Endurance as Annihilation
The way we move shapes the way we feel, think, and behave. Mechanical tension, rate of force, and duration of effort do more than burn calories; they influence the conscious experience and embed a specific disposition. These physical efforts eventually construct our sense of self. It begs the question: before we choose an endeavor, what kind of person do we intend to become?
There is a recognizable pattern to any specialized athlete—a distinct "frequency." When I allowed endurance efforts to shape me, I noticed a peculiar shift in my internal landscape. Is was more than being able to go further or faster. As useful as an aerobically dominant engine is for sport, it has a sneaking way of deteriorating a piece of your humanity.
The meticulous attention to body composition and the psychology forged from endless hours inside one’s own head are the ingredients of superhumans, yet they can leave a person with a glaring disability: a disbelief in anyone but themselves. Perhaps it’s trivial to those who refuse to "go deep," but the craft of enduring multi-hour or multi-day efforts—at the cost of general fitness—commonly leads to a cyclical, self-aggrandized personality.
But why?
Endurance requires two distinct features to persist:
Discipline: The regular frequency and consistent volume required for expansion. You must learn to give effort without question—rain or shine, sick or swell. This is the foundation of military indoctrination: the body must learn to do exactly what it is commanded.
Self-Care: A direct, hyper-sensitivity toward one’s needs. No amount of will can overcome an underfed or mishandled body. Success depends on learning to listen to specific calls for attention while simultaneously ignoring the pleas to cease.
Together, these allow us to explore the reaches of capability. But extreme endurance rarely stays balanced. Most athletes try to develop it too quickly, creating a rift between discipline and self-care. This results in the practice of self-flagellation disguised as training. The "self-care" that allows one to calculate salt and glucose to the milligram curdles into a hyper-fixation on self-importance.
What I am describing are extreme developments at the cost of all other attributes, but one could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like a BDSM scene. Behavior is behavior; in my experience, I’ve seen how this aerobic fascination correlates to abusive, masochistic proclivities. Psychologist Paul Rozin coined the term "benign masochism" to describe how humans reframe pain as a precursor for reward. Studies on ultra-endurance athletes often highlight "Dark Triad" traits: high sensation seeking, a need for control, and a cold, resilient mental toughness.
I was surprised to find this wasn't just my discovery. While modern memes glorify David Goggins’ "punish-myself-at-any-cost" rhetoric, I realized I was looking at a millennia-old mystery. The ancient Greeks viewed this imbalance as a corruption of the soul. Plato argued in The Republic that while physical training builds "grit" (thumos), leaning too heavily into it without balance creates a person who is "savage" and a "hater of reason" (misologos)—which he explicitly connects to being a "hater of people" (misanthropos).
Plato’s athlete stops trusting reason to solve problems. Because they rely solely on force and physical will, the "disciplined self" becomes a weapon. When you learn to ignore internal signals for well-being, you start to perceive all threats as external. You lose the ability to connect, eventually viewing other humans as obstacles rather than kin. This was echoed in the 2nd century by the physician Galen: "They [athletes] have no more soul than swine... they are senseless."
This isn’t to say every runner is a budding megalomaniac. But it highlights that human physicality requires symmetry. The remedy is found on the opposite end of the energetic spectrum.
For years, we taught that strength training merely supported endurance. What I didn’t know was that we were "curing" a common aerobic malaise. Strength, too, elicits behavior. Unlike the endless "gray zone" of endurance, true strength requires an intimate knowledge of one’s absolute limits. It offers an objective measure of will that demands presence rather than dissociation. What started as an exploration of performance has turned into a study of how strength might reinstate an athlete's humanity.
The irony is thick: the endurance athlete spends a lifetime trying to outrun their own limitations, only to find themselves trapped in the prison of their own ego. Strength training breaks that cycle. We do not lift weights just to move faster or longer; we use the weight to anchor ourselves back to the earth, strength training — in the unbalanced — is an act of humility. If endurance is the art of dissociation, strength is the art of integration. We aren't just fixing a power-to-weight ratio, we are restoring the balance between the will to suffer and the capacity to reason.
The development that so many endurance athletes resist ends up being the anchor that prevents endurance from becoming total annihilation.
