are external limits that will continually restrict athletic ability, and that each athlete has a predisposed line that their body cannot and should not cross, then your approach would likely be less traumatic, but yield less insight about the body’s capabilities.”

The Hindsight Bias Defining What Is Pain vs. Endurance—

Nowadays, I'm inclined to say it depends on the greater purpose of what you're trying to do, but this is exactly where I've started to fear my own ability to be endlessly resilient in this domain. Apparently, the grittiest people are those who both love and believe in their ability to push themselves for their own pursuits, but there's another element too: that it helps to genuinely believe that what you do makes a difference for others.

Maybe you're inspiring someone (like an athlete who wanted a role model like them growing up.) Maybe you're making sacrifices in a career for others' safety. Mine has turned into genuinely believing that my understanding of and grip on books/beauty/awe/etc,. means I can break through to people who feel fundamentally disconnected. For the scientists depicted in this, the nobility maybe comes from the awe in this purity of understanding—proving that we can push ourselves long past what we expect.

I can control as much as I can control, but when it comes to what I can't? Will the outcome define what is pain vs. sacrifice? Then I work backwards from what happens. Worth it. Not worth it.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the hero's journey and this concept of earned beauty and the satisfaction of contrast that sheer hedonism (or laziness) cannot touch. Is a person what they've gone through? But then how much of that is hindsight bias? Does it make us neglect what's too easy, or to associate pain with worth?

I do believe that individual trials and suffering are necessary to the forging of the willpower and your internal...force, if that's the proper way to word it. But that everything does come with a cost, and a lot of choosing to shoulder it is with the assumption that things will work out for us once we've finally gone through enough to "earn it," rather than pain being pain for its own sake. We can't entirely erase our identities as narrative creatures, and I think so much hinges on this terror of what it means to earn anything.

One of my biggest values is that of being genuinely able to achieve anything. It's also a bit of a toxic trait. I know I have a ridiculously high pain tolerance, that my endurance is unreal, that I can operate in cycles of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I did not have such a strong sense of self-efficacy, I could not do what I do.

(Related: on my reading list is Useful Delusions. Occasionally, I try to learn all I can about unconscious influences in an attempt to finally reign victorious over all of them and be the most high-achieving, perfect, rational creature.)

So, in some ways, self-awareness can be a little bit of a curse. Fatigue is prevalent. Feelings lie. We work backwards, for the most part. But the belief is fuel.

Overall Thoughts

Voice-wise, the book is a little cut-and-dry. It's interesting, but not completely immersive, which is totally fine. I get so much value from the studies and the analysis, and can make so many connections to my physical, emotional, and intellectual limits.

So it's a great, inspiring look at the pros and cons of pushing yourself past everything you possibly can when your brain absolutely screams at you to quit, consciously or not. We have so many built-in limits and capacities in all realms of life that it takes conscious effort to notice override. For that reason, it was a phenomenal book in tandem with Novelist as Vocation, Grit, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, and other books I've sought out to remind myself why I won't ever stop fighting for perfection (or at least, a certain severity of excellence.)

It also handles the cost of that override, and how rewiring these warning signs bleeds into your psyche, with nuance and sensitivity. So at least I know what I give up. Is it worth it? Time will tell. Fuck it. I already ran today, but maybe I'll go for another.

Reading List

sticking with it for the goal / Grit

the light at the end of the tunnel / Anatomy of a Breakthrough

the physical-internal overlap / Novelist as Vocation

finitude and time investment / Four Thousand Weeks

suppressing signals / The Body Keeps the Score (some have mixed opinions on whether this book is good for people or not—there's nuance here)

delusion as a motivator / Useful Delusions

thoughts follow action / Mind in Motion

hindsight & narrative / The Science of Storytelling

extreme boundaries of the body / Extreme Medicine