How can one compare that kind of endurance with that of the athletic arena? Pain, perseverance, courage, survival? How inappropriate those words seem when applied to mere recreational pursuits. It meant living from day to day with the heart tearing itself between hope and fear, merely subsisting under a cloud of doom with no finish line in sight. Endurance meant surviving in the rigid domain of despair, beyond the reach of help, or rest, or pity. Endurance meant living through two cold winters as a prisoner of war, his body weight dropping as a low as 66 pounds from its original 165. That ordeal also included fighting off sharks while the enemy shot at him.ДЄfter his raft beached on a small island, endurance meant living with the tyranny, torture and torment of his captors, including the threat of decapitation. To Zamperini, endurance came to mean starving and thirsting while confined to a life raft for 47 days. The lessons started when his plane went down in the Pacific Ocean, south of the Hawaiian Islands, while on a rescue mission. On May 27, 1943, Zamperini, a bombardier officer in the Army Air Corps, began a two-and-a-half year odyssey in which he learned the true meaning of endurance. However, seven years after those Olympics, during World War II, he would be introduced to an entirely different kind of knowledge. An Olympian at 5,000 meters in the 1936 Berlin Games, Zamperini knew about running endurance and all those related words. Your perspective might change when you consider the story of Lou Zamperini of Hollywood, CA. What could possibly be more demanding-physically and mentally-than pushing the body relentlessly mile after mile? Maybe you even fancy yourself a survivor. Certainly, you are familiar with pain, agony and adversity. You must also know about concomitant virtues, such as stamina, fortitude, strength, guts, perseverance, heart and courage. Perhaps you've run a few marathons and think you know the meaning of endurance.

Endurance definition