Instant Genius - How to push the limits of human endurance

Episode Date: April 18, 2018

Ahead of the London Marathon, we talk to Alex Hutchinson, author and former long-distance athlete about what it takes to push the human body to its limits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heinz. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and... and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality.

British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Even in the last few months, there's been some studies on this idea and asking runners to smile while they're running. And it seems to increase their efficiency by about 2%.

So they burn 2% less energy to maintain the same pace through some combination of probably, you know, relaxing muscles. But just the act of smiling seems to help change how your brain interprets those signals from the rest of your body. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor of BBC Focus magazine.

This weekend, more than 40,000 runners will take to the streets of the capital to compete in one of the most prestigious and iconic events in the sporting calendar, the London Marathon. After months of training, these runners will feel like they've pushed their bodies to the very limit. But as Alex Hutchinson discovers in his new book, Endure, the human body is capable of significantly more than we can imagine, even after a gruelling 26.2 mile run through the Cobble Streets of London. He talks to ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara

about what happens in the body when your endurance running, whether we humans can ever run a marathon in under two hours, and how smiling while you run can improve your race times. So I guess I would call myself a science journalist these days. You can narrow it down. I'm a science endurance journalist or a sports endurance science journalist because I've been writing for the last 10 years or so about the science of endurance, not so much who is winning and losing races, but why they do and what are the limits

that athletes face and that we all face. And so my background is that I actually started out. I was a physicist originally. I did a PhD and some postdoctoral work in physics. And I was also a distance runner. So I was competing for the Canadian national team as a middle and long distance runner. And so I think the question that a lot of athletes face, as it comes time to walk away from the sport or to move on, is, you know, did I go as fast as I possibly could? Was I anywhere near my physical limits?

And so that sort of lingering question stuck with me for a long time. formed a lot of my reporting and eventually was the seed for this book to try and understand what are the limits of endurance and how close was I to them. And over the course of reporting the book, which is sort of nine years or so, my exploration of endurance got a lot broader. It's not just about, you know, could I have run a faster 1500 meter race endurance. I ended up defining it as the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. And that applies, you know, as much while you're doing your taxes or at work as it does in a marathon. But it's, it also, it also, you know, started with that sort of interest as a runner.

So that's the sort of the seed of where it comes from. So can you sort of explain to us? What is happening to our bodies when we run just as a sort of basic, you know, physiological level? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of things that are going on that all sort of integrate into that feeling of, boy, I'd like to stop. One of the key challenges for running of any duration longer than, you know, a minute is

your most efficient source of fuel relies on oxygen. And so you're struggling to get enough oxygen to your muscles. So you're panting in air and that oxygen is getting transferred to your bloodstream and your heart is pumping as hard as it can to pump oxygen-rich blood to your muscles, and your muscles are then trying to extract it to help provide the fuel they need. But in doing so, if you're running hard enough, you're also the metabolic byproducts of providing fuel to your muscle are starting to accumulate in your bloodstream. And we often hear about lactic acid.

And I spent quite a bit of time in the book looking into the origins of the belief that lactic acid kind of burns our muscles. And it's not quite true, but there's a kernel of truth in it and that the metabolic byproducts like lactate and protons and other changes in pH levels in your blood, they don't directly, you know, consume your muscles, but they send signals back to your brain that make it very uncomfortable and that make you want to slow down. So there's a supply and a demand part that your muscles are trying to get enough oxygen, and you're also getting these byproducts that are accumulating and sort of poisoning your blood.

And all of these things, along with changes in your body temperature and decreases in your fuel stores in your muscle, especially if you're running a full marathon, you're starting to run out of fuel. And your muscles are actually getting damaged if you're running. You're pushing off, but you're also breaking every time you land, and those landings do a little bit of damage to your muscles. It's particularly pronounced running downhill, but even just running a marathon, you'll have muscle damage. And all these things are sending signals back to your brain, which your brain is then integrating into a signal that says you really should stop. And we're going to make this very uncomfortable for you if you don't obey the message to stop.

So what's happening? It's sort of like your muscles are getting to a point where your brain wants to stop. Is it to protect the muscles from further damage? Or is it just, I can't take it anymore? Well, this is an area of vigorous debate among physiologists to this day. I think what's clear is that if you step out the door and to start sprinting down the street as hard as you can, you're not going to reach a point where your muscles have truly, it's very difficult to, if not impossible, to run yourself to a complete stop. And the sort of classic example of this is you watch the Olympic Marathon or the London Marathon.

on for that matter. You'll watch, and there's every incentive in the form of hundreds of thousands of pounds to win that race. And if you're in second in that race, and particularly if you're in second, just like a couple of seconds behind the leader, you're pushing as hard as you can. You're leaving nothing in the tank. And then you cross the finish line and you watch these guys and they, you know, they take a deep breath and then they jog off. You know, they're still moving. So their muscles are still capable of moving. And the other way of putting it is if at the 24-mile mark or the 38K mark of a marathon, you were to release a lion onto the course and have it start chasing people, you discover that these people can still sprint. So it's not a question

of your muscles reaching an absolute limit, despite what it feels like. It's not that your muscles can't go. It's your brain deciding that your muscles shouldn't go any farther in order to avoid the risk of danger. And the general, although there's, again, there's lots of debate, the general thinking is that this is some sort of evolutionary-driven behavior that prevents us from either doing serious damage to ourselves or just misjudging the balance between, you know, foraging for more food versus getting back to the campsite. So that's, you know, you mentioned the balance there. At what point is the importance of what the brain is doing and what the muscles are doing?

Like at what point does it the tables turn as if it were? Well, you know, it depends on the context. And there's always stories of, in many contexts of, you know, your child is trapped under a car. and you suddenly find you have superhuman strength that you can lift the car off the child, whether this is true or not is debatable. But, you know, I was speaking to a pain researcher at McGill University about, you know, how do athletes do these, you know, ridiculous things where they'll compete through, you know, a broken limb or something like that.

And he said, well, look back evolutionarily or even to the animal kingdom. If you're a deer and you, you know, trip and break your leg and while a wolf is chasing you, You can't say, oh, time out, you know, I need to take a day to recover and then we can resume this chase. You have to just keep running. So the brain has caution, but you also have to have ways of overriding the brain's caution in particularly important circumstances. And, you know, in some cases, depending on your mental state of mind, running the London Marathon can be a sort of faint echo of being chased by a wolf if you can get into the right mindset. Or someone dressed up in a rhino costume. Yeah, well, if those rhinos charge, you've got to be careful.

So, you know, watch for the fancy dress people. So with that sort of in mind, is there sort of a physical point the maximum that we can reach physically with like muscles and training? And then we have to work on our brain to be able to take us that extra bit further? So I would almost put it the other way around that there is in 99% of circumstances, and I can talk about some of the exceptions. but in most cases, there is no physical point that we reach that is like, yes, you've done everything you can and now it's at the job of the brain to push you further. It's kind of the other way around. You have a large physical capacity and you'll never approach the limits of it.

And it's your brain that's always making the decision about how prematurely to stop you. And, you know, what athletes learn over time, but what I think that we're learning more and more about is that there are ways you can manipulate or alter how early. the brain applies the brakes. So I know for me as an athlete, it always felt like I could go as hard as I could, and that was my physical limit. And then on really special days, I could transcend my physical limits. But I now sort of view it the other way around that I was never transcending my physical limits. I was just being allowed to approach them a little more closely. So could that be the same for anyone? So I'm not a particularly good runner. My times are

bad. Let's put it that way. Would it be a case for me to say, okay, well, to be able to train harder and to train better, I need to work on that mental brain part first. Yeah, I think so. But I think also, this is actually something that happens naturally, too, that we maybe don't think about as much. You know, if you were to take someone who hasn't been running at all and say, you should run a park run 5K in six months, get out there and start trying to run three times a week. And after six months, there's no doubt that there'd be a bunch of physical changes in their body. Their hearts would be a little stronger. And and their muscles would be stronger and more efficient and so on.

But there'd also be mental changes because they would have gradually learned the difference between the yellow light of caution and the red light of actual reaching a limit. When someone starts running for the first time, they head out there and they're panting, and this feels like an absolute, you know, a real serious problem that they're out of oxygen and their legs are starting to hurt. And what they gradually learn is that that feeling of panic and that feeling of being out of of breath and of legs feeling like cement, that's okay. That's not a sign that your heart's about to explode or your legs are about to fall off. That's just a warning sign saying that you can't continue that pace forever and you can ignore it up to a point. And so there's plenty of research

showing that we do learn to tolerate greater levels of discomfort over time. And there's great pain research on athletes. And if you compare athletes and non-athletes, they have roughly the same pain sensitivity. So there's no, there's no immunity to the idea of pain. If you pinch an athlete, they'll squirm as much as a non-athlete. But if you keep ramping up the pain signal, the athlete will be willing to tolerate more. And again, that's not because they're not feeling the pain, but it's because thanks to repeated exposure every day with discomfort, they've learned psychological coping techniques, things like being able to distract themselves from the pain, or reframing the pain so that it's more emotionally neutral. They're not panicking. It's just information,

and that allows them to deal with the pain better. So it is something we work on naturally just by going through the process of physical training, but it's also something that we can work on directly and explicitly, and that I think top athletes, almost without exception, do work on that deliberately to get better at it. So when I watch marathon runners or when I watch any sort of long distance, they sort of look as if while they're going through it, it's almost effortless for them. But when they cross the line, then it seems like they're,

there's this huge, great, big relief that they have on them. Is that just them letting their minds sort of welcome the pain, as it were, or just say, OK, you can have your moment? Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, I think that there's a great diversity of tactics that can be used. But I think it's really interesting to watch, say, Elliot Kipchogi, who's the Olympic champion, and he won London two years ago and will be there again this year. He deliberately smiles every, say, five minutes or so, especially in the last half of a race. And when it's getting most painful, he's got a big grin plastered on his face over every

few minutes. And when you ask him about it, he says, well, look, I'm running with my mind as much as with my legs. And so it's important to remind myself that it's fun and to try and convince my legs that it's okay. And, you know, that sounds sort of, that's the kind of thing that my tendency as a skeptic is to sort of smile and nod and dismiss it. But actually, even in the last few months, there's been some studies on this idea and asking runners to smile while they're running, and it seems to increase their efficiency by about 2%. So they burn 2% less energy to maintain the same pace through some combination of probably relaxing muscles. But it also changes, just the act of smiling seems to help change how your brain interprets those signals from the rest of your body.

So that the distress signals from your muscles no longer seem quite so threatening if you've got this idea that everything's okay and you're you're tricking yourself into thinking that everything's fine. So I now have the idea of just doing a run and then just sort of saying to myself halfway through, I'm enjoying this more than I probably really am, just to give myself that extra boost. Exactly. And, you know, look, when I was in university 20 years ago, we had a sports psychologist who gave us sort of roughly that advice, gave us all these techniques for negative thought stopping. And we thought this was just the most terrific joke. We thought it was hilarious and we laughed and laughed at what a silly thing she was doing,

because we knew that to be the fastest possible, we just had to maximize our VO2 max and improve our lactate threshold. And one of the things that I've come away with after a decade of looking into this stuff and looking into the research is that, boy, I wish I had a time machine and I could go back and say, hey, Alex, take this stuff seriously

because it turns out as sort of ridiculous and abstract as it sounds, there's pretty good laboratory-based evidence that changing your internal monologue makes a difference. And so if you learn to replace the negative thoughts like, oh, this really hurts, I can't do this, I'm going to have to stop with, I've trained for this, I'm ready for this. There's been studies that show that, okay, first of all, yes, you improve your performance, you enhance your endurance, which sounds like a big placebo effect. But they've also found that

a couple of weeks of self-talk training then allows you to, for example, increase the level that your core temperature reaches by about half a degree if you're doing exercise in hot conditions. So it really is enabling you to dig deeper into your physiological reserve. So exactly what you said. If you can convince yourself that you're actually enjoying yourself, even if it seems like you're maybe deceiving yourself, if you can convince yourself your mind to follow, then there's some benefits there.

I mean, it sort of sounds like with this physical capability that we have of endurance, and then there's the part of your brain which is sort of saying, just keep going and the smell. It sounds like there's a sort of balance between the effort. So you say, I can't be bothered to do this anymore. And actually, that's having a really real impact on your actual endurance. Yeah. Well, so there's, I would say there's a growing agreement that the perception of effort,

your subjective sense of how hard this is to continue, really is fundamentally what determines whether you're able to continue. Now, of course, your sense of how hard it is. is affected by how tired your muscles are and how hard you're breathing. But it really is, if you make that sort of semantic switch that it's not your muscles and your breathing that are stopping you, they're just affecting your effort. And your effort is what determines whether you go or stop. Then what you realize is that there are other ways of influencing your effort, like thinking

positive thoughts or, you know, or taking a cup of coffee, for example, that change your perception of effort and can allow you to go farther without any time. change in what your muscles or your legs or your heart are doing. So this subjective sense of effort, which just seems like an abstract concept, turns out to be a really powerful construct. I'm just imagining now that every time I sort of get myself into a bit of a fog, I'll just go, I'll just have a nice cup of tea, just to sort of help myself, sorry. Yeah, well, there's, you know, look, it's no coincidence that whatever the stats are, 90% of people drink coffee or tea. And there's been lots of debate over the years.

is why does caffeine have such powerful and ubiquitous performance effects? And there have been theories about how it allows you to burn your fat stores more effectively or it changes the contractile properties of your muscles. But the newer view is that it's actually, it plays a role in affecting how certain neurotransmitters in your brain function and it counteracts mental fatigue. And so the idea here is, you know, in a marathon, of course you've got physical fatigue, but it's also hard to summon the effort to keep pushing through, to push through the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.

And again, whether it's in a marathon or in a long meeting at work or in other contexts. And so caffeine is directly affecting your mind's ability to kind of hold your finger in the flame. So, you know, taking caffeine, for example, that's affecting the way your mind works. Is there anything else there that can do that? So obviously there's always doping scandals and that sort of thing, which are using untoward methods to sort of change you physically and to be able to, is there something like that that's out there that's doing the same job but mental with your mental endurance? Yeah, there are a few different approaches of which I have varying opinions.

So the one that sort of is maybe the best analogy to doping. And that is maybe the most spectacular demonstration that the brain really does affect your limits is electric brain stimulation. There's a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, which is, it's gotten a, you know, there's been a whole bunch of research over the last five or ten years. And it's fairly controversial because a lot of the research has gotten overhyped. But there's pretty reliable evidence now that if you, so this is basically you take a, you know, a nine-volt battery and two wires and connect some electrodes to your brain and run a very high-veld. very weak current, that just changes the sensitivity of the neurons in whatever region of the brain you target. You can alter your perception of effort. You can also, you can all directly alter how hard a given physical effort feels without changing anything in your muscles. And so that allows you to

enhance your endurance. And this is out in the world now. There's a Silicon Valley startup company that sells the, sells headphones that purport to offer this technology. And there are athletes at the Winter Olympics who used this and their endurance athletes of other, you know, at the world Ironman Triathlon championships, there were athletes using this technique. So from a scientific perspective, I think that's really, really interesting that you can alter someone's limits just by, you know, running some gentle voltage through their brain. From a sporting perspective, I think that raises all sorts of questions about what roads we want to travel down and in pursuit of marginal gains, as it were. So that, that,

That's one example. There are some more, I don't know how to put it. There's some methods that are of trying to train your brain, which aren't so much, don't seem quite so much like a shortcut where you're deliberately, so you can think of like, there's the very famous marshmallow test where a Stanford psychologist had four-year-old say here, you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait for an undetermined amount of time, you can have two marshmallows. And so you have to inhibit your initial response, which is to eat the marshmallow. And that's kind of a way of thinking about endurance performance, too. To run a marathon, you have to, for three or four or however many hours, inhibit your natural and very well-justified response, which is to want to slow down. And so the trait of response inhibition is a very key cognitive trait. And so if you sit at a computer and do a bunch of cognitive tasks, you know, tapping buttons depending on which letters and numbers and arrows flash on a screen, that you can design those tasks

to specifically tax your response inhibition. And if you do that for, say, an hour a day, five days a week for 12 weeks, the theory is you should be able to enhance, to cause changes in your brain that improve your response inhibition and consequently make you a better marathon runner without ever having stepped away from your computer. And so there's some research on that that's been funded by the British Ministry of Defense being done at the University of Kent and it's now been replicated at the University of Birmingham, which seems to have pretty powerful effects.

I've tried it and I can say it's really boring and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But if you're looking for that last 1%, that seems to be a potential route. That sort of method is a very outside way of improving at these very marginal gains. Are there anything that can be done, which is, let's say, more within the sort of field of running? So obviously, people run with other people.

Is that going to make you a better run and work on your brain better than just running solo? So the group effect is really fascinating. And the idea that you can get more out of yourself when you're running with, say, training partners, there's been some really amazing work at the University of Oxford looking with their rowers, saying, okay, we know that exercise increases your pain tolerance, presumably because it ramps up brain chemicals like endorphins. So if you sit at your rowing machine and do a given workout, then yes, we can measure an increase in pain tolerance. Now if we get you and your teammates, the people with whom you've trained for many months towards a common goal, and you all sit

at your separate rowing machines and do exactly the same workout, you'll see a much bigger increase in pain tolerance. So there's something about the nature of doing something. something with other people. And, you know, at something like the London Marathon, of course, you have this massive sense of collective work towards a common goal. So I think that's one of the reasons that people are able to achieve much more when they are in a context like a race or working with teammates or training with teammates. Now, there are all sorts of other things, benefits to training with other people. For instance, if you're with other people, then, of course, you have lots of people who are all working on making sure that the pace stays at a good level, for example.

So if you've decided you want to run eight minute miles, you're less likely, one person, their mind may sort of drift off. Their response inhibition may kind of fade for a bit. But if you've got three people running together, there's always someone who's going to notice if the pace is lagging and keep it down. So I do think there's a lot of different ways that you can end up pushing yourself a little more. when exercising with other people. What about sort of goal-orientated situation? So the obvious goal of running the Olympic marathon is to win gold. And does these goals change people's something in and change their ability to adieu more?

Yeah. So there was an interesting analysis a couple of years ago. You know, in this modern era, of course, we have, you know, race results, vast databases of race results that exist online for the pleasure and an analysis of big data people. And so there was an analysis of about 9 million marathon finishers, I think it was, looking at the distribution of times. And what they found is, of course, yeah, it's sort of a bell curve. You know, there's a few people running very, very fast, a few people running very, very

slow, and most people sort of in this broad area in the middle. But superimposed on this bell curve are these spikes and troughs. So at every hour barrier, you'd have a huge surge in the number of people who ran just below that hour barrier, so that ran who ran 358 or 359 for the marathon, and then a trough where there's not many people who ran 4 flat or 401 or 4.02. And then if you break it down, the same thing occurs at half hour barriers and even at 10 minute barriers. So you have this statistical overrepresentation of people who manage to run, you know, 339. rather than 340. And what this tells us is, first of all, that people are motivated by round numbers,

which is no surprise. But it also tells us that, you know, if you were to ask someone at, with a couple miles to go in a marathon, are you running as hard as you can? Of course, they're going to say, yes, get away from me and don't stop talking to me. I'm going as hard as I can.

How dare you suggest otherwise? But what you find is that when they get to the final mile or the final kilometer and they realize, oh, I still have a shot of getting under that round number. They discover that they do have some physiological reserve left, that what felt to them like their absolute physical maximum was actually concealing some reserve that with sufficient motivation, with a goal that they consider worth chasing, they're able to access some of that physiological reserve. And so that tells you that, first of all, that you weren't running, you know, if you're on pace for a 336, you will finish the race.

never having had a hint that you had that extra physiological reserve if it had been a round number you were going for. But it tells you that if you set the goal high enough, you are able to dig in a little, or if you have a goal that's meaningful to you, and if it's reasonable, you know, you can't just decide you want to leap over, you know, a tall building or something. But if you have a reasonable goal and you're within sight of it, you will be able to dig deeper into your, closer to your physical limits. And I think that's probably an extremely broad finding. It's demonstrated by this marathon dataset, but, you Yeah, of course, the more meaningful the goal is, and if it's within your reach, that's a key caveat, then you'll be able to push a little closer to your limits.

So just on that note, you've got the thing that everyone is trying to strive for at the moment with the marathon is under two hours. And I think it was Elip Chukhuge, wasn't it, who almost made it? Yeah, he ran, so this was part of Nike's Breaking Two race, which was an artificially constructed race that a Formula One track in Italy. last year with some some details like he had pacers that allowed him to draft through the whole race because they were jumping in and out of the race which is not permitted for world records so this wasn't a world record but he ran two flat two hours zero minutes and 25 seconds which is more than two and a half minutes faster than the current official world record and yeah you know i think he was very very motivated to get close to two hours and i think he he he would

probably be the performance that I've witnessed where someone came as close as possible to pushing out their true physical limits. He didn't have a finishing kick, unlike most people who are close to a, like, you know, you'd think, like I said, there'd be more people who would run 159 than two flat. He ran two flat and he wasn't able to accelerate even though history was within his grasp. And I think that's because he was so motivated by this goal that he was pushing right, you know, from very, very early. He was leaving nothing in reserve. But I think the fact that he's done that performance now will help drag other people a little bit closer to that goal. All of this discussion of mental limits and the role of the brain and physical limits is of course secondary to the fact

that physical constraints are real too. I could have the strongest mind in the world and I wouldn't run a, you know, I wouldn't run a 210 marathon or a 220 marathon. And similarly for these, even the greatest athletes in the world, they can have enormous self-belief and the greatest mental skills in the world. But two hours for a marathon is still a tremendous physical challenge. So I don't want to undersell that and say that, oh, as long as they believe it, they'll be able to get there. He's almost.

That's the thing, isn't it? So he's sort of, as far as with a very set mind goal, he's sort of physically and probably mentally as close as we are at this point. Yeah, I mean, I think there was plenty of speculation and discussion leading up to that Nike race as to how close he and there were a couple other runners in the race, how close they would come. And I don't think many knowledgeable observers thought he would get anywhere faster than 201 at best. It was really, I was there in Italy watching the race, and there are some performances that

but just you watch them and you think that was sort of history in the making. And for all the sort of controversy around the Nike race, because it was basically a big marketing stunt, it was a really transcendent performance. And you really had the sense that this was a guy who kind of flew as close to the sun as it is possible at this point in our evolution. He left it all out there on the track. An amazing feat.

So just finally, is there something, that we can do with all of this information that you've discovered about our endurance that can make us better runners and not just runners just going that little bit further? Yeah, so to go back to what I was saying earlier about self-talk, that's really what I walked away from this with. It's because there are these other techniques that I talked about. You can apply electricity to your brain if that's your bag. And you can also spend hours in front of a computer clicking buttons in search of a marginal gain. But in terms of the size of the advantage and the sort of applicability to other areas of life and just the reasonableness of the

time investment and the effort investment, I think spending some time becoming aware of your, of the thoughts that echo in your head during times of stress, whether it's a race or whether it's in other contexts of life, listen to that voice and understand what it is you're telling yourself because those words have power. And so if you're telling yourself, here we go again, you know, I'm such an idiot. Why did I go out so fast? This is going to be a disaster. You're, you know, you're not creating that reality, but you're nudging that reality a little bit closer. And so the first step is to become aware. And then you have to think about what should I be saying to myself at this stage? Halfway through the race, what are the words that I want to be in my

head. I want them to be something like, you've done the training, you can do this. You've done the training. You can do this. And the truth is, you know, under stress, your mental bandwidth is very narrow. You're not going to be, you know, reciting Shakespeare at that point. You're going to have a few simple words in your head. So if you can practice during training, you can figure out what you want to say. Then during training, practice when things get tough saying, you've done the training, you're ready for this. You've done the training. You're ready for this. And, you know, maybe you have a different phrase that's going to come in that you want when you hit the three quarters mark of the race. And if you can make those changes, I think it's powerful in terms of its potential for enhancing

your performance. It's also going to make the experience more positive. And it's also something that I think is generalizable, be far beyond running. That's great advice. I will certainly be doing that next time. I might actually get out and go for a run. That and smiling. Make sure you're At worst-case scenario, if you practice the smiling technique, you'll make some good friends out in the park. That was Alex Hutchinson, talking about endurance and the limits of human performance. His book, Endure, is available now. In the April issue of BBC's Focus magazine, which is on sale now, we search for exoplanets by taking a look at Project Blue. This audacious plan has a single goal in mind.

to photograph an exoplanet in the habitable zones of the nearest sun-like stars in the hope of finding a potentially habitable planet. Plus, you can find out more about real-life robocops, how freezing patients could help save their lives, and how geoengineering could start a climate war. Did you enjoy this podcast? If you liked what you heard, why not subscribe and leave us a review? You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, A-cast,

in many of your favourite podcast apps. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

Discover more at name audio.com. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a US-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to first. finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed, pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have

someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome, Columbia, engineered for whatever.