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Enduring physical hardships trains mental 
strength. 
If running a marathon isn’t challenging enough 
for you, you can always sign up for an 
ultramarathon – that’s any marathon lasting over 
six hours, though some of them can last several 
weeks. The Iditarod Trail Invitational, for 
example, includes walking, biking, and skiing 
through Alaskan blizzards for up to thirty days.
Since 1980, the number of Americans who have 
completed such extreme endurance feats 
jumped from 650 to 79,000 in 2017. What draws 
people to these crazy adventures? 
For Shawn Bearden, host of a popular podcast 
on ultrarunning, endurance sport was a way out 
of his depression. He explains that training his 
body to endure such extreme physical hardship 
is a way to cultivate mental strength that carries 
over to other parts of his life. For example, 

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during the race, Bearden tries to focus on the 
present moment and draws strength from 
thinking about his loved ones – skills that have 
also helped him manage his depression. 
Endurance athletes like Bearden do not 
necessarily seek out their sport because they 
are extremely resilient, but because the sport 
trains them to become extremely resilient. In 
fact, histories of depression, addiction, and 
anxiety are common among the world’s top 
ultrarunners. 
In 2015, when researchers followed athletes 
competing in the Yukon Arctic Ultra, they found 
that the athletes’ ability to soldier on through 
extreme conditions was linked to very high levels 
of the hormone irisin. Irisin is best known for 
helping our bodies burn fat as fuel, but it also 
stimulates the brain’s reward system, acting as a 
natural motivation-booster and antidepressant. 
Irisin in the bloodstreams of participating 
athletes was highly elevated before the 
marathon, and climbed even higher during it. 
Irisin belongs to a class of proteins called 
myokines, which are manufactured by our 
muscles during physical activity. Myokines are 
known to boost our physical and cognitive 
performance, alleviate pain, reduce depression 
and inflammation, and even kill cancer cells. 
Because they can protect the brain from some of 
the neurodegenerative symptoms of conditions 
such as depression and Parkinson’s, scientists 
have started calling these beneficial proteins 
“hope molecules.”
Exercising at such high intensity and volume as 
extreme endurance athletes can stimulate 
intense bursts of myokine release. But you don’t 
need to be an ultrarunner to harness the positive 
powers of the hope molecules: a single hour of 
biking is enough to release about 35 different 
myokines into your bloodstream. 
As these blinks have hopefully shown, the 
myriad benefits of physical activity are available 
to all of us. As humans, we are hardwired to find 
happiness in movement.