Considering Pain, For Big Satisfaction in Endurance Sport

pain |pān|

noun: physical suffering or discomfort, mental suffering or distress

In general, pain has a distinct reputation for being the unpleasant bad guy or even the herd of elephants in the room. Both whom most humans instinctively avoid at all turns. Unless you’re an endurance athlete.

In a world increasingly designed to promote comfort, endurance athletes willfully choose to participate in (and pay large sums of money for) endeavors that will invoke pain and discomfort for sometimes very long periods of time. With some upcoming writing on this topic and extended ‘personal projects’ looming, I have gleefully repondered this theme while spending lots of hours on the trails.

What we find out quickly as endurance athletes is that pain and discomfort are a steady part of our experience. They are also important information. Pain lets us know when something is amiss, when we need to pay extra attention or change something up. It is also, and more intriguingly, our dance partner in transcending what we are capable of as athletes. What we glean over time is that if we can negotiate our relationship with pain well, we can not only choreograph the dance steps we take in our experiences, but we can gain even more satisfaction from our sporting endeavors. We start to get that there is so much more of us than we think.

Humans in some cultures are driven to challenge themselves to achieve something or to feel a sense of purpose. We get enormous satisfaction from the outcome but even more so from the journey getting to the outcome because any challenge involving large doses of discomfort require us to push back on who are in our comfortable life.

A challenge is a test and as any test goes, it can be seemingly unattainable and put us way outside our comfort zone. A difficult physical test requires putting our body under stress while the mind is working hard to negotiate our rocky inner dialog—how fast we can take the pain, how long we can take the pain, etc. The pain can be anything from white noise, to vibrating mental and physical distortion, like being too close to the stage and speakers at a concert while the crowd is throwing rocks at the performers. If we extend our body to the edge of what we knew prior by being on the move for hours or even days, then that vibrating discomfort is consistent and steadfast. As we learn to choose what kind of companion it will become, then we will not only come out of our race experiences immensely satisfied with how we negotiated this relationship, but we’ll most likely be back for more. Perhaps next time we can accept even more discomfort in order to go longer, faster, higher?

When I consult with athletes on relating to their pain and discomfort, I ask them to initially consider the following:

• Start to take note of what your mind thinks about your pain relationship.
• Write down your mental reactions to being in pain and discomfort while training and racing.
• Consider that it’s ok to dislike pain as a part of your sporting experiences.
• Then accept that pain is your companion in your endurance experiences. You’ve noted you don’t like it. Now accept it.
• Practice not liking nor disliking that pain is present. Allow it to just be, with out any emotion behind it.
• Start to view your pain as useful information. Ask yourself, “What is my pain telling me now?” Then change up or challenge your race strategy based on the answer.
• Start to take note of what is useful, strategy-invoking pain and what is injury, or potentially damaging pain. Store this information away and then keep gathering it to use as critical reference data for future endeavors. This process is required for all long time endurance athletes who wish to keep enduring.

Then consider, that what you are committed to as an athlete is much bigger and vaster then your pain and discomfort. That to dance in step with your pain will allow you to bring a whole different person to your next challenge. A tougher person.

Is this easy? No. But it not only gets easier over time, we start to engage with the process more naturally the more experience we have. Consider. Breathe. Believe. Transcending what you think you can do with your next endurance endeavor could be just one dance away. And the really cool thing is that the intrigue with this process will never go away.

Got Pain? Dance with it. I’d love to help you choreograph that process.

– Terri Schneider