it is a sublime thing to suffer…
“It is a sublime thing to suffer and be stronger.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow“It hurts up to a point and then it doesn’t get any worse.”
Ann Trason“When a person trains once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in more ways than physical. Is it raining? That doesn’t matter. Am I tired? That doesn’t matter, either. Then willpower will be no problem.”
Emil Zatopek
No one likes to suffer. And yet, some of us look forward to it.
Suffering is a means to an end. It’s temporary. Temporary might mean minutes … or hours. It might mean days. But it is temporary. And once the suffering is over, once the critical mass is past, there is reward. There is pride and accomplishment and satisfaction. There is power, reassurance, validation. There is strength.
Some people are better at suffering, better at gritting their teeth and powering through. Better at not letting the twinge, the side stitch, the cramp stop them in their tracks. Better at shutting out the distractions, the detractions, the noise.
Where does that come from? That mental edge. Can you train yourself to that state? Or it that what training is for, to push your physical boundaries, to test your limits and prepare yourself for the mental strategy involved.
I’ve been struggling with the mental aspects of training and racing. Not struggling with suffering, per se, but struggling to keep focus, block out the unimportant things. Struggling to get to the point of suffering. Triathlon has been a mainstay for me, something I have been involved in for over a decade. In the beginning, it was a gift, given to teach me things I needed to learn about myself. I’ve lost sight of that and in losing sight of that I lost some of my motivation. I lost my willingness to push and test my limits. But suffering teaches many lessons and I am once again a willing student.
