Learning how to suffer

The Tour de France has just kicked off and we have the opportunity to watch some of the greatest endurance athletes in the world 'duke it out' for the next 3 weeks. When you start to take part in endurance sports one of the things that you learn all too quickly is that the events we challenge ourselves with hurt! They are both mentally and physically draining. This weekend just gone we had TBC athletes at distances from sprint Triathlon to Ironman and all in their own way will have had to learn how to suffer. To put up with often a high level of discomfort in the hope of beating our PB, hitting the podium or gaining a qualification to another race so we can suffer some more.

Pain and our responses to it is a very interesting subject. I have always wondered how some people seem to be able endure what seems like an intolrable amount of discomfort while others pack at the drop of a hat. What are some of the factors that make some people more able to suffer than others?

Some interesting reseach in this area has been developed by the behavioural economist Dan Ariely. I have been following his work at MIT and Duke University for a few years now. You may be wondering what a behavioural economist is doing with pain studies? He researches a wide range of subjects but the study of pain is closer to him than most - he was badly burned as a child and suffered terrible burns to his body - so his work comes with a lot of authority and experience on this particular topic. Take a look at this You Tube video and this might provide some interesting insights into why some people are able to handle more suffering than others.




Dan's research revealed that everyone who had suffered some sort of acute injury developed the ability to adapt to pain and the more severe the injury the more they seemed to be able to endure pain. He made a fascinating distiction from working with chronic pain sufferers, and that was, our ability to endure pain very much depends on how we atribute pain - either positively (i.e. its tough but I can deal with it)or negatively (i.e. its tough and there's no hope of it getting better).

So how does this relate to swim, bike, run? Think about the kind of conversations you have with yourself when the training starts to hurt, are you having positive, self-affirming conversations? Saying to yourself... "this is how I should be feeling right now, its ok, my body is working hard and thats just how it should be", "this is doing me good, its getting me where I want to be in 3 months time" - because these are exactly the kind of positive attributes for pain that helps us learn to endure it. If you have any ambitions to get good at endurance sport learn to love that feeling, because thats the positive feedback that your body is adapting. Keep going comrades!