How to Push Past the Pain, as the Champions Do

A couple things eventually happen. First is the athlete starts to associate pain with progress. This is actually a bad thing since pain should always remain as valid feedback and signal a person to think about the actions they are taking. Second and more import is that the athlete accepts the pain and deals with it. Like most things in life, it sucks a lot more until you know what to expect. For example, getting punched in the face causes pain, but more than that it causes surprise. Remove that surprise and even if the pain is the same, the athlete will now react in a more sensible way from the punch.

For reference, I don't do any long distance (5k is what I maintain) running but have always played various sports, trained in MA, and primarily powerlift now (at least until the ski slopes open!).

[1] After experiencing all sorts of pain over the years there are definitely good pains and bad pains. IMHO, it takes time and experience to recognize what pains are what :)

An athlete's relationship to pain is ridiculously complex. Partly because pain is so complex, and really should be split out in different concepts/words. Adjectives are just so clumsy. For example, high performance athletes must learn to differentiate the pain of training from the pain of injury. It is possible to push too hard, to suck up too much pain. But it's also possible to be too tentative. Striking that balance is what keeps high performance athletes healthy, but always improving (something I have big problems with).

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I and some of the more competitive athletes I am friends with go to train, we want the pain. Going into training, we look forward to the burn. We know that it's good, that it signals progress, that it will fade, and that it means that we are better. But once we get into the training, all the love and craving doesn't change the fact that your legs are dying and lungs are on fire and arms don't want to move. The love by itself will not keep you going on. You have to push through that pain. The fact that you were pumped up 5 minutes ago doesn't mean anything in the moment.

Nothing fancy compared to people I trained with.

I've read Once a Runner a long time ago. Training life is similar - it's all consuming really. In many ways it's like a job and a way of life.

Since I gave up running and got on with my life, I still train and compete competitively - even low key competition is enough to keep things interesting and motivating even though it's not the way of life it used to be.

I don't recommend that people do marathons actually. I've done 3 and they take such a tremendous effort to recover from that a lot of people just stay on the couch and don't start running again.

I have heard it said that "pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body".

It's a signal that your body is under stress, but that can be a good thing. One of the keys is understanding the difference between the pain of "I'm stretching my capabilities" and the pain of "I'm damaging something".

I did two sports on national elite level and whenever you train or race beyond the "threshold" you put yourself into great danger, and only because you spend years near that threshold you are able to handle it. An elite runner or cyclist or whatever can tell the difference between pain that will go away when you slow down, and pain that will get worse or could put you into a wheelchair. When elite sportsmen(-women) loose control because of any thirdparty event, even when in unbearable pain, they have a high chance to regain control because they don't think about how they do it, it just happens. It's not a coincidence, that those people walk away from a crash, where hobby sportsmen loose there life. (Remember Lance going through the grass at the TdF ~6 years ago?)