Welcome to Endurance in Theory, a journal about the Science of Endurance (and sister-Journal to Not Fast but Far… which is a Journal about Endurance in Action). The brief is to tell the story of tracking down the latest science of endurance, scouring for material that will accompany stories of endurance endeavour in occasional articles and eventually in a book.
Hard to credit, I know, in one who pretends to be so physically active, but it’s what we writers do for research. So, picture me, a typical writer - lurking in dimly-lit reading rooms, riffling the pages of fusty manuals and pensively transcribing world-changing ideas, all in the pursuit of some arcanum, the mystic depths that are the physiological and psychological understanding of endurance.
No… it’ll be an intellectual steeplechase, careering through online publishing platforms, full of quantum apparitions - and eclipses - of understanding, and interviews that zip and flash into online existence. And hey - the height of excitement, this - an occasional a visit to a laboratory, to see science in action, or at least some poor, exhausted character driving themselves to their limits.
There was a plan to travel by bicycle to do this, as the ‘Itinerant Interviewer’. I started out with confidence, cycling over the South Downs to a meeting (and then another less adventurous trip, on a Santander hire-bike in London, to visit a biology teacher in prursuit of a fun way to describe metabolism). However, the plan may have to be amended, for arthritic reasons… And anyway, there are certain practical problems (with turning up in someone’s office as a sweat-pig after riding for hours to get there).
Well, that’s the theory. If I’m honest, I have found it er… near comically challenging… to get to the source of this information, to meet these denizens in their white coats, to watch as they snap their fingers, mark a clipboard and magically scientific understanding arises. They are among the busiest people I have ever tried to meet. They seem blind to emails, and scurry for cover as soon as hove into view…. (I jest, clearly, and I am very grateful to those who have shared their time so generously).
Perhaps I am doing it all wrong. Too light-hearted in the face of impossible seriousness. Or perhaps it’s the threat of a book – most of these people write books themselves, so they’re well aware of how unlikley it is that, first, their insights will be understood and accurately represented, and second, anything will actually reach the light of day, (instead their thoughts will probably sit unrequited in darkness on the shelves unread). I jest again… I know nobody answers their emails nowadays, unless you hit them with something that they need ‘this much, right now’.
So read on for the comic adventures of a writer researching human endurance….