How Tim Krabbé’s The Rider Made ‘Suffering’ Aspirational

And how athletic suffering would be better framed as scratching an itch

“In interviews with riders that I’ve read and in conversations that I’ve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering…

“In 1910, Milan-San Remo was won by a rider who spent half an hour in a mountain hut, hiding from a snowstorm. Man, did he suffer!

“In 1919, Brussels-Amiens was won by a rider who rode the last forty kilometers with a flat front tire. Talk about suffering! He arrived at 11.30 at night, with a ninety-minute lead on the only other two riders who finished the race. The day had been like night, trees had whipped back and forth, farmers were blown back into their barns, there were hailstones, bomb craters from the war, crossroads where the gendarmes had run away, and riders had to climb onto one another’s shoulders to wipe clean the muddied road signs.

“Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns into memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lay with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately.

“That’s why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney.”
Tim Krabbé, The Rider

TIM KRABBÉ HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR. When his book, The Rider, about a fictional French bike race, with the hero, like Krabbé himself, a reformed chess Grandmaster in search (unsuccessfully) of less cerebral kicks, was translated into English in the early 2000s, it unleashed a tsunami of pseudo-suffering. It gave the millions of young men (because it was pretty much entirely men back then) who were involved in endurance sports the permission — and the language — to claim that their bike rides in the leafy lanes of Kent, or their Saturday morning runs chasing friends through parks and pastures of outer London, were not in fact joyful expressions of fitness and a relief from the responsibilities of work and family life, but in themselves profound and meaningful acts of suffering.

The language of suffering was so attractive that Rapha launched a whole brand off the back of it, where suffering was the product and the clothes were simply mementos of that misery.

It was all bollocks of course, even if I bought into it at the time. At worst the discomfort we experience in running or cycling or whatever expression of endurance you choose is just that: discomfort. There is no jeopardy beyond pride, and (ample) experience suggests that any embarrassment you feel at having to explain to your peers why you dropped out of a race is misplaced: long accounts of a lack of talent, insufficient preparation and naive tactics are invariably met with yawning indifference, not mockery. The fact is, no one gives a shit about our competitive exercising beyond us.

And that’s probably why we try to impart meaning on these activities by amplifying ‘discomfort’ to ‘suffering’, and conflating ‘unusual’ with ‘epic’. Back to The Rider:

“Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”
Tim Krabbé, The Rider

The emptiness of other people’s lives shocks us, and what’s more, we know that if we looked in the mirror, we’d be saddened by the emptiness of our own lives. That’s why we make things hard for ourselves, and make the hard things sound even harder when we recount them to ourselves and others. We aspire to the myth of Sisyphus without stopping to think whether a life spent pushing rocks up a mountain is all that inspirational at all.

Age is a great leveller. Now I’m in my forties I’m far happier to frame my athletic aspirations as aimless, somewhat selfish amusements. I love to compete and I love the process of setting goals, committing to a process over weeks and months that allows me to challenge those goals. But in my experience, suffering is never the right framing for success: on the days when I’ve performed well and run good times, the discomfort I’ve felt has been closest to the sensation of a strong and persistent itch that demands to be scratched. The harder you scratch, the better it feels, way beyond the point where you’re doing yourself damage. On those (increasingly rare) days, my appetite for momentum is insatiable and while that is uncomfortable, it’s also joyful. That makes me think that the best athletes in the world are rarely the ones who can suffer the most, but the ones who can tap into this place of joyous discomfort with greatest ease.

It’s my contention that becoming better at suffering won’t make you a better athlete or a human being. Instead, I think we should aim to find playfulness and some kind of satisfaction in discomfort, while being at one with the idea there only ‘point’ to running or cycling for hours each week is the pleasure we find in that pursuit.