
The Curiously Elastic Limits of Endurance - anarbadalov
https://www.outsideonline.com/2279081/are-limits-endurance-mental-or-physical
======
kyleblarson
I ran in a couple of trail 50k's last year and decided to focus more on my
training for next year's races so started working with a coach who has trained
numerous olympic nordic skiers. I quickly realized that my training was
completely incorrect and ineffective previously. He focuses maniacally on long
hours of low intensity aerobic effort with very strict heart rate constraints
mixed with strength and only occasional high intensity effort. I have seen
impressive results after only 2.5 months. Here's an article he wrote:
[https://www.outsideonline.com/2270151/what-everyone-gets-
wro...](https://www.outsideonline.com/2270151/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-
endurance-training)

~~~
gameswithgo
A lot of amateur endurance athletes will hear about elite coaches or athletes
saying things like "quality over quantity" or "less is more" and not realize
that the context of those comments is something like: "I was training 40 hours
a week but I realized if I did better if I dropped it to 30 hours a week with
more specificity or harder hard days". They then use that to justify not doing
more than their comparatively tiny workload, which is psychologically natural
since you don't want to do more!

But until you get up to the point where more is too much, which is usually
more than you imagine, more is usually more.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZ48AE3TOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZ48AE3TOI)

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te_chris
I can relate to this.

I'm a master's swimmer, but I'm only really now picking up pace after having
to take a couple of years off to properly build strength in my shoulders to
carry on after a rotator cuff injury.

Around May 2016 I decided to try jumping back into the squad training after
just under a year of rehab. It was my first session back; I was massively
unfit. At the end of the session the coach got us to do a 100m race. I was up
against a couple of guys who'd been faster than me in the session and was
determined to show I hadn't slipped that much. I ended up swimming a 1:07 for
the 100m free beating one of the faster guys. I couldn't believe the time. I
don't really know what happened, but I REALLY wanted to win this race and just
went for it. A few weeks after this my shoulder wasn't holding up to the
training volume and I had to drop back into more gym rehab type stuff.

I finally got back into the pool properly around May of last year. The best
time I've swum in a similar scenario since has been a 1:07 and I'm the fittest
and strongest I've been for years.

~~~
trendia
Swimming is great because it doesn't reward effort as much as it rewards form.
I came to swimming from a running / cycling background, and I quickly realized
that extreme exertion was _not_ the key to getting better speeds. It's only
when I started to consciously focus on form and accepted being slower during
training, that I saw much improvement.

Also, congrats on the 1:07! I'm not even close to that speed yet.

~~~
graphitezepp
I don't agree with this sentiment, but I came to swimming from a swimming
background. Maybe I just had the form down when I was so young I only ever had
to think about the effort.

~~~
te_chris
Was going to say that :) Once you get technique then you just have to hammer
at it but with more technique

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yesenadam
William James' essay _The Energies of Men_ has some remarkable stories of
endurance, and bodily transformations under extreme circumstances, in it.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Energies_of_Men](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Energies_of_Men)

~~~
benbreen
Thanks for this, I had never seen it before. I love William James' writing
style - somewhat typically Victorian and ornate, but underneath the style, an
incredibly lucid and original mind. From the linked essay:

 _Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on
different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies
slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but
which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived
habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of
clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding.
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake._

~~~
yesenadam
That one starts unusually ornately. But that's such a classic sentence:

 _To crown the whole pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a constant
diarrhœa, and consumed as much opium as would have done credit to my father-
in-law._

Not bad for the 1907 _Philosophical Review_. My favourites are _On a Certain
Blindness in Human Beings_ (which led me to Stevenson, who's an even greater
essayist) and its sequel _What Makes a Life Significant?_ , but there are many
great ones. _The Ph D Octopus_ , _The Moral Equivalent of War_ , etc etc or
the very funny one _On Some Hegelisms_ about when on nitrous oxide he
recognized it as the key to Hegel's thought. And his book on religious
experience, textbook on the principles of psychology, and other books are
still well worth reading and very enjoyable reads.

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olivermarks
'...brain and body are fundamentally intertwined, and to understand what
defines your limits under any particular set of circumstances, you have to
consider them both together'.

The 'considering' is at the foundations of many mystical and meditative
traditions going back thousands of years.

Separately, for years when I ran I would time myself and stress about going
faster over the same route, and enter races for the medal, t shirt and ranking
amongst finishers. I realized that was not a useful way to get the most out of
running and that I should try to make it a far more meditative, relaxing
experience, and was surprised to find (when I did time myself one day out of
curiosity) that I was running at the higher end of the elapsed times I had
stressed about previously

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noelwelsh
In case anyone else is curious, the author's 1500m Olympic trial is here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dSLUVmK1Ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dSLUVmK1Ik)

~~~
monktastic1
Alex Hutchinson, #251.

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montyf
I always liked the story about the breaking of the 4 minute mile. It shows how
easily our brains can box us in to particular views of reality, and how they
act to further perpetuate this "reality". I bet that if a minute was, say, 65
seconds instead of 60, we still would have hit a "wall" trying to break the 4
minute mile.

~~~
vinceguidry
The article states that the popular telling of that story is incorrect, it
took 20 years after Bannister did it for 300 people to run sub-4 minute miles.
And Landy might well have broken it on the day that he did even if Bannister
hadn't done it.

I think there's actually something to the idea that 4 minutes is a real
biological limit that can only be overcome through the right training, the
right technique, and the right mindset, and that it took until recently to
figure out how.

What's curious to me is how it lines up. I suspect that this is like something
you see on Numberphile, where a seemingly unrelated geometric problem ends up
getting solved through number theory. What a 'minute' is, exactly how much
time it is, dates all the way back to prehistory. I don't think we should be
_that_ surprised that a biological limit should line up that neatly with our
units of time.

~~~
montyf
It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting
and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge
role in these stories. From my personal experience running track and field
this phenomenon occurs rather frequently. All it takes is one person achieving
a long-standing milestone for the rest of the team to quickly follow suit.
I've seen similar things happen in non-physical competitive games, like chess
and dota 2, at the highest level.

Maybe there is some kind of safety mechanism built into our brains preventing
us from doing things that we've never observed or heard of being done. Brain:
"No one's ever run sub-4 minutes, so I don't know for sure whether doing so
would kill me or not. Better not try."

~~~
js2
I wonder whether this may even dovetail with Tim Noakes’ “central govenor”
theory:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor)

~~~
montyf
Thanks, that's really interesting, including the Criticisms section. I think
that there must be a mix of psychological and physiological factors at play.

Not sure how directly relevant this is but I used to get dead-tired if I had
any less than eight hours of sleep. I had spent most of my life hearing about
how I "needed" at least eight hours. Then I had a period of insomnia where I
would regularly get three hours a night which challenged this deeply-held
belief. My functioning was impaired, of course, but it was comparable to how I
functioned on 7 hours of sleep prior. Now I can sleep six hours a night
without problems, having broken through some psychological barrier.

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foobarrio
When talking about endurance running, my mind immediately jumps to Courtney
Dauwalter. In Oct of 2017 she run the Moab 240 mile race by 10+ hours. She's
had other "super hero" stories such as pushing through temporary blindless to
finish another race. I don't know of any particular feature that allows her to
achieve these feats of endurance but the "brain/body" connection seems to be
huge part of it since her training volume/intensity doesn't seem to be that
much different than her peers.

~~~
gameswithgo
Being better at running a long way than peers at the same training volume is
also easily explained by plain physical talent, which varies enormously.

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gaius
_The British military has funded studies of computer-based brain training
protocols to enhance the endurance of its troops, with startling results_

Anyone have anymore details on this?

~~~
Momquist
[https://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/brain-training-
bo...](https://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/brain-training-boosts-
endurance)

It's based on the Brain Endurance Training (BET), by Samuele Marcora of the
university of Kent, who is quoted in the OP's article (for his definition of
effort).

[https://www.kent.ac.uk/sportsciences/people/profiles/marcora...](https://www.kent.ac.uk/sportsciences/people/profiles/marcora-
samuele.html)

