Chapter 9, "The River" explores the relationship between imperialism, post-colonialism, the regulation of voice, and the construction of modern endurance sports science and theory.

Rather than treating physiology as a neutral body of knowledge, this chapter examines how authority in endurance culture is produced, protected, and enforced. It traces how certain ways of speaking about the body came to count as scientific, while others were dismissed as subjective, anecdotal, or unserious. The result is not just a training paradigm, but a hierarchy of legitimacy that determines who is allowed to speak, what kinds of experience are trusted, and which explanations are permitted to stand.

Chapter 9 situates endurance science within a broader historical pattern. It draws parallels between imperial systems that centralized knowledge and erased local understanding, and modern training cultures that privilege abstraction over perception. Metrics replace narrative. Thresholds replace judgment. The athlete’s internal experience is tolerated only when it confirms the model, and discounted when it challenges it.

This chapter argues that the dominance of mechanistic endurance theory is not simply the result of better evidence, but of institutional convenience. Reductionist models scale well. They credential easily. They produce authority that can be exported, monetized, and defended. What they do not do well is account for regulation, variability, or lived reality.

You cannot draw a picture of your cat. That's the reason you cannot train properly. Application is the hardest part of training. How do we measure training when we cannot use emulsification of the soul as the benchmark that we've put another drop in the drum? We learn to avoid fatigue at all costs, and we learn how much some people seem to love to be tired.

Don't stay hard. Training isn't supposed to be a cage match with a polar bear. It's practice with proficiency leading to improvement in what we can do with ease. The best way to train is to feel easy everyday. Easy doesn't mean slow or fast. Easy means with ease. We just have to cut bait on the romanticism to get there. It's hard to stay easy.