Getting Comfortable With Discomfort

Life trains us at an early age to avoid pain.  I watch my 8-month old explore the world:  now and then he discovers that something hurts.  He stops doing it but quick.

But when we exercise, pain happens.  Let's just admit that. 

I dislocated my right shoulder playing an absurd, indoor version of the playground game four-square back when I was in grad school.  I'd done it before, and it had popped back in quickly, but this time the dislocation wouldn't reduce.  So a friend drove me to the E.R., doing his best to handle the stick-shift car that I was now woefully incapable of driving.  No one quite knew where the hospital was (all us grad students were new in town), and my friend was no Ricky Bobby on the gearshift, so the ride to the hospital was long and jerky as hell.  Not exactly the ride you want en route to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder, where even the slightest jarring causes a sharp, sudden pain in the affected shoulder akin to being electrocuted. 

Once we got to the hospital, the wait was interminable, and so my shoulder remained out of joint for something like an hour and a half. 

During that time, I remember that the agony rose and fell alongside my body's natural endorphins, which were working overtime.  One moment I wanted to cry out in agony, the next I felt like laughing hysterically.  I was high on my body's own pain-numbing agents.

Even without a single shot of anything synthetic, I literally got high.  It was bizarre.

I imagine that one gets a smaller, more controlled dose of those same hormones during and following a tough workout.  They're pretty strong stuff.

I've watched my wife give birth, drug-free to two children--the second one induced, which, for those of you not in the know about such things, means that the baby comes on like a ball from a cannon.  No ramp-up, no easing into things, no gradual, relaxed opening to the universe allowed.  The pain, I imagine, was just this side of tolerable.  

We're all born because some brave woman put herself through that for our sake. 

We walk because we refused to give up despite bruised knees and ankles, despite one painful failing, flailing attempt after another.  We hung in, cowboyed up, and got it done.  No one ever just said, "You know, this walking thing isn't worth the pain.  I'm sticking with crawling."

So we owe our very existence to a primal instinct that some kinds of suffering are worth the momentary aggravation.  We aren't simply pleasure-seeking devices.  We have some sense of the big picture, of short-term suffering towards the goal of long-term reward.

Which leads me, circuitously, to my point about pain as an inherent part of working out.  I've worked out for so long that I no longer really think of exercise as painful.  The main thing I remember from good workouts is the clear-headed euphoria that follows; a feeling that colors are brighter, that hope will prevail over despair, that there's more sunshine than shadow.  Surely that chemical buzz is a playing out of some evolutionary quirk that, a zillion years ago, kept us out hunting for game, planting crops, building shelters, through harsh conditions and at times when we just didn't feel like it.

So whether it's some chemical itch being scratched, or something more evolved, I don't care--it works for me.

Intellectually, though, I realize that exercise can be, in fact, quite painful.  I curse and gasp and bring myself to near-collapse many, many times over the course of a week, and yet, I keep coming back, presumably because something in me recognizes the pain of exercise as something that's worth enduring a little pain for--unlike, say, pounding my fingers with a hammer.  Part of my job as a trainer is to try to encourage people to go into that pain, find their edge and push it just a little further than they thought they could, a handful of times each workout.  

There's a recent New York Times piece in which a guy who's training for a marathon confronts the idea of exercise as painful.  Here he describes his trainer's reaction following a particularly tough workout:

"You need to get out of your comfort zone," he said, while I stood with my hands on my knees, struggling to recover. "You’ve developed a style that doesn’t really stress you much. But you’re going to be uncomfortable on marathon day, and we need to train your brain to accept that fact and have you uncomfortable on some of your training runs...

"I know this is difficult and scary. But it’s like you trying to teach me to cook but I don’t want to try anything other than hamburgers and steak — which I know I can do well and not slice my finger off. But to be a better cook we have to try new things and get out of that comfort zone."

The author remains skeptical; he's able to handle a certain amount of pain, but is reluctant to push beyond it.

Ideally, I suppose, a good exercise program can make us comfortable with discomfort; more relaxed in the unknown.  If you have a good trainer, you might feel a little nervous before the workout, because you don't know how far he or she will push you during the session; and afterwards, all the better for having survived something that you weren't sure you could handle.