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Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
by Alex Hutchinson · 2018
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"If you want to gain insight into the mind of great athletes, adventurers, and peak performers then prepare to be enthralled byAlex Hutchinson's Endure"--Bear Grylls. From the National Magazine Award-winning Runner's World columnist, frequent New Yorker online contributor, and Cambridge-trained physicist: a fascinating and definitive exploration of the revolutionary new science of endurance and the secrets of human performance. Alex Hutchinson, Ph.D., reveals why our individual limits may be determined as much by our head and heart, as by our muscles"-- "From the National Magazine Award-winning Runner's World columnist, frequent NewYorker.com contributor, and Cambridge-trained physicist: a fascinating and definitive exploration of the science of endurance and peak performance"--
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"Alex Hutchinson is a well-known sports journalist. In the book, he writes about human limits and how they’re elastic to a certain extent. We think that we can just go this far but, actually, we can push it further. He opens the book with the story of Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes. Previously, we thought that if you ran faster than a four-minute mile, your heart would just explode, that it was not something that we could do. But, thereafter, people realized it was possible. Now, talented high schoolers run that fast every year. So we have this collective, human enterprise of pushing these limits. Hutchinson talks about ways in which biologically, your body wants to maintain a sense of control or homeostasis. So sometimes we perceive our limits as lower than they actually are. He talks about the mental or psychological limits that we place on ourselves. So it’s an interesting examination of where our limits lie. That’s a big part of human nature. What we’re capable of—what we can do; what we can’t do—that’s often how we define what it means to be human. So having that athletic inquiry is very interesting. Perseverance has limits. One thing I do in my book is I push back against the ‘limitlessness’ rhetoric. Oftentimes, we are defining our limits in physical terms. But there are other things that we step over in order to achieve the best that we can. Oftentimes, the first limit we step over is our cultural limits: our family, the people in our lives. Sometimes people step over moral limits—they’re willing to take performance enhancing drugs, or cheat in other ways that allow them to be limitless in a certain sense, but not with integrity to themselves or in the context of their lives. So I think that Hutchinson is right—there is so much more that we can get out of ourselves. But I think a mature conversation about it will assess the ways in which being limitless is not necessarily what we want in a full life."