How can I better handle the pain inside my races?

GRACE, PENNSYLVANIA

Grace, thank you for your question.

Pain, in all its varieties, is a thread of aliveness that binds us all. Pain is also a primary challenge within distance running. In my opinion, there are four steps to working with pain: expecting it, understanding it, engaging in the race, and becoming curious about the pain.

Step One: Honest Expectations

The first step toward relating well to pain is to expect it. Every race will be hard, and most workouts too. Most races will hurt more than your nervous system is comfortable with, and if you are brave and fit and healthy and in a race that truly challenges you, beyond your perceived capacity. You can’t predict the flavor or the amplitude of the physical pain that you will experience, and you can’t control it. These are inherent facts within racing, just like the ocean is cold or that fires take time to get started.

These points about pain seem obvious. But what is less obvious is how our emotional mind often reframes the pain within a race as a problem. This pain-is-a-problem lens lures an athlete’s focus into fear stories about how their body feels and the imagined impact of these feelings on race outcomes. These fears whisper that what you might or do feel is not natural or inherent within racing: beware, your pain is going to prevent you from meeting the challenge that you worked so hard for. Fear distracts from the fact that giving your best in the presence of pain is the challenge that you worked so hard for.

Fears are not the only manner by which our emotional mind skews what is natural. Another is fantasies. Fantasies delude us into expecting the rare exception within a wide range of more likely possibilities. For example, fantasies tell you that today your body might respond like it did in that race in ninth grade; the one where you moved through the field like water and won, never touching a moment’s tension. Fantasies cast a malevolent hue upon feelings and events which differ from this narrative. They suggest that in fact, you should feel like you did in ninth grade, and if you don’t something is wrong.

Once accepted, honest expectations can protect us from the volatile illusions within fear stories  and the reactive shock of fantasies defied. With honest expectations we become calmer, more consistent, more clear-seeing and far more proactive when faced with the realities of the challenges that matter to us, including the pain that is racing.

Honest expectations arise from acceptance of the nature of the challenge that is racing, and of the design of the human being. So, let’s move to deepening our understanding of the human being and how we naturally respond to pain both physically and psychologically.

Step 2: Understanding Your Pain Response

When you have been running fast for a while some physiological changes are occurring: your body is utilizing oxygen at a higher rate than it can take it in, your glycogen (energy) stores are gradually depleting, your muscle fibers are breaking down, and lactate is accumulating. You are tipping out of ideal homeostasis (optimal body balance) at a rate that cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Whether physical or emotional, pain’s first message is always, pay attention. Something has changed.

Our nervous system is highly reactive to tiny shifts out of homeostatic balance. With respect to exertion pain, our inner alarms are sounded far earlier and louder than necessary. For example, even when study participants exert to failure (the point where the athlete feels like they cannot continue to exert further), researchers have found that they have plenty of glycogen remaining in their system. Also, the mean maximum muscle fiber recruitment during these studies has been measured at less than fifty percent.

We are warned in the following ways: first, attention is narrowed to the location of the discomfort. Then, the uncomfortable sensations are amplified in order to make sure that we notice them. Finally, this amplification of discomfort usually prompts an emotional, often fearful, response. When running, all three occur early and automatically in response to a measurably inconsequential physiological shift.

I’m sure that many of you have someone in your life with whom you censor what you share because they tend to overreact. With respect to physical exertion pain your brain is like that person. Your own reaction also arises from a similar motive: genuine care for your welfare.

The Dual Arrows of Pain

In Buddhist literature there is a metaphor about pain that refers to two arrows. The first arrow represents the objective physical changes experienced when your body begins to exert inside a race, and the automatic amplification of the sensations of exertion. The second arrow refers to our emotional reaction to the discomfort: our fear of what we are feeling. Second arrow reactions can be significant and greater than the objective sensations of the pain itself.

In fact, the most painful element of pain is often fear.

Step 3: Engagement in the Race

After developing honest expectations, and gaining some understanding of your own pain response, the next step to handling exertion pain is to engage in the race.

Your first approach to race engagement should always be competing with the people around you. However, if competing feels too overwhelming right now begin by taking refuge within a very specific plan of execution. Construct a loose plan with clearly defined chunks. Do this especially if pain is moving you to look far ahead in the race and fear about how you feel. Chunks are retaining walls for engagement; they separate you from the fear story about how you feel and how far you have left to go.

The harder the moment the smaller the chunk should be. Decide upon a task inside each chunk that is something that you can do regardless of how you feel or how the race is unfolding. Hunker your attention down inside one chunk of the race at a time. Focus only on the task that you have planned to complete within each chunk. Practice your plan in training. Remember the breath while you’re in there.

Regardless of what manner of engagement you choose it is critical that you plan in advance of the race what you will do when things get hard. Once pain and fear rise, and the negativity bias narrows, it is very difficult to access brave or optimistic ideas that you do not already have pre-considered and folded safely in your mind.

Make a habit of doing what you planned to do regardless of how you feel. This means every practice and every race, no matter how they are unfolding. For some of you, this will be the only pain management method that you will ever need.

How Do The Best Runners Handle Pain?

Until they learn better, many presume that the best competitors are the best because they are more confident than others and they possess superior pain tolerance. This presumption assumes that the person at the front of the race is not suffering or afraid like you are, especially if they are elite.

Overall, I have learned that the best competitors are the best because they can be present and engaged in the race regardless of what they fear or feel. And they feel a lot! Every one of them has a different method to practice engagement, methods which they access regularly in training, and which they also often apply to discomfort in areas of their lives outside of running.

Regular engagement practice (including mindfulness meditation) improves a person’s capacity for presence. Greater presence does inhibit pain and fear, but I don’t think that pain and fear inhibition accounts for these athletes’ superior performance, at least not most of the time. Rather, consistent high performers have developed the habit of focusing and acting well in any circumstance. It is this habit, written by repetition into their body and psyche, that guides them on clear mountain days and also within weather when nothing can be seen.

I have also noticed that many very successful runners experience a sincere fear of pain prior to their races. Sometimes they express this blatantly to me with a wide-eyed exhilaration in the hours before a race.

I have a theory about the evolution of an elite runner’s relationship with pain, and the raw fear of pain that many of them experience: elite runners have refined race engagement into a reliable response. Many have also faced their fears about what races do or do not mean about them. This work leaves them with the awareness that they can handle discomfort early in a race and maintain it (even amplify it) toward the end. They have also realized that there is less to lose from any race result than they previously feared there was, and so they are more willing to take competitive risks. The competitive freedoms enabled by this awareness will bring them into contact with their first arrow pain response earlier and possibly more deeply than athletes without these capacities.

These athletes are usually consistently successful competitors. But, their experience inside the race can be a lot to bear. I suspect that their fear comes from the awareness that they can bear more pain than they knew that they could, and therefore they have to. There is a quote credited to the hero in the classic, Once a Runner which reads, “I know [that I am capable of this task before me] and that is a terrible thing to have to know.”

Would we call this capacity greater pain tolerance? In my opinion, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that these athletes are able to focus and act better than most in the presence of pain. No, if we define pain tolerance as some sort of imperviousness or resistance to pain.

This difference is important. If I’m not specific about this, young runners are going to go into their next workout gritting their teeth against the pain, a mistake which is likely to weaken their relationship with pain further.

The form of pain tolerance that elite runners develop, which I would prefer to call pain acceptance, comes to someone who has developed the capacity to feel deeply, and to not fight against what they feel. Over time and with a great deal of diligent practice their nervous system has learned to remain present inside of intensity. Eventually, I suspect that these athletes experience a reduced fear response to sensation inside the effort, but not a reduction in sensation. They may even experience heightened sensation. And, their nervous system definitely anticipates the approaching intensity in advance.

Step 4: Curiosity

Sometimes, despite an athlete’s excellent expectations and understanding and plan, they find themselves lost in their pain. For example, inside a race, when the task is to simply maintain pace and position, the awful simplicity of that moment can become overwhelmingly difficult. You and your pain, and your fears about your pain, are alone together in time interminable. Chunks help, but at times even these walls crumble; sometimes it takes everything inside a person to just stay where they are in the face of the rage of let go.

A particular form of paying attention is one way through this storm, but it is counter-cultural and un-intuitive, especially within a sport which draws people of passion, and which reveres toughness and fierce resolve. This way is a radical about-face and disarmament inside the storm’s very eye: Curiosity about the pain.

Curiosity is wide open attention and willingness to approach. It is a choice to not resist, deny or fight what is here right now. I might call curiosity fearlessness at will.

Curiosity About Pain While Running

When applying curiosity to exertion pain while you are running, begin during long, hard workouts in practice. Bring your full attention to the sensations of the discomfort itself. Ask, what am I feeling physically in my body? Study those physical sensations with open interest. In the first half of an effort, when we bring our full attention to what is physically felt, right now, we will almost always notice that the actual objective physical sensations are not as severe as initially perceived. By doing so, we isolate the first arrow – the objective pain, from the second arrow, our fear about the pain.

Next, ask, are there emotional sensations here that are apart from the physical sensations? For example, do I sense resistance, judgement or fear? Does some inherent part of this challenge feel like a problem? When you become curious enough to be discerning about the pain that you are experiencing you are 1) communicating to your mind that uncomfortable feelings are sensations to be curious about as opposed to afraid of, and 2) developing your ability to discern between the two arrows of the pain response. You are calming your inner over-reaction by developing your ability to see what is real and what is a fear story.

And, You Can Handle It

One final and crucial step following the curious exploration and discernment of discomfort is to consciously notice that no matter what you are feeling in that moment, you can handle it. “I can handle this,” communicated explicitly to yourself is an inarguable statement of truth. Wherever you are in that effort, holding your pace, in your position, it is a fact that right now you are handling what you are feeling. In this moment, and now this one, you are present with pain and fear, and you are ok.

Several years ago, I was working with an athlete who was preparing for a marathon. She shared with me an experience from an 18-mile training run. The run was prescribed as 12 miles at her easy pace followed by 6 miles faster at steady state. She was about 1 mile into her steady state when she started to feel a great deal of discomfort. While she continued to run, this athlete studied her experience with curiosity.

“My legs felt fine, my lungs felt fine,” she told me, “but still, somehow I felt so bad out there.” She became curious about her experience and realized that the “intolerable” feeling was emotional stress. As she ran, she brought to mind the part of herself that was stressed, and in her mind’s eye she saw herself put her hand on the head of her stressed self. “It’s ok,” she said gently to herself, “you’re fine,” as she continued to run. After a couple of minutes of soothing herself, her stress dissipated. She finished her run successfully.

With each choice to be curious about your experience in this manner your relationship with pain can slowly transform. It is not so much that you will become tougher, or better able to tolerate or “push through” pain. More so, your emotional mind will learn that pain is not as threatening as initially perceived. After many curious encounters, old habits of fear and reactivity to pain can be replaced by a new capacity for acceptance. Fearlessness in the form of curiosity, opening instead of closing, will become your reflexive response.

Stay, and You Will Be Ok

This past fall I lingered at the edges of an NAU XC team meeting. Coach Smith spoke to his athletes about the wave like reality of exertion pain inside the race. He spoke of reaching the top of a hill when lactate is peaking and you feel like you have to drop back. “Stay,” he said. “Stay, stay, stay. Soon, you will realize that you are ok.”

Stay. You Have No Idea How OK You Will Be

Elite distance running offers an understanding of fear and pain far beyond what is natural for a human. The struggle inherent in the craft itself is the cost of this gift. At some point in a runner’s career, if they really care to access their full power, they will need to look honestly at their relationship with fear and pain and ask how both are affecting their decision making. Are you staying and allowing yourself to be changed?

Things can get messy when attempting to change one’s relationship to pain and fear in running. There can be many half attempts, and commitments given up on before someone finds the right way for them to stay. Usually, that first commitment to a pace or position, or change for the better that actually holds (!), is preceded by many reactive disengagements.

I have noticed that it is the pain of these disengagements felt in the lengthy stretches between disappointing races, suffered alongside the fleeting sense that there is something different and better and possible, that eventually moves the athlete to ask, which is the greater of their two miseries? The comparatively short, fiery, fear defying minutes of trying something new inside the race? Or, the lengthy sick drudgery between the disappointing performances?

As miserable as it is, that drudgery that I am referring to is actually the slow death of hope that your old way will yet prove fruitful; it is the ache of your almost-awareness that it is you that has to change.

When change arrives, it is rarely a rational concession. Nor is it a submission to those who claim to know what you need or should do. Instead, it is the response of a life force that seeks its own freedom, one that has chosen what pain it will engage with. This response only comes to those who spend time at their edges. Those brave enough to try to stay, over and over, until something, no longer necessary, lets go.

Something interesting happens when we stay on imperfectly to what we are committed to and accept the inherent pain of that commitment. Things fall away. Things we could not have released if we tried, but which must be removed by time and suffering alone. I am learning that it can be worthwhile to stay and allow oneself to be worn into a different being. And, that there is something inside of us worth being reduced to.

I can still see some athletes I know make that first brave commitment to stay in moments when they would have previously let go. I remember the changed look in all their eyes afterward. I can remember the new liberties that they took in ther racing, and in their lives following.

Pain means pay attention, this is your opportunity to transform. It is the gateway to the discovery of capacities inside yourself far more precious, personal and rare than the accolades of outcomes.

For those who wish to learn an additional strategies for working with pain, our level 1 focus session series includes several sessions that address this further.