Great article. In long distance endurance sports especially, "suffering" is an essential of the game. Persistence pays off far more than raw talent.
You'll feel aches, pains, hunger, technical problems, weather, nagging injuries ... yet the only thing you can do is keep going. There's an obvious tension between what your body is telling you ("Hey slow down and rest. You're not running from a predator. You've got plenty of food. There's pizza and beer at home. Why are you doing this?") and your athletic goals.
Success is all about planning, preparing, pacing to avoid the obvious causes of suffering for as long as possible. Then when fatigue inevitably hits, recognizing those mental states for what they are: a distraction. Trust your preparation and continue to focus on the path ahead. It starts to sound very much like meditation.
There's a interesting theory in exercise physiology called the "Central governor" - your brain unconsciously monitors signals throughout the body and if it detects anything that could potentially damage vital systems, activity will be shut down directly _causing_ what we experience as fatigue. I find it fascinating that the limits of human endurance could based on our brain's unconscious decision making ability. I wonder if training (in the sports sense) is similar to training a neural network - feed a variety of inputs about physical conditions, continually tune predictions about which signals are safe vs unsafe for the vital organs. IOW "learning to suffer" might be a physical process by which we improve athletic performance through optimizing our fatigue calculations.
The peak endurance runner looks akin to a skeleton. The peak sprinter, bursting with life. Humans were made for spurts of activity followed by long periods of rest. Same is true for the work world.
That fallacy has been parroted on fitness forums (fora?) for almost two decades. There is a big dose of selection bias when looking at any elite athlete.
You'll feel aches, pains, hunger, technical problems, weather, nagging injuries ... yet the only thing you can do is keep going. There's an obvious tension between what your body is telling you ("Hey slow down and rest. You're not running from a predator. You've got plenty of food. There's pizza and beer at home. Why are you doing this?") and your athletic goals.
Success is all about planning, preparing, pacing to avoid the obvious causes of suffering for as long as possible. Then when fatigue inevitably hits, recognizing those mental states for what they are: a distraction. Trust your preparation and continue to focus on the path ahead. It starts to sound very much like meditation.
There's a interesting theory in exercise physiology called the "Central governor" - your brain unconsciously monitors signals throughout the body and if it detects anything that could potentially damage vital systems, activity will be shut down directly _causing_ what we experience as fatigue. I find it fascinating that the limits of human endurance could based on our brain's unconscious decision making ability. I wonder if training (in the sports sense) is similar to training a neural network - feed a variety of inputs about physical conditions, continually tune predictions about which signals are safe vs unsafe for the vital organs. IOW "learning to suffer" might be a physical process by which we improve athletic performance through optimizing our fatigue calculations.