I picked this up just prior to the taper phase before a marathon. My basic idea was that since i couldn’t train my body anymore for the big event, I could at least discover some ways to push my mind. If this were a self-help book (it shares some characteristics) it would fall squarely in the inspirational-not informational quadrant.
The “science” of the book can be reduced to an extremely useful mental model in the form of an equation. P=E*C where E is a value between 0 and 1. P= Performance, E=Effort, C= Capacity. The variable of focus for the book is effort, what does it take for people to “fire walk” their way to better performance? What gives you the ability to suffer? The implicit answer is wanting it bad enough. He spent a lot of time trying to complicate that equation but I didn’t find that helpful or compelling.
There were some interesting bits about the specific impacts and origins of mental toughness. For example, for women, there is a causal link between self-defense training and self-confidence/assertiveness. Similarly, people with difficult but not impossible childhoods seem to be able to suffer longer and better without giving up. There is a whole world of potentially fascinating literature about the link between in-the-race toughness and real-world grit that was mostly hopped over. That might be a compelling “why”!
The majority of the book was spent recounting the stories of athletes and races. I found some of them very interesting and one was good enough that I re-listened to it (Steve Prefontaine’s chapter) as I drove to my race in the early hours of the morning. However, it was weighted far too heavily on the side of inspirational for my taste. While it was a good training companion, it was also a poor coach. I wanted something that would offer an empirically backed path to improve my mental toughness and this wasn’t it.