How Do We Perform Beyond Our Limits with Malcolm Gladwell and Alex Hutchinson

hello my name is malcolm gladwell i am here with alex hutchinson the author of the fabulous book endure which i'm happy to be here discussing with you alex um i like this book so much in fact i wrote the full word or at least you asked me to write the forward um and it isn't a really wonderful book first the first point i wanted to make was although you're a runner and i'm a runner it's not a running book that is definitely uh something i want to make clear is that it started because i was a runner like this my interest in endurance definitely came from the fact that i'm a 100 running nerd i wanted to know why i could couldn't go faster or what i could do to go faster but as i sort of explored this question it became a much much broader question you know while i was writing the proposal of this book i had my first daughter while i was well i was writing the book i had my second daughter endurance means something very different when you've been up for three nights in a row and what i realized is that it's it's really a kind of a universal thing the the the desire to be able to continue to keep going when everything is telling you to stop and and uh so that's and that's what i've ended up exploring is not just how to run faster but kind of how do we endure yeah is it so it's fair to say i mean reading this book one of the um one of the unexpected things i learned was that we probably spend too much time differentiating among endurance tasks as opposed to wondering what they all have in common you can look at a spectrum of different activities whether it's you know cognitive activities or physical activities and whether they're short duration or long duration and fundamentally what a lot of things have in common is that you kind of have to hold your finger in the flame you have to resist your your impulse to to pull it away or whatever your first impulse is and i think that is kind of a unifying theme that that brings together great athletes great uh great performers in business in other contexts and it's actually you know when you think about great athletes we often think about physiological measurements like who's got the biggest vo2 max who's got the fastest 40 yard time but you can actually do cognitive tests on great athletes and they are different than the rest of us they they can perform better on computerized tests of mental fatigue resistance you know i thought of that when i was listening to a podcast the lance armstrong podcast forward and he had on a number of his former writing mates the several of his teammates from the glory years and they were all talking they were so reminiscing about what it was like to be on the tour de france and they started talking about these brutal climbs you know when the weather was freezing and they're they're on the bike for i forgot how many a ridiculous number of hours climbing some massive mountain there were several things fascinating the first fascinating thing was how much they clearly enjoyed not just the memory but they enjoyed the experience of suffering in that way and then they segued into this wonderful conversation about all them had now children and their great anxiety is apparent is that they didn't know whether they would be able to pass along to instruct their children in the joys of suffering which i thought was so fantastic but it's sort of what we're what you're getting at right that there is something quite unique about the mindset of these endurance heroes yeah you know so i heard one researcher describe this as benign masochism that maybe one of this you know we we look for all the traits or the secrets or the ways that great athletes become great and maybe one thing is that on some level they enjoy hurting and they don't enjoy extreme pain but there's something about the feeling of you know if you hear people talk about you know i i felt alive during that moment it was hard but i felt alive and i think i i would bet i don't know i would bet that someday we'll be able to identify that some people are wired to enjoy pain a little bit but i also think we can learn that a little bit i i know for me my you know my own i so i share a little bit of that anxiety about how do i teach my kids that it's okay to be uncomfortable that it's actually it can be a glorious thing to be uncomfortable it's like well okay look back alex as a 12 year old were you like i love to suffer i'm a spartan stoic yada yada yada no i was an ordinary kid and through a combination of of circumstance and opportunity i i got into running and i didn't love running initially i loved the idea that you could stop running that's like the best part about it and it was only you know over time that i learned to acquire a taste for it so i think uh and i bet the same is true for these cyclists that you know they probably didn't like pain you know they probably weren't six-year-olds saying you know please let me stick my finger in the socket again i just love to hurt but you it's an acquired taste well a couple of questions out of that so my first assumption one of the reasons that i would have had before i read your book would be the difference between a truly elite endurance athlete or performer of any kind and me is that um they don't they can achieve at levels without pain that i can't in other words that if i'm if i compare myself to the greatest distance run in the world they're so fit that they can run near a world record time and not actually suffer the way i suffer but what you're saying is something different that not only are they better physiologically but they also suffer but are fine with it yeah this is one of the great debates right like haley gabriel selassie ran a marathon in two hours joe schmoe ran a marathon in four hours doesn't that mean joe schmo is twice as tough as haley gabriel's lassie because he was out there for twice as long pushing his limits and you know there's lots of rabbit holes you can go down in that debate but look there's no doubt that the greatest athletes have uh physical abilities that allow them to do things with ease that the rest of us can't but i think an undersold part of it part of that equation is yeah they've either have learned to or able to or have trained themselves to deal with pain and i think you know anyone who's trained for a sport for a long period of time ends up understanding that yeah their body has gotten bigger stronger tougher whatever but they've also learned to go into that zone of discomfort and learn the difference between a warning sign and a stop sign they've learned that if you know if you're breathing hard or if your legs are feeling heavy that doesn't mean you're out of oxygen you're about to die it just means you know this isn't sustainable indefinitely but you can ignore it so i i do think the great athletes uh they learn to tolerate they they don't they don't necessarily feel pain differently than the rest of us but they frame it differently it's information and they're as a result they can stay in that pain cave for longer now do we how good of an understanding do we have of that process so you've suggested that some part of it might be a learned adaptation i'm assuming some part of that might also be just a a straight-up innate difference can we say with confidence that the act of continuously and over a long period of time testing the outer limits of your thresholds can raise your threshold for pain yeah this is relatively recent stuff like there's a study that goes back to the 80s early 80s with with swimmers elite swimmers in scotland where they saw they tested pain sensitivity it's actually pretty brutal you know you put a blood pressure cuff around your arm and you have to squeeze a contraction every second until you can't take it anymore so it's really pushed to the limits and it gets very painful so they found that pain tolerance ebbed and flowed with the competitive season so they were able to not just were they able to swim better in the middle of their competitive season they were able to tolerate more ischemic pain it's called when they were preparing for a big race and the lowest pain tolerance was after their off season so even within elite athletes it it rises and falls and more recently there's been some studies where they they show that you if you take people and you train them physically they're pain tolerant they're tolerant to other kinds of pain so it's not just within the sport their generalized pain tolerance increases and it increases specifically in proportion to how much they suffer in training you can do different kinds of training that are more or less uncomfortable but achieve the same physical changes but if you're uncomfortable you learn to tolerate pain the mechanisms it's it's still up in the air but the the leading theory is that it's it's basically psychological coping mechanisms you learn to reframe the pain or distract yourself it's just familiarity with with discomfort you one of the most kind of hair-raising of the many hair-raising stories you tell in the book is of the end spike to talk a little bit i thought that chapter was fantastic but tell me tell tell us a little bit about that about voigt and his um extraordinary uh achievement because he bears exactly on this point of the man's tolerance or ability to reframe pain was off the charts that that was his whole claim to fame is that you know his his his motto was shut up legs that you know his legs could be screaming at him whatever they wanted but he just he didn't care he didn't want to hear it and he credited this to his his upbringing in an east german uh well in an east german sports school he was selected when he was quite young so his era is what he when is his so he's in his mid-40s now so he would have been born around 1970 or early 70s so so towards the end he was one of the last crop going through these east german sports schools where it was like you know you you better make the grade or you go back to your to your little town and with no opportunity for advancement in an apartment and stuff like that and so he always felt and you know there's always a little bit of self mythology but he always felt that he was less talented than most of his competitors but he was just willing to hurt and that that translated into the way he rode cycling races too is that he was never saving his energy for the end or trying to tuck in the pack he was famous for like what there's only 200 kilometers to go all right i'm going to make a break and i'm going to split all out up this mountain to see if i can break everyone else and so he was a total fan favorite because he was the hard man he was the guy who was willing to suffer and so it was perfect in in book i ended up telling the story of him setting the hour record because the hour the cycle in in in cycling the hour is basically very simple how how long can you cycle in an hour and it's the ultimate test of pain because there's no tactics there's no teammates there's no there's nothing like that and it was sort of a match made in heaven and he broke the record by almost a mile does he still hold the record he does not he does not a bunch of big guns he did it when he was in his you know 41 42 and then a bunch of big guns uh like bradley wiggins came after him and they pushed it forward his description so when he gets off the bike he has this description of how he felt so do you give us a flavor he goes through every part of his body you know his elbows are sore from the riding position he's got in fact the worst aerodynamic mistake he made during this record was he had to keep standing up every few laps because he was having incredible saddle source from sitting without moving on this bike because you can't in aerodynamic position you can't even look up to see the clock so his neck was in agony and of course he had the whole metabolic feeling of what we traditionally call lactic acid burn uh so you know it just sounded like basically the worst thing you you could ever do and yet it was the you know one of the greatest moments of his life can we rank various endurance sports in terms of how insane their practitioners are because i i've often thought that cyclists have a have a threshold for suffering that's greater than runners is that fair i think we can rank them i think we will argue to the death about the argument i've so the argument that i've heard from a bunch of people is that rowing is actually maybe the most painful thing you can do it's like running you know a 5k except you're using your whole body so the agony that for runners we would experience in our legs they're experiencing throughout their whole body just absolute complete limits but and so they're very strong but they're also aerobically fit enough to be able to punish themselves for six minutes so it's not like one of those races that ends after two minutes now cycling i think is is you know often the races are or the stages are three four or five hours so it's not as intense physically the whole time but they have to be ready at all times so i think there's a more mental aspect to cycling where they have to be out there and the amount of training time they have to accumulate it raises the question of whether um the mythologies of the sport play into that so when you were talking about voigt you said that he had a personal mythology which was he was not as talented as everyone else so that meant he had to work harder right and you can see how if you talk about if his ability to deal with pain is as much as a matter of how he frames the experience his personal mythology that i'm only going to win if i work harder it's a crucial part of how he frames it but it's also true of sports right in running there is the there's the category of the effortless win there is no effortless win category in cycling right no one ever said no one has in the history of cycling i swear to god no one has ever won a twitter front stage and said that was super easy but people have won you know 1500 meters at the olympics and walked away like they just did you know yeah they're taking them walking apart it's an interesting point and one of the fun parts in researching the book was i you know i read up on the hour record in cycling and read some of the historical accounts and so a lot of people say one of the great records is eddie mercs in the 1970s it was one of the great runs at the rides at the time and again you get this lyrical description of how incredibly painful it was from him at the end and that's not something yeah that's not a a subset of the running literature maybe marathoners sometimes they finish and they say you know i'm beat up in all these ways but for cycling it seems to be this sort of exquisite uh you know symphony of pain that they experience at the end so maybe i should respect them to your point about rowers i remember once years and years ago i was at some conference and i met a guy who was still quite young he was a former olympic rower for england and he must have been 6'4 to something and he wanted to go for a run and it was i was very fit at the time it must have been in the mid 90s we went for a run and he's not a runner he's six four two you know he's a row but he was first of all i saw i was like intellectually interested how fast can i go and before he drops off and the answer is he never dropped off he but he he almost killed himself and i my whole thought was there is no no runner would ever do this you know but in his world the idea of push i mean now that i hear that rowing is one of the hardest it makes perfect sense because i was this big guy lumbering next to me at like six minute mouthpiece in 95 degree heat and you're not giving up yeah well it's it shows that the mindset makes a big difference i remember the story of a friend of mine who was again very fit out for a run on a training camp in california and this big enormous guy you know six plus 200 and something pounds he was about to pass him and the guy decided to stay with him and he thought well no one who's 200 something pounds is going to stay with me i'm a you know elite runner and this guy stayed with him and stayed with him and after a couple miles he said who are you and he said the guy introduced himself apparently he was the heaviest man to break for for four minutes for the mile 10 15 years earlier so yeah he had the he had the ability but he also you know the body type is maybe less different minds can inhabit different bodies yeah how do these kind of insights how what they change the way we train athletes but more than athletes i'm just you know you say you have two young daughters knowing what you know about endurance from this book has it changed the way you might parent them it changes the way i respond to the challenge of parenting for sure so in in the sense of dealing with my own fatigue and understanding the difference between uh when i feel like i can't go on which is sort of every tuesday and thursday and saturday in some sense in some ways uh and and what my actual limits are and understanding that the the stories i tell myself about how i'm feeling really have an effect so if i wallow in self-pity and tell myself that no one has to work as hard as i do to bring up kids um that's going to make things a lot worse and so i that mental aspect of endurance is something that i've really taken to heart in trying to understand the power i have to reframe my own experiences in terms of bringing up the kids and as you related to before trying to make sure that they that life isn't too easy for them you know they're still young right now they're they're three in one so so the lessons i can teach them are more along the lines of please stop throwing that on the floor but yeah you know what my my youngest daughter or my oldest daughter rather is playing soccer and last week we were there and at the end she was i'm so tired i can't keep going i've been running around well it's like you're choosing to run around but my wife was also my wife is probably more horde card than hardcore than i am and she sat her down said you know what but it's good to be tired doesn't it feel good wasn't that fun to push yourself and you know so who knows how much of that she's going to integrate you used a phrase earlier the difference between what is a something and a stop sign a signal a warning sign or a warning sign yeah what is can you expand on that what is the difference between a warning sign and a stop sign my subjective experience of limits is that when i run a race i'm running as hard as i can and if someone beats me it's because my body was incapable of of doing that and that's just that's demonstrably not true that we in almost no circumstances do we actually reach a point where our muscles can't contract anymore the probably the most graphic illustration i can think of that is is uh is holding your breath it's an elemental need right like you when i finish if i'm if i try and hold my breath then when i stop i'm not thinking well if i really wanted it i could push a little more it's like well i'm out of oxygen so your your body's flashing yellow is um is quite conservative your body warns you well shy of danger so a common mistake we would make would be to assume that once the flashing yellow is there the the the red is coming instantly and it's not that's exactly the big idea that i took away from this book because it's a pattern that shows up everywhere you look whether it's whether you're running out of water whether you're overheating we get these warning signs and there's still a lot of runway and it doesn't mean in all situations you want to push into that yellow zone if you if you will but knowing that it's there gives you a little more wiggle room and i think you know in in any sort of context i think also cognitive context like the the feeling of fatigue is something that i fight when i'm writing or or you know or traveling and understanding that okay it's not that i'm so sleep-deprived that i'm gonna pass out it just means i'm tired it's a warning sign i need to get some sleep but i can push through this you know i wonder about the observation again to to bring it to to refer to the world of running what we've seen in running over the last 30 and 35 years is that the endurance specialties have become increasingly dominated by athletes from africa that's one way of framing it but there's something about africa another way of framing it is the endurance sports have become increasingly dominated from by people from countries that are a lot less wealthy and i'm wondering are there certain habits of of mind that are necessary for endurance that are getting harder and harder for wealthy countries to teach yeah so this is you know this is a million dollar question right and there's there's there's a lot of different answers there i think you know if you look at a poverty-stricken country where there's limited opportunities obviously there's a bunch of things going on in terms of for a kid growing up in in the united states what are they giving up if they choose to spend their 20s running right or their teens or 20s running and and also let's say you have a 14 year old who decides he or she wants to be a great runner can they can they just start running without getting injured if they haven't been if they've been sitting on their screens through childhood so there's a lot of stuff going on but you know i don't i don't think there's any doubt that uh the discomfort learning to deal with discomfort is something that we've programmed out of our lives and i mean just as a random thought i i remember 10 years ago or so taking a trip to papua new guinea to do a hiking trip and i didn't have a lot of money so we took the very difficult way of getting to the start of the hike which was to take a uh basically a truck for a six-hour ride on these terrible roads and in the back of the truck there were maybe 25 people hanging off the roof and you know and we were sitting there it was like you know i went and we went and hiked through the jungle carrying all our stuff for a week that was easy compared to sitting on that truck which is a daily rite of passage for people in those communities that's just how you get from point a to point b and it's like yeah it would take me a lot to learn to be able to deal with that sort of discomfort and so you know look i don't wish discomfort on me or on anyone but there's certainly i think truth is the idea that different upbringings are going to prepare you differently for discomfort that i want to come back to a point you are making earlier and i want you to expand out a little bit more so what we're suggesting here is that this ability to kind of push the envelope to go beyond the warning sign and get to the closer to the stop sign it's cross-disciplinary that is to say if i learn it in one domain it's at least of some usefulness in another domain is that fair to say or do we know that yeah i think that's true i mean whether it's a universal general rule there may be some details but there's lots of interesting studies showing that you know uh the ability to resist mental fatigue doing computer tasks translates into the ability to resist fatigue on a bike various aspects of of uh learning to deal with pain they tran like i was saying earlier they they transfer it's like just because you've learned to to do a lot of bike riding or running doesn't necessarily mean that you should be able to handle electric shocks better but it turns out that that's true what really matters whether you're again whether you're writing a book or whether you're running a race is not you know the level of lactate in your legs or the level of caffeine in your in your brain it's how hard does it feel and how does that compare to how much i'm how hard i'm willing to to work and so everything else feeds into this global sense of how hard is this and that's i think that's a sort of a as closest to a universal law as we can get does that suggest that some kind of endurance activity maybe even endurance physical activity ought to be considered a necessary part of a good education and we can speak of endurance activity broadly like it you know it doesn't have to be going for a run although i think you and i would agree that that's a fine character building activity you know it could be playing games like soccer there's lots of things but lots of ways of getting at that skill but i think if you don't experience discomfort on some level you you you can't learn to do it without you know repeated exposure so that's what i hope for my kids uh you know whether we can institute the uh compulsory fizz out again uh for younger kids it's another question i you know it's funny i version of this for me was when i was running competitively i was the terrified of racing i had more race anxiety than i couldn't sleep for like a week before major races as a result i have no anxiety in any other aspect so i have no public speaking anxiety none and it's because when i stand up in front of the room i think this is so much easier than running a race you um you wrote this book over how many years i started telling people when i was interviewing them it was probably nine years ago now that i started saying i'm writing this book will you be are you willing to talk to me so i think hopefully they're they're now realized that i was telling the truth they just took a while so there's an astonishing amount of reporting and storytelling in this at one point you went to the comrades marathon in south africa um and i just want you to i mean because it was one of those there's many like these wonderful moments in the book where you just are taken someplace that you have never seen before um tell me about that experience and why you went and what you learned so okay comrades is it's about a 55 mile ultra marathon in in south africa and it's it's the biggest ultramarathon in the world and it has this tremendous uh it's kind of the boston marathon of south africa and now i've been to a lot of races in my life hundreds uh but this was an experience like none that i've ever really had before and as a former middle distance runner i can say it's the first time i thought i'd like to run an ultra marathon i'd like to be part of this one thing is there's like 20 000 people who run it some years so it's a massive thing and a huge support and it takes hours and hours the winners might run six hours but the official cutoff is 12 hours if you want to have an official time in the comrades marathon you have to finish within 12 hours and this is taken enormously seriously by people and what they do at the finish line in the stadium they have the you know the finishes i think was finishing on a track and they have the finish line set up and when they get close to maybe a minute left before 12 hours the the the race official stands at the finish line with his back facing the oncoming runners so that he won't see them and be biased by them and he holds a gun in the air and the whole stadium starts counting down and you can see all the runners who were sort of straggling into the stadium realizing oh i have 46. 45 44 seconds remaining to be an official finisher and these guys have been out there for 11 minutes 11 hours and 59 minutes they are just wrecked they are the the detritus of you know human existence and they start sprinting and it looks like you would imagine you know the race of the zombies looking they're just oh trying to get there and they are sprinting and then the gun is in the air three two one the gun goes off and a bunch of race marshals jump across the finish line and join arms so that no one else can cross the finish line and when the year i saw it one guy made it he ran basically 11 59 59 and someone else who would have been basically zero 12-0-0-0-1 bounced off these guys and just healed over backwards and you know he still gets to cross line he knows he did it but there was something about this sense of this achievement meant so much to so many people that and and they took seriously the difference between making it and not making it and you know the guy who ran twelve zero zero zero zero one will be back the next year so and and you know that's on my on my bucket list is i would love to experience that race because you could see it had so much meaning to people wonderful thank you so much alex and i i hardly recommend endure to anyone out there who wants a fantastic read wonderful thank you

Channel: Next Big Idea Club

Views: 12,655

Keywords: Alex Hutchinson, Endure, Malcolm Gladwell, Marathon, Running, Sports science, adam grant, book authors interviews, book community, endurance, ideas that will change your life, interviews with writers and thinkers, life-changing insights, next big idea app, next big idea club, next big idea podcast, nonfiction, smart talks, transformative ideas, world's great thinkers, alex hutchinson endure, endure book alex hutchinson, endure, endure alex hutchinson, alex hutchinson runner

Id: iGPEK1rwqBg

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021