Streamed live on 13 March 2018.

Is it possible to run a marathon in under 2 hours? Probably. Running a mile in under 4 minutes was impossible until Roger Bannister did it. Reaching the peak of Mt. Everest without the help of supplemental oxygen was impossible until Messner and Habeler did it in 1978.

The world of endurance sports is filled with stories about humans testing the boundaries of what is possible to do, and scientists have been busy studying that performance and trying to understand whether there are real limits to performance, and what those limits might be.

Our guest on this episode of “Read Science!”, Alex Hutchinson, has written about all this, the science and the sport, in his engaging book Endure : Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. We talked about as much of it as we could fit into our hour, but we, too, had limits on how much we could discuss.

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