Could Writing Every Day Make Me a Better Athlete?

I stopped cold in my run today while listening to Endure, by Alex Hutchinson, a book about the “mind, body and the curiously elastic limits of human performance.” It was the chapter focused on the connection between mental fatigue and perception of effort. The idea, in brief, is that your mind has far more responsibility for the perception of fatigue than we give it credit for — perhaps even more than our muscles. As he puts it:

“the effort of running is only as hard as your brain perceives it to be.”

This is either the best or worst news ever. I’m either doomed by this busy little brain, or I’ve got an opportunity to take the pressure off my legs and let my mind do some work.

Hutchinson follows the work of Samuelle Marcora, among others, whose studies show that athletes who are engaged regularly in mentally exhausting work showed a higher level of perceived exertion when they engage in physical exercise. Initially, this was pretty discouraging: my days and weeks are filled with a lot of context switching between tasks and projects, a lot of need for focus, and honestly, a lot of Zoom calls. Is the nature of my work and life today simply prohibitive for feeling mentally capable of a high level of exertion?

Hutchinson says nope. “Brain training” in fatiguing brain activities can help build endurance and change perceived effort. The idea is that if you systematically engage in a task that strains and taxes your brain, you will learn to resist mental fatigue, and you will perceive effort as less. So it may be that taking on a practice of writing every day for 30 days could be providing an additional level of training that I couldn’t achieve with my mileage alone.

If writing every day might make me a faster runner, I’m here for it. And if it doesn’t work for my running paces, at least I’ll have written every day.