Learning to Suffer (Page 2)

"...if your goal is to win, what is 'better' is what works."

Absolutely agreed. Well put.

I think suffering is highly overrated.   I'm not willing to kill myself over 8th in my AG, but if I get close to a podium, then sure. However, the harder you go, the sooner you die.  You gas out quicker, and I've seen it happen many time.  

However, if you do want to access that inner suffering, the best thing to do is shut off your mind and just focus on the finish line or the person in front of you.

Frederick Nietzsche does not agree:

"That which does not kill us only serves to make us stronger."

and...

"Man is sometimes inexorably in love with suffering."

So now I can't resist (sorry -- I'm a professional philosopher):

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities -- I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not -- that one endures." (The Will to Power)

"You want, if possible -- and there is no more insane "if possible" -- to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it -- that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible -- that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?" (Beyond Good and Evil)

(I hasten to add that I am no Nietzschean, but there is something to what he says, IMHO.)

So awesome and surprising that anyone else feels this way.  It is 100% true.  Humans do not have to learn to suffer. We suffer so much in our daily lives that we are blind to most of it.  What we need to do is stop looking for pain, suffering and discomfort in our training and racing.  It is a matter of semantics but also a matter of shifting the mindset.

Intense does not have to equal pain and suffering.  Training and racing are some of the most physically intense things we do. That intensity can easily be labelled as pain and suffering as we do not really have a frame of reference or vocabulary to express it otherwise.  Me, I just think of it as orgasmic, because it is far more similar.

Maschists seek out true pain. Most people are not true masochists, therefor you are not seeking out pain and suffering. If training and racing were painful, not very many would participate.  Training and racing is intense in a glorious and life affirming manner.

It is really a bit of ego stroking to think of what you do in terms of pain and suffering and pushing through it.  Not only ego stroking, but also limiting you from really finding how far you can go.

Tunnel vision, dizzy, tasting blood, vomiting, blacking out?  Great!  You and 75% of the other ladies  in the 60+ age groups as well.  So now what do you do to set yourself apart?

And everyone will have their version of what motivates them and they are all valid answers. However.... back to pro Mt. bike racers... suffering was a known part of the sport. They knew, they did it, they embraced it, they took pride in it. So what ever suffering means to you or to them can be different, the point is that you can compete at the top level of a sport with that mind set and succeed. So it isn't the word "suffering" it is all about how and what you do with it.

I don't have a problem with calling a spade a spade. Pushing myself to a place I don't want to be hurts. It's suffering. It is not pleasant. But just like anything else in life, there are parts in it that hurt, that are not pleasant, that make you want to curl up. The question remains to many of us.... do we have what it takes to continue when all we want to do is curl up?

What I do have a problem with is a couple of stastements of why do it if you are not going to win your catagory..... well why the heck should any of us do anything because 80% of us will never win a catagory ever. The point is to see what we can do. Once we see we can train, then we see how hard we can go. There is a personal reason why we do what we do. I doubt I will ever be at the top of anything at this point, but I do what I do to see what it is I am capable of. I have pushed myself in races now harder than I ever have. That's cool to me. And everyone generally has the same questions they want to answer..... do I have what it takes when it matters??? Thats a question I at least have. Perhaps one day I will be willing to sacrifice a finish to find out.

Well even the pros talk about it. I'm new to this, I don't know much... but there was that article in Lava I think somebody gave me about the "Pain Cave". That every endurance athlete will crawl into the pain cave. Point isn't getting there, the point is what you do with it whe you are there. Do you "suffer" through it, or do you go exploring.

Perhaps Chrissy enjoys smiling in it. Perhaps for a mere mortal like me my satisfaction comes from just getting to it and knowing it won't kill me. They are both accomplishments of the human spirit to me. Doing the best we can with what we have.

A little off-topic but I find this very interesting because my reaction to others on the course is the opposite.  I find it very easy to be sucked into what others are doing and suddenly realize I've pushed myself way beyond where I should be pace-wise or that I've lost focus on what I'm doing so much that I've slowed myself down because I'm competing with them and wrecking my form instead of focusing on my own body and what I should be doing.  I love the feeling of racing others but I need the motivation and focus to be from/on me or else I'm running someone else's race.  

I'm just finishing Chris McCormack's book and in it he talks about "embracing the suck" which means that at some point the race is going to suck for everyone and instead of dreading it and trying to push it away as long as possible, you should just accept that it's coming and do a sort of "oh there you are, pain, I knew you'd be along sometime soon" and try to mentally accept that there's a crappy part of every race but that you can almost always run (bike/swim) through it.  

Well then make this 2 people who agree with this.  I am far from a fast racer.  I will likely never podium in anything but a very small local race (I managed a 4th place a couple of weeks ago based on a low turnout of our fast people in town).  But, I go out and push myself 3 times a week during workouts with my coach and team and my long runs.  Each one of them has me finding new limits.  Or maybe better stated finding what I thought was a limit isn't and I still have more room to push.  Heck, last week we did a track workout to work those fast twitch muscle fibers (those that one hopes to recruit in that final sprint that haven't used all of their glycogen stores)  and there was significant pain in the days following.  However, I have only twice thought I was truly suffering during a run.  Both were special cases that had complete physical and mental breakdown and only one was a race.   And both instances helped my change strategies. 

What I do with training, where I want to go with training does not include suffering.  Suffering indicates a negative connotation.  I may feel pain, I may think I've gone past my limits but, truly, if it was suffering I wouldn't go back for more.  I cannot, I will not place negative connotation on something that makes me so damn happy.   

Everyone, pros included, needs to have their success and failure evaluated thusly: Did they succeed or fail because of what they did or in spite of it?

Sometimes pros make bad choices and employ less than ideal strategies.  

Everybody loves their pain cave.  They take pride in it. In this regard, I am an outlier.  I prefer to shine a spotlight on the intense sensations I experience while racing. My strategies for dealing with them are to embrace them. To continually seek out an experience that I would describe in negative terms is insane to me.

I need to be evaluated in the same manner I suggest. I am 39 yrs old and slightly heavy, but I swim nearly as fast and ride faster than most pro triathletes. (Running is coming back) Would I be better if I embraced my alleged suffering more?  Or maybe I am onto something?

I am by no means certain, but I am certain that putting dropping a cinderblock on your foot and riding your bike as fast as you can for 5 minutes are different enough experiences as to deserve different words to describe them.  

The replies to this post are quite exceptional I think - beyond my expectation.  There are many good points made to the semantics of the word suffering.  Perhaps a better title for the post would have been "Learning to Endure Suffering" - because the goal really isn't to suffer, but rather to mentally deal with the suffering that comes from pushing our limits. 

This is an interesting topic.  I agree with what Scout and Dave are saying. If you train hard regularly (and smartly in a way that doesn't cause injury), then there should not be much suffering to speak of on race day. I think just about everybody has that little bit extra on race day. The race day excitement all but guarantees that. But if you train hard, what might have been that little bit extra is just a normal brisk effort on race day. And then you go a little bit harder still from that.

My friend who also races but tends to favor going longer vs getting faster says I need to lose that race mentality when I train. That I'm going to burn myself out. Well that hasn't happened yet. I agree I need to be smart about not hurting myself and as I gain experience I think I'm getting better about picking and choosing my spots to push it. And not every day am I going to feel like that kind of effort. But I do tend to treat training sessions as mini-races and I am racing against maybe what I did last time out, or a previous PR or whatever (except for swimming where "swimming hard" causes my already shaky form to go all to heck). It helps make training more interesting and helps raise the bar for me. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. However, eventually what was uncomfortable becomes normal, and then there's a new level of effort that becomes uncomfortable.

Great post!!!! 

Been cycling for years & enjoy a good sufferfest as much as the next guy but Tom provides some outstanding perspective.  With the best mental prep/plan you can only perform to your physical limits, and then (eventually) something physiologically may break.  Perfect mental performance will NOT turn me into a cat 1 racer or Kona AG winner.  While there are obvious differences between elites & AGers, doing the best you can do on a given race day is not failure.  There are issues beyond our control (weather, course conditions, mechanicals, etc.).  But pushing absolute limits of physical breakdown risks the ultimate failure.  Nietzsche postulated 2 possible outcomes-

"That which does not KILL YOU makes you stronger."

A modern philosopher covered the former case.

"Stupid is as Stupid does."    -Forrest Gump

Interesting and very timely article for this thread on exercise and pain/suffering in the the NY times...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/health/nutrition/17best.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

Thanks for that article, very interesting read. 

I agree with Scout about the suffer part. Suffering has a negative connotation. What you are doing is learning to listen to your body and what it is telling you. From that, you can formulate a plan on how to deal with it.

I'm going to use hypoxic sets in swimming as an example. Hypoxic sets do nothing for you physiologically. They don't expand your lungs, any of those other myths. What they DO, is teach you how to control your body and its reactions when you are screaming for air. This can be invaluable when you are pushing the swim in a tri, and you get smacked with a wave and can't breathe on schedule.

All the references to the "hurt locker", and the "pain cave", are simply descriptors for that time when you are pushing your body out towards the limits of your current ability. Yeah, it can hurt, but feeling that, accepting it, and seeing how long you can last there is the purpose, not the pain itself.

Purposely go out some times, with the goal of failing. If your mile pace for a moderate run is 10 minutes/mile, go out for a 4 mile run at a pace of 9:00/mile. If you end up walking, so what? I bet you get a lot further than you think before you have to stop. If you make it all, then next time try 4 miles at 8:30 pace. Unless you are on the verge of injuring yourself, ignore the achy/pain/complaints from your body, and again, I bet you would be surprised at how far you get. And, knowing the signals that your body sends out when it is on the edge would let you feel that in a race and be able to back it down a touch before it becomes critical.

I have done martial arts for almost 20 years, and I teach 2 hour seminars on self defense. The biggest thing that I find is people are scared to get hit because "it will hurt". Yes, it will. Just like a shot at the doctor's will hurt. BUT, if you can accept that it's going to happen, and it's going to hurt some, then you can function and get past it. That's where the vast majority of people lose a fight/altercation, is they get stunned by the initial pain.

The brain is a muscle like any other. You need to train it like you do for the rest of the sports. All you have to tell yourself is that "Yeah, it's going to hurt some, but it's temporary". When you can make yourself BELIEVE that, then you are most of the way there.

John

I you don't want to 'fail' in a race than do so in training. If you push yourself so hard during training that your body shuts down you will know what your limits are and be able to push to them in a race. Example: I do out and back rides and runs because, to me at least, it gives me no choice but to finish the run.  On some of my long runs I run with no real distance plan but rather a pace plan. I go out at target pace, say avg 7 min/mile until I feel I can't go anymore before I turn around and now I still have to run back and still maintain the pace. 

Other option is to put your self in situations where there is a high probability of suffering no matter what you do. I once hiked 17 miles in the mountains with an 80 lbs pack full of trail tools in the pouring rain, now any time I think I am suffering I think back to that dumb day and say to myself 'If i did that I can do this.'

Go through basic training.

OR, run high school cross country.

I attribute my ability to push myself to my limits to those two things.   I kind of go bananas when I see people taking their PT test and they are "dying" and they are barely going anywhere.  I definitely think it's more of a mental issue of not understanding just how hard you CAN push yourself without really dying.