Pain 101: An Introduction Not All Runners Will Necessarily Like
Are the odds stacked against us runners?
Statistics show that 100% of runners will experience pain at some point.*
Let that sink in for a moment. If this is true, NONE of us can avoid something as unwanted as possible in life as pain.
Life is painful enough already and oftentimes more than we believe we can handle so why would we voluntarily add more into the fray? Many of us live daily routines that include real threats to our very survival, we have marital problems, health issues, financial insecurity, emotional and physical trauma, and more so any additional insult might cripple our extremely fragile state of existence. It can, literally and metaphorically, knock us off our feet.
Pain also doesn’t give a flying toss about how much we want to do something and how noble our intentions. It doesn’t care about our demographics, if we’re nice people who stop and help little old ladies cross the street or if we’re evil bastards who’d as quickly trip them and laugh as we scoot away. It doesn’t care if we’re as careful and methodical as a Swiss watchmaker in how we approach a new routine like running.
Pain is also the most important part of our sensory systems that keep us alive, moment-to-moment and over the course of our life; so much so that every other system will bend at the knee while it subsumes every aspect until the pain source abates. No part of life is immune to its potential power and the body not only responds vigorously to pain, it responds to the potential of pain (real or imaginary) AND it learns and memorizes these…and these memory traces are irreversible just like every other memory our very complex and error-riddled brain produces (and even more so in many ways).
Thus, learning more about pain might help those who are considering starting a running routine but are afraid (for obvious reasons!), it might help those who are already in it (pain or a running routine) to understand any positive value and not give up, and it might help those who have given up to rethink their decision and give it a second (or hundredth) try.
I’ll gradually unpack these issues and a lot more over time if you’re interested. The only way for me to know is for you to respond in some way so please become an active participant. Just like running (and life) is not a spectator sport and needs to be actively experienced, I’ll need you to be anything but static, stationary and unmoving.
One paradox to begin with
Before leaving this first post, I want to highlight that in some ways you already know about the topic (unless you have CIP (see below), but even then you have the capacity to understand it), yet in some ways you’ll never be able to understand the topic the way I do, or how anyone else does for that matter.
I’ve found the words from Elaine Scarry in her seminal book, “The Body In Pain,” to absolutely nail this paradox:
“…there is no language for pain, that it (more than any phenomenon) resists verbal objectification.”
“… pain enters into our midst as at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed.”
“To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about it is to have doubt.”
So, we cannot NOT know what we mean when we talk about it while we CANNOT know exactly what is meant when we do.
Pain, like running, cannot be spoken of in ways that fully capture the experience — yet, once experienced, it cannot be forgotten. It cannot be removed from a person’s mind, let alone their soul: it is now an integral and intimate part. To be understood it must be experienced first-hand, it is intensely personal… it can, however, be shared but only by those who have experience.
IF you’ve ever moved your body through space and felt the warmth of the sun on your forehead, or the wind in your hair, or smelt the flowers around you, you’re a runner and you know exactly what I’m talking about on some level.
I hope to build on that understanding as we walk (or run!) along life’s journey together.
Happy running,
Gary
*I completely made up this statistic to illustrate a few points (but the other points are real).
First, just because I’m a researcher and have been practicing in the field for decades doesn’t mean what I say is true and you should run with it as dogma. Question everything.
Second, even if a statistic is ‘valid’ the meaning of it needs to be unpacked: for example, 100% of normal people will experience pain at some point in their life because sensing pain is a vital part of life; yet, not everyone who experiences acute pain develops chronic pain, just like not everyone who takes pain medication will become addicted (indeed, extremely few people DO). There are exceptions to every rule like not everyone can respond to pain: congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare genetic disorder where the person can’t feel pain; they usually end up dying an early and tragic death because they can, literally, walk their feet off, developing gangrene (that they also can’t feel) and having systemic organ failure. Plus, what causes suffering in one person can cause ecstasy in another person — think torture that crushes a victim of war but leads to enlightenment of a saint. Context is king for everything as the saying goes.
Third, if what we’re told is true or not, we immediately ‘believe’ it (and remember it) on a subconscious level and unbelieving it is not the simple reverse process. Another quirk of the brain and one we can’t do anything about with the exception of consciously challenging it over and over again until the erroneous belief weakens relative to the correct one.
Finally, we are all “N of 1” experiments, meaning we’re utterly unique (just like the other 7 billion people on the Earth) so what might be true for the masses might not be true for us, despite the odds; yet, we’ll lie to ourselves (mostly subconsciously) until the end of time if what we don’t want to be true really is, rather than admit the truth and do the work.
