endurance

Endurance is the ability to sustain a physical or mental effort over an extended period. It encompasses endurance of the body—such as stamina for prolonged exercise—as well as endurance of the mind, including persistence through fatigue, discomfort, or challenging conditions. In everyday usage, endurance often refers to long-duration performance or resilience.

In sports and physiology, endurance is commonly divided into several components. Cardiovascular or aerobic endurance refers to the body's capacity to deliver and utilize oxygen during sustained activity. Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to perform repeated contractions over time. Overall endurance also depends on energy metabolism, fatigue resistance, and pacing. Training improves these traits by increasing VO2 max, lactate threshold, mitochondrial efficiency, and capillarization, while factors such as nutrition, sleep, and recovery influence performance.

Endurance can be measured through tests such as time trials, distance events, or standardized endurance assessments, and is often expressed as performance over a fixed time or distance. Endurance training programs vary with goals, ranging from distance running and cycling to mixed aerobic workouts and sport-specific conditioning.

The term Endurance has also been used as a proper name. Notably, the Endurance was the ship used by Ernest Shackleton in his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition; built in 1912, it became trapped in pack ice and sank in 1915, with the crew surviving through remarkable endurance and resourcefulness.

Beyond sports and exploration, endurance appears in military, psychological, and endurance-themed cultural contexts, reflecting the broad idea of sustained effort against fatigue or adversity.