Friday Tri: The Perception of Pain

This week, I lost a couple of toenails again. The same ones I always lose when I start running long distances, more than 20 miles in one day. I have a 50 mile race coming up so that means every week I'm doing a couple of really long runs. I had just bought new shoes a few weeks ago. And in fact, I had just been into the local running store and had talked to them about my problem with lost toenails. The guy looked at me and my shoes and pretty much said that you can't expect to run more than 20 miles without losing a couple of toenails. That wasn't the shoes' problem. He did ask if I had the right kind of socks, which I did.

One of the interesting things about this experience is that I had been on and off the treadmill a couple of times during the run, to change DVDs and to use the bathroom. Not once did I notice pain in my feet. And this has happened time after time to me. I gashed my leg open a couple of months ago on my indoor bike, had blood dripping down my leg, and I didn't know it until I was in the showed, looking down at my leg.

On the other hand, last week I had a crash while riding and it hurt A LOT. I didn't think I could get back up. I wasn't happy to get back up. I felt pain every second of the rest of the race. And I was scraped up badly on one elbow and have some bruises, certainly. I'm not saying I wasn't in pain. I was. But all in all, I escaped from that crash relatively well. I've had worse crashes. I think hitting a softish person actually saved me from hitting the ground harder. Not so good for him, of course, but he absorbed a lot of the impact.

Why is that on so many occasions when I do not expect to feel pain, I do not feel it? And when I expect to feel pain, it seems that I may slightly exaggerate it? It seems to be part of the expectation itself, and possibly the sense of fear that goes along with it. When I had the crash, I expected to feel pain and I was afraid of it ruining my race, of taking a long time to recover from, of lots of things. My mind had long scenarios playing out of worst case scenarios. In the other cases, I was busy doing other things.

A friend of mine has taught me a little about her practice of "mindfulness." She spends some time meditating every day and allowing herself to experience life in the moment. She says that she notices pain in her body, if there is any, and just lets herself accept it. I asked her if she tried to measure it and compare it to the day before or anything and she laughed. That is exactly the opposite of what mindfulness is about. Putting numbers on things is the human way of trying to predict and control the world, of trying to contain it. It is also our way of trying to get away from the pain, escaping it.

But when you just accept the pain, see it for what it is right now, in this moment, and stop trying to anticipate the next moment or tomorrow or next year, the pain isn't such a terrible thing. It's just pain. Yeah, your body tells you it's bad. You are evolutionarily designed to react to pain because if you didn't, you might end up dying from an injury that you could have protected yourself from. But pain is no more than a bodily reaction to a stimulus, just like pleasure is. It's information. It doesn't require a response. You can respond, if you choose to. But you don't have to.

I love this way of thinking about pain. And I think it does help me see why it is that I can be doing a workout that is clearly causing me pain, but not notice it until I stop doing the workout. It's because my mind is elsewhere. It's not accepting the pain. It's busy monitoring other functions. It's busy watching my show, making sure that I get in all the fluid and calories I need for the race, thinking about pace and what not. And it's just pain. It's your brain telling you something. But if you don't have time to notice it right then, the brain will just wait until you do.

One of the books I've been reading said something like, "Pain doesn't kill anyone." Yeah, I guess it doesn't. Pain is the perception of injury, not the injury itself. The injury may kill you, but not the pain.