I was thinking last night about suffering. Strange, I know – perhaps even morbid – but it’s something that inevitably comes to mind during and after a maxed-out threshold run with Cliff. For me, this meant 3x15 minutes @ 6:00/mile pace with 3:00 rests (that’s about 7.5 miles of hard running). That’s a pretty heavy load for me, and it was made even heavier by the gut-searing hills where we were training: the ironically named Point Pleasant Park in Halifax. What I was thinking about, though, is why runners like me choose – seek out, even – suffering.
Okay. Maybe “suffering” is too strong a word for what I was feeling while trying to sustain the pace up some long hills – perhaps I’ll go with “discomfort.” Whatever you want to call it, what I met with on those hills was not just laboured breathing and the sear of lactic acid flooding my muscles but also a divided interpretation of those physiological signals. On the one hand, I knew the training was “good” – good because I felt it was preparing me to achieve my goal in a week and a half, good because the discomfort was a sign of the effort needed to become faster and stronger. On the other hand, however, I felt a real desire to stop, an interpretation of those signals as “bad”: bad because they could be a sign of overtraining, bad because over-effort could result in injury. In the end, for better or for worse, the “good” outweighed the “bad,” and I completed the workout.
It is an ongoing battle for any runner, though, trying to figure out what is good and what is bad in training. The “ethics” of training are far from clear in advance – you can only know them by their fruits… when it’s too late. And it all feels like crap sometimes, good or bad.
However, what fascinates me with all this discomfort is what it takes to push on despite it – why a runner doesn’t obey when a fairly insistent part of her mind is screaming STOP! There’s probably more than one reason, but it struck me during that punishing threshold workout that one reason is a kind of creative desire – a will to create.
One thing most runners have in common is a continual desire to change, to transform. If you run to lose weight (like I did at first), then each decision to run is fuelled by a desire to transform not only how you look but also how you live. If you run to compete against others or yourself, then your decision to run takes its energy from a desire to stimulate the necessary changes to your muscles, circulatory system, and so forth to go faster and faster. Even if you run simply to maintain your fitness level, there is still that basic desire to enter into an activity of transformation and movement.
But the funny thing about transformation (this kind, at least) is that it’s uncomfortable – it hurts… sometimes a lot. But the desire to create through transformation – to shape the body and mind through running – can cut through the discomfort. At its best, this desire can light the fires of a kind of artistic creativity. The runner can work like a sculptor, chipping away at the bits of stone that encrust the ideal form hidden within the block of marble – except for runners, the hammers and chisels of their toolkit are workouts: easy runs and long runs for broad chiselling, intervals and thresholds and hills for taking chunks out, and rest and recovery for smoothing the form. The runner’s work, however, is never finished.
So for me, labouring up those hills in Point Pleasant Park was, to some degree, an artistic choice, made and sustained by a desire for self-transformation. In my mind, I see a runner capable of running 6:00/mile over 13 miles, so my workout was like a studio session, where I chipped off more extraneous pieces of stone in my effort to reveal and actualize this idea of myself as a runner.
The danger comes in being overzealous with your chisels. One wrong hammer, and you can waste the block of stone – an arm or a leg (or worse!) can get lopped off.
I don’t want to take the comparison of running and sculpture (or the visual arts in general) too far. What I’m saying, though, is that there is an art to the way runners deal with discomfort, and it is fuelled by a creative desire. Discomfort is simply part of the transformation process, and in this sense, every runner embraces discomfort as a “good” thing, as a condition of self-creation/transformation (although everyone is very happy when the workout is over!). But it isn’t true that the more discomfort you feel and can handle, the better you’ll be – this fact adds to running as an art. There is a line at which a creative discomfort tips over and becomes a destructive pain – when the work serves more to obscure the desired image than to reveal it. That’s when desire darkens and becomes frustration.
But the risk of failure and frustration amplifies the bliss of a good run and a good race. And this is one of the many things I love about all runners, from those just starting and shuffling along to those who push the upper limits of what the human body can achieve – we’re all taking creative risks. We could fail; we could do harm… lasting harm, even; we could become embittered, but we do it anyway – and we choose to make it meaningful to us even if, like all artistic practices, it is not inherently so.
To me, pushing through the discomfort of Wednesday evening’s threshold running was worth it. Ever so slightly, I’ve shaped and transformed myself according to a particular vision of myself. However, I have no idea if it helped or hindered my goal for Valley Harvest… for that, I’ll have to wait until the 11th – the only revelation is in the performance.
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