Bannister is not describing a race. He is describing a threshold, and everything before it he throws away.

Up to the point where effort turns painful, you and the person who beats you look identical. Same session, same hours, same visible discipline. The record only starts where the discomfort does.

You know your own threshold to the minute. It is the moment the draft stops flowing and becomes a puzzle, the set where your form starts to go, the conversation that stops being pleasant and turns into the actual negotiation. Something in you produces a reason right then, and the reason is always excellent.

That reason is the skill you have practised most.

Run it forward. If you stop at the same place four times a week, that is two hundred rehearsals a year of the stopping, and none of the other side.

Nobody grades you on it. You stop at the boundary, tell yourself you did the work, and by most measures you did — you were there, you put in the time. But the hour that counted was the one you traded away at the edge, and no line in your calendar shows it missing.

Sunday makes this easy to see, because nothing today is forcing you past anything.

So pick the one thing you always abandon at the moment it stops being fun. Do it, and when the reason arrives — on schedule, sounding sensible — stay ten minutes past it. Ten minutes past the reason is the only part of today that leaves a mark.