Staying With The Trouble

One of the most challenging aspects of training for any race is standing firm & committed to our goals when they threaten to overwhelm us. I am sure that you have experienced those training sessions where you felt you were not capable of matching your effort with the pace required. When we reach this internal place we are standing at the frontier of who we wish to become. It is a very threatening & scary place.

I think the key for managing these situations is to stay with the trouble. Staying with the trouble means meeting the uncomfortable feeling, the fearful thought head on & refusing to succumb to the initial wave of the storm. Instead, you are best served to move with the experience of pain & distress by engaging, embracing & working with it, rather than checking out or avoiding. You stay with the experience before rejecting it. After all, the only way to reach your goal is to meet the challenges training throws your way.

Sure, you say, easier said than done. My Telos Running athletes have embarked on the first week of a 14 week Mile Cycle. The first workout was yesterday & it was designed to help them accurately predict the best target paces for their 1 Mile time trial (TT) scheduled for Saturday.  In this workout, some athletes noted their biggest challenge was not primarily dealing with the pain or finding an optimal rhythm, as I might have expected. Instead, they had a very hard time concentrating & focusing on the paces. They found they needed to shift their typical mindset in order to remain present & correct through the entirety of the workout. This was a significant challenge & something they also had not expected.

I think for many, the biggest issue is the novelty of training for shorter distance races: it is a very different experience than the type of suffering that is required in racing 10K & beyond. Perhaps this is why so many marathoners avoid the races that are 5K & shorter. This has always confounded me. I spent the majority of my competitive racing career training for & racing these distances so it amazes me that some athletes prefer the slow-drip, water torture pain of the marathon or ultramarathon to the full blast firehose pressure of the shorter races.  

Not me! I love the kind of hurt that makes the eyes roll into the back of your head. I am not special. You too can appreciate this type of suffering & can really grow in your experience as a runner by standing firm under its initial onslaught.

I liken the experience of the novelty of this kind of pain with Tim Noakes' Central Governor Theory. Think of it as a kind of circuit breaker, where if the body feels that it is at risk of failure or death, it will stop the athlete from continuing to exercise. A breaker is thrown & the power stops being transmitted in order to keep the overall system from failing.

One conclusion I have come to over my years - both athlete & coach -it is the breaker that gets thrown is mental, not physical. I think we endeavor to protect ourselves by unconsciously throwing in the towel mentally before anything actually manifests physically. If this is so, then we can develop resistance to this automatic response by slowly & consistently approaching the edge of capability in training. In fact, simply recognizing that you can control your response to physical pain & mental distress can go a very long way in allowing more stress to the system. It is possible to expand our capacity to withstand the storm, not through tricks, or hacks or secrets. Rather through simply doing the work.

“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes.
The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.

- John L Parker, Once A Runner

By staying with the trouble, you acclimate yourself to its presence & the experience of it. The trouble tends to disappear.  & we find we are capable of handling this current amount of pain. In fact, we find staying with the trouble advances us deeper into the territory we wish to explore: out on the edge of our limit, pushing the boundary of the unknown frontier of who we may become.