In the popular imagination (and the thesaurus), endurance and suffering are inextricably linked. “No pain, no gain” is a motto across most sports, but in skill sports this relationship is more negotiable, says Wolfgang Freund, a researcher at University Hospitals Ulm in Germany who studies pain in athletes. The incomparable Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona, for example, “at least had the illusion that a brilliant soccer player didn’t need to suffer,” he says. For cyclists and other endurance athletes, though, pain is unavoidable, and how you handle it is intimately tied to how well you
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