Pushing the limit: Why Hassan is my favourite female athlete of the year

On the edge of madness, where suffering and courage live, is where great sport exists.

- Rohit Brijnath

On the fields, as sweat rains and self-doubt is fended off by grit, and pain clogs the brain, the athlete is full of questions.

Is this feat possible? Surely not? Who knows?

Then, they try.

They scrap across five hours and 53 minutes (almost four football matches) in tennis finals. They slither rope-less up a rock face. They hurtle down mountain slopes at 100kmh on a 28mm cycle tyre. They take a body "broken beyond repair", as 40-year-old Lindsey Vonn has, back to the ski slopes.

Crazy, huh?

The beauty of the human limit is that it remains unknown and it is this truth which seizes athletes. They are adventurers who live to explore it. Think of it as a summons from inside. "Because it's there", the legendary climber George Mallory replied when repeatedly asked why he wished to climb Everest. Then he died trying on its slopes in 1924.

Most of us never know what lies within us. Where our bodies can physically go or how far our mind can take us. But the great athlete, to choose a word the astonishing runner Sifan Hassan uses to describe herself, is "curious".

What else is greatness but an investigation of the self?