Excerpt from Values of Pain
As Jacqueline Simon Gunn says, in her interesting and provocative book Bare: Psychotherapy stripped:
"My running coach, Chantal, had me performing innumerable track workouts in preparation for my long-distance road races. They were painful; and the pain was different than what I experienced during endurance training and longer races."
And:
"The ability to stay relaxed and focused in the face of pain and exhaustion is essential to being a successful long-distance runner. This may not seem like much fun, but the sense of strength and power that comes from running is like nothing else I have ever experienced. For me, this is the psychological component of the "runner's high." When the pain seems most intense and you really want to stop, somewhere you find the strength to keep going. Continuing in the face of such a rigorous effort endows you with all the power you'll need to push on. This, then, for me at least, supplies an inner strength that is needed to move past the pain into a sort of spiritual transcendence."
This is overcoming pain as a discipline. The runner knows something the rest of us are busy forgetting: to get stronger, you have to go on until you are uncomfortable, and then go on a while longer. It is in that place where discomfort happens but activity is still possible that growth and development happen.
Whatever exercise you choose this is true. If you stop because you are tired or a little bit uncomfortable, the exercise is wasted. You never get better at the exercise you are doing. You must slightly exceed your limits each time, and this is an act of will, of discipline. This requires knowing about pain and pushing through it. Without the knowledge of pain this exercise becomes dangerous, enabling the runner or cyclist or swimmer to exceed their limits to the point of serious injury or death. Thus the distance runner has to know they have pain or discomfort, measure whether it is serious enough to attend to, and table the awareness of such pain for the good of the activity.
"My running coach, Chantal, had me performing innumerable track workouts in preparation for my long-distance road races. They were painful; and the pain was different than what I experienced during endurance training and longer races."
And:
"The ability to stay relaxed and focused in the face of pain and exhaustion is essential to being a successful long-distance runner. This may not seem like much fun, but the sense of strength and power that comes from running is like nothing else I have ever experienced. For me, this is the psychological component of the "runner's high." When the pain seems most intense and you really want to stop, somewhere you find the strength to keep going. Continuing in the face of such a rigorous effort endows you with all the power you'll need to push on. This, then, for me at least, supplies an inner strength that is needed to move past the pain into a sort of spiritual transcendence."
This is overcoming pain as a discipline. The runner knows something the rest of us are busy forgetting: to get stronger, you have to go on until you are uncomfortable, and then go on a while longer. It is in that place where discomfort happens but activity is still possible that growth and development happen.
Whatever exercise you choose this is true. If you stop because you are tired or a little bit uncomfortable, the exercise is wasted. You never get better at the exercise you are doing. You must slightly exceed your limits each time, and this is an act of will, of discipline. This requires knowing about pain and pushing through it. Without the knowledge of pain this exercise becomes dangerous, enabling the runner or cyclist or swimmer to exceed their limits to the point of serious injury or death. Thus the distance runner has to know they have pain or discomfort, measure whether it is serious enough to attend to, and table the awareness of such pain for the good of the activity.
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