Book review: Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson

I’m going to try to get in the habit of writing brief reviews of books I’ve read, that may be of interest to people visiting this site. Last week, I mentioned Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. This week, it’s Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson - which I highly recommend.

I run, quite a lot, and have goals of running faster than I have before. That’s what attracted me to Endure, as I am intrigued by the role that my brain may play in whether or not I am able to push my own limits when training or racing. That said, the book would be of interest to anyone who wants to get the best out of themselves, whether you’re a runner or choose to test yourself in other ways.

Don’t expect any quick-fix ‘this is what you need to do to get an extra 5% from yourself’ tips though. I don’t think it’s a spoiler for me to say that - after all, if such a quick fix existed we would all know about it.

Instead, what Endure offers is a comprehensive overview of what scientists believe is happening in your body, your brain, and how the two interact with each other when you’re doing an endurance activity. Armed with this information, you should be more aware of what you are experiencing (the differentiation between pain and effort is helpful, for example) and better able to respond in a way that improves your chances of getting the result you want.

This has all been said elsewhere, in other reviews, though.

What I would like to look at here - as a writer who is always looking to improve his own writing - is why I think this book works so well.

I raced through this. Yes, it’s a subject that interests me, and I was already aware of and enjoy reading Hutchinson’s work, but that’s no guarantee that this would be a good book.

The subject matter is primarily sourced from academic journals and interviews with exercise physiologists and other scientists. Presented in the wrong way, this could have been dry and difficult to wade through for a reader who isn’t already an expert in these fields. What Hutchinson does is present this information in a way that makes sense.

It would also be easy to present this information in a way that lacks a narrative or any sense of momentum to hold the reader’s interest. Hutchinson avoids this by weaving various threads through the text.

Each chapter has at least one real-world example, an endurance feat or failure, that illustrates and ties together the academic studies referred to in that section.

Beyond this, Hutchinson includes stories from his own personal experience, which helps the reader (many of whom are likely to participate in endurance sports) relate to what he is explaining. Certainly, the passage where Hutchinson describes the latter stages of his debut marathon felt uncomfortably similar to my own experiences.

Finally, as an umbrella over the top of all of this, a motif that reappears at regular intervals, is the story of Eliud Kipchoge, Lelisa Desisa and Zersenay Tadese’s ‘Breaking2’ attempt to run the marathon distance in under two hours.

The effect of these different narrative arcs - micro, meso and macro - is to give an impetus that a straight academic review may be lacking. I think it is that makes Endure work so well.