Alex Hutchinson Quotes

In a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.

You judge what’s sustainable based not only on how you feel, but on how that feeling compares to how you expected to feel at that point in the race.

endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.

This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance; how you get fit matters: you have to suffer.

the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.

A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.

turns out that, whether it’s heat or cold, hunger or thirst, or muscles screaming with the supposed poison of “lactic acid,” what matters in many cases is how the brain interprets these distress signals.

Earlier studies with dogs and goats have suggested that brain temperature, rather than core temperature, might control the limit of exercise tolerance in the heat.

Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.

wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort.

The limits of endurance running, according to physiologists, could be quantified with three parameters: aerobic capacity, also known as VO2max, which is analogous to the size of a car’s engine; running economy, which is an efficiency measure like gas mileage; and lactate threshold, which dictates how much of your engine’s power you can sustain for long periods of time.

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.

The important thing is that, thanks to epidemiological studies, we know that exercise is the most powerful anti-aging tactic we’ve got.

Whatever regrets may be, we have done our best.

If you want to run faster, it’s hard to improve on the training haiku penned by Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner, the man whose 1991 journal paper foretold the two-hour-marathon chase: Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while22

endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”5 That’s actually Marcora’s description of “effort” rather than endurance (a distinction we’ll explore further in Chapter 4), but it captures both the physical and mental aspects of endurance. What’s

If I could go back in time to alter the course of my own running career, after a decade of writing about the latest research in endurance training, the single biggest piece of advice I would give to my doubt-filled younger self would be to pursue motivational self-talk training—with diligence and no snickering.

At low speeds, the effort is primarily aerobic (meaning “with oxygen”), since oxygen is required for the most efficient conversion of stored food energy into a form your muscles can use. Your VO2max reflects your aerobic limits. At higher speeds, your legs demand energy at a rate that aerobic processes can’t match, so you have to draw on fast-burning anaerobic (“without oxygen”) energy sources.

Most American climbers, Twight argues, “are scared to be hungry, or they wouldn’t carry so much damn food.

Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while22

Burke and others published a pair of studies in 2016 using a protocol dubbed “sleep low,” which involved a high-quality carbohydrate-fueled workout in the late afternoon, followed by a carbohydrate-free dinner; then, the next morning, a carbohydrate-depleted moderate workout before breakfast.38 Repeating this cycle just three times, for a total of six days, produced a 3 percent improvement in 20-kilometer cycling times.

In 2015, Staiano and Marcora presented recently declassified results from a military-funded study of thirty-five volunteers who had trained three times a week for an hour at a time on stationary bikes. Half of the volunteers did brain training while cycling, using the flashing-letters test that I had tried. After twelve weeks, the physical-training-only group had improved their time to exhaustion by 42 percent; in comparison the physical-plus-brain-training group had improved by a whopping 126 percent.

It felt like heading out for a run immediately after a stressful work or travel day.

Another eight-week program modeled on Kabat-Zinn’s stress-reduction course. This version of mindfulness training puts more emphasis on sport-specific skills like concentration and embracing rather than avoiding pain, and addresses common athlete pitfalls like perfectionism by teaching self-compassion.

Their immeasurable and ongoing support throughout my life is what has allowed me to pursue a career as a writer.

Instead of blocking out the pain, I try to accept it, feel it as much as possible.

I remind myself that my fiercest opponent will be my own brain’s well-meaning protective circuitry. It’s a lesson I first learned in my breakthrough 1,500-meter race in Sherbrooke more than two decades ago, but its implications continue to surprise me. I’m eager to learn more, in the coming years, about which signals the brain responds to, how those signals are processed, and—yes—whether they can be altered. But it’s enough, for now, to know that when the moment of truth comes, science has confirmed what athletes have always believed: that there’s more in there—if you’re willing to believe it.

Worryingly, they gained even more strength from imagining themselves doing an evil deed—confirmation, perhaps, of a theory, long discussed on online running message boards, that the best way to run an 800-meter race is fueled by “pure hate.

I tried to explain to her that every good race involved exceeding what felt like my physical limits. If I ran 800 meters as hard as I could in practice, I might run 2:10; in a race, I might run 1:55. Accessing that hidden reserve was anything but a foregone conclusion, and waiting to see how deep I would manage to dig was what made racing both exhilarating and terrifying. (I never did get a date with her.)

High-traffic areas are the most problematic. Australian researchers recently asked test subjects to jog back and forth alongside a four-lane highway and found elevated blood levels of volatile organic compounds, commonly found in gasoline, after just 20 minutes. But pollution levels drop exponentially as you move away from a roadway, according to a 2006 study in the journal Inhalation Toxicology. Even just 200 yards from the road, the level of combustion-related particulates is four times lower, and trees have a further protective effect—so riverside bike trails, for instance, have dramatically lower pollution levels than bike lanes along major arteries.

More recent research suggests a simpler rule: whatever weight you use, you should be unable to lift it again when you complete the set.

It’s this loss of muscular power, rather than strength, that causes the most problems for seniors in day-to-day life—which is why researchers now recommend that seniors include at least some power-building exercises in their program

surprising results about a phenomenon he called “asymmetric weight gain and loss,” based on the experiences of 55,000 runners in his National Runners’ Health Study. Put simply, he found that you gain more weight when you stop exercising than you lose when you subsequently resume the identical exercise program. “In other words,” he says, “if you stop exercising you don’t get to resume where you left off.” Falling off the exercise wagon for a few weeks may just add a pound or two, but if it happens every year it can lead to steady accumulation of weight even though you’re working out diligently for the other 50 weeks of the year. Williams found that, after a break in exercise, women didn’t start losing weight again until they were running at least 10 miles a week, and men had to hit twice that total. Once they exceeded that level, the subjects were able to start reversing weight gained over holiday and other breaks.

High-protein plants Spinach (3 cups, cooked): 15 g of protein Asparagus (3 cups, cooked): 12 g Lentils (1 cup, cooked): 18 g Oats (½ cup, dry): 13 g Quinoa (1 cup, cooked): 8 g

I, too, kept searching for the formula—the one that would allow me to calculate, once and for all, my limits. If I knew that I had run as fast as my body was capable of, I reasoned, I’d be able to walk away from the sport with no regrets.

Top athletes really push themselves to a darker place, and stay there longer, than most people are willing to tolerate.

Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while

Olympic athletes are strong and fit and tough. But none of that matters if they’re not also resilient, capable of shaking off setbacks and adapting quickly to unexpected circumstances.

This heightened resilience to stress will help the soldiers handle the inevitable chaos they will encounter during combat and reduce their likelihood of developing post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Winning Mind Set, a 2006 self-help book by Jim Brault and Kevin Seaman, which uses Bannister’s four-minute mile as a parable about the importance of self-belief. “[W]ithin one year, 37 others did the same thing,” they write. “In the year after that, over 300 runners ran a mile in less than four minutes.” Similar larger-than-life (that is, utterly fictitious) claims are a staple in motivational seminars and across the Web: once Bannister showed the way, others suddenly brushed away their mental barriers and unlocked their true potential.

In 1865, for example, a pair of German scientists collected their own urine while hiking up the Faulhorn, an 8,000-foot peak in the Bernese Alps, then measured its nitrogen content to establish that protein alone couldn’t supply all the energy needed for prolonged exertion.

brain-altering drugs like Tylenol that boost endurance without any effect on the muscles or heart.23

He was a careful and capable leader who had gained respect for the traditional knowledge of native people during his service.

To prove it, Marcora and his colleagues tested a simple self-talk intervention—precisely the approach my teammates and I had laughed at two decades earlier. They had twenty-four volunteers complete a cycling test to exhaustion, then gave half of them some simple guidance on how to use positive self-talk before another cycling test two weeks later. The self-talk group learned to use certain phrases early on (“feeling good!”) and others later in a race or workout (“push through this!”), and practiced using the phrases during training to figure out which ones felt most comfortable and effective. Sure enough, in the second cycling test, the self-talk group lasted 18 percent longer than the control group, and their rating of perceived exertion climbed more slowly throughout the test. Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.

At low speeds, the effort is primarily aerobic (meaning “with oxygen”), since oxygen is required for the most efficient conversion of stored food energy into a form your muscles can use. Your VO2max reflects your aerobic limits. At higher speeds, your legs demand energy at a rate that aerobic processes can’t match, so you have to draw on fast-burning anaerobic (“without oxygen”) energy sources. The problem, as Hopkins and Fletcher had shown in 1907, is that muscles contracting without oxygen generate lactic acid. Your muscles’ ability to tolerate high levels of lactic acid—what we would now call anaerobic capacity—is the other key determinant of endurance, Hill concluded, particularly in events lasting less than about ten minutes.

This shows that simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance. How you get fit matters: you have to suffer.

Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.

The mind, in other words, frames the outer limits of what we believe is humanly possible.

Our brains are sending signals to our muscles; as we fatigue, those signals are getting weaker and weaker,” Putrino explained. “The brain is making a choice. But the brain’s opinion isn’t always right.

endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”5 That’s

Without a time machine (and a rectal probe), it’s impossible to settle the debate one way or the other—but we can rule out heatstroke.

In the end, the most effective limit-changers are still the simplest—so simple that we’ve barely mentioned them. If you want to run faster, it’s hard to improve on the training haiku penned by Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner, the man whose 1991 journal paper foretold the two-hour-marathon chase: Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while22

When you exercise repeatedly in hot conditions, your body’s protective responses get progressively better: you sweat more heavily, starting at a lower temperature; your vessels dilate even wider to deliver heat-laden blood to the skin; and the total volume of blood in your body increases, allowing your heart rate to stay lower during exercise.

Their conclusion was that “the end point of any performance is never an absolute fixed point but rather is when the sum of all negative factors such as fatigue and muscle pain are felt more strongly than the positive factors of motivation and will power.

Under normal circumstances, it’s very rare for people to reach the limits of their cold tolerance if they’re appropriately dressed,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

But Landy’s enigma isn’t that he wasn’t quite good enough. It’s that he clearly was.

sprint fearlessly to an enormous early lead in the women’s 1,500, click off lap after metronomic lap all alone,

Suddenly my obsessive calculating and endless strategizing seemed ridiculous and overwrought. I was here to run a race; why not just run as hard as I could?

at least in recreational athletes, pain tolerance is both a trainable trait and a limiting factor in endurance.

psychology

Science has confirmed what athletes have always believed: that there's more in there—if you're willing to believe it.

And every machine, no matter how great, has a maximum capacity. Worsley, in trying to cross Antarctica on his own, had embarked on a mission that exceeded his body’s capacity, and no amount of mental strength and tenacity could change that calculation.

By the time I ran what would turn out to be my fastest 5,000, on a perfect evening in Palo Alto, California, in 2003, I’d decided I needed a new mental strategy: I would pretend I was only running 4,000 meters, and simply not worry if I had to jog the last kilometer. I wanted to run 2:45 per kilometer, and my first three kilometers were 2:45, 2:45, 2:47. The moment of truth: I knuckled down and vowed to run the fourth kilometer as hard as I could—but little by little, I drifted back from the pack I was running with.

enduring the rack rather than submitting to the guillotine