Rethinking Physical Limits

As you watch Shaun White execute a trick on the halfpipe, or Ashley Wagner land a triple axel, or Lindsey Vonn race down the slope… you might ask yourself a question. What exactly separates me from these Olympic athletes? Obviously, there’s the years of training and the fact that they’re extraordinarily fit, but there’s also something else. Something mental. Something that lets them push their limits. To find out exactly what this is, we talked with Alex Hutchinson, author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.