Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black. On this segment, we invite you to join with us as we learn all about the limits of the human body and the human mind with our guest, fitness journalist and bestselling author Alex Hutchinson, whose latest book is called Endure, Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.

Alex, you spent eight years working on this book. Talk to us more

about the research that you did and what your goal was. Yeah, I guess for me, it all started as a, it comes out

of my younger days, my interest as a competitive runner. I was interested in endurance because I wanted to know

why I couldn't run faster, essentially.

And so it started as a very personal interest, and it gradually morphed into a professional

interest because I became a science journalist and started writing about the science of endurance.

And so the way the process ended up working is that for those eight years, I was working as a journalist for various, you know, magazines and newspapers like Runner's World and Outside magazine.

And I was using that sort of career path as an opportunity to go around the world and meet the most interesting people I could think of or find in the, in the find who were searching for an understanding of endurance.

And it became a much broader thing than just, why can't they run faster,

but more about the struggle for endurance, which I think is kind of a universal feature of life in a way.

And tell us more about who you talked to and the studies you looked at.

Yeah, so, I mean, there is a huge sort of body of research trying to understand the way the body works.

And it's been going on for about a century.

And just in the last, I would say, 10 to 15 years, there's been a shift away from trying to

understand endurance the way we understand, you know, how a car works, just as a sort of the sum of how the machine works.

And realizing that humans are different, that there's a brain, that we don't just sort of go out and try and run a marathon and stop when we run out of fuel, that there's this much more complex

system going on that's trying to keep us healthy. So the people that I was most interested to meet were this sort of

newer generation of researchers who are reevaluating what it means to hit the limits of your endurance

and arguing that it really has more to do with what your brain thinks than how your heart is pumping

or how much lactic acid is in your legs. So there's a guy named Tim Noakes in South Africa

and another guy named Semwell Markora who's in Italy. There's a guy named Kai Lutz in Switzerland.

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