Endure; Finding The Limits Of Human Performance - Alex Hutchinson - #046

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. We are kicking off 2019 with what might be the best episode that I've ever recorded. I know I do say that a lot, it's a running joke, but this one genuinely could be it. Alex Hutchinson is a writer, journalist, and an endurance athlete. Recently wrote a book called Endure, Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. I think anyone who has ever gone for a run has thought to themselves, what makes some of us quit while others continue? And just how much of human performance is dictated by the mind and how much by the body? It's a fundamental question, which anyone who has ever taken part in a physical pursuit has considered. And today, Alex is going to take us through exactly what he's uncovered. I'm absolutely certain that this is going to be a massive benefit to a lot of listeners. If it is to you, please pop it into your gym Facebook group or send it to some friends that you know would really appreciate the insights that Alex gives us. This could genuinely be a game changer for a lot of athletes' performances as we move into 2019 So pound the share button if you would be so kind. Don't forget to hit subscribe if you are new to the channel. It would make me very happy indeed. And if you are a regular listener, please go and give me five stars wherever you are tuned in. Now, let's go and improve our endurance.
Alex, welcome to Modern Wisdom, how are you?

**Alex Hutchinson** (1:52)
I'm good, thanks Chris for having me on, I appreciate it.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
Brilliant. So, I'm specifically excited about today's podcast, not least because my endurance sucks. So I am hoping, as I'm sure many of the listeners are, to find some strategies that can improve our endurance. And also I think probably define and better understand what endurance is, because as far as I'm concerned, it's something that I work on quite a lot. And sometimes I feel like it's good. And then sometimes I feel like I might have never trained before in my life.

**Alex Hutchinson** (2:33)
Yeah, I mean, so I'll confess, I started with a very narrow definition of endurance. I've been a runner my whole life. So I was thinking very narrowly of endurance as kind of, how fast can you run a long race?
But I've come to think of endurance as a much broader thing. And in fact, I'll jump right in with the definition that I ended up using in the book, which is that endurance is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So it's something that takes place over time. And it can be, we can be talking about mental endurance, physical endurance, at work or during exercise or whatever the case may be. But what I'll end up arguing is that fundamentally that struggle is the same. And the struggle to continue, to keep studying for an exam or something is actually the same mental struggle that goes on when you're running a marathon and you're trying to force yourself to maintain a pace that is unpleasant.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
That's a very artistic definition, I think. Much more artistic than I would have thought.

**Alex Hutchinson** (3:38)
Yeah, it's definitely not where I started out thinking that my definition of endurance would be the maximum amount of oxygen that your lungs can transport to your muscles.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
That's what I was expecting.

**Alex Hutchinson** (3:47)
Mid-range exercise. But that definition, I didn't just pull it out of, let's say, my head. It's actually from a scientific paper from a guy at the University of Kent who studies endurance. He's the head of the Endurance Research Group there. And that's what he concluded that this is what the fundamental bedrock of endurance is, that it's not about oxygen, it's not about muscle fibers, it's about a mental struggle. And that ultimately, whether you're running a marathon or again in some other aspect of your life, struggling to continue against something that's unpleasant, it's how you face that struggle mentally. And it's your struggle to continue against that mounting desire to stop that really matters. So that's the scientific definition, even though it sounds like I was writing a poem about endurance or something.

**Chris Williamson** (4:36)
Yeah. So where does endurance begin? What did you first begin to look at? And where does the book start?

**Alex Hutchinson** (4:43)
Yeah. So actually, I mentioned that I've been a runner for most of my life, and I actually competed for the Canadian National Team for about a decade as a cross-country runner and track and field runner. So this started as a sort of personal quest for me. And actually, the place I started the book is a single race that I had back in the mid 1990s when I was a university student, where I was trying to break the four-minute barrier for 1,500 meters, which is a little bit shorter than a mile. So it's kind of like a 418 mile. So, yeah, it's a poor man's four-minute mile barrier, let's say. It's not as fast as the four-minute mile, but significant.