> 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

> 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).