Endure - Alex Hutchinson - Scott Goggins

 

This was a book club recommendation from Rachel. It's an interesting book and had to have taken him forever to write it. Essentially it's two parallels happening at the same time. One story is how he is working with and participating in Nike's sub 2 hour marathon and the other is chapter after chapter about the science behind what's holding us back from performing and what we can do to get the last 1%. I think this book is less about sports and more about how our bodies function when handling intensity. An example would be if I can do a boring task for 3 hours a day would that make me able to push harder in a marathon. That kind of stuff. Overall it was interesting to read about and it was also interesting to see how the science progressed from the old days to now. It seems like everyone was smarter back in the day and people kind of just hopped into the field. A lot of the back in the day scientist were athletes that later in life worked in a lab then they'd come up with a super good formula that could predict your speed called Vo2 lol idk it's kind of weird because I assume you need like 10+ years of college to figure out something like that. Who knows. Some of the stuff they talk about is super relatable like if you pushed your 'max' the whole race then why can people sprint at the end. 

In terms of people being smarter back in the day, it makes a lot of sense. I know longer write by hand so I don't really have to know how to spell cause autocorrect does it. I also just go to chatgpt if I need something answered so I no longer critically think. It's just like everything is fixed by the computer if i make a mistake so I don't really have to know how to do stuff. Maybe I need to start writing more letters. 

An alright book and as the other books this book is super specific to athletes and the science behind it so if that's not super interesting to you then its probably not for you.