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It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress and wastes their time: In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is m

by LanceH 3y ago

It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress and wastes their time: In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also just uses up more of their reserve. Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around the track with the misery of running in wet shoes. Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's about making them hurt more." Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.

Xcelerate 3y ago
> It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points. What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me? It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).

by LanceH 3y ago

Xcelerate 3y ago

> It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points. What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me? It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).