Nicosia, Cyprus. A runner recalled realizing they were in third place only in the final 50 metres of their first trail-running race, with race staff calling, “The third is coming,” shortly before the finish. After crossing the line, the runner’s girlfriend reacted with surprise at the performance.
Podium finish and questions about performance
The runner said they only understood they were on the podium moments before finishing. At the finish line, they described their girlfriend grabbing their head and saying, “Wow, baby. I didn’t know you were that good.”
The experience prompted the runner to reflect on why people can sometimes perform beyond what training and past results suggest, a question they said stayed with them for days.
Ideas drawn from “Endure”
The runner cited the foreword of Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, in which Malcolm Gladwell describes unexpectedly strong races that exceed what training would predict. The runner said these accounts, along with Hutchinson’s analysis, focus on how expectations, perceptions, and the brain’s interpretation of effort can unlock or limit performance.
The runner described the book as examining what limits human endurance and arguing that endurance is not determined only by muscles, lungs, or oxygen, but also by the brain’s role in deciding when to stop. They said the book blends science, storytelling, and sports history and discusses pain, fatigue, heat, thirst, belief, and mental toughness to explain how mind and body interact to set, and sometimes stretch, performance limits.
Physiological model versus perception-based approach
According to the runner, Hutchinson challenges a traditional body-as-machine model that treats the body as a mechanical engine constrained by limits such as VO2max, muscle fatigue, lactate buildup, fuel depletion, heat, and dehydration, assuming the system fails once these limits are reached.
The runner said the book contrasts this with contemporary scholarship that frames the brain as a regulator, interpreting physical responses as protective signals rather than failures. In this view, the runner said, performance is shaped by perceived effort, expectations, motivation, beliefs, and context, and quitting can occur before physical limits are reached because the brain judges the cost too high.
Lingering uncertainty about pacing
The runner said reading Endure led them to view their race performance as influenced not only by an above-average VO2max but also by perception of effort, expectations, and motivation.
They said they continued to struggle with practical questions about pacing without knowing true limits, pointing to sore, lactate-filled legs and HRV metrics from a Garmin fitness tracker as physical signals that the race had been a stretch. The runner said the effort left them uncertain about how to pace future races, how to gauge effort, and how to distribute fuel evenly across a course without knowing their true capacity.
Approaching the Kambos Mountain Race
The runner cited John L Parker Jr.’s novel Once a Runner on pacing, quoting: “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.”
They said the passage was on their mind before the start of the Kambos Mountain Race on January 25, adding that a rational evaluation of their “running capital” and an efficient strategy proved impossible.
How do you decide on a pacing strategy when you cannot be sure where your true limits are?