Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with self is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
Outworker
#081 - Alex Hutchinson - The Real Science Of Endurance & Why Your Limits Are Lies
Alex Hutchinson breaks down why endurance is not just about the body and how the mind may be the ultimate limiter. We unpack the science behind perceived effort, mental fatigue, and hidden reserves — and why most of us are barely scratching the surface of our true potential. He shares how identity shapes performance, why self-talk matters, and how brain science is redefining human limits. This is a masterclass in pushing past your edge — in sport, career, and life.
Timestamps:
00:00 How To Define Endurance
03:55 Understanding The Mind & Body In Endurance
08:58 Conscious Mind vs. Unconscious Mind In Endurance
15:52 Shifting Beliefs Of The Body
22:38 Alex's Obsession With Running
25:45 Coming Out Of That Obsession
32:14 Effort Is Perception
37:06 Role Of Identity In Endurance
42:01 Importance Of Self Talk
45:26 Is Endurance An Extreme Case Of Flow State?
48:36 Alex's Hypotheses On Endurance
52:18 The Reality Of Being A Writer
1:01:01 A Hidden Benefit Of Learning About Endurance
1:06:50 What Drives Alex's Work Forward
1:11:07 Life Is A Winding, Unknown Road
1:14:15 Connect With Alex Hutchinson
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What’s up outworkers. Alex Hutchinson breaks down why endurance is not just about the body and how the mind may be the ultimate limiter. We unpack the science behind perceived effort, mental fatigue, and hidden reserves — and why most of us are barely scratching the surface of our true potential. He shares how identity shapes performance, why self-talk matters, and how brain science is redefining human limits. This is a masterclass in pushing past your edge — in sport, career, and life.
Tim Doyle (00:05.614)
I feel like endurance is such a commonly used word that it actually makes it more difficult to truly understand what it means. Like I think when we use it in a technical sense, we use it more so as an adjective. Like we just think of it as synonymous with endurance sports. So we think of endurance just like swimming, running, Ironman, cycling, but I want to strip all of that away and get to the root of it. How do you define what endurance is?
Alex Hutchinson (00:34.004)
Yeah, it is a tough question and I probably you could ask 10 people and you'd get 10 different answers. the, definition that I've been going with, which is, credit to a researcher named Sam well, Marcora who, who, who, used it as it's the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So it's, it's not like, it's not something you can specifically measure in a lab. It's not your view to max or anything like that. It is something general.
which applies in endurance sports, but I think applies in a lot of other areas of life too.
Tim Doyle (01:06.946)
Yeah, I mean, your life as a whole, it seems like endurance has played a huge component, not just from the physical with being a runner, but you've had a very diverse three-dimensional life, would say, you know, focused on running in your early life and then being a physicist and then transitioning into being a writer. I'm curious to know how you see endurance as something like that, you know, not just as the physical, but
you know, entire life, I was played a role.
Alex Hutchinson (01:38.548)
Yeah. mean, so look, I'm an endurance guy, so, so I'm biased, but I would say, think endurance plays a key role in everyone's life. Like that you cannot go through life without having to struggle to continue against amounting desire to stop, whether that's in the classroom or in the professional context or in a personal context or in a sports context. me, endurance is definitely like a central thing. And it's, you know, I've been a runner from, from my whole life. So it's part of my identity that, you know, I'm able to.
keep struggling to continue against that mountainside or to stop. And so that it's definitely something that, you know, when I'm approaching or when I have approached challenges in other areas of my life, if it's like, okay, I've decided to reinvent myself, I'm leaving physics, I'm going to become a journalist. This is going to be a long and arduous road. like, that's okay. It's good. I'm good at long and arduous roads. I know that because it, because you know, as a runner, it's not just like in a race you have to endure.
for four minutes or for two hours or whatever the length of the race is, training for endurance is a, is a real, Endurance challenge in the sense that you're saying I'm going to spend the next two years of my life and I'm going to every day I'm going to put in the work and I'm going to be tired on, 363 out of every 365 days of the year. And I'm going to hopefully judge it so that I'm feeling great on the two days when my most important races are whatever.
So anyway, this idea of being able to play the long game of persisting through challenge, running it gives me confidence that, if I'm going to now set out on a new journey as a journalist, let's say, that I'm going be able to do it. I'm going to be able to push through it. So I've definitely sort of taken that as kind of my mantra for challenges, both in and out of sport.
Tim Doyle (03:28.216)
When it comes to understanding the physical compared to the mental with endurance, how do we navigate that when we're appreciating the mind and body as a unified entity versus two separate things?
Alex Hutchinson (03:43.73)
Yeah, it's definitely, you know.
The underlying question that I think motivated, got me interested in the research that I wrote about in Endure is like, when I finish a race and I'm like, I went as hard as I could, how much of that limit is dictated by mine and how much is my body? you could say, first of all, you're never going to get a perfect answer to that question. Second of all, as you're sort of suggesting,
The question is not well posed because my mind is part of my body. Where do you draw the line between mind and body? If you're experiencing central fatigue, if nerve signals back to your brain are convincing your brain to down regulate your muscles, is that your mind or is that your body? So look, it's impossible to answer that question, which doesn't mean that I don't try.
There was a study, I don't know, it must have been five or six years ago now, which I'm trying, I can't remember the exact details, but I think it was like a cycling study. They put people through a bunch of physical tests and a bunch of psychological tests and then had them do an endurance task. And it's like, okay, which of these parameters predict performance best? And so with that particular construct, they were able to come, it's like, it's 69 % physical and 31 % mental. And of course that's...
That's the numbers aren't really that precise. And so it depends how you frame the question. But the, if I had to like, if there's a message that I think is important to take away, it's that they both matter. that we often certainly again, running is my metaphor for everything. If, if, if, if you're running a rate, if I, if you put me on a treadmill and dial up the speed to some quick pace or whatever, and then say, Alex, run until you fall off the back.
Alex Hutchinson (05:42.731)
When I fall off the back, I'll be like, man, was trying and you offer me like, you know, a thousand bucks for every minute I stay on. So I'm really, really trying hard. And eventually I fall off the back and I'm like, man, I wish I could have stayed on for another minute to get another thousand bucks, but I just couldn't, my legs couldn't do it. My, was breathing too hard. It was, I was just at my limits. That is almost always an illusion. If it was a million bucks instead of a thousand bucks, my legs probably would have been able to do it.
Tim Doyle (06:10.188)
I like that idea and you write about it your book a little. You say, after all, the brain is part of the body. And it's kind of a rhetorical question, another tough question to ask, but why don't we see it that way?
Alex Hutchinson (06:26.344)
Yeah. Well that, that is like, you know, the philosophy of the last 5,000 years trying to understand, you know, the duality of mind and body. so a couple of things, one, one is that physical sensations feel very real and measurable. so certainly in the context of endurance, it's like, you know, if I'm trying to lift up a weight and I can't lift up a weight, it's not like I don't want to lift. doesn't feel like I'm deciding not to lift up the weight. So there's a.
Tim Doyle (06:31.063)
Yeah.
Alex Hutchinson (06:55.712)
There's a lot of, there's a lot going on in our minds that we don't have access to, in our brains, let's say. So we have the illusion that we're, you know, these rational creatures that are, you know, every time I move, I'm like, I am going to decide to move my hand over towards this cup so that I can drink some water. But in reality, there's, you know, it's like the iceberg where most of the action is going on underneath the surface. So I think we're unaware in a lot of cases of.
Of what our minds are doing. so that helps to give us the illusion that, there's this separate thing called my body that, that, that, that, that, that I just control by thinking about it. whereas in reality, you know, you can do. You know, the, whole in psychology, not just in sports, sports science, but in psychology, there's various studies you can do that the people do that show, all the, all the calculations that are going on under the surface in your mind.
That dictate what actually how your body reacts to a given stimulus. I don't know that that's not that's not a good answer because it's a very hard thing to answer but but but Yeah, no, no, but it's it's it's an interesting to think to think about it. And so we can talk about this and we could say You know look Tim. We all know that the mind is part of the body But no matter how often I say that it doesn't change my subjective experience that that there's a you know There's a little man inside my head
Tim Doyle (08:03.392)
Yeah, I mean, it was a tough question.
Alex Hutchinson (08:22.524)
that's making decisions and that's separate from this machinery of my muscles. It still feels that way no matter how much I tell myself that it's not.
Tim Doyle (08:31.426)
Getting deeper into the mental, is there any further context or research that you can share about the conscious versus unconscious mind when it comes to endurance?
Alex Hutchinson (08:44.498)
Yeah. I mean, the first caveat I should say is that, I am not a, like a psychologist or a neuroscientist. And so that, that whole concept of, of conscious versus unconscious, when you talk to psychologists or to brain scientists or cognitive scientists, they bristle like the, the, the, every, it feels like every scientist I've spoken to.
has a different definition of like, is this true? Can we talk about conscious versus unconscious? Is this really more like Daniel Kahneman's system one versus system two? There's all these different ways of talking about the different types of processing that we do, the different ways we react, the different ways our minds work. So what I would say in terms of what more we can say about that is that what Freud thought 100 years ago is not the current thinking. It's not like,
I have repressed dreams from my childhood and, and, know, when I try and want to race, really what I'm trying to do is make up for the fact that my potty training didn't go well or whatever. the, the, it's the, this distinction between conscious and unconscious is, is much more nebulous. And I would, I guess, look, and I will, I will say again, not, not being a brain scientist at the forefront of brain science. I'm not confident of this, but I feel like it's.
it's much harder to make a distinction between conscious and unconscious than we might assume that it's not this bright line that there's this sort of continuum. Things are going on deep down below, like, you know, we're, we're, our bodies are constantly sensing like the temperature, let's say, or hunger. And there's things that we kind of are semi aware of. And then there's this sort of, frontal lobe where we're fully aware and, know, try it, trying to exert control, but yeah, so that's a waffly answer, but it,
I think the key thing to understand is that it's not as simple as, we have an ego and an aided, a superego or anything like that.
Tim Doyle (10:46.848)
Yeah, and I think when I was reading your book, I was also looking at it from the context or just a, you know, another rhetorical question or hypothesis that I had. was like, it's interesting. Like within my unconscious mind, is it any way possible that maybe there's some type of reserved energy store within my unconscious mind that I'm not really able to access, but potentially I could some way.
Alex Hutchinson (11:13.728)
Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, I think that's a really sort of powerful idea. And, and again, it's that idea that when you reach your limits, actually there is more, if you can tap into your unconscious, I think that's true. I think that's true. I'm just, I, I, and I think that, you know, that's to me is one of the sort of the most exciting areas of inquiry in let's say the last 10 or 15 years of
of sports science, it's more a question of like, what words do we use to describe that? So I think those words that I understand and you understand and hopefully listeners understand that unconsciously where let's say the brain is protecting you, the brain is saying, you think you want to out of energy, but you don't want to run out of energy because that's going to be really ugly and put you in danger. I think in broad strokes, that's true.
But when you try and say, okay, well, let's see, where is this unconscious or how does this unconscious work? Then, then you find it, it becomes much harder to, the, the, the, words we use start to get difficult to define, but I think in practice, it's true that we can unlock some of this hidden reserves and there are, so like a very simple example is, you, you do some endurance task all out and.
There are lots of studies showing that if you're not fully fueled, let's say you wake up in the morning and you go do a one hour hard run, that if you then towards the end of that run, take some sports drink, swish it in your mouth and spit it out. So you haven't even changed the fuel. It's not that you've given yourself more fuel. You've just signaled to your brain that you're sending more fuel. Then you can go faster.
And this is not a decision because let's assume you're maximally motivated in both cases. this is clearly something that's going on at an unconscious level, where your brain is then deciding, there's fuel on the way. So we can, you know, we can release more fuel to the muscles. And, know, the, next twist of that is you can do the same thing with artificially sweetened drinks and it doesn't work.
Alex Hutchinson (13:39.073)
So this is not just a question of you're tasting sugar and it's telling you, uh, you know, fuels on the way, because you can taste, you can have that same taste. can be unable to distinguish it, but it doesn't work if there's no actual fuel, no carbohydrate, no sugar in, the, in the drink. So there's a lot of studies like this where you find ways of manipulating the environment and all of a sudden it doesn't feel harder to you, but you're able to, to, to go faster or push harder.
So clearly there's a hidden reserve.
we have many ways, including just, you know, psychology, just like self-talk, things like that, just changing the inner narrative that can help access this reserve. But it remains where that reserve is, like how it's regulated is still, you know, mostly a mystery.
Tim Doyle (14:37.57)
Yeah, that's really fascinating. I mean, for you personally, what was the transition like from going very numbers calculation based to simply just viewing your body as a machine to having this more nuanced perceptive view on things and having a greater appreciation for the fluidity of your body, especially when it comes to endurance.
Alex Hutchinson (15:00.168)
Yeah. I mean, I would say it's very much still a work in progress. you know, so I look at some, some, some context. I, I, I wrote the book in deer that came out in 2018 and I spent, you know, nine or 10 years researching it. So I had a lot of time to marinate in the ideas about the brain's role in endurance. the book came out and, and I, I was giving talks about it in various places and one talk, someone stuck up their hand and, and,
asked about the last line in the book, which is something along the lines of like, you know, it turns out that there really is, you know, we really do have more to give. There really is more in there if we can come to believe, if you can come to believe it. And I was, when I wrote that, was kind of, what I meant is self belief is really important. That one of the most powerful ways of unlocking the reserve is to believe that it's there. But this, the,
person in the audience had read it as if you can come to believe it that I didn't really quite believe it yet myself, that I was still the very numbers-based sort of if you can't measure it, doesn't exist guy that I was during my athletic career when I was younger. And I thought about that and I was like, well, that's not what I meant when I wrote it, but it's probably one of those, here we go, unconscious, almost Freudian phrasings where it's like,
Yeah, it is true. I still have trouble believing it. And you know, in my own life, so I wrote this book all about how self-talk is great and you know, maybe mindfulness training and people like, so what has your experience been with mindfulness training? I was like, I still haven't actually done it. know, so it's, it's like the, the, when I was a kid, there were these GI Joe public service announcements where, you know, like don't stick your fork in the toaster or whatever. And the kid would say, or the GI Joe at the end would say, now you know.
Tim Doyle (16:38.318)
Hahaha
Alex Hutchinson (16:53.746)
And knowing is half the battle. And that's a sort of reminder to myself that I can intellectually know that there is more to endurance than VO2 max and that my thoughts and my emotions and my feelings play an important role. I believe that intellectually, but I still struggle with it because my whole perspective on life is built around just very concrete, measurable.
So yeah, it's an ongoing dialogue in my head, I guess.
Tim Doyle (17:29.582)
That's really fascinating. mean, I would. mean, does that feel like a double edged sword at times or you feel like that's a huge benefit of yours because it allows you to continue to push forward in your work and always be curious.
Alex Hutchinson (17:45.513)
Yeah, it's interesting. So let me, let me answer a slightly answer that within us in a sort of sideways way, which is that I w so in the context of running, running was the most important thing in my life, you know, through my, my twenties. And so I was trying to do everything I could to shave off a 10th of a second. So now like I turned 50 this year, I still run, I still train, I still race, I still compete. but it's not.
Like I'm not super stressed about that. I like to go out and compete and see what I'm capable of, but I don't really care if I'm a second faster or slower because I, for one thing I'm always slower every time I go.
So in a sense, the fact that I haven't done these things isn't as sort of hypocritical as it might seem at first, because I'm just like, there's lots of things I don't do now, because I'm not like, I don't train, you know, 100 miles a week, because I'm just like, I have a career and I have kids and I have a family and I so I fit running into the box that that's available. And so I think one.
Miss misnomer or one misapprehension is, that, you can get faster just by believing different things. Well, that's super easy. You should just believe different things or, but it's like, no, do doing that, that takes effort and work and time to do that. You you call it inner work. you know, it, it's, it's not a freebie.
doing mindfulness training or, or, you know, motivational self-talk, all these things take effort. So, I would say I haven't done the bigger reason that I haven't sort of gone deep on them is not that I'm too skeptical to believe them. It's that I'm too lazy or busy, depending on how you want to phrase it. But I, I do think, you know, your question was like, does this kind of hold me back or help drive me forward in terms of maintaining curiosity? I think there's a little bit of.
Alex Hutchinson (19:50.716)
Um, staying skeptical, staying. So, sorry, I'm kind of rambling here, but, I'll give another context. I write a lot about things like sports supplements or sports technology, you know, fancy watches that measure HRV, which are very, very popular among endurance athletes. And I'll write about the evidence for what they do or what they don't do. I don't have a GPS watch. I don't take any supplements. I don't try. Like I've written tons about.
Um, and this company called Morton that has a hydrogel sports drink and a very special formulation of baking soda. It's like the hottest thing in endurance sports. I've written some very big articles on those topics. I've never tried any of them. And so.
something that I think is a strength for me personally, my, for the kind of journalism I like to do is that I am not writing about my personal journey. I am not writing about my experiences, whether I liked the flavor of that sports drink, or whether self talk worked for me. I'm I'm writing about what the evidence shows. So that there is an advantage, I think a little bit in just staying outside the fray, not not being the
the hundredth person on the internet writing about their personal journey with this stuff, but being someone who is interested in it, who cares about the outcomes, who finds the topic fascinating, but is standing outside the field and writing about it. It's still, I still feel a little funny sometimes where it's like, yeah, I'm writing my 11th article about this and I still haven't actually tried it. So it's a...
Tim Doyle (21:28.256)
No, I really liked that. And it seems like within your life and your personal journey, I think I would say the way that I viewed is, okay, yeah, I'm not writing about my personal journey, but my personal journey was the launching pad for me to be able to get to this point. And now I'm going to build off of that. And I do want to talk about your personal journey a little bit more because I find it really, really fascinating. And like you said, running was the most important thing up until your late twenties.
to the point of something that I heard you say, to the point of your brother changing his wedding for a track made of yours.
Alex Hutchinson (22:06.174)
I still feel bad about that because I ran like crap, but, yeah, like I look back and I'm like, how the hell did I have the nerve to, to, to ask him to do that? you know, when you're in the, when you're in the middle of it, sometimes you're that's maybe not, not, not the greatest example of like sports as a part of a healthy life, but yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was what I lived for.
Tim Doyle (22:23.512)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (22:27.788)
Yeah, I mean, how young were you when that obsession really started to take place in your life?
Alex Hutchinson (22:33.44)
I guess I started training seriously. I mean, I've sort of identified as, a, a runner, as someone who liked to race since I was, you know, since kindergarten or whatever, but, I was 15 when I started training. Seriously. I had, very, some, some immediate success in my first year to first year of running, let's have training series theory first year and a half. that then kind of got me hooked.
made me believe that I could be, you know, reach the top levels or whatever. And I got pretty serious, from right, right from that point on. And I guess by the end of, was, I, and then I had some mediocre years for awhile. And then it was one of those things where in my last year of university and a lot of people who train seriously in a sport like running, which is not like a, there aren't a lot of.
doors that open, thanks to running beyond college. So a lot of people would quit at the end of college and maybe that would have happened to me, except that I had a sort of big breakthrough actually starting in my third year of college. But then in my last year of college, I, I leveled up and the summer after I graduated, I made my first national team for, for Canada. And so that then was like, I've, you know, now I'm really.
playing in, if not the big leagues, then the relatively big leagues from my perspective. And I got injured the next year and missed the next couple of years. So then I felt like I had unfinished business. so, so in other words, there were, were a series of things that each of which served to kind of draw me on for another couple of years to say, well, I can't walk away until I find out how good I can be. Or I can't walk away without knowing if I can come back from this injury and get back to that level or the next level.
So, but yeah, like basically from about 15 to 28, that would have been my, my era of, yeah, running first, everything else at distance.
Tim Doyle (24:35.118)
What was it like coming out of that obsession when you were 28 and you knew it was like, okay, you know, I have the rest of my life in front of me here.
Alex Hutchinson (24:43.698)
Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, big feelings and, and, lots of uncertainty. So a few things came together. One is that that was, that was 2004. And so I was preparing for that summer's Olympic trials and I got a stress fracture in my back, in my sacrum about three months before the trials. So I was able to run in the trials, but I'd only been, you able to run on dry land for, for a few weeks before the trials. so that helped in the sense that.
You know, had I, let's say I had been healthy and gone and come forth at the trials or something like that. And not, not achieved all my dreams, but it might've been enough to make me think, well, maybe it's worth re-upping for one more cycle. Um, the stress factor was, I missed, I missed the whole season and I'd been, I had really struggled with injuries before that too. So there was a sense of, of natural closure there. And then that also, I had that coincide with that's when I, at the time I was a postdoctoral researcher in physics.
I had applied to journalism school. so right after the Olympic trials, I had one month and then I, I left my job as a physicist and started as a journalist. So there were a lot of, there was a lot of reinvention, launching into journalism, I think was the way I coped with, you know, here's who I was for, for 10 or 13 years or whatever it was. here's where I poured my passions into it. I'm starting something brand new where.
where, of all, it's, you know, it's going to be hard. It's journalism then, just as now was not an easy career to, to, to go forward in. but it also had some excitement that for me had kind of leaked out of physics. I, I no longer was super passionate about it. Journalism was new and fresh. And so I was able to kind of,
Alex Hutchinson (26:38.176)
transfer my dreams a little bit. Yeah, not to go too deep. There's around that time, my brother has a sort of joke because he knew I was thinking of leaving physics. He gave me a book for Christmas, which was someone's PhD thesis from the University of Chicago about physics, physics career trajectories. It talked to physicists from all sort of levels and how they progressed and what their hopes and dreams were. And the title of the book was The Stars Are Not Enough. And one of the points it made was that physics is like
is one of those careers where there's a Pantheon, where there's like, I wonder if I could ever be like Albert Einstein or whatever. Um, and there are a lot of careers which are great careers, but which don't have carry that same, uh, sense of like reaching for, for something like there are lots of great accountants and some I've, some of my best friends are accountants, but no one's like, I wonder if I could ever be like, you know, Bob the accountant and, be, you know, be the fastest with the slide rule or whatever. It's just, that's it. It's a job you do rather than a, a sort of.
aspirational dream. so journalism, think was a good fit because it had that same sense of like, wonder if I could ever achieve that, if I could ever be a columnist for runner's world or something, which was probably my number one dream when I, when I started. so all of which is to say I was able to transfer nonetheless, like I I went to journalism school when I was 28, did a master's, I did my, my master's thesis was on, post Olympic, you know, when athletes retire and what happens.
how they feel. So I was doing a little bit of like meta therapy by talking to a bunch of athletes who'd had different types of transitions after they retired from and the psychologists that they worked with and the programs. So this was helping me think about some of the challenges that I would face and how important it was to find something else to dream about.
Tim Doyle (28:26.018)
Yeah, that that resonates on a deep level. mean, just a little personal anecdote about me. I feel like when I was much younger, physical obsession was with working out, like lifting weights. And I feel like I grew out of that obsession. And it was tough for me because it was like, I'm a very intense person, so to speak. I was like, but I I'm not getting that same intensity or I'm not getting that same feeling from working out anymore. And then I got into podcasting.
And pretty early on, was like, Ooh, this feels like a similar feeling that I would get in a similar intensity and energy that I would get from working out. Is that something that you tapped into or something that you recognize with writing early on? And did it feel similar to running?
Alex Hutchinson (29:11.358)
Yeah, I think there were a lot of parallels and I think, yeah, like I was just saying before, part of it was the sense that there's something that you can be working towards. There's something, there's a perfect ability or a sense of progression, a sense of like, maybe I can do, if I keep working, I can do this better. And I think, you this is something I've,
ended up wrestling with a little bit in my, in my last book, the explorers gene, where it's like that feeling that you can, that you're, that you're alive, that you're pursuing something. It's a super, super like motivating and exciting and satisfying feeling. Eventually, as you get older, you start to think, I wonder if I need to like turn this down at some point, or like, is, is, you, do you always want to be having the feeling that.
the stars are not quite enough, that there's something more. So I've started, I probably have a slightly different perspective on that now than I did when I was 28 and just launching into journalism. But I think it was absolutely vital for me to have something else I could transfer my passions or my sort of aspirations into, or just my obsessiveness, my intensity, as you're saying. And that worked well, and I think it's very much like
what you're finding too, that if you hadn't found something to replace that feeling, you would start to feel pretty empty or directionless. We all find things to channel our interest into, and some of them are more productive than others. it's like, really kind of want to think carefully about what attracts your attention and your interest and your intensity.
Tim Doyle (31:04.652)
Yeah, I think you know you've found something you love when the effort it takes just feels second nature. And I think you, least for me personally, I think that happens pretty quickly or you're able to recognize that pretty quickly. And that's something that I find really interesting about your writing when it comes to endurance. You use phrases like sense of effort, perception of effort, perceived exertion, rather than simply just saying effort or exertion.
Why is it important to understand effort with that interpretive type of language?
Alex Hutchinson (31:39.999)
Yeah. I mean, think the key thing there or the key, the key thing that I'm trying to highlight is that it's not set in stone, that it is a subjective, perception because if you accept that effort is just, it's just a thing, it's an objective fact, which is I think how, what my mindset would have been, throughout my competitive career. Cause I had never thought about this stuff that
If, in the third lap of a mile, feels like, like it feels this hard. That's just how hard the third lap of a mile feels. Whereas when you start thinking about, the subjective perception of how hard it feels, he realized, it was feeling really hard, but maybe that's in part because I was expecting it to feel hard or because I was scared or whatever. there are that there's no, like, there is no effort meter that you can
clamp onto someone's brain and say, well, yeah, that's how hard you were feeling. And effort and pain are two different things, but it's pain is a similar, there's a similar conversation to be had about pain where it's like,
I can, you know, if I can apply a burn to your skin and I can tell you how hot that the, the, the, the metal is or whatever, like that was a hundred degrees and that was 200 degrees, but you can't measure how it feels and different people, know, pain is a fundamentally subjective sensation and effort effort is too. And so, that's, it's a subtle point, but I think it's, it's like, I think it's kind of the central one. I think what you, know, what you're picking up on there is, is probably the most important.
realization that I had in sort of trying to understand the science of endurance.
Tim Doyle (33:28.622)
interesting point about perception and it goes to your personal makeup as a person which is that you're colorblind. I'm curious to know how that has played into your life with endurance just with like the perception and insight. Would be curious to know what your thoughts are there.
Alex Hutchinson (33:49.409)
Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, fortunately, it hasn't meant that I've gotten run over while running through a red light by accident on a run. Yeah. No, it's it. So yeah, I haven't really thought about the parallels, but, um, when you grow up colorblind, you, you definitely understand that perception is subjective. That, that what, what I see is not what everyone else sees. Uh, it can be a pain in the neck when you're
Tim Doyle (33:54.338)
Hahaha
Alex Hutchinson (34:18.976)
dealing with even just like reading scientific papers. It's like, okay, here's a graph with six different, the lines are six different colors. I have no freaking idea which, you know, which line is which. And so if you don't give me dashes and dots or whatever, I can't, I can't read the graph. Um, and, and, know, similar with displays on computers and stuff like that. So that's, that's a minor frustration, but I think on a, on a deeper level, there is an understanding that, that, uh, and you know, even leaving aside colorblindness, I read an article recently.
camera where it was, that was talking about color perception and talking about the, yeah, there was a new study that where they're picking up the, they were doing brain scans of people looking at different colors and starting to pick up signatures of, what goes on in the brain when you perceive red versus blue versus yellow and making the point that it's like, okay, on a given person, can repeatedly then say, we can do a brain scan and then we can tell that person's looking at red right now, but you can't.
judge it from person to person because the brain signatures are different. And going, which gets to this deeper point that we actually don't know for sure that what I see as red is what you see as red or that we experience the same visual sensation, even leaving aside that I'm colorblind where we know that I'm not seeing the same stuff as everyone else, but even within people who are not defective like me, that perception is subjective. And that's a...
Like you said, that goes back to this. You understand that's true about colors. You understand it's true about a lot of other things like effort and pain.
Tim Doyle (35:56.334)
There's this interesting passage from your book that stood out to me. say, may have the greatest endurance in the world, but if you're an incurable optimist who can't resist starting out at a sprint or a coward who always sets off at a jog, your race times will never accurately reflect what you're physically capable of. How does identity you think play into endurance and almost like a nature versus nurture perspective?
Alex Hutchinson (36:25.408)
Yeah, it's an interesting question. So, I mean, so what, what I was talking about there is, is this idea of, of pacing that, that, that when we talk about endurance, it's never just, uh, you know, uh, um, a measure of capacity. Uh, it's, it's a measure like it's, it does not just like this guy has 28 courts of endurance. How you perform fundamentally depends on.
how you judge your effort, how well you judge your effort and how, how deep you're willing to push. And it took, so I, guess I to draw on my own experience, I always prided myself on being a very smart racer that I was, I didn't get caught up with emotion. It's like, if you, if you go to cross country races around the world, everyone goes out so fast. Everyone runs the first mile at an insane pace. And there's, there's, there is a,
A lot, logic behind it is like, it's really crowded at the beginning. If you get stuck behind 100 people, you're going to do a lot of effort. But so everyone, let's say people are going to average six minutes a mile for cross country race. Most of them will go to like five minutes for the first mile and then just be hanging on for dear life. And I would say. You people are all idiots. I, I know what I'm capable of running for whatever the distance the races, let's say five miles. So I'm going to set it at that pace because that is physiologically optimal. And so I had this construct in my head.
of the smart racer who is doing things better, doing things the right way. And was only kind of toward the end of my career and then in retrospect when I started to get into the science of it, I sort of made this very obvious, this realization that should have been very obvious, which is that if you think you can run five minutes per mile, then you start two steps into the race, you're running five minutes per mile pace. You've already created a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're already
You have already kind of made it unlikely or almost impossible that you're going to run 450 per mile that day because you've decided what you're going to run right from the start. And so, and as, know, so as a, as an endurance athlete, spent a lot of time racing against Kenyan athletes who, uh, um, have for the last 30 or 40 years been absolutely dominant. It's maybe a little more complicated now, but, but certainly when I was racing in the nineties and early two thousands, the Kenyans were the best in the world.
Alex Hutchinson (38:54.144)
And there were a lot of Kenyans who would come over to North America and run road races, just trying to make a living, you know, printing a hundred bucks or 200 bucks a weekend. And there was a characteristic way that these Kenyan road racers tended to race, which was they would just go with the leaders, no matter who was there, no matter how fast it was, they would try and stick with the leaders for as long as they could. then, you know, typically if, unless they were the best, they would start fading. And someone like me who had gone out more slowly would gradually reel.
some but not all of them in. And it took me a long time to understand. It's like, so I was racing in a cautious way so that I was maximizing my chances of having a good race, but minimizing my chances of having a great race. Whereas some of these other runners, they had a different perspective because they were trying to make a living. They were trying to survive. So to them, it's like, they wanted to come first, second or third. And if they weren't first, second or third, they didn't care. They could come a hundredth because
Prize money zero for fourth and prize money zero for a hundredth was the same for them. So they were running all out. And as a result, they had a lot of crappy races, but they had some amazing races far better than I could ever dream of because they were willing to take chances. So that was kind of an epiphany understanding that races aren't just this sort of pure, simple measure of your capacity, that as you said, your identity, how you think about what you're capable of, right from the moment of the starting gun is.
is influencing the outcome. so your willingness to take risks, your willingness to have a bad race is going to dictate your chances of having a great race. And that's, that's something I've tried to keep in mind, uh, even outside of, of running. Cause I think that the same thing is true. It's like, you, you, you're not going to achieve everything you set out to, but it's very unlikely you're going to achieve substantially more than you set out to, right? Like you, you have to be willing to swing for the fences sometimes.
Tim Doyle (40:51.712)
You talked about how the biggest change that you would have made to your running career is that you would have invested more of yourself into motivational self-talk training. What exactly do you think that training would have looked like?
Alex Hutchinson (41:05.79)
Yeah, and I'll broaden that to say that I would have taken sports psychology seriously because motivational self-talk is one element of that, which is essentially trying to change your internal monologue so that when the going gets tough, which it always does, our default mode is to say, this really sucks. Why am I doing this pointless sport? I should be an accountant. But that's the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're like, this is so hard.
Tim Doyle (41:09.805)
Yep.
Alex Hutchinson (41:33.525)
Then as your brain is evaluating all the signals from your heart, from your lungs, from your legs, from, it's also taking into this account that, you're, this other part of your brain is saying it's really hard. It's really hard. And so you're judging, I'd better slow down as opposed to, if you're saying, this is what it's like, I'm ready for this. Everyone else is feeling this too. So I can keep pushing. more likely to keep pushing. I think, I think motivational self-talk is probably the easiest to understand. And the most.
the most widely applicable type of, of sports psychology work and in terms of what it looks like, you know, it's, it's a question of thinking carefully about what are, what are the thoughts that go through your head naturally, which ones of those are problematic and what could you replace them with and what would, what would work for you? Because there's no, like you look through the, you listen to other people's mantras sometimes and you're like,
God, that's so cringy. I could never say that to myself. I would never take that seriously. So you have to figure out what's, what's reasonable for you. And then have to practice it, right? You can never, you can't just drop a list of what you want to say to yourself and expect it to pop into your head halfway through a race. need to be practicing it in training and in races. So that's one thing I do, but, just more broadly, I think I would take seriously the role of the mind. So for me, I, I, I would say one of my, when I was, when I was racing well,
my superpower was that I could push hard and dig deep and really rise to the occasion. The bigger the race, the better I tended to perform. But there were also times in my career where I got too far on the wrong side of the curve of being psyched up and I was just pathologically nervous. I can remember going to some meets in Europe and one of the veterans of the
of the team who is, you know, a multiple Olympian. It's like, Alex, God, it's exhausting rooming with you because you're so nervous. You just make everyone else in the room nervous. And, you know, and I heard them, but I didn't change. I didn't know how to change that. And I think probably working with a sports psychologist would have helped me to, you know, recontextualize what, what am I here for? What are the stakes? Like what happens if I don't race? Well, life goes on like.
Alex Hutchinson (43:56.211)
I, so, so there were, there were other aspects of my, my mental preparation that I think I could have done a lot better at and that I, but I just didn't know it was something that was changeable in a, in a sort of controllable and repeatable way.
Tim Doyle (44:16.334)
I had Steven Kotler on my show, do you know who Steven is? Yeah, so mean, flow state expert. I'm curious to know, and this is tying into the pain component as well, about how people in an odd way could almost be enjoy the pain or become addicted to the pain in a way. Do you see endurance or could we make the case that endurance is just like...
Alex Hutchinson (44:20.223)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Doyle (44:44.95)
an extreme case of flow state.
Alex Hutchinson (44:48.896)
I think when it's going well, it absolutely is. think...
So there's a difference between what you can do in training and what you can do in racing. if, if I were to go out to the track and run a mile as hard as I could just by myself on a Tuesday night or whatever, it's radically different from what I could do in a competitive race where the stakes matter, to the point that like when you're in workouts, if you, you don't want to think about it too much, cause you're like, so I just did, you know, 10 times a quarter mile.
slower than my goal, my pay mile pace. And I was taking two minutes of rest after each one. There's no way I'll be able to like, you just feel like I just went as hard as I could. And I couldn't even do a quarter of my race distance at that pace. so there's this, there's this mystery or this, this magic that happens in the course of competition. I think flow flow state is maybe one way of, of expressing what is different that you have to be able to enter an altered state.
It's not just that you're trying harder in the race. There there's more to it. flow is one of those things that for me, it's, it's, it's like sports psychology in the sense that I read it and it makes sense and it feels familiar. the, the, the research behind it is not as satisfying as that. would like it like the, quantifiable, side of me is like, okay, so can't, can't we like measure this? Can't we, you know, can't we check these parameters and
But as a sort of qualitative description of what it feels like to be pushing hard and pushing beyond what you might have thought was possible, I flow state is a great way of thinking about it and it identifies some of the conditions. You need to be trying to do something that's hard, that's near the limits of what you're capable of, but not beyond them.
Alex Hutchinson (46:54.368)
If you can lift 100 pounds, it's no point in trying to lift 500 pounds. It's not interesting to try and lift 50 pounds. You need to try and lift 105 pounds, right? Like you need to be pushing yourself. And so that's good example. That's one of the pre-conditions of flow is this kind of barely manageable challenge. And I think that's a great way of thinking about what a good race feels like, that you're right at the edge of your capacity.
Tim Doyle (47:19.618)
find it interesting that you say that the research doesn't feel fully satisfying for you. And you talk about how things can sound plausible, but plausibility isn't the same as proof. I'm curious to know within your work and your curiosities, are there any hypotheses that you have, but you don't necessarily attach yourself to because you don't fully have proof?
Alex Hutchinson (47:46.337)
I mean, I would go so far as to say that all of modern cognitive science, that's not really fair.
Tim Doyle (47:54.328)
haha
Alex Hutchinson (48:02.688)
Like there's a, there's a fundamental problem with let's say sports psychology, which is that you can't do a placebo controlled blinded or double blinded trial. Like let's say you teach one, teach one group to do self-talk and you don't, and don't teach the other group. And then you switch them around to make it, to do a crossover trial. That first group can't unlearn self-talk. You can't take away what you've already taught them. So you can never do a crossover trial. So, so it's not, it's not that.
Scientists are stupid or or lazy too lazy to test these ideas It's just that we're talking about ideas that are very hard to test in a way that fits with my like from physics Quantifiable mind, but I but in terms of like theory so There's a theory that's that's sort of ascendant in cognitive science right now called predictive processing or it's sometimes called They're related to an idea called the free energy principle the fundamental idea there is that
everything that's going on that our brains fundamental job is to predict what's going to what it's going to see or sense in the world and that our senses that we're not just like like a sort of big TV camera that's Looking around and recording what's going on in the world We're predicting what's going on in the world and we use our senses to check that yes That's you know, I expect to see a monitor on my desk There's still a monitor on my desk and so but but fundamentally all of the world is being
generated as a prediction in the brain. And this has lot of implications for how the brain works, what goes wrong in, you know, mental health conditions. It's also about how we think about endurance because endurance is fundamentally a predictive process going back to what we talking about earlier about pacing that when you run a marathon, you don't just sprint as hard as you can until you and then slow down gradually. It's fundamentally you're predicting what you think you can run.
And so having those predictions slightly off the, know, if the predictions are too conservative, you're limiting your performance. And, and I think fun, I think as a general rule, anyway, processing is a complicated topic, which I will not try to explain in one answer. But what I will say is you read the ideas of predictive processing and I find it a very plausible explanation for how the brain is constructed and how the brain works.
Alex Hutchinson (50:26.568)
you talk to skeptics and they point out it's like, where's the evidence? Like, that's one way of explaining it. And it goes, it's just like in physics, it's like string theory has beautiful mathematics. but critics would argue that it's like unfalsifiable, that there's other ways of explaining it too. just because you can come up with an explanation that fits the facts doesn't mean that's the right explanation. string physics is super complicated. predictive processing, I think there's ways of testing this stuff. And I think in the next
decade, we're going to see more rigorous tests of this idea that if it pans out is going to be the new kind of grand theory of how the brain works.
Tim Doyle (51:08.632)
I would assume that your physics background and that's where your real academic foundation, you've really been able to leverage that as a writer from the standpoint of just holding yourself to a high standard. Not that writers in general don't hold themselves to a high standard, but just going to that standpoint of you came in to writing from a very different viewpoint than I would say most writers are.
And you've talked about on the journalism side, which I find really interesting is that in the past when it comes to science journalism, writers can become so focused on the audience where you almost tried to reverse engineer the writing process of like, okay, what is the audience want or what do we need to be putting out there? Rather than just being solely focused on
you know, like, okay, let me be a writer here. And I'm curious to know how do you balance that out between, I guess, following your own intuitions and curiosities and writing for yourself to a degree versus also knowing, okay, I am writing for other people.
Alex Hutchinson (52:25.416)
Yeah, a couple of good questions in there. for first I'll say about the physics. I've, I've, I've used my physics knowledge surprisingly infrequently. Like I have not had to be like, I understand. You know, occasionally there's, you know, there's stuff in physiology where it's like, you really have to understand conservation of energy or, you know, momentum or whatever, or like biomechanics, maybe even more so like forces and torques for the most part. I think it actually,
goes back to like mindset and identity in the sense that I went through physics, physics was super hard and required some serious, you had to have serious mathematical chops. had to be willing to read very hard things and struggle with hard ideas. so my self, my identity, my, way I like to think of myself is I can read hard papers. It's fine. Like, and I can read and I'm not daunted if I read a paper and I don't understand half of it. I'll read it again and, and then I'll
talk to the, you know, talk to the scientists and I'll, and I won't just like say, you know, I'll ask them to explain it to me because I'm confident that if we work, you know, if I work at it, I can, I can get it. And so I'm really trying to understand what's going on as opposed to just reading the abstract or taking the press release. And look, there are lots of journalists who do that extremely well without having gone through physics. But for me, I think that's where physics gave me the, the, the mindset and the confidence to say, I'm going to try and understand what I write about.
I'm really gonna read the whole paper, which is...
Yeah, I want to throw it. Yeah. I don't want to sound dismissive, but it's like, it is definitely possible to write papers based on reading the abstracts. And sometimes you can tell that that's what's happened. in terms of writing for the audience versus writing. Yeah. Like it's a tension. It's a constant tension. Like, are you writing, are you trying to write what people want to hear? Are you trying to write what you want to say? Or you think is important to say, I think to some degree it's an important tension because,
Alex Hutchinson (54:33.77)
So occasionally I think like, Hey, maybe I should do a sub stack. Then I can just write whatever the hell I want. I don't have to convince an editor that it's interesting. And that sounds like heaven in some ways, but I also know that my editors, at, all the publications I've written for the play an important role in kind of, you know, reigning in self-indulgence. It's like, if you let writers just write only what they want, some of them will produce.
brilliant stuff, I'm sure. But as a whole, you will get a lot of self-indulgent stuff. It'll be like, you'll be trending towards 100 % memoir. Everything is like, let me tell you about this cool thing that happened to me when I was 12. And I love telling those stories, which is why I need an editor to say, Alice, maybe we don't need this story about when you're 12. Why don't you just tell us about the study? But it was a great story. So I think...
the worst excesses on one side are that you become, you're doing like the Google analysis to what are people searching these days? Let's write an article with those seven search terms. And that is awful, awful, awful. The results of that are terrible. But there is, even though I like to imagine that it would be great to have no constraints. On being,
at least conscious of like, what do people care about? What do people want to know? And how do they want to, how do they want to be told this? So I guess another example of that would be my sort of default mode of, of discourse would be like, Hey, I read this really interesting study. I'm going to present, I'm going to tell you what's in the study. And I'm going to go through the four key figures in the study and explain what those figures are. And for some fraction of the, of the, of the world, that's like, Hey, that's great. We're just getting the information.
you know, semi digested and spit into our mouths like wonderful. but a lot of other people are going to be like, Whoa, that's boring and, and in impenetrable. But if you make me understand why it matters by starting with a story or by framing it around an anecdote or something like that, then I'm going to be into it. And so I, I definitely lean towards, I have a lot less, like when I, if I write about
Alex Hutchinson (56:56.124)
hydration for running. I'm not going to be like 34 year old Bob Smith used to like to run without drinking. Now he started drinking and he really likes it. And here's a study that explains why. Like I, I just, that's not my thing. I don't, I don't do that. But if when you're writing about complicated topics, if you can illustrate it from a real world. So I try to force myself and that's an example of me trying to think of how will readers want to grapple with this information. They will like to, to,
to see it come alive with a real story. And so I do that even if my default would be like, I'm just going to post four graphs and tell you what's in the graphs.
Tim Doyle (57:35.662)
Yeah, it's a lot easier said than done, I think the way that you write, the way that you balance the research and the substantive with also the personal and really drawing people in. It's a difficult subject matter. mean, yeah, you could get deep into the weeds and it seems like you're able to
Alex Hutchinson (57:54.046)
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Tim Doyle (58:04.652)
balance it pretty well.
Alex Hutchinson (58:06.354)
And again, back to your original point about like trying to anticipate what the, what readers want. And then again, to what I was saying about editors, it's like, yeah, I still, you know, I've been doing this for a long time now, but you know, well, all of conversations, my editor and I'll be like, look at this great study. And sometimes they'll be like, yeah, I don't think that's gonna like fly for this audience. And sometimes I'm disappointed. And sometimes I think it's the wrong call. Like, you know, sometimes I'll push back and say, like,
put me in coach, I can do it. think this is complicated, but I think I can explain this. And other times I'll be like, yeah, fair enough. This is going to be, this, is going to be heavy sledding to, or it's going to be uninteresting or hard to make, but it's, it's definitely, those are contexts where it's helpful to have someone pushing back against you sometimes. and, and this, maybe this is a good opportunity to shout out. you know, David Epstein is one of my, you know, the, mentors and someone I really admire.
he has a book coming out next year, called inside the box. I haven't read it yet. but it's all about how constraints can foster creativity. that, that taking, you know, this, the main, this idea that if, if people would just let me do what I wanted and let me be who I am, that I would be maximally creative and productive. what I understand about David's book is that it's, it's kind of pushing back against that idea and saying that, sometimes it is helpful to be like.
No, if you're going to write this poem and it's going to have five syllables on the first line and seven syllables on the second line and five on the third line, and you're going to write a better poem because of those constraints. And so I think in that sense, I certainly like having an editor who will, you know, I'd rather have the editor say, Alex, that story is boring than write the article and have, you know, 10,000 people out there going, God, this is boring.
Tim Doyle (59:55.192)
Do you think an education on endurance can yield better physical outcomes? Like, do you think if somebody were to hypothetically read your book and, now I have a base understanding and knowledge on endurance and I'm more mindful on this, it'll yield better physical outcomes?
Alex Hutchinson (01:00:15.464)
Absolutely. If you buy my book, I guarantee 6 % improvement, 100%. Now let me give a slightly more nuanced answer. I think it can be a double-edged sword. And I'll quote David Epstein again, who he once wrote something along the lines of, just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist. And I think the context he was saying that is like,
Look, just because you can, you know, dunk from the foul line doesn't mean you can explain to other people or understand why you're able to dunk from the foul line or why you're able to do these. Like, in a lot of cases, athletes are gifted in ways that, they may have difficulty articulating to others and even to themselves, but it goes the other way too, just because you're an ornithologist doesn't mean you're a bird and you can know everything about it, a topic and still be terrible at it. And, and so.
I've had this sort of internal debate or conversation with other people over a long time. It's like, is it helpful to be an Uber nerd about the sport, be really fascinated with it? And I think there are times that it can get in the way, that there's a benefit to just being like, no, I'm just gonna, I go out there and I do it and I rely on my coach to tell me.
When the train and of course I have my own thoughts, but I'm not like hyper obsessed with looking up that, know, trying to understand the physiology of electron transfer in the muscle cell or whatever. I do think that.
I'm about to say I do think that reading my book will be helpful. I do think that there's things.
Tim Doyle (01:02:03.406)
The reason why I brought that up though is because that is the thought that I had when I was reading your book. I was like, I think this could potentially benefit me physically.
Alex Hutchinson (01:02:13.632)
I'm super psyched to hear that. And I think it's true. I think one of the main criticisms I got about Endure, or not criticisms, but like feedbacks like, really interesting information. I really wish you'd had more on how to apply this in practice. And you know, my response to that was like, yeah, me too. Like, I, you know, I wish I knew how to apply it, but I think, so first of all, that's just, yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, 6%, that's what I promise.
Tim Doyle (01:02:36.558)
I'm gonna be your biggest hype man here basically, I feel like, at least from my case, I feel like the knowledge itself is the application.
Alex Hutchinson (01:02:47.632)
That's the argument that I would make that it's like, yeah, look, sure. I wish I could give you 10 exercises, mental exercises to do or whatever. And there are people who will do that. My more focus is on where's the evidence at. And I really do feel that knowing that, I feel like
The knowledge, the big ball of knowledge that's encapsulated in that book, had I had that when I was an athlete, I think I would have had a different perspective on what my abilities were. And so I look back, my best event was the 1,500 meters, which is basically like a mile. And I raced the 1,500 for like a decade. My best time was 3.42. Never once in that decade did I ever go through the halfway mark faster.
And even I never went through the halfway mark faster than 345 pace. And so then I was able to pick it up sometimes on my best races, but I never took the chance of going through at 340 pace to see what would happen. And I think that's the kind of thing that I would have thought more carefully about had I had I had a sort of, not just a, not just a sort of scientific knowledge, but had I been thinking through these questions more deeply about what defines our limits and how do we, how do we, how do we determine what
pace to be set out at. then what will force me to slow down on that third lap? Is it going to be because I have lactic acid bubbling out of my ears or is it going to be because it's hard and my mind is full of doubts and I'm worried that I'll slow down in the last lap so I'm slowing down prematurely. So I do think it helps. But I also would say...
as a guy who gets into the minutia, I've interacted with a lot of athletes who have questions and who my diagnosis would be, man, you're too into the minutia. You're worrying about the details too much. You're showing up and your coach is saying, do eight by a kilometer with a minute and half rest. And you're saying, I don't know, shouldn't the physiology...
Alex Hutchinson (01:05:06.144)
I read a study that said that two minutes rest is better. So shouldn't we do six by K with two minutes instead of eight with one and a half. And it's like, it can become a source of anxiety. This sort of belief that you can optimize every detail. Whereas in fact, you're losing more by fretting about it than you would gain by, you know, micro adjusting the, the, the workout. so I think there's a balance. think, think knowledge is good, but, not letting it, but, keeping its importance in context and not letting it start to.
Tim Doyle (01:05:23.374)
Mm.
Alex Hutchinson (01:05:36.17)
Drive the bus.
Tim Doyle (01:05:38.082)
Yeah, allowed to supplement your process rather than becoming the entire process. Are there any big questions that you feel like continue to drive your work forward?
Alex Hutchinson (01:05:50.505)
Yeah, I think, you know, I mentioned earlier this idea of predictive processing and I think that's the most hopeful avenue I see. So when I wrote Endure, there were two kind of main theories that I highlighted on how the brain defines performance. This idea of a central governor that's protecting us from really emptying the well or what was called the, psychological theory.
which is this idea fundamentally that it's just about how you feel. It's that effort is the master switch. And if you feel it's too hard, you'll slow down. so learning how to adjust effort was the key goal. Both of those are sort of interesting perspectives that I think capture truth. And if you push far enough, I think they end up kind of being very similar, like saying the same things. But they don't actually explain how the brain works in the context of endurance. And so...
I think that's a big open question because to really be able to, know, manipulate's maybe too strong a word, but to be able to kind of take advantage of and learn how to influence how your brain is controlling you, the more we know about how it actually works, the better. so I think there's, as I mentioned, I think this idea of predictive processing is going to get,
rigorous testing over the years to come. actually, I wrote an article last year saying, I think predictive processing has potential to explain some of these questions in a better way. And I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing people trying to explain endurance and the limits of endurance in this context. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here, but a couple of months ago, was a paper came out explicitly trying to use predictive processing.
to explain endurance. And of course, if the paper came out last month, that means they've been working on it long before I ever thought about it. So it's starting. And that's a modeling paper. And they sort of suggested, here are some things that we need to test to see if this is true. Here are some ways we could start to examine this. This is a classic example. I was mentioning earlier about some ideas that are kind of hard to explain and you don't know whether
Alex Hutchinson (01:08:15.504)
it's going to be something that an audience is going to be interested in. and, you know, and I would say, think like when I wrote that article saying, predictive processing might explain endurance. Didn't like, it didn't make a lot of, of a splash. don't know a lot. I didn't get a lot of people, connecting with it. So I think there's potential for interesting science to come out of it. And I think from a journalistic perspective, I think there's a fun challenge there, which is.
This is what people in cognitive science think of as like the big idea of this generation, potentially. How can I explain that? How can I bring that out in a way that is accessible but captures what's cool about it? And I'm sitting here talking to you, doing a really absolutely crappy job and expressing what it is that's special about it. But I hope over the coming years I can...
can find ways of, I mean, part of it is if you can't explain something well, it's a sign that you don't understand it well. And that is absolutely the case here. I don't understand the theory well, but hopefully there's potential to get better.
Tim Doyle (01:09:30.062)
That's an endurance test in itself, it seems like, when it becomes for your writing career.
Alex Hutchinson (01:09:35.968)
Yeah, this is not something that I'm going to sit down next week and be like, I'm going to explain predictive processing in a way that is going to be accessible to people. No, this is something that maybe the 10th time I write about it, I'll find a way or a metaphor or a framing that captures it in a way that's more interesting or more accessible or something.
Tim Doyle (01:10:00.782)
I want to end off by sharing a little anecdote and I think it ties in nicely with that. Something that you posted on Instagram a few months ago, you were, I guess you were driving your daughter, I think to sports practice and you make a wrong turn. And you say the, and she wants you to, you know, use ways and you say the ubiquity of GPS felt emblematic of a deeper shift in how we interact with the world and with each other these days, more passive, more automatic, more forgettable.
I wanted to chart my own path and make my own mistakes. And it feels like the way that you were just talking right there about your writing in that journey seems very synonymous with that. But it also just feels like your journey is almost like this is like a microcosm for that. mean, like starting out as a runner, getting deep within the world of academia and physics, and then transitioning into being a writer, you know, a very
winding road you could say and I think especially younger people I think people need an appreciation for that where you know obviously you can understand the body as a machine but just like life as a role it's not going to be a you know a mechanistic sort of linear path so I have true appreciation that you promote that winding path of your life as well.
Alex Hutchinson (01:11:21.514)
Well, thanks, and you know, I hope it doesn't lead anybody astray, but I guess what I would say is...
the the leaps and the turns that I've made. I'm happy with them all. You know, like, you know, don't regret having spent 10 years as a physicist or whatever. But what what enables that what makes that possible is that each of those times, it wasn't like I only want to be a journalist if it goes exactly according to my plan, and I'm, you know, make it and do the things that I dreamt of.
what made journalism feel satisfying right from the start, right from when I was in journalism school, there was a sense that this is the right thing, was that even if I end up doing something completely different, even if I end up writing about accounting, which is when I started as a freelancer, was going to writing for an accounting magazine, going to accounting conferences, that's fine. That the fun of trying to chart a path was satisfying on its own independent of the goal.
And know, like it's one of the ultimate cliches about enjoy the journey rather than destination. But I think that that is what makes a winding path possible if you're not same with running. Like, look, I wanted to make the Olympics. Believe me, I really, really, really wanted to make the Olympics. And I didn't, I didn't even come particularly close. But it was an awesome journey. And so I have no regrets about it. And so it's, it's, that is
what I would encourage people to look for is things that are just fun to pursue. Where there is a goal that you care about, whether you make it or not is not going to be the ultimate determinant as to whether you thought it was a good journey.
Tim Doyle (01:13:09.834)
Alex, I think that's a great place to end. Where can people go to learn more about you, your work, anything else you'd want to plug?
Alex Hutchinson (01:13:17.45)
Well, big thanks for the conversation, Tim. This has been, it's been fun going in some unexpected directions. you know, a metaphor for the things we were talking about. I have a website, alexhutchinson.net. it's got links to, you know, various social media places and, and where, you know, recent articles, I write for, for outside at about once a week. I have a new article on a new topic in, in sports science, but yeah, you can find links from, from alexhutchinson.net.
Tim Doyle (01:13:45.548)
Awesome, talking with you today.
Alex Hutchinson (01:13:47.243)
Okay, thanks Tim.
