12 ms·

Learning to Suffer

162 points by Dowwie 6y ago

jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Suffering will come to most people eventually; no need to do fancy summoning rituals. > When we each learned to suffer, we also learned that the suffering eventually ends Oh that that were true! I think it's a bit naive to call endurance suffering. I get that it might be nice to be able to experience endurance in a pure/controlled enough form where it can be retroactively framed as a positive experience / accepted as a nurturing challenge, but...
- notesinthefield 6y ago
  The capital 'S' suffering of poverty and the suffering of sport are so obviously incomparable, why approach pedantry?
  - ehnto 6y ago
    I don't think the difference is obvious to everyone, especially not everyone in a position to suffer for sport. Poverty is not the only suffering out there either, imagine someone choosing to be in pain and boasting about how they conquered it from the eyes of a chronic pain sufferer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    It’s great that some people can suffer for fun. I’d like to see them try to survive my life where there is no end, no escape, no relief. Only death will finally take the pain away. There may be a difference in kind between sport and what I deal with but I gotta tell ya, I’ve yet to see anyone who can actually see the difference.
    - notesinthefield 6y ago
      Im going to vapid for a second and im sorry to be an invalidator but I dont think discussing your existential suffering in a thread regarding the difficulty of sport is worth the time and you can see that.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    All the classic conservative writing complaining of lazy poor people would seemingly not know the difference.
- op03 6y ago
  I always thought it was the opposite. Struggling through something gets my mind of something else.
- jonahrd 6y ago
  That's definitely the sentiment I most disagreed with in this article. It's summed up pretty succinctly in Sufferfest 2 [1, 13:20] (aptly named). "We're lucky to be able to electively suffer like this" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4CbP_E7oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4CbP_E7oo
pmoriarty 6y ago
"I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. That is when I start counting, because then it really counts. That's what makes you a champion." -- Muhammad Ali
ridaj 6y ago
I think this is what people mean when they say "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".
- metabagel 6y ago
  Actually, I think they mean that pain doesn’t mean that you have to as well endure mental anguish. You can accept the pain. It doesn’t make the pain go away, but you’re not adding to it with your own mental anguish.
pjm331 6y ago
Sounds like some Type 2 fun First heard about types of fun from an article posted here - I think it was this one https://www.tetongravity.com/story/culture/the-three-and-a-half-types-of-fun-explained https://www.tetongravity.com/story/culture/the-three-and-a-h... Edit: put type 3 at first but on second thought it’s type 2
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  A climbing buddy of mine related this ‘fun’ scale to me years ago. I honestly kind of thought it was an off the cuff type thing from him, but I guess it’s been banging around.
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    Kelly Cordes wrote about it in 2008 or so; it wasn’t a new thing then. It’s a useful heuristic.
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  I once told a flight student a lesson would be fun. “Your kind of fun or my kind of fun?”
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  The article covers three types of activity. "fun" (Noun, uncountable): - amusement, enjoyment or pleasure - playful, often noisy, activity.
simmjaso 6y ago
How true it is, and the knowledge that suffering eventually ends is the key. The phrase I learned was repeating as many times as necessary “how it is now is not how it will forever be”
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Loved this article. Nevertheless, I think there's another dimension to the ability to endure. 2 summers ago, I hiked the 230 mile Cape Wrath Trail in the Scottish Highlands with my brother. I didn't have any of the physical issues that the author described (despite almost endless wet conditions underfoot and frequently from above too). I had trained for and finished an extremely hard 50km trail race in the Colorado Rockies 2 weeks before the hike started, and was in excellent shape even before we started. Nevertheless, it was only my brother's inability to even imagine quitting that got me to the end. I was variously bored, confused about the why, and/or simply willing to call it quits. I wasn't in pain, I didn't dislike walking all day with an insanely heavy pack on, I hadn't even minded a 30' fall down a mountain. But it still took everything I had, plus more from my brother, to get me to want to keep going. People who can do that easily have my respect, admiration and envy (like ... my wife!)
- ioseph 6y ago
  I find when hiking there's a huge toll / boost from being the weakest or strongest link. If I'm hiking with friends who are relatively novice I find it completely effortless whereas with people more experienced than I I find the going far more though. Maybe it's just hard to be the slow one.
  - bigmattystyles 6y ago
    Being the weakest is just stressful for me. I worry I’m slowing others down and ruining their experience. It’s the same but not quite as bad, when I’m the fastest; I worry I’m ruining the experience for others and making them feel bad. You wouldn’t believe the relief I get when I’m in second position...
  - Lio 6y ago
    In competitive Cycling it’s this battle of poker that makes the mountains so interesting. Everyone has bad days in a Grand Tour stage race. They have to hide that from each other and themselves or their rivals will try to turn the screw just a bit further whilst pretending they have loads left in the tank.
- 6y ago
maximente 6y ago
great article! one interesting thing i've found is that the higher the suffering, the more fondly i look back at the event/time period and overcoming it. the inverse also seems weakly true - i'm not very proud of periods i've spent coasting in life. second, it seems to create a fraternizing effect - i seem to also recall fondly the people with whom i shared the suffering. perhaps this explains some of the military people reflecting back fondly on times of truly intense suffering.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Part of the ability to look back fondly may be the higher intensity of experience packed into shorter time than when you coasted. Check out the Long Short, Short Long time phenomenon. The short period of intense experience later feels like a much larger period of time, and the long period of monotony later recalls as a very short inconsequential moment in time. For example, the 24 hour flight to your holiday destination will compress into a very short unimportant memory where the holiday itself will recall as if it were a much longer period of time than it was.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    VSauce tells me there is a newer emerging Short/Short time phenomenon of interacting with screens and watching TV and using social media; it seems like a short time when it's happening and seems like a short time reflecting back on it.
NalNezumi 6y ago
I like the message, but I'm not sure how generalizable it is. Suffering with an end date attached is way more tolerable than sudden, unplanned suffering. This is why people endure hard studies(PhD, STEM/Medical School) internship, infant rearing, you name it. I would also claim that physical suffering mentioned is somewhat easier to suppress than mental suffering, in fight-or-flight response context because we have a way clearer consensus of what is not-ok when it comes to physical pain, making the detection of it easier. (The author mention his pain not being back/knee/not serious made him keep going) But for most of us suffering is not planned/predictable; it comes suddenly, unplanned and often is cyclic/wave-like pattern. For the case of cyclic pattern, telling oneself "suffering will eventually end" doesn't help that much because around the corner when it ends, looms the next batch of suffering again. This is why "suffering will eventually end" sounds like a nice comforting advice to new parents/student/employee but is a terrible advice to someone that is going in-and-out of depression, in a life crisis, etc.
- closeparen 6y ago
  In cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression, you will be asked to observe and take notes on both positive and negative emotions. One reason is to become aware of the thoughts and behaviors that trigger them. This has a surface-level application: dismantle negative triggers, build positive triggers, feel good more often. But another mechanism is meta. One of the worst elements of depression is the belief, "I feel terrible all the time for no reason (or for big intractable reasons), and I always will." This probably isn't true. You feel terrible sometimes, for specific reasons you can identify and work on. You also feel okay sometimes. The trick is to notice this. CBT putting it in your face on a regular basis can force an update to your model of feeling. Then when a negative emotion comes, it doesn't have a big powerful story about helplessness and permanence to interact with. The story was responsible for most of the suffering. Without it, the emotion passes in less time and with less intensity. The waves roll in and then collapse. Tides change, moon phase changes, weather changes, seasons change. You don't have to believe the whole thing is going to stop to appreciate that conditions will be favorable again.
  - dash2 6y ago
secretcombos 6y ago
The timing of this article is interesting. I've been putting off going to the dentist to have my back molar pulled. I've had this toothache since December but the pain has intensified the past week or so. It's a constant low-level pain that spreads to my front teeth and vamps up as I try to sleep. I'm wondering if I should "tough it out" and suffer through the pain until the molar completely dies and crumbles away? The process has already started and the tooth is a jagged mess. Will the pain then stop or will my mouth become infected? I work at a homeless shelter and they suffer through toothaches, often without medication of any kind. At least I can take ibuprofen when the pain gets too much. Is suffering the dentist of the homeless? Update: Thanks for the comments, they are helpful. I will make a dentist appointment in the morning.
- ehnto 6y ago
  That is not what happens. At least not the only thing that happens. You risk infection that can climb into the nervous system in your face, the pain you have now could not compare. The consequences of damage to the nerves can be life long.
- echlebek 6y ago
  No, you should not do this. Go to a dentist immediately. You will eventually develop an infection, and they can be quite serious.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I've let a tooth die and fall out without getting infected, but most definitely wouldn't do it again. Dentist is so safer, faster and more comfortable!
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I would recommend to "tough it out" and have the tooth pulled. In total the sum of pain will be way lower that way.
- wikibob 6y ago
  Oh My God No! The infection can cause sepsis. You could lose a chunk of your jaw. You can literally die from dental infections.
lcc 6y ago
I think this is BS, actually. I think I'm allowed to say that because I've completed some long-ass hikes and other suffer-fests myself. Suffering, in and of itself, isn't a skill. You will endure iff you want to endure. That is, if the perceived benefits of enduring outweigh the pain. I've suffered through multi-week hikes with blisters and a too-heavy pack because I loved the views, the remoteness, the self-reliance and asceticism. And also because there were no good alternatives, because bailing midway would have been a different kind of emotional and logistical pain. I've also bailed on things. Not a ton of them but always with good reason. I quit a job I hated after trying to suck it up for too long. I quit my college sports team after barely getting played for two years. I left a long-term relationship when I realized my partner wasn't treating me well. I don't think of those bails as failures. They just didn't work out, and I'm happier without those things in my life. In fact I'm proud of myself for putting aside my pride and fear of being a 'quitter' in order to pull the plug on them. The hikes I suffered through aren't successes, either. With experience I've gotten better at preparing and packing, so even longer and more challenging hikes are easier for me now. Better views and more comfort is where it's at. No need to suffer just for the sake of suffering.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > Suffering, in and of itself, isn't a skill. You will endure iff you want to endure. That is, if the perceived benefits of enduring outweigh the pain. This is what gets me through marathons. You hit the real hard part around mile 20 and fuck it, running another 6 is easier than going back the other way. Faster you run faster you’re done.
  - hinoki 6y ago
    At least for running, my experience is that suffering is most definitely a skill that you can improve. You get faster when you realise that the level of discomfort that stopped you the last run could actually be so much worse, and yet somehow you can still run faster. I agree that suffering for its own sake probably isn’t worth it, but if you want to run faster/farther, getting used to suffering will let you improve. Don’t over train, but don’t always listen when your body wants to stop, unless it’s joint pain :) For people who enjoy the suffering itself; well that’s a different hobby than running, and I won’t judge.
drenvuk 6y ago
It's just walking. I'm not sure why this is here.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  And a marathon is just running. Hikes like the author discusses are not "just walking". As to why it's here, HN readers seem to like topics related to stoicism and perseverance.
  - drenvuk 6y ago
    A marathon is not just running. The prolonged length of time, distance and speed are heavy stressors. The hike that the author discusses is just a nature walk with poor footwear. I did St. Olav's way back in 2019. There is no sanctity in hiking. It's just a walk and you either are prepared or aren't.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      As a runner, I could say the same about running a marathon. A half-marathon (or near) distance was practically a light exercise for me for a long time there. A marathon would be a harder exercise, fatiguing, but not too challenging. Because I was prepared (running 5/10/15k regularly for several years). But I would never call it "just running" for anyone else. The idea that hiking is "just walking" because for you it was, is similarly absurd. With elevation changes, gear on your back (10-40lbs depending on how lightweight you go, easier to be lighter than when I started with metal-framed packs), significant distances per day, potential time constraints requiring longer daily distances, you have similar "heavy stressors" in hiking.
- nednar 6y ago
  This confusion you felt while you wrote it: That's the feeling of not knowing what you don't know. Remember it, so you won't make bad decisions when it happens in a more important situation.
  - 6y ago
gao8a 6y ago
The army is structured suffering that even pays, feeds and shelters you
spaetzleesser 6y ago
In buddhism there is a distinction between pain and suffering. Having pain doesn't necessarily mean that you have to suffer. This helps me a lot to endure when I am sick or have other discomfort. It doesn't always work but I think it's a good guideline.
- aszantu 6y ago
  byron katie has some nice technique going in asking 4 questions about the suffering and getting behind the believe that makes the difference between pain and suffering. Very often it's the resistance toward pain that intensifies and turns it into suffering.
matmatmatmat 6y ago
I really learned to suffer as a parent of, first, a newborn, then infant, and now toddler. The emotional burden is incredible but you know you must overcome it to provide a warm, caring, environment.
trabant00 6y ago
Learning to push through discomfort and pain is how you get injured. Both in sports and in general life. Ignoring those signs should be reserved for the most exceptional of circumstances. I would slap the enthusiasm out of young me, knowing now the price I have to pay everyday.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I disagree with such a hard and fast rule. Some pain and discomfort can and should be pushed through. Other pain should not be. Pain should be a signal to consider carefully what you are doing.
  - strstr 6y ago
    Really depends on the activity. For any activity where overuse injuries are common, it’s probably a good heuristic. I consider myself reasonably fit, but I’m not sure any of the activities I do strictly require physical pain. Soreness? Fatigue? Sure. But rarely pain, unless I’ve made a mistake.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      > Soreness? Fatigue? Sure. But rarely pain, unless I’ve made a mistake. A big part of this is that people inexperienced with pushing themselves will mistake the soreness and fatigue for pain and quit. It's easy for you to say this because you claim to be "fairly fit". You have experience beyond average (at least in the US).
      - watwut 6y ago
        If you mistake the soreness and fatigue for pain and stop at that moment, you will still get in better shape. Really. It just gonna be slow. If you mistake pain for soreness and fatigue, you wont exercise until that injury you just caused yourself heals. Also, if you are overweight, did not exercised for long, but are ambitious, that is the prime situation where it is easy to cause yourself an injury. Fairly fit means that your body is adjusted exercise at least somewhat and joints and such can withstand.
aspyct 6y ago
I've been on long hikes. I've also broken bones, some of which will hurt until the end of my life. I agree with your point of view on hikes. It's a mind game. But that's not the whole story. For some people, pain doesn't end. Pain is every day, and you get nothing in exchange. No trees, no fresh air, just pain. I could go on, lay out the difference between pain and the resulting mental suffering. While you can't always avoid the former, the latter is up to you. But that's a whole other story. Congrats on your achievements. Man, I wish I could go back hiking. You learned how to conquer your pain, may it be inconsequential and temporary. Bear in mind that, sometimes, it has long term (everlasting?) consequences. And that makes it completely different. Avoid consequences. Really, do.
- pgsandstrom 6y ago
  I agree. I've had experience with pain lasting several years due to issues with my jaw. No matter how strong you are, it takes a heavy tool on your happiness. I had a friend that was going through painful knee surgery, and he was very optimistic. "Im good at enduring hard times" he said. I warned him to prepare for the worst, to be ready to reach out to friends if depression hits. He shook it of. But just a few months later, there he was. For the first time in his life, he was depressed. He could endure terrible pain for several hours. But when the pain just never ever goes away, when you get zero time to recover, it grinds you down. Never ever risk permanent pain. It is a worse hell than you can imagine, if you've never been there.
Lio 6y ago
In my favourite sport, Cycling, suffering has long been venerated. The imagery includes stories of Hinault riding through a snow-storm with frostbite. Or Pantani fighting his inner daemons (a battle he sadly later lost) to summit a mountain with his arms held wide like “Christ on the cross”. The great Irish rider Sean Kelly once pulled down his shorts to show a journalist a saddle sore the size of an egg when asked why he wasn’t as good as expected. I often speculated if it’s a coincidence that Cycling as a sport is traditionally most popular in catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, France and Belgium.
- erostrate 6y ago
  That's a very interesting idea. However cycling is also hugely popular in protestant countries, eg Netherlands or the UK. And other sports share this fascination with suffering. For example in mountaineering one of the most famous stories is that of Joe Simpson going down a remote mountain in the Andes with a broken leg and no food or water over several days.
  - Lio 6y ago
    That's very true and one reason why I said "traditionally" but there are no Monuments or Grand Tours in either Britain or Netherlands. It's just a thought and not a very well researched one so I wouldn't expect anyone to take it too seriously. For Joe Simpson, or say Earnest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic, these are stories where something went wrong and they were able to show heroic Endurance* just to survives. In professional Cycling, it's slightly different, temptation is a factor. You can stop at any time and you'll be picked up by the warm Broom Wagon or team cars that follows the race. It would be so easy to give in to the devil on your shoulder offering you the easy way out... Even giving in to that weakness is venerated by numerous photographs of weeping riders by the side of the road. Cycling fans seem to respond to a loser's suffering, as we recognise shared weakness. That story of temptation seems to chime with stories of martyrs and saints. Who knows though, like I said it's just a hypothesis. * Sorry, terrible pun.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I think that is because initially, "suffering" in sport is actually rewarding. It happens around the same time endorphins flow and you feel so good after. And then you feel improvement and achievement. You have to overcome some discomfort to get better, so trainers and coaches teach that mindset too. And it pushes you further and plus, you can imagine yourself as sort of tough hero. And you can brag about it. The issue is when it becomes addictive and it is not good suffering anymore, but rather deliberate destruction of body with long term consequences.
dagenleg 6y ago
Quoting Zizek: "Don’t fall in love ... with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself.
- DrOctagon 6y ago
  Quoting Zatopek: "Pain is a merciful thing – if it lasts without interruption, it dulls itself."
_0o6v 6y ago
On a practical level, the author had awful blisters and heel pain because she was wearing trainers on a thru-hike?! Get some proper hiking boots!
- gtr 6y ago
  I should imagine an experience outdoors person like her would be able to choose appropriate footwear! Boots are heavy and don't protect you from blisters either.
- Steltek 6y ago
  Many thru-hikers choose trainers (or really "trail runners") over traditional hiking boots. Even without aggressive ultralight gram-shedding, a contemporary pack weighs a fraction of what it once did and you don't need to up-armor your feet anymore.
brailsafe 6y ago
I love this article. I haven't hiked that far, but I've hiked very long and high single days, and have taken quite a few falls that have seemingly caused long-term foot damage where every time I set my foot down for the first time in a day, it feels like my arch collapses. I think it's an incredible mental challenge one must go through to do something like the author talks about, but I do wonder if it's not distinguishable from applying the same mental game to something like doing boring intellectual tasks. Such as a boring programming job for a company you hate. In both cases, it never occurs to me to quit, and the same force drives me to keep trying until it gets better or it ends. But pushing yourself with your brain to do the mechanical process of taking steps seems much more within reach than using your brain to make your brain do something it's not going to do. For me, once a task is knowable, predictable, or just very routine, my brain seems to cloud over with a haze, and my ability to see through it is like shining highbeams at fog in the middle of the night. With hiking, taking a step forward is always progress, but with software engineering, the next step is a mental hurdle that might just not happen, no matter how much you've learnt to suffer.
1experience 6y ago
Not listening to your body when it is talking to you is a guaranteed way to get injured even in a permanent way, your body is not against you, if it is sending you a message there is a reason. When it comes to exercise avoid the three Ts. Too much, Too soon, Too fast.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I wonder if there's a pain-tickling based program. Simply be very sensitive to your body signals, and cut when you hit 5% pain (absurd quantification but you get the idea)
- deleted 6y ago
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- dkarl 6y ago
  I agree, but I also disagree. There is a lot of discomfort that has nothing to do with long-term physical damage to your body. The author takes the distinction for granted: > I’d have stopped if I felt like I was truly injured I think what the author is talking about is that we start as children from a position of trusting discomfort unconditionally. It distresses us, and we avoid it. Through experience, we learn that that the distress that many types of discomfort causes us is disproportionate, and we start to react to it differently. We even learn to associate certain types of discomfort with the reward of hard work. If life doesn't force these experiences upon us, we have to get them by choice, or else our lives can end up overly constrained by discomfort that we never learned to put into context. But you're right as well. In the gym, people first learn what their bodies can do when they use emotion and bravado to unlock levels of effort and discomfort they had never experienced before. As they gain that ability, they also learn to moderate it, to use it wisely in the context of how their body responds to what they're doing with it. The first without the second is dangerous, and the second without the first is constricting.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    Yeah, there's a big difference between being hurt and being injured. I'd go so far as to say that most athletes will deal with both during their career. Learning to manage it is truly an art. If you're too conservative you leave a lot on the table. Being too aggressive absolutely will get you injured. The one consistent thing though that research shows is that if you are considtently doing workouts that you would rate as a 10/10 on your own internal uncalibrated scale, you are at much higher risk for injury. The art of knowing how hard to push yourself isn't something that people just intuitively know. It takes experience of failing in both directions to nail the sweet spot. It's not impossible to learn, but I agree that most athletes don't even have it nailed. Thats one of the things a good coach is for.
amelius 6y ago
> Every backpacker, thru-hiker, or endurance athlete knows how to suffer. This is nothing special, however. Every student learns how to suffer too.
- parliament32 6y ago
  Emotional and mental burdens are nothing compared to your body screaming at you to stop 16 hours into an ultramarathon.
__mharrison__ 6y ago
As someone who has done a couple ultra marathons, I think they are 30% physical, 10% nutrition, and the remainder is mental.
fao_ 6y ago
This reminds me of the continuum concept: We had traded our slightly too small aluminium canoe for a much too big dugout. In this vessel carved from a single tree, seventeen Indians at one time travelled with us. With all their baggage added to ours and everyone aboard, the vast canoe still looked rather empty. Portaging it, this time with only four or five Indians to help, over half a mile of boulders beside a large waterfall was depressing to contemplate. It meant placing logs across the path of the canoe and hauling it, inch by inch, in the merciless sun, slipping inevitably into the crevices between the boulders whenever the canoe pivoted out of control and scraping one's shins, ankles and whatever else one landed on against the granite. We had done the portage before with the small canoe, and the two Italians and I, knowing what lay ahead, spent several days dreading the hard work and pain. On the day lye arrived at Arepuchi Falls we were primed to suffer and started off grimfaced and hating every moment, to drag the thing over the rocks. When it swung sideways, so heavy was the rogue pirogue, it several times pinned one of us to the burning rock until the others could move it off. A quarter of the way across all ankles were bleeding. Partly by way of begging off for a minute, I jumped up on a high rock to photograph the scene. From my vantage point and momentary dis-involvement, I noticed a most interesting fact. Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything and swearing non-stop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest, Indians, were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle: they relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and were especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held barebacked against the scorching granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest, enjoying his relief. All were doing the same work; all were experiencing strain and pain. There was no difference in our situations except that we had been conditioned by our culture to believe that such a combination of circumstances constituted an unquestionable low on the scale of well-being and were quite unaware that we had any option in the matter. The Indians, on the other hand, equally unconscious of making a choice, were in a particularly merry state of mind, revelling in the camaraderie; and, of course, they had had no long build-up of dread to mar the preceding days. Each forward move was for them a little victory. As I finished photographing and rejoined the team, I opted out of the civilized choice and enjoyed, quite genuinely, the rest of the portage. Even the barks and bruises I sustained were reduced with remarkable ease to nothing more significant than what they indeed were: small hurts which would soon heal and which required neither an unpleasant emotional reaction, such as anger, self pity or resentment, nor anxiety at how many more there might be before the end of the haul. On the contrary, I found myself appreciative of my excellently designed body, which would patch itself up with no instructions or decisions from me.
parentheses 6y ago
Goggins
gumby 6y ago
Being in the backcountry has an advantage/disadvantage: when you're days from the nearest trailhead you have little choice but to continue.* When you are, say, in a PhD program, every day you have the option of throwing in the towel. I feel like sticking through the latter is psychologically more difficult. * I've only had to set a broken limb (arm) once in the backcountry. In that case we distributed that person's gear and spent three days getting out. On a different trip: very painful/bloody feet; luckily we were only about five miles from our destination so we took turns helping the victim walk out under his own power.
neurobashing 6y ago
Makes me think of boot camp. Once you realize Parris Island is as much a mental exercise as physical, it completely changes. Yeah an hour in the sand pit doing mountain-climbers after you just humped 10 miles is a bit tiring, but you just have to keep doing it. You just have to keep telling your limbs to go. The point is to teach you your limit is far, far beyond what you think it is.
perrygeo 6y ago
Great article. In long distance endurance sports especially, "suffering" is an essential of the game. Persistence pays off far more than raw talent. You'll feel aches, pains, hunger, technical problems, weather, nagging injuries ... yet the only thing you can do is keep going. There's an obvious tension between what your body is telling you ("Hey slow down and rest. You're not running from a predator. You've got plenty of food. There's pizza and beer at home. Why are you doing this?") and your athletic goals. Success is all about planning, preparing, pacing to avoid the obvious causes of suffering for as long as possible. Then when fatigue inevitably hits, recognizing those mental states for what they are: a distraction. Trust your preparation and continue to focus on the path ahead. It starts to sound very much like meditation. There's a interesting theory in exercise physiology called the "Central governor" - your brain unconsciously monitors signals throughout the body and if it detects anything that could potentially damage vital systems, activity will be shut down directly _causing_ what we experience as fatigue. I find it fascinating that the limits of human endurance could based on our brain's unconscious decision making ability. I wonder if training (in the sports sense) is similar to training a neural network - feed a variety of inputs about physical conditions, continually tune predictions about which signals are safe vs unsafe for the vital organs. IOW "learning to suffer" might be a physical process by which we improve athletic performance through optimizing our fatigue calculations.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  The peak endurance runner looks akin to a skeleton. The peak sprinter, bursting with life. Humans were made for spurts of activity followed by long periods of rest. Same is true for the work world.
  - jasonladuke0311 6y ago
    That fallacy has been parroted on fitness forums (fora?) for almost two decades. There is a big dose of selection bias when looking at any elite athlete.
bufordtwain 6y ago
Apparently some people don't have enough naturally-produced suffering? They feel the need to manufacture it by (over)doing something that should be enjoyable.
deleted 6y ago
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thehappypm 6y ago
I'm a really big hiker, and I really understand what the author is saying when she says backpacking is mostly mental. A cold, rainy day where you don't have enough layers, all your clothes are wet, and it's another 9 miles through mud and mountains to the nearest shelter is suffering and downright scary. Looking up a 3000 foot rock scramble with a heavy pack when you've already covered too many miles and you're hungry is suffering. But -- I don't think it's a good idea to ignore injury. That isn't the "Good" kind of suffering. If your skin is coming off your feet or your knees are swelling like crazy.. pushing through is kind of dumb.
jokoon 6y ago
Noam chomsky said he believed that aging is caused by people failing to get through pain. Or something like that. I wish I could find the quote.
k__ 6y ago
Persistence and the will to learn and adapt are the path to success. If you give up, you don't have a chance. If you always make the same errors, you don't have a chance either.
Bakary 6y ago
Sounds to me like suffering fetishism and the association of it with moral worth.
oblib 6y ago
I have read way too many of these kinds of stories. Thru-hikers are akin to long distance runners.(For some of them) Their goal is to brag about how many miles they walked and how grueling it was, and that's exactly what this author does. I have backpacked for close to 50 years now and there are a few types of hikers I've run across that have sucked up my time or just been obnoxious to meet on the trails and by far thru-hikers are likely to be obnoxious. I've had them hike into my camp at night, tell me this is where they've planned to setup for the night, and then demand I give them water because they ran out, and ask for supplies like bandages, neosporin, aspirin, tylenol, and even food. I have cut trips short because of that. It happened so often I quit using hiking trails and that I can kind of thank them for because I'd been leery of bushwhacking far off trail and getting lost. I had to sharpen my mapping skills and learn how to remember how to get back to my starting point. That was actually pretty easy once I put it in practice and now with a topo map and compass I always know where I am so I can wander aimlessly in our forests for days, which are the same forests the author talks about blistering her feet. I've been hiking here for over 30 years and never blistered my feet. And I wouldn't consider myself to be anything but stupid if I did. Had she taken the time to get off trail and explore the "hills and hollers" here she could have wrote about the stunning beauty everywhere you go no matter what direction you take. Instead she told everyone how miserable it was but she was tough enough to take it and you should learn how to "suffer" too. If you really want to learn how to suffer come here and hike those trails in the summer and don't use any bug repellent. The ticks and chiggers will give you a serious lesson in suffering and it'll last at least a couple weeks after you've left.
togs 6y ago
When it comes to suffering, for me it tends to be like "I'll be much happier when this is over", or "Oh God, make it stop", like I'm on the verge of throwing up in my mind and waiting for merciful release. And then eventually I get fit and more attractive and slightly more confident. Sometimes I even want the pain. No idea why. It's certainly not rational. Thinking about it probably makes it worse. So Nike probably got it close ("Just do it."), but I think a more accurate slogan is "Don't think about it beforehand--just do it, y'know, for a little while, unless it hurts really bad, in which case you should stop doing it and consider seeking medical attention." Suffering sucks. It sucks especially when there's nobody to see/tell about it/nobody cares, no prestige, or sense of moral worth to be derived from it. If I jog by myself, I'm a nobody. If I jog on a team I'm part of a story. I think this is why jogging around the neighborhood doesn't stick. It just sucks, all by itself, and you may even get heckled for it. Nobody cares, and if they do it's for the wrong reasons. By myself I'm not contributing to anything besides my ego. I think my class bias shows clearly here. This middle-class type of suffering is voluntary... I was going to write more, but that's all I have for now.
cafard 6y ago
Ah, the "pain in my heels". I ran myself into a case of plantar fasciitis about the beginning of 2019, tried to run through it, and lost about four months of running. I am still surprised that I was stupid enough to do this, having lost some weeks almost forty years ago to trying to run through a twinge in my knee. Now, back in the days when I was a decent recreational runner, there was seldom a race in which I didn't wonder, about 2/3 of the way through, what in the world had caused me to sign up, and didn't think that I really shouldn't do this again. I'm not really sure what learning was involved there--it was mostly I think stubbornness, being determined that I was going to have run part of the race and suffered the discomfort without finishing.

162 points by Dowwie 6y ago

Suffering will come to most people eventually; no need to do fancy summoning rituals. > When we each learned to suffer, we also learned that the suffering eventually ends Oh that that were true! I think it's a bit naive to call endurance suffering. I get that it might be nice to be able to experience endurance in a pure/controlled enough form where it can be retroactively framed as a positive experience / accepted as a nurturing challenge, but...

notesinthefield 6y ago
The capital 'S' suffering of poverty and the suffering of sport are so obviously incomparable, why approach pedantry?
- ehnto 6y ago
  I don't think the difference is obvious to everyone, especially not everyone in a position to suffer for sport. Poverty is not the only suffering out there either, imagine someone choosing to be in pain and boasting about how they conquered it from the eyes of a chronic pain sufferer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  It’s great that some people can suffer for fun. I’d like to see them try to survive my life where there is no end, no escape, no relief. Only death will finally take the pain away. There may be a difference in kind between sport and what I deal with but I gotta tell ya, I’ve yet to see anyone who can actually see the difference.
  - notesinthefield 6y ago
    Im going to vapid for a second and im sorry to be an invalidator but I dont think discussing your existential suffering in a thread regarding the difficulty of sport is worth the time and you can see that.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  All the classic conservative writing complaining of lazy poor people would seemingly not know the difference.
op03 6y ago
I always thought it was the opposite. Struggling through something gets my mind of something else.
jonahrd 6y ago
That's definitely the sentiment I most disagreed with in this article. It's summed up pretty succinctly in Sufferfest 2 [1, 13:20] (aptly named). "We're lucky to be able to electively suffer like this" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4CbP_E7oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4CbP_E7oo

pmoriarty 6y ago

"I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. That is when I start counting, because then it really counts. That's what makes you a champion." -- Muhammad Ali

ridaj 6y ago

I think this is what people mean when they say "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".

metabagel 6y ago
Actually, I think they mean that pain doesn’t mean that you have to as well endure mental anguish. You can accept the pain. It doesn’t make the pain go away, but you’re not adding to it with your own mental anguish.

pjm331 6y ago

Sounds like some Type 2 fun First heard about types of fun from an article posted here - I think it was this one https://www.tetongravity.com/story/culture/the-three-and-a-half-types-of-fun-explained https://www.tetongravity.com/story/culture/the-three-and-a-h... Edit: put type 3 at first but on second thought it’s type 2

germinalphrase 6y ago
A climbing buddy of mine related this ‘fun’ scale to me years ago. I honestly kind of thought it was an off the cuff type thing from him, but I guess it’s been banging around.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  Kelly Cordes wrote about it in 2008 or so; it wasn’t a new thing then. It’s a useful heuristic.
travisjungroth 6y ago
I once told a flight student a lesson would be fun. “Your kind of fun or my kind of fun?”
kubanczyk 6y ago
The article covers three types of activity. "fun" (Noun, uncountable): - amusement, enjoyment or pleasure - playful, often noisy, activity.

simmjaso 6y ago

How true it is, and the knowledge that suffering eventually ends is the key. The phrase I learned was repeating as many times as necessary “how it is now is not how it will forever be”

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Loved this article. Nevertheless, I think there's another dimension to the ability to endure. 2 summers ago, I hiked the 230 mile Cape Wrath Trail in the Scottish Highlands with my brother. I didn't have any of the physical issues that the author described (despite almost endless wet conditions underfoot and frequently from above too). I had trained for and finished an extremely hard 50km trail race in the Colorado Rockies 2 weeks before the hike started, and was in excellent shape even before we started. Nevertheless, it was only my brother's inability to even imagine quitting that got me to the end. I was variously bored, confused about the why, and/or simply willing to call it quits. I wasn't in pain, I didn't dislike walking all day with an insanely heavy pack on, I hadn't even minded a 30' fall down a mountain. But it still took everything I had, plus more from my brother, to get me to want to keep going. People who can do that easily have my respect, admiration and envy (like ... my wife!)

ioseph 6y ago
I find when hiking there's a huge toll / boost from being the weakest or strongest link. If I'm hiking with friends who are relatively novice I find it completely effortless whereas with people more experienced than I I find the going far more though. Maybe it's just hard to be the slow one.
- bigmattystyles 6y ago
  Being the weakest is just stressful for me. I worry I’m slowing others down and ruining their experience. It’s the same but not quite as bad, when I’m the fastest; I worry I’m ruining the experience for others and making them feel bad. You wouldn’t believe the relief I get when I’m in second position...
- Lio 6y ago
  In competitive Cycling it’s this battle of poker that makes the mountains so interesting. Everyone has bad days in a Grand Tour stage race. They have to hide that from each other and themselves or their rivals will try to turn the screw just a bit further whilst pretending they have loads left in the tank.
6y ago

maximente 6y ago

great article! one interesting thing i've found is that the higher the suffering, the more fondly i look back at the event/time period and overcoming it. the inverse also seems weakly true - i'm not very proud of periods i've spent coasting in life. second, it seems to create a fraternizing effect - i seem to also recall fondly the people with whom i shared the suffering. perhaps this explains some of the military people reflecting back fondly on times of truly intense suffering.

ehnto 6y ago
Part of the ability to look back fondly may be the higher intensity of experience packed into shorter time than when you coasted. Check out the Long Short, Short Long time phenomenon. The short period of intense experience later feels like a much larger period of time, and the long period of monotony later recalls as a very short inconsequential moment in time. For example, the 24 hour flight to your holiday destination will compress into a very short unimportant memory where the holiday itself will recall as if it were a much longer period of time than it was.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  VSauce tells me there is a newer emerging Short/Short time phenomenon of interacting with screens and watching TV and using social media; it seems like a short time when it's happening and seems like a short time reflecting back on it.

NalNezumi 6y ago

I like the message, but I'm not sure how generalizable it is. Suffering with an end date attached is way more tolerable than sudden, unplanned suffering. This is why people endure hard studies(PhD, STEM/Medical School) internship, infant rearing, you name it. I would also claim that physical suffering mentioned is somewhat easier to suppress than mental suffering, in fight-or-flight response context because we have a way clearer consensus of what is not-ok when it comes to physical pain, making the detection of it easier. (The author mention his pain not being back/knee/not serious made him keep going) But for most of us suffering is not planned/predictable; it comes suddenly, unplanned and often is cyclic/wave-like pattern. For the case of cyclic pattern, telling oneself "suffering will eventually end" doesn't help that much because around the corner when it ends, looms the next batch of suffering again. This is why "suffering will eventually end" sounds like a nice comforting advice to new parents/student/employee but is a terrible advice to someone that is going in-and-out of depression, in a life crisis, etc.

closeparen 6y ago
In cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression, you will be asked to observe and take notes on both positive and negative emotions. One reason is to become aware of the thoughts and behaviors that trigger them. This has a surface-level application: dismantle negative triggers, build positive triggers, feel good more often. But another mechanism is meta. One of the worst elements of depression is the belief, "I feel terrible all the time for no reason (or for big intractable reasons), and I always will." This probably isn't true. You feel terrible sometimes, for specific reasons you can identify and work on. You also feel okay sometimes. The trick is to notice this. CBT putting it in your face on a regular basis can force an update to your model of feeling. Then when a negative emotion comes, it doesn't have a big powerful story about helplessness and permanence to interact with. The story was responsible for most of the suffering. Without it, the emotion passes in less time and with less intensity. The waves roll in and then collapse. Tides change, moon phase changes, weather changes, seasons change. You don't have to believe the whole thing is going to stop to appreciate that conditions will be favorable again.
- dash2 6y ago

secretcombos 6y ago

The timing of this article is interesting. I've been putting off going to the dentist to have my back molar pulled. I've had this toothache since December but the pain has intensified the past week or so. It's a constant low-level pain that spreads to my front teeth and vamps up as I try to sleep. I'm wondering if I should "tough it out" and suffer through the pain until the molar completely dies and crumbles away? The process has already started and the tooth is a jagged mess. Will the pain then stop or will my mouth become infected? I work at a homeless shelter and they suffer through toothaches, often without medication of any kind. At least I can take ibuprofen when the pain gets too much. Is suffering the dentist of the homeless? Update: Thanks for the comments, they are helpful. I will make a dentist appointment in the morning.

ehnto 6y ago
That is not what happens. At least not the only thing that happens. You risk infection that can climb into the nervous system in your face, the pain you have now could not compare. The consequences of damage to the nerves can be life long.
echlebek 6y ago
No, you should not do this. Go to a dentist immediately. You will eventually develop an infection, and they can be quite serious.
- nullsense 6y ago
  I've let a tooth die and fall out without getting infected, but most definitely wouldn't do it again. Dentist is so safer, faster and more comfortable!
spaetzleesser 6y ago
I would recommend to "tough it out" and have the tooth pulled. In total the sum of pain will be way lower that way.
wikibob 6y ago
Oh My God No! The infection can cause sepsis. You could lose a chunk of your jaw. You can literally die from dental infections.

lcc 6y ago

I think this is BS, actually. I think I'm allowed to say that because I've completed some long-ass hikes and other suffer-fests myself. Suffering, in and of itself, isn't a skill. You will endure iff you want to endure. That is, if the perceived benefits of enduring outweigh the pain. I've suffered through multi-week hikes with blisters and a too-heavy pack because I loved the views, the remoteness, the self-reliance and asceticism. And also because there were no good alternatives, because bailing midway would have been a different kind of emotional and logistical pain. I've also bailed on things. Not a ton of them but always with good reason. I quit a job I hated after trying to suck it up for too long. I quit my college sports team after barely getting played for two years. I left a long-term relationship when I realized my partner wasn't treating me well. I don't think of those bails as failures. They just didn't work out, and I'm happier without those things in my life. In fact I'm proud of myself for putting aside my pride and fear of being a 'quitter' in order to pull the plug on them. The hikes I suffered through aren't successes, either. With experience I've gotten better at preparing and packing, so even longer and more challenging hikes are easier for me now. Better views and more comfort is where it's at. No need to suffer just for the sake of suffering.

Swizec 6y ago
> Suffering, in and of itself, isn't a skill. You will endure iff you want to endure. That is, if the perceived benefits of enduring outweigh the pain. This is what gets me through marathons. You hit the real hard part around mile 20 and fuck it, running another 6 is easier than going back the other way. Faster you run faster you’re done.
- hinoki 6y ago
  At least for running, my experience is that suffering is most definitely a skill that you can improve. You get faster when you realise that the level of discomfort that stopped you the last run could actually be so much worse, and yet somehow you can still run faster. I agree that suffering for its own sake probably isn’t worth it, but if you want to run faster/farther, getting used to suffering will let you improve. Don’t over train, but don’t always listen when your body wants to stop, unless it’s joint pain :) For people who enjoy the suffering itself; well that’s a different hobby than running, and I won’t judge.

drenvuk 6y ago

It's just walking. I'm not sure why this is here.

Jtsummers 6y ago
And a marathon is just running. Hikes like the author discusses are not "just walking". As to why it's here, HN readers seem to like topics related to stoicism and perseverance.
- drenvuk 6y ago
  A marathon is not just running. The prolonged length of time, distance and speed are heavy stressors. The hike that the author discusses is just a nature walk with poor footwear. I did St. Olav's way back in 2019. There is no sanctity in hiking. It's just a walk and you either are prepared or aren't.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    As a runner, I could say the same about running a marathon. A half-marathon (or near) distance was practically a light exercise for me for a long time there. A marathon would be a harder exercise, fatiguing, but not too challenging. Because I was prepared (running 5/10/15k regularly for several years). But I would never call it "just running" for anyone else. The idea that hiking is "just walking" because for you it was, is similarly absurd. With elevation changes, gear on your back (10-40lbs depending on how lightweight you go, easier to be lighter than when I started with metal-framed packs), significant distances per day, potential time constraints requiring longer daily distances, you have similar "heavy stressors" in hiking.
nednar 6y ago
This confusion you felt while you wrote it: That's the feeling of not knowing what you don't know. Remember it, so you won't make bad decisions when it happens in a more important situation.
- 6y ago

gao8a 6y ago

The army is structured suffering that even pays, feeds and shelters you

spaetzleesser 6y ago

In buddhism there is a distinction between pain and suffering. Having pain doesn't necessarily mean that you have to suffer. This helps me a lot to endure when I am sick or have other discomfort. It doesn't always work but I think it's a good guideline.

aszantu 6y ago
byron katie has some nice technique going in asking 4 questions about the suffering and getting behind the believe that makes the difference between pain and suffering. Very often it's the resistance toward pain that intensifies and turns it into suffering.

matmatmatmat 6y ago

I really learned to suffer as a parent of, first, a newborn, then infant, and now toddler. The emotional burden is incredible but you know you must overcome it to provide a warm, caring, environment.

trabant00 6y ago

Learning to push through discomfort and pain is how you get injured. Both in sports and in general life. Ignoring those signs should be reserved for the most exceptional of circumstances. I would slap the enthusiasm out of young me, knowing now the price I have to pay everyday.

im3w1l 6y ago
I disagree with such a hard and fast rule. Some pain and discomfort can and should be pushed through. Other pain should not be. Pain should be a signal to consider carefully what you are doing.
- strstr 6y ago
  Really depends on the activity. For any activity where overuse injuries are common, it’s probably a good heuristic. I consider myself reasonably fit, but I’m not sure any of the activities I do strictly require physical pain. Soreness? Fatigue? Sure. But rarely pain, unless I’ve made a mistake.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    > Soreness? Fatigue? Sure. But rarely pain, unless I’ve made a mistake. A big part of this is that people inexperienced with pushing themselves will mistake the soreness and fatigue for pain and quit. It's easy for you to say this because you claim to be "fairly fit". You have experience beyond average (at least in the US).
    - watwut 6y ago
      If you mistake the soreness and fatigue for pain and stop at that moment, you will still get in better shape. Really. It just gonna be slow. If you mistake pain for soreness and fatigue, you wont exercise until that injury you just caused yourself heals. Also, if you are overweight, did not exercised for long, but are ambitious, that is the prime situation where it is easy to cause yourself an injury. Fairly fit means that your body is adjusted exercise at least somewhat and joints and such can withstand.

aspyct 6y ago

I've been on long hikes. I've also broken bones, some of which will hurt until the end of my life. I agree with your point of view on hikes. It's a mind game. But that's not the whole story. For some people, pain doesn't end. Pain is every day, and you get nothing in exchange. No trees, no fresh air, just pain. I could go on, lay out the difference between pain and the resulting mental suffering. While you can't always avoid the former, the latter is up to you. But that's a whole other story. Congrats on your achievements. Man, I wish I could go back hiking. You learned how to conquer your pain, may it be inconsequential and temporary. Bear in mind that, sometimes, it has long term (everlasting?) consequences. And that makes it completely different. Avoid consequences. Really, do.

pgsandstrom 6y ago
I agree. I've had experience with pain lasting several years due to issues with my jaw. No matter how strong you are, it takes a heavy tool on your happiness. I had a friend that was going through painful knee surgery, and he was very optimistic. "Im good at enduring hard times" he said. I warned him to prepare for the worst, to be ready to reach out to friends if depression hits. He shook it of. But just a few months later, there he was. For the first time in his life, he was depressed. He could endure terrible pain for several hours. But when the pain just never ever goes away, when you get zero time to recover, it grinds you down. Never ever risk permanent pain. It is a worse hell than you can imagine, if you've never been there.

Lio 6y ago

In my favourite sport, Cycling, suffering has long been venerated. The imagery includes stories of Hinault riding through a snow-storm with frostbite. Or Pantani fighting his inner daemons (a battle he sadly later lost) to summit a mountain with his arms held wide like “Christ on the cross”. The great Irish rider Sean Kelly once pulled down his shorts to show a journalist a saddle sore the size of an egg when asked why he wasn’t as good as expected. I often speculated if it’s a coincidence that Cycling as a sport is traditionally most popular in catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, France and Belgium.

erostrate 6y ago
That's a very interesting idea. However cycling is also hugely popular in protestant countries, eg Netherlands or the UK. And other sports share this fascination with suffering. For example in mountaineering one of the most famous stories is that of Joe Simpson going down a remote mountain in the Andes with a broken leg and no food or water over several days.
- Lio 6y ago
  That's very true and one reason why I said "traditionally" but there are no Monuments or Grand Tours in either Britain or Netherlands. It's just a thought and not a very well researched one so I wouldn't expect anyone to take it too seriously. For Joe Simpson, or say Earnest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic, these are stories where something went wrong and they were able to show heroic Endurance* just to survives. In professional Cycling, it's slightly different, temptation is a factor. You can stop at any time and you'll be picked up by the warm Broom Wagon or team cars that follows the race. It would be so easy to give in to the devil on your shoulder offering you the easy way out... Even giving in to that weakness is venerated by numerous photographs of weeping riders by the side of the road. Cycling fans seem to respond to a loser's suffering, as we recognise shared weakness. That story of temptation seems to chime with stories of martyrs and saints. Who knows though, like I said it's just a hypothesis. * Sorry, terrible pun.
- watwut 6y ago
  I think that is because initially, "suffering" in sport is actually rewarding. It happens around the same time endorphins flow and you feel so good after. And then you feel improvement and achievement. You have to overcome some discomfort to get better, so trainers and coaches teach that mindset too. And it pushes you further and plus, you can imagine yourself as sort of tough hero. And you can brag about it. The issue is when it becomes addictive and it is not good suffering anymore, but rather deliberate destruction of body with long term consequences.

dagenleg 6y ago

Quoting Zizek: "Don’t fall in love ... with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself.

DrOctagon 6y ago
Quoting Zatopek: "Pain is a merciful thing – if it lasts without interruption, it dulls itself."

_0o6v 6y ago

On a practical level, the author had awful blisters and heel pain because she was wearing trainers on a thru-hike?! Get some proper hiking boots!

gtr 6y ago
I should imagine an experience outdoors person like her would be able to choose appropriate footwear! Boots are heavy and don't protect you from blisters either.
Steltek 6y ago
Many thru-hikers choose trainers (or really "trail runners") over traditional hiking boots. Even without aggressive ultralight gram-shedding, a contemporary pack weighs a fraction of what it once did and you don't need to up-armor your feet anymore.

brailsafe 6y ago

I love this article. I haven't hiked that far, but I've hiked very long and high single days, and have taken quite a few falls that have seemingly caused long-term foot damage where every time I set my foot down for the first time in a day, it feels like my arch collapses. I think it's an incredible mental challenge one must go through to do something like the author talks about, but I do wonder if it's not distinguishable from applying the same mental game to something like doing boring intellectual tasks. Such as a boring programming job for a company you hate. In both cases, it never occurs to me to quit, and the same force drives me to keep trying until it gets better or it ends. But pushing yourself with your brain to do the mechanical process of taking steps seems much more within reach than using your brain to make your brain do something it's not going to do. For me, once a task is knowable, predictable, or just very routine, my brain seems to cloud over with a haze, and my ability to see through it is like shining highbeams at fog in the middle of the night. With hiking, taking a step forward is always progress, but with software engineering, the next step is a mental hurdle that might just not happen, no matter how much you've learnt to suffer.

1experience 6y ago

Not listening to your body when it is talking to you is a guaranteed way to get injured even in a permanent way, your body is not against you, if it is sending you a message there is a reason. When it comes to exercise avoid the three Ts. Too much, Too soon, Too fast.

agumonkey 6y ago
I wonder if there's a pain-tickling based program. Simply be very sensitive to your body signals, and cut when you hit 5% pain (absurd quantification but you get the idea)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dkarl 6y ago
I agree, but I also disagree. There is a lot of discomfort that has nothing to do with long-term physical damage to your body. The author takes the distinction for granted: > I’d have stopped if I felt like I was truly injured I think what the author is talking about is that we start as children from a position of trusting discomfort unconditionally. It distresses us, and we avoid it. Through experience, we learn that that the distress that many types of discomfort causes us is disproportionate, and we start to react to it differently. We even learn to associate certain types of discomfort with the reward of hard work. If life doesn't force these experiences upon us, we have to get them by choice, or else our lives can end up overly constrained by discomfort that we never learned to put into context. But you're right as well. In the gym, people first learn what their bodies can do when they use emotion and bravado to unlock levels of effort and discomfort they had never experienced before. As they gain that ability, they also learn to moderate it, to use it wisely in the context of how their body responds to what they're doing with it. The first without the second is dangerous, and the second without the first is constricting.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Yeah, there's a big difference between being hurt and being injured. I'd go so far as to say that most athletes will deal with both during their career. Learning to manage it is truly an art. If you're too conservative you leave a lot on the table. Being too aggressive absolutely will get you injured. The one consistent thing though that research shows is that if you are considtently doing workouts that you would rate as a 10/10 on your own internal uncalibrated scale, you are at much higher risk for injury. The art of knowing how hard to push yourself isn't something that people just intuitively know. It takes experience of failing in both directions to nail the sweet spot. It's not impossible to learn, but I agree that most athletes don't even have it nailed. Thats one of the things a good coach is for.

amelius 6y ago

> Every backpacker, thru-hiker, or endurance athlete knows how to suffer. This is nothing special, however. Every student learns how to suffer too.

parliament32 6y ago
Emotional and mental burdens are nothing compared to your body screaming at you to stop 16 hours into an ultramarathon.

__mharrison__ 6y ago

As someone who has done a couple ultra marathons, I think they are 30% physical, 10% nutrition, and the remainder is mental.

fao_ 6y ago

This reminds me of the continuum concept: We had traded our slightly too small aluminium canoe for a much too big dugout. In this vessel carved from a single tree, seventeen Indians at one time travelled with us. With all their baggage added to ours and everyone aboard, the vast canoe still looked rather empty. Portaging it, this time with only four or five Indians to help, over half a mile of boulders beside a large waterfall was depressing to contemplate. It meant placing logs across the path of the canoe and hauling it, inch by inch, in the merciless sun, slipping inevitably into the crevices between the boulders whenever the canoe pivoted out of control and scraping one's shins, ankles and whatever else one landed on against the granite. We had done the portage before with the small canoe, and the two Italians and I, knowing what lay ahead, spent several days dreading the hard work and pain. On the day lye arrived at Arepuchi Falls we were primed to suffer and started off grimfaced and hating every moment, to drag the thing over the rocks. When it swung sideways, so heavy was the rogue pirogue, it several times pinned one of us to the burning rock until the others could move it off. A quarter of the way across all ankles were bleeding. Partly by way of begging off for a minute, I jumped up on a high rock to photograph the scene. From my vantage point and momentary dis-involvement, I noticed a most interesting fact. Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything and swearing non-stop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest, Indians, were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle: they relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and were especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held barebacked against the scorching granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest, enjoying his relief. All were doing the same work; all were experiencing strain and pain. There was no difference in our situations except that we had been conditioned by our culture to believe that such a combination of circumstances constituted an unquestionable low on the scale of well-being and were quite unaware that we had any option in the matter. The Indians, on the other hand, equally unconscious of making a choice, were in a particularly merry state of mind, revelling in the camaraderie; and, of course, they had had no long build-up of dread to mar the preceding days. Each forward move was for them a little victory. As I finished photographing and rejoined the team, I opted out of the civilized choice and enjoyed, quite genuinely, the rest of the portage. Even the barks and bruises I sustained were reduced with remarkable ease to nothing more significant than what they indeed were: small hurts which would soon heal and which required neither an unpleasant emotional reaction, such as anger, self pity or resentment, nor anxiety at how many more there might be before the end of the haul. On the contrary, I found myself appreciative of my excellently designed body, which would patch itself up with no instructions or decisions from me.

parentheses 6y ago

Goggins

gumby 6y ago

Being in the backcountry has an advantage/disadvantage: when you're days from the nearest trailhead you have little choice but to continue.* When you are, say, in a PhD program, every day you have the option of throwing in the towel. I feel like sticking through the latter is psychologically more difficult. * I've only had to set a broken limb (arm) once in the backcountry. In that case we distributed that person's gear and spent three days getting out. On a different trip: very painful/bloody feet; luckily we were only about five miles from our destination so we took turns helping the victim walk out under his own power.

neurobashing 6y ago

Makes me think of boot camp. Once you realize Parris Island is as much a mental exercise as physical, it completely changes. Yeah an hour in the sand pit doing mountain-climbers after you just humped 10 miles is a bit tiring, but you just have to keep doing it. You just have to keep telling your limbs to go. The point is to teach you your limit is far, far beyond what you think it is.

perrygeo 6y ago

Great article. In long distance endurance sports especially, "suffering" is an essential of the game. Persistence pays off far more than raw talent. You'll feel aches, pains, hunger, technical problems, weather, nagging injuries ... yet the only thing you can do is keep going. There's an obvious tension between what your body is telling you ("Hey slow down and rest. You're not running from a predator. You've got plenty of food. There's pizza and beer at home. Why are you doing this?") and your athletic goals. Success is all about planning, preparing, pacing to avoid the obvious causes of suffering for as long as possible. Then when fatigue inevitably hits, recognizing those mental states for what they are: a distraction. Trust your preparation and continue to focus on the path ahead. It starts to sound very much like meditation. There's a interesting theory in exercise physiology called the "Central governor" - your brain unconsciously monitors signals throughout the body and if it detects anything that could potentially damage vital systems, activity will be shut down directly _causing_ what we experience as fatigue. I find it fascinating that the limits of human endurance could based on our brain's unconscious decision making ability. I wonder if training (in the sports sense) is similar to training a neural network - feed a variety of inputs about physical conditions, continually tune predictions about which signals are safe vs unsafe for the vital organs. IOW "learning to suffer" might be a physical process by which we improve athletic performance through optimizing our fatigue calculations.

YinglingLight 6y ago
The peak endurance runner looks akin to a skeleton. The peak sprinter, bursting with life. Humans were made for spurts of activity followed by long periods of rest. Same is true for the work world.
- jasonladuke0311 6y ago
  That fallacy has been parroted on fitness forums (fora?) for almost two decades. There is a big dose of selection bias when looking at any elite athlete.

bufordtwain 6y ago

Apparently some people don't have enough naturally-produced suffering? They feel the need to manufacture it by (over)doing something that should be enjoyable.

deleted 6y ago

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thehappypm 6y ago

I'm a really big hiker, and I really understand what the author is saying when she says backpacking is mostly mental. A cold, rainy day where you don't have enough layers, all your clothes are wet, and it's another 9 miles through mud and mountains to the nearest shelter is suffering and downright scary. Looking up a 3000 foot rock scramble with a heavy pack when you've already covered too many miles and you're hungry is suffering. But -- I don't think it's a good idea to ignore injury. That isn't the "Good" kind of suffering. If your skin is coming off your feet or your knees are swelling like crazy.. pushing through is kind of dumb.

jokoon 6y ago

Noam chomsky said he believed that aging is caused by people failing to get through pain. Or something like that. I wish I could find the quote.

k__ 6y ago

Persistence and the will to learn and adapt are the path to success. If you give up, you don't have a chance. If you always make the same errors, you don't have a chance either.

Bakary 6y ago

Sounds to me like suffering fetishism and the association of it with moral worth.

oblib 6y ago

I have read way too many of these kinds of stories. Thru-hikers are akin to long distance runners.(For some of them) Their goal is to brag about how many miles they walked and how grueling it was, and that's exactly what this author does. I have backpacked for close to 50 years now and there are a few types of hikers I've run across that have sucked up my time or just been obnoxious to meet on the trails and by far thru-hikers are likely to be obnoxious. I've had them hike into my camp at night, tell me this is where they've planned to setup for the night, and then demand I give them water because they ran out, and ask for supplies like bandages, neosporin, aspirin, tylenol, and even food. I have cut trips short because of that. It happened so often I quit using hiking trails and that I can kind of thank them for because I'd been leery of bushwhacking far off trail and getting lost. I had to sharpen my mapping skills and learn how to remember how to get back to my starting point. That was actually pretty easy once I put it in practice and now with a topo map and compass I always know where I am so I can wander aimlessly in our forests for days, which are the same forests the author talks about blistering her feet. I've been hiking here for over 30 years and never blistered my feet. And I wouldn't consider myself to be anything but stupid if I did. Had she taken the time to get off trail and explore the "hills and hollers" here she could have wrote about the stunning beauty everywhere you go no matter what direction you take. Instead she told everyone how miserable it was but she was tough enough to take it and you should learn how to "suffer" too. If you really want to learn how to suffer come here and hike those trails in the summer and don't use any bug repellent. The ticks and chiggers will give you a serious lesson in suffering and it'll last at least a couple weeks after you've left.

togs 6y ago

When it comes to suffering, for me it tends to be like "I'll be much happier when this is over", or "Oh God, make it stop", like I'm on the verge of throwing up in my mind and waiting for merciful release. And then eventually I get fit and more attractive and slightly more confident. Sometimes I even want the pain. No idea why. It's certainly not rational. Thinking about it probably makes it worse. So Nike probably got it close ("Just do it."), but I think a more accurate slogan is "Don't think about it beforehand--just do it, y'know, for a little while, unless it hurts really bad, in which case you should stop doing it and consider seeking medical attention." Suffering sucks. It sucks especially when there's nobody to see/tell about it/nobody cares, no prestige, or sense of moral worth to be derived from it. If I jog by myself, I'm a nobody. If I jog on a team I'm part of a story. I think this is why jogging around the neighborhood doesn't stick. It just sucks, all by itself, and you may even get heckled for it. Nobody cares, and if they do it's for the wrong reasons. By myself I'm not contributing to anything besides my ego. I think my class bias shows clearly here. This middle-class type of suffering is voluntary... I was going to write more, but that's all I have for now.

cafard 6y ago

Ah, the "pain in my heels". I ran myself into a case of plantar fasciitis about the beginning of 2019, tried to run through it, and lost about four months of running. I am still surprised that I was stupid enough to do this, having lost some weeks almost forty years ago to trying to run through a twinge in my knee. Now, back in the days when I was a decent recreational runner, there was seldom a race in which I didn't wonder, about 2/3 of the way through, what in the world had caused me to sign up, and didn't think that I really shouldn't do this again. I'm not really sure what learning was involved there--it was mostly I think stubbornness, being determined that I was going to have run part of the race and suffered the discomfort without finishing.