A week ago Sunday (4/8) was the SacTown 10 mile race up in — yup, you got it — Sacramento, a PA race, my first 10 mile race in a decade, and my first PA race post-stroke. I think at every big marathon I’ve ever run, I always see someone holding a sign that says something to the effect of “do something every day that scares you,” and let me assure you, as irrational as it was, returning to Sacramento to race — the very place where just 9 weeks before, I had driven to for another PA race and ended up sitting it out last minute because I had a blinding headache stroke, unbeknownst to me — yeah, that mightily qualified as “doing something that scares me.” Clearly, driving two hours to Sac and then racing there in February didn’t cause my stroke, but even though I had been medically cleared to run for the preceding 4.5 weeks come Sactown race day, it still felt a little weird to return. The wound was still fresh, though fortunately not as gaping as it once was.
Before I had gotten sick, I was really looking forward to this race — having not run a 10 miler in a literal decade, since the Perfect 10 Miler in NE Ohio back in summer 2008 — and to the possibility of utterly shattering my 10 mile PR, which was as soft and low-hanging as they come. Getting sick and sidelined for a bit changed all of that, though, so my focus shifted accordingly; the victory would come in finishing the thing and in helping to field a full women’s team that day. Those two components would be sufficient; anything else would be gravy.
In the weeks leading up to Sactown, I had cautiously bumped up my mileage, with my longest continuously-run run topping out at 11 and change over some great, hilly terrain in my ‘hood. I hadn’t done any speedwork whatsoever, so my pacing plan for Sac was something along the lines of “do what feels good” and “remember that you’ve only been running for 4 ½ weeks.” I figured that the pace would amount to something in the 8s, maybe flat-to-mids, but honestly, more than anything, the name of the game was to rely on feel. My Garmin was there just to capture data, not to dictate how I ought to be rolling.
Once my teammates and I arrived to Sac on race morning, we ran a couple mile warm-up and then settled into the corrals pretty easily. The course was somewhat weird, though I imagine much more logistically easier to manage than other alternatives: two 5-mile loops, with scenery that included brief residential sections, a bike path, some industrial/office park area, and then a quick little jaunt through the mall area outside the Capitol. The race also offered a 5k distance — not part of the PA race — that began earlier in the morning, so I imagine that it was much easier to cordon off such a comparatively smaller section and less scenic portion of Sac and West Sacramento than, say, what the city had to do for a bigger race, like CIM. The Sactown 10 course, itself, was pretty average in my book, not really anything to write home about, and not particularly memorable, though with its very few inclines, I could see how it’d lend itself to some fast 10-mile times (which would make it memorable for many!).
Without a lot of fanfare, we were all off and running our two laps. It was a sunny and gorgeous spring morning, and by the race’s end, it felt like it had warmed up considerably. I felt pretty good throughout my race, just chugging along and doing my thing, and reminded myself how lucky I was to be there, doing what I was doing, given what could have been a dramatically different outcome just nine weeks earlier.
right off the yellow bridge, coming through the Capitol mall area, and going out for round two. (PC: WRC)
I tried to stay as evenly-paced as possible and ended up with a 7:40 average, with about a 20 second positive split, on a course that seemed to be at least .1 mile long, based on what I had heard from many of my teammates and what I had read about from last year’s race. (GPS and race distance discrepancies are part and parcel in this sport, it seems, and I try not to get too hung up about it. I’m assuming that it was USATF certified, since it was a PA race and all, so I figure being off .1 or so probably falls within the suitable discrepancy range for certification. For their purposes, it’s surely better to be over by a little than under).
the yellow bridge, not far from the finish line, IIRC
By the end of the day, I had posted 14 miles, with the warm-up and cool-down miles I shared with my team, which amounted to my biggest volume day post-stroke and just shy of 40 for the week, another new volume record post-stroke. It was honestly fantastic to be in Sac with my team, to be able to share the miles and the experience with them (including some awesome PRs!), and even with me being the DFL Wolfpack finisher that day, I honestly didn’t care; I was (am) just happy to be there, doing what I love to do. A little perspective can go a long way.
team cheesin’ (PC: WRC)
Running Sactown also gave me some good feedback about how my fitness was shaping up in the 4.5 weeks of running that I had been doing post-stroke and would help give Lisa and me both some direction as I begin training for the SF Marathon in earnest. Plus, Sactown was an excellent and fairly low-key and low-pressure stepping stone for me in April in advance of the Silicon Valley half marathon a week later and a couple April 5k races, too. There was definitely a point in my life where I’d only sign up for a race if I felt like I were in “racing shape,” but now — post-stroke or otherwise — I’m more inclined to sign-up and just run without expectation, being happy with whatever I can do on the day, with whatever effort I can muster. Race day is so fun, besides, and the feedback it can give you — the feedback I get from racing, anyway — is pretty invaluable. That, coupled with the social aspect that the morning brings — you can’t get much better than that.
If I were a betting woman, I’d wager that it’s highly likely that we’ve all asked this question of ourselves, publicly or privately, at least once in our lives. Particularly if we consider ourselves to be athletes, and more pertinent to the tone of this blog, especially if we are runners, it is highly likely that we have all wondered we have wondered where our limits lie. How much further can we run, how much faster can we go — simply stated, how much better can we be? — and relatedly, what will it take to get to that elusive point of “better,” that point beyond where we currently reside?
Adding to the seeming explosion in the canon of brain training and running literature comes writer Alex Hutchinson’s newest book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. I’ve read Hutchinson’s work pretty regularly when he was a contributor over at Runner’s World (and now that he’s gone over to Outside) and back in the day, I read one of his other books, Which Comes First: Cardio or Weights? From what I can remember from his time at RW, he was one of the “running science” guys, someone who’d write about some esoteric, “super science-y” running-related concept and who would then package his findings into accessible take-aways for readers, those of us who aren’t endowed with a Ph.D in physics like himself but who are nonetheless curious about the scientific process that underlies all this running-related stuff.
I took a pic of my library book copy and put it on IG stories but alas, did not save it. this screenshot from amazon will have to suffice.
So it was with Endure. As the title suggests, in his book, Hutchinson examines the so-called limitations to human performance, particularly in the realm of endurance and thus, running (but not exclusively). In a way, his book reads like a literature review of the numerous studies in the past that have examined anything and everything related to human endurance, yet his book’s not just a literature review (and thankfully so). Instead, as Hutchinson explores the “curiously elastic limits of human performance,” he examines exactly why human performance is so malleable by simultaneously breaking down, problematizing, and hypothesizing about what different research findings suggest and their long-term implications for human performance. When I worked in higher ed, we always said (sometimes begrudgingly) that everything is a process. That’s the case here, too. Even if we think of endurance as being a simple mathematically-based equation, the reality is that it’s much more fraught with variables, some of which that matter (and many of which that don’t, or don’t to the degree to which we think they do).
But I’m not a science person; I’ll probably hate this book. Well, sure. Most of us aren’t “science people”; shoot, I haven’t been in a science class for a good 10+ years. Nonetheless, if you’re a runner — and if you’re here in my teeny, tiny corner of the internet, surely you are — then simply by being a runner (or, I mean, being alive…) , you’re a participant in science. You don’t have to know all the terminology or be able to recite the Krebs cycle to understand a lot of what Hutchinson explains in his book, and fortunately, more often than not, his writing is completely accessible. There is simply so much that happens when we go for a run — on the physiological level, on the psychological level, on so many bodily systems levels — that it’s really pretty profound when you think about it.
this review doesn’t lend itself very naturally to many pictures, so I’ll have to go on a limb here. (insert some tenuous, endurance-related connection about having to endure to reach the top, whether literally or figuratively…)
While Hutchinson doesn’t break-down his book in that way — there’s no first you inhale the oxygen, which goes to your lungs, to where your brain sends a message — there is a healthy amount of exploring, of wondering why, in a major road race (DC’s Cherry Blossom 10 miler), for example, he personally was able to close the gap on a huge number of more able-bodied competitors one day, whereas in other races, he faltered horribly and finished poorly. Why is it that some days we can close like hell and finish a race or a hard workout so much better than our wildest dreams? What does it take to move the needle just a little bit more and get just a wee bit more out of ourselves? How much of our limitations are within our control to overcome, and how much lies beyond us? These are the questions that he spends over 200 pages exploring, buttressed with a litany of research to help arrive at his answers.
If you’re like a sizable percentage of the running community right now, you’ve probably been reading lots of other “brain training” related books, like How Bad Do You Want It?, Grit, or Run Strong, Stay Hungry. I’ve read all three of those books and have genuinely enjoyed each of them. I think every runner out there will do anything (legal) to gain a mental edge when it comes to racing, and most of us realize that our mental game needs much more attention and love than what we’ve been doling it out to it.
What separates Endure from any of the three aforementioned works (and in particular, the first two) is that Hutchinson shows that our limits simply are not just a matter of not wanting something badly enough. In other words, we can’t just will ourselves away to realizing a better performance. There is absolutely something to be said for mental fitness and mental resilience, absolutely, but making the assertion that “I didn’t want it badly enough” undermines what’s, in actuality, a really intricately-organized choreography between our mind and our body at any given time. It’s a tidy statement to claim that we faltered at achieving our goals because our mental game wasn’t strong, and while that may be true, there’s likely much more going on. That “much more going on” — that’s what Hutchinson tries to get at in this book.
I just now noticed, as I’m going back and quickly inserting pictures, that most everything I chose are pictures from running uphill on trails. Alright.
He names lots of familiar folks as he explores the research related to endurance, so if you’ve read virtually anything about this subject in the past couple years, chances are high that you’ll recognize a lot of the key players: Tim Noakes and Samuele Marcora among them. While Hutchinson doesn’t explicitly pin Noakes and Marcora against each other, as he explains their research (and their concomitant research implications), it’s fairly obvious that they are. Generally speaking, when it comes to what we all understand to be “endurance,” most of us think of it in one of two ways: something that’s more a matter of mental resiliency and toughness (a la Marcora) or something that’s determined by a Central Governor or otherwise biologically-dictated and precluding factor (a la Noakes). This strict bifurcation is what Hutchinson upends a bit by straddling a lot in the gray area. In Endure, Hutchinson problematizes this otherwise clean dichotomy and posits how our endurance isn’t necessarily a matter of either/or.
In a word (or a few): this shit’s complicated. Its implications are enormous, however.
I appreciated how Hutchinson structured his book, dividing it into three distinct parts (Mind and Muscle, Limits, and Limit Breakers), and then sub-dividing each section into even more specific parts (including exploring the view of human bodies as machines, a la A.V. Hill; the limits that pain, oxygen, or heat impose on human performance; or how some people “train” their brain to perform better). Unlike, say, How Bad Do You Want It, Endure doesn’t feature case study after case study to elucidate its claims. Instead, Hutchinson intersperses his case studies and vignettes more selectively, nestled amongst the science that he’s exploring, making the book lighter on the storytelling side and heavier on the academic side.
That said, I still thought his writing style was completely accessible and easy-to-follow, and thankfully, I never felt bogged-down or suffocated in incomprehensible scientific jargon or minutiae. (Again, let me reiterate that I haven’t been in a college science class for over a decade, and I was still absolutely able to follow his writing and actually enjoyed it). In addition, Hutchinson anchors a lot of his findings and exploration in the running and cycling communities, ostensibly because it’s from those disciplines that a lot of the endurance-related science and studies are based, but he still includes other applicable findings from hiking-related research and Arctice exploration; I guess you could say that endurance is endurance, for the most part.
So what do we make of endurance, then? Or rather, how do we define it? As you can probably guess, this is a loaded question, but for the purposes of his book, Hutchinson subscribes to Marcora’s idea of endurance being “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop,” a definition that importantly involves both the mental and the physical components of the game.
That’s really the crux of the book: that endurance is mental, yes, but it’s also very much physical (or physiological); that there are components to our endurance capacities over which we can control, sure, but there are others over which we are in the passenger seat, more or less along for the ride. We can only control so much — at least right now, at this moment in history. How that will change over the coming years — and the ethical implications therein — remains to be seen.
Miley Cyrus said it’s the climb. Alex Hutchinson said more or less the same.
As is probably to be expected, at least from my experience from reading other science writing, Hutchinson takes a lot of the popular wisdom and so-called conventional knowledge from this particular realm of science and turns it on its head a bit, challenging it and showing how — and why — exactly things are more complicated than we tend to think they are. Case in point: dehydration (or thirst). He devotes an entire chapter to the subject under the “limits” section of the book, and aside from recalling the oft-cited Gatorade origin story, he gets deep into the science — the original studies and the follow-ups that contest them — that are responsible for the popular notion that even being dehydrated just 2% can cause a noticeable performance deterioration. It’s really fascinating stuff.
Supplementing this chapter is “fuel,” another foray into the biological/physiological under-the-hood effects that our fuel has on our performance and how (or why) it is that our fuel of choice affects in the profound ways it does. It’s beyond the scope of my review here to detail each limitation as Hutchinson characterizes them, but you can probably guess some of the others — including heat, oxygen, and pain. Again: I find this stuff to be fascinating, the least of which because there is just so much damn contention about these ideas within the running and greater scientific communities. Collective wisdom is just that, collective wisdom. No one said anything about it ever being accurate (or sound). As a layperson, it’s interesting to read all the different sides to the argument.
Endure isn’t a training manual, nor does it come with glossy, self-referential exercises at the end of each chapter to help you pull away key tidbits that will necessarily help propel you to your Next Great Big Thing in your own racing or personal endeavors. Endure is much too untidy for something that, well, neat. Instead, this book posits all the many shades of uncertainty that exist within ourselves and within our capacities for realizing our goals — be they athletic, career, or whatever else — and in doing so, it lends a ton of power to the numerous variables that can affect our performance at any given time. The limiting factors that I touched upon already definitely play a role here — I’m talking heat, oxygen, fuel, and thirst — but other comparably-important variables include a coach’s words (i.e. how you’re prepared, or not, going into a key workout or race); Borg’s rating of perceived exertion (RPE, as you’re probably more familiar with), and pacing (or as Ross Tucker, Tim Noakes’ acolyte, described as “the anticipatory regulation of performance” [211]). Pacing, in and of itself, would probably be a sufficiently robust example to use for the entirety of this book simply because it incorporates both the mental and the physiological side to endurance: or in other words, according to Tucker, it’s “the process of comparing the effort you feel at any given point in a race to the effort you expect at that stage — an internal template that you develop and fine-tune from experience” (211). You’re not going to walk away from Endure feeling like you necessarily have an arsenal of mental Jedi tricks to power you through the next struggle you encounter in your pursuits, but it will make you more cognizant of the role that everything sometimes can (or does) play. Sometimes cognizance is enough.
This is arguably one of the poorest book reports I’ve written because quite honestly, I didn’t know where to start with it. There’s so much good stuff in Endure, from both the science and the “human” side of things, that figuring out how to neatly encapsulate it all seems like a grand exercise in futility. Probably one of the best aspects to this book is in how Hutchinson punctuated the beginning of each major section with a snapshot from his time as an on-site reporter in Italy during Nike’s Breaking2 attempt last year. As I understand it, he was one of a very few and select reporters granted on-site press access to the highly secretive behind-the-scenes detail, and really, when we talk about human endurance and human performance, you can’t get much of a better stage than that: humans attempting to run 26.2 miles in under two hours on their own, (dope-free) volition.
That’s where this stuff gets exciting, when we as humans begin to realize what Hutchinson calls the elasticity of our performance, that we can slowly but surely begin to wrap our heads around going after our Next Great Big Thing, whatever it is. No one thought that humans could safely run a sub-4 minute mile, until Sir Roger Bannister did (and aptly, Hutchinson talks about this a lot and the issues with such a blanket claim like that). Remember when women couldn’t run marathons — and most definitely couldn’t run while they were pregnant — until they could and until they did? We couldn’t put humans into outer space until — you guessed it — we did. It’s in this audacious dreaming, scheming, and hoping that we can begin to conceptualize the versions of ourselves that are getting after our Next Great Big Thing and that we realize how much we have shortchanged ourselves all this time because of some (or many) preconceived notions or limitations we’ve thrust onto ourselves.
better, together. c/o HRC’s _What Happened_
Toward the end of his book, Hutchinson talks about how “placebo” is a bit of a dirty word in science for all the obvious reasons, and he features a scientist (whose name I can’t remember, unfortunately) who challenges all of us to alter our thinking on this, acknowledging that the “belief effects” an athlete has can (and often does) influence his/her performance quite significantly. Again, I think this is fascinating to read about because in a sport like running that is so littered with endemic levels of doping, if there’s something out there that athletes can use and swear by as a performance booster — even if it’s scientifically irrelevant and has no causal or correlative effect — by all means, if they think it works, it works; what do we care? Wear the mantra bracelet, don the compression socks, put your hair up in that special rubber band; if it doesn’t violate the integrity of your abilities with some shady pharamaceutical, why not?
It will be interesting to see how human endurance changes — or is challenged — in the next half-century. There is so much out there now, so many strategies and gear and visualization and brain techniques (and more) that promise everything short of a breakthrough, and for people who are itching to squeeze out every last drop from their potential, all of these tools are viable options and fair game. With Breaking2, many people moaned and groaned the “manufactured” and “contrived” nature of it and duly complained that Nike’s VaporFlys yield up to a 4% increase in performance (making it akin to legalized doping, as some critics are claiming) and also mentioned that the runners got to draft behind an electric Tesla with a big-ass clock that blocked the wind ever-so-perfectly. Despite all of this, the fact that some of the world’s best runners (marathoners, specifically) decided that they’d go for a moonshot and attempt to do something that no one else had ever done — that’s what matters. That’s the takeaway. That’s what’s curious and elastic.
Hutchinson doesn’t end his book with any sort of inspirational if the Breaking2 guys can do it, so can you! message for the masses. Interestingly, though, when he talked to Eliud Kipchoge (who ran 2:00:25 at Breaking2) immediately post-race, Kipchoge, himself, made it a point to say that his 2:00 victory, while short of the Breaking2 dream, was a victory for all of us — for all of humanity. You could say that the Breaking2 venue was a perfect embodiment of what endurance is all about — regardless of how “contrived” or how big of a “marketing and PR stunt” it may have been — because it was in that huge, global stage that many of us were reminded that we are capable of doing some incredible and extraordinary things. Our endurance is more than carbon shoes, cheesy mantras, or being the conductor on our own Pain Train; it’s all of that stuff, sure, and more. Much more. We rarely, if ever, allow ourselves to glimpse down that rabbit hole.
c/o news.nike.com (Hey, Joan and Allyson!).
Most of us will not go on to realize otherworldly athletic feats on a global scale, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t achieve accomplishments that are otherworldly for ourselves. What that looks like will be dependent upon each of us, of course, and our relative strengths and weaknesses. My takeaway — and I’m guessing that of Hutchinson, his point of writing this book — is to remind all of us that a lot, but not all, of our limitations are self-inflicted. Each of us is able to realize so much more than we know (or could probably comprehend) — and that shit’s exciting exhilarating, if you ask me.
How we stretch ever-so-slightly more out of ourselves with each day, each trial, each tribulation is up to us and us alone; as Hutchinson’s subtitle suggests, our capacity to endure is curious, yes, but it’s also elastic, and therein lies the excitement, my friends.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.
-Rudyard Kipling, “If” (also quoted on p.7 of Endure)
