This is the outside podcast.

Yeah, I think the big question that underlies the whole pursuit of limits is

when I push to what feels like my limit is that everything that my body has to give.

And there's an idea that's called the central governor these days, thanks to a scientist named Tim Noakes, who proposed this idea in the 1990s.

Somehow we're hardwired

not to be able to push all the way to the point where we sort of keel over on the savannah

while chasing the antelope and die. We have some sort of circuitry that prevents us from

pushing all the way to our physical limits.

Now, this idea wasn't just invented in, you know,

1996 when Tim Noakes started talking about it.

People have speculated about it for decades and probably for centuries,

but it's only in the last couple of decades that people have started to try

and a little more systematically measure this idea of,

can we squeeze every bit out of the lemon, or is there some sort of limit that prevents us from getting there?

Certain things never get old.

Pushing the limits of the human body is kind of one of them.

So over the next few weeks, we're revisiting some of our favorite stories from the last few years.

We'll have new stuff soon, but it's not quite ready yet.

So while we're ramping that up, we're going to be looking back at some of our favorite episodes ever and how they came to be. This week, it's an episode that had such a

roundabout path to existence that it's hard to believe that it made it on the air at all. It's the

story of two guys dueling for the world record in pull-ups in 24 hours.

It came out of a reporting trip to a super remote tropical island, where I had followed an obsessive climber for outside's print magazine. And while we were there, he mentioned

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