It's that time again. Time for an essay the subject of which is extremely important, so I want you to turn off the I-tunes, the TV and grant your cell phone some mercy by refraining from pounding out 1,000 meaningless words a minute and give me your undivided attention. I have touched upon this subject in several of my previous posts, but wish to expand upon it here in detail. Please bear in mind that I am not learning anything from writing what I already know--this is solely for your benefit. Yes, you; the one shifting around in your chair to find the most comfortable position. It's time for a reality check, and for a lesson on one of the most important, useful and empowering skills a human being can possess. The ability to endure.
Suffering. You probably just flinched. Did you get a little uneasy when you first read the title of this essay? It is a powerful word, if only because of the negative psychological connotation it carries with it. When most people think of suffering, they think of pain, misery, stress and exhaustion. Rightly so. However it is also an opportunity: An opportunity to expand your capacity far beyond what any diet, pill, exercise or drug possibly ever could. An opportunity to clarify true limits and rewrite what is possible. The ability to withstand physical pain and emotional misery is a hard-learned skill available only to the brave and committed. Before diving into what this ability can do for you some clarification is in order, as most people seem to lack a basic understanding of what pain is and how it works. One must understand his adversary before he is able to defeat it. Pain does not force you to stop--it only tries to convince you to do so. If you can shift your focus to anything aside from your suffering you will find that you are able to endure far more than you thought. But the minute you start to feel sorry for yourself, you hand the victory to your pain. When enduring prolonged misery one must always be the aggressor--you must be the one in charge, calling the shots and in control of your immediate circumstance. You can never be at the mercy of the conditions--becoming a victim never did anyone any good. Flexibility and adaptability, both physical and emotional, are key to maintaining your ability to exert your will during hardship. Developing these traits requires a commitment to hard work and a willingness to explore pain. After all, you must suffer if you want to suffer well. Practice makes perfect.
Still shifting around in your chair, I see. Before you stop reading, allow me an attempt to instill in you some hope. People often fear what they don't understand. After this paragraph however, fear of the unknown will no longer be a viable excuse. Now un-contort your face and stay with me while I explain. I occasionally wear a shirt I got at Ironman on the back of which reads: "Pain is only a state of mind". While this is a pretty catchy phrase, it's slightly misleading. In reality, pain is actually a fabrication of the mind. This may be difficult to swallow, but the truth of the matter is that pain is not physically real. It is not tangible, and does not exist as a quantifiable force in our physical universe. Instead, pain is a function of the 'central governor' part of the brain. Its purpose is to illicit an intense response to damage and/or trauma occurring to the body and prompt immediate action to rectify, stop or flee from the cause of it. In layman's terms, what this means is that when you touch a hot burner on a stove, the heat from the burner and the damage it does to your hand does not cause the pain directly. Instead, it prompts your brain to cause the pain in order to give you a very strong compulsion to pull your hand away from the damage-causing stove burner, quick, fast and in a hurry. Suffering is the prolonged exposure to some or many types of pain, and the sensations you feel as a result are often purposefully specific. For example, if you have been training or racing hard for many hours out in the burning hot sun on a 90+ degree day, you will eventually tap into your brain's millennium-old survival mode. The conditions will have unavoidably caused you to become dehydrated in addition to raising your core temperature, pushing you closer and closer to heat exhaustion. Your brain will afflict you with an overpowering sense of thirst and an extremely powerful compulsion to seek out water and shade. This scenario is nothing more than a classic example of your subconscious brain taking steps to reverse a harmful and potentially even lethal chain of events in order to return your body systems to their state of optimum functionality or equilibrium. Self-preservation. That's what its all about, and its all the central governor part of your brain is concerned with. It doesn't care about your dreams, your goals, your problems or desires. It is oblivious to the circumstances surrounding the reason your body was being stressed or damaged. It doesn't care that you were in a war zone and the bullets and shrapnel flying past your head were more immediate concerns than the oppressive heat or your lack of adequate hydration. It is totally unconcerned that you were running through the heat of the day to reach a telephone to call for help because a loved one lay on a remote trail, bleeding to death due to a mountain lion attack. That is why it's called your subconscious brain; its purpose is to protect you, not please you or even be the least bit accommodating to you.
I can hear your heavy sigh and the steady drumming of your restless fingers. Rest assured, that neuro-physiological lesson was imperatively relevant and completely necessary. Because you now possess all the knowledge required to put a lid on that inconveniently annoying central governor and kick it all the way back to the stone age where it came from, some many eons ago. All it takes is focused effort and some practice, and the willingness to throw yourself into a situation you know you're not going to enjoy. Start with small steps--you have to walk before you can run. The next time you work out, do not hold back. Learn the difference between total application and just going through the motions. Between true hard work and what you've been doing. Focus completely on the task at hand. Nothing meaningful can be gained when your body is doing one thing and your mind another. Give it absolutely everything you have, moving as fast and as powerfully as possible. Avoid wasting your time taking rest breaks and absolutely above all else, DO NOT QUIT. Your fitness gains will be exponentially higher, and you will become tougher for having endured that brief period of suffering. The weight of the reward far exceeds that of the immediate cost of temporary discomfort. Pain is temporary, but pride is forever.
"Pain is constant during hard effort. This is precisely what keeps most people from pulling out all the stops – it fucking hurts. But with the right attitude and the will to suffer, this sort of pain can become easier to endure with practice. You confront it, immerse yourself in it, and become it. You survive. The next time – because you know what's coming – you are less apprehensive, which spares energy, allowing you to focus, to push harder, and perhaps to truly suffer. You don't quit. You get through it. Confidence soars. Your self-image changes, you begin to see yourself as able, capable, and newfound capacity causes ambition to evolve so you try something harder. It lasts longer. In it, you have the time to think, to look inward, which separates the 'sprint' experience from the endurance effort: self-knowledge gained during effort is more honest and clear than what one learns through analysis after the fact, which is too often corrupted by selective memory."
It's all about attitude. If you attach a negative stigma to the act of suffering, it will always beat you down. By contrast, if you associate suffering with positive ideas, such as strength in the knowledge that you are growing stronger and tougher, beating the odds, expanding your physical and mental capacities and redefining what those increasingly less intimidating 'limits' are, you will excel at enduring the pain, and greater results will inevitably and unavoidably follow. A positive and productive attitude combined with unrestrained effort are nature's unstoppable one-two punch. With these deceptively simple qualities, a fit individual can accomplish virtually any task, and endure almost anything. "The outcome of both sports competition and actual combat are decided largely by one's mental attitude. To be sure, superior firepower, whether physical or technical, is a determining factor but the 'heart' governs the application of resources, which makes spirit the most powerful force on the field. Acquiring the spirit necessary to win, which includes a positive acceptance of pain is difficult in a society where comfort is more highly regarded than capacity, where genuine physical fitness is the norm for less than 15% of the population."
Modern society values comfort and luxury as if they were the new gods of the 21st century. In today's world of climate control and feel-good marketing, discomfort and suffering are obsolete. Take a trip to your local grocery store, stocked with aisles full of pain relievers and symptom-masking drugs. Indeed, entire businesses and corporations thrive only on the predictability of the average consumer's willingness to pay almost anything to live as comfortably as possible. Think about this the next time you have a headache and you rush to the cabinet for an aspirin or whatever only to find the 48-count box already empty. Are you seriously going to waste a couple of dollars in gas and 20-30 minutes of your life to drive down to the store and shell out more of your hard-earned money on an outrageously over-priced, mass-produced drug just to temporarily relieve a temporary pain, one you know will go away all on its own in due time? If your answer is yes, than you have no hope of ever overcoming real suffering. If your answer is no, there's hope for you yet.
Far too often in challenging athletic endeavors uncommitted, self-deceiving individuals give up prematurely, telling themselves "This is impossible," "I just can't do it," or "This just isn't my day." They say it enough times they begin to believe it. In reality, they quit because they were unwilling to suffer further, not because of any physical, genetic or environmental limitation. I have said it before and I will repeat it again: Your body is capable of producing ten times the amount of work your mind thinks it can. In the world of endurance sport, "impossible" is a dirty word. Indeed, our sport fosters the belief that 'impossible' is nothing more than a word in a dictionary; ink printed on paper and stated as fact as if in a vain attempt to convince us that it is anything other than fiction. Many times in my past life have I uttered the phrases "That's not possible" and "I could never do that." Well it is and I did, many times, such that I truthfully no longer know where the upper limits really lie. I believe that to the motivated and the committed, death is the only limit. I believe that my body will cease to function long before my will to go on begins to diminish. I know that there is nothing I cannot do, no task or challenge I cannot overcome. My mind and willpower have repeatedly taken my body to levels of performance and endurance conventional wisdom would suggest it should not have been capable of. I have regularly surpassed my own self-imposed limitations and watched my confidence soar and my capacity increase as a result. 'Impossible' no longer carries any weight in my universe, and has been summarily deleted from my personal dictionary. This was all made possible primarily by my willingness and developed ability to suffer. I don't give in to the pain--the pain gives in to me.
People these days seem almost fanatically hell-bent on avoiding anything that would require them to venture outside their comfort zones. What they fail to realize is that the more they persevere through physical hardship, the larger that comfort zone becomes. The importance of the ability to adapt to one's environment cannot be overrated, and with the expansion of your boundaries comes the expansion of your options. The following is an excerpt from the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who explains the difference between reticent, circumstance-driven reactive people and assertive, performance-driven proactive individuals: "Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn't, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn't a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not." Attitude is everything. If you develop the ability to withstand hardship and setback, then adopt an aggressively productive attitude, you will find that hardly any circumstance or condition phases you. I personally like to think of this as a form of invincibility. The world becomes a much bigger yet more accessible place, opening the door for any number of life-enriching experiences. Stop making excuses to convince yourself you can't do it and start finding reasons to prove to yourself otherwise. Commit to persistent hard work and a positive tolerance of pain and be prepared to be amazed by the capacity of human physiology.
"The mind and body adapt to both comfort and deprivation... Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men." Learn to suffer and adapt to overcome.