How’s this for an offbeat analogy?

You’re a dartboard on the back wall in a renovated barroom that was once a rectangular-as-they-come row home. I’m a regular there, and these articles are the darts I throw from distances determined by your interest in the topic.

Every bullseye means the next round’s on me. And you, a somehow sentient circular piece of wood covered with numbers and felt, also get to imbibe.

Want to drink up today?

Then allow me to move closer to you. Feign interest for a moment in achieving a tremendous athletic endeavor - albeit one you probably have no interest in ever attempting.

To finish a 26.2-mile marathon in under three hours.

On race day, all your training pays off - for 25 miles. You’re well under your goal pace until that time.

Then you hit “the wall.”

You keep going slower and slower until you’re reduced to a labored walk.

The course takes a sharp turn, allowing you to see the finish line a quarter mile away. The sight somehow turns your labored walk into an all-out sprint. You triumphantly cross the line with the clock showing 2:59 and change.

Is this a far-fetched finish?

According to a 2014 study cited by Alex Hutchinson in Endure (Harper Collins, 2018), marathoners with the goal of running one in under three hours are able to increase their pace in the last 1.4 miles 30 percent of the time. The study of over 9 million marathon finishers also unearthed an important anomaly that Hutchinson explains.

“Around every significant time barrier - three hours, four hours, five hours - there are far more finishers than you’d expect just below the barrier and fewer than you’d expect above.”

This fact is one of the reasons to answer “yes” to the question posed in today’s title. That another governor besides Josh Shapiro legislates your exercise.

Tim Nokes, a retired exercise scientist whose 750 scientific books and articles have been cited more than 20,000 times in scientific literature, calls him the Central Governor.

But the central governor is not really a who but a what: in essence, the limits you encounter during exercise that are not a direct result of failing muscles. Limits that are “imposed in advance by the brain,” a failsafe to make sure you stay safe, avoid injury or even death.

Whether or not the central governor actually exists is far from a settled matter. A few of Noakes’ peers challenge him on this. For instance, a review of the Central Governor Model published in the May 2016 issue of Frontiers in Psychology calls the theory “controversial at best and unfalsifiable at worst,” that it teaches us “precious little.”

But what’s precious to you and me, be it little or not, is finding ways to get more out of exercise. One way is to assume Noakes is correct and listen to what he has to say in a 2017 Scientific Triathlon podcast, “Psychology and the Central Governor Model with professor Tim Noakes.”

Just past the 13-minute mark, the now-retired Noakes explains that he and his research team have identified the point “where your brain starts to think [exercise] is not worth the effort anymore,” that the “discomfort you’re feeling is not worth the effort you’re putting in.” So your brain tells you to give less of an effort or even quit altogether.

But what Noakes will tell you is to never quit “because your brain is playing games with you.” That the so-called fatigue you feel is “purely an emotion we use as an excuse.”

Feeling offended by his assertion? I see myself as lacking many athletic talents but possessing the ability to endure a world of hurt, so I certainly was - at first.

Until I recalled my biggest bike racing failure and realized it had occurred because my emotions got the best of me.

About 12 years ago, I gave up in a 40 kilometer time trial just past the halfway mark. While an increasing pain in my right hip and glutes from the titanium rod in my right leg played a part, what sealed the deal was being passed as if I was a picket fence by a rider I didn’t recognize.

Who started, according to the number he wore, two minutes after I did.

A few days later, I told a buddy about giving up and that I felt I no longer had what it takes to race. He called me a name now very politically correct, but asked around and found out the rider who flew by me that day was only 20 years old - and a low-level pro from out of state.

Long story short, that info eased my mind and I entered the time trial state championship. I managed to win my age group by a few seconds - despite experiencing the same hip/glutes pain as I did the prior race.

The central governor got overruled in that race, with help from something else Noakes says is true.

“The bigger the ‘why,’ the better the performance.”