Willpower

record of 17:04.
    “This was a whole other level of pain,” he said shortly afterward. “I still feel as if somebody hit me in the stomach with the hardest punch they could.”
    So how did he will his way through it?
    “That’s where the training comes in,” he said. “It gives you the confidence to pull through a situation that isn’t so easy.”
    By training, he didn’t mean simply his recent exercises in breath holding, although there had been plenty of them during the previous year. Each morning he’d do a series of ordinary breath-holds (starting with regular air instead of pure oxygen) separated by short intervals, gradually increasing the duration and the pain. Over the course of an hour, he’d end up holding his breath for forty-eight minutes, and then he’d have a pounding headache for the rest of the day. Those daily breathing drills got his body used to the pain of carbon dioxide buildup. But just as important were the other kinds of exercises he’d been conducting for more than three decades, since the age of five. He had long been a believer in the notion that willpower is a muscle that can be strengthened. He picked up this idea partly through reading about the Victorian training of his childhood hero, Houdini, and partly by trial and error.
    Growing up in Brooklyn, Blaine forced himself to practice card tricks hour after hour, day after day. He learned to win swimming races by not coming up for air the entire length of the pool—and then, with practice, eventually won five hundred dollars in bets by swimming five lengths under water. In the winter, he eschewed a coat, wearing only a T-shirt even when walking for miles on bitterly cold days. He regularly took cold baths and conducted the occasional barefoot run in the snow. He slept on the wooden floor of his bedroom, and once spent two straight days in a closet (his tolerant mother brought him food). He got in the habit of continually setting goals that had to be met, like running so far every day, or jumping to grab a leaf from the branch of a certain tree every time he walked under it. At age eleven, after reading about fasting in the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, he tried it himself and soon got up to four days on just water. By age eighteen he managed a ten-day fast with just water and wine. Once he became a professional endurance artist, he reverted to the same techniques before a stunt, including little rituals that had nothing directly to do with the stunt.
    “Some sort of OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] kicks in whenever I’m about to do a long-term challenge,” he told us. “I make tons of weird goals for myself. Like, when I’m jogging in the park in the bike lane, whenever I go over a drawing of a biker, I have to step on it. And not just step on it—I have to hit the head of the biker perfectly with my foot, so that it fits right under my sneaker. Little things like that annoy anyone running with me, but I believe if I don’t do them, I won’t succeed.”
    But why believe that? Why would stepping on the drawing of a biker help you hold your breath longer?
    “Getting your brain wired into little goals and achieving them, that helps you achieve the bigger things you shouldn’t be able to do,” he said. “It’s not just practicing the specific thing. It’s always making things more difficult than they should be, and never falling short, so that you have that extra reserve, that tank, so you know you can always go further than your goal. For me that’s what discipline is. It’s repetition and practice.”
    These exercises certainly appear to work for Blaine, but his endurance feats hardly constitute scientific evidence—or a model for anyone else. David Blaine is about as far as you can get from a random sample. A child who voluntarily takes cold baths and goes on four-day fasts is not representative of any known population. Maybe Blaine’s feats are mainly due not to his training but to the willpower that he was born with. Perhaps all the training was simply evidence of how unusually disciplined he always was. He, like the Victorians, thought that training strengthened his willpower like a muscle, but maybe he just happened to start off with a very strong muscle. To see if these training techniques really worked, or could make a difference for anyone else, you would need to test them with people who were not endurance artists—the sort of people who would never regard a saint living on a pillar as a