Nicholas Thompson and the Art of the Run

"One of the things that I believe about running is that most of the pain is not physiological-it's your brain worrying that you're putting in too much effort and won't be able to maintain homeostasis. At that point, your nervous system starts to send pain signals throughout your body that aren't really necessitated by muscle fatigue or lactic-acid buildup-the kinds of problems that we think about."

"The Running Ground is an investigation into how I was able to run very fast in my forties-so much faster than I had run in my twenties and thirties, when I was sort of at a physical prime in my life. I trained very hard and in very focussed ways in my thirties, so why was I not able to run faster? One of the important realizations I had is that I just did not conceive that I could go faster."

Running shifted imagination and sense of self. Running functioned as a tool for building discipline, for relating to a father, for paring away everyday demands, and for achieving calm and clarity. Endurance sports illuminate how pain operates, often arising from the brain's protective responses rather than from muscle failure or lactic acid. Nervous-system signals can produce pain that is psychological, not strictly physiological. Overcoming this pain requires psychological strategies that alter perception of effort. Improvements in speed and performance can stem from focused training and from conceiving the possibility of going faster; mental belief in capacity influences outcomes.

Read at The New Yorker