How to get better at embracing the suck

Improving your running performance involves a bit of suffering. While you shouldn’t actually be in physical pain when you’re training, being uncomfortable as you challenge new paces or work harder is part of the process–something endurance athletes often call “embracing the suck.” The good news: you can learn to get better at it.

Simon Marshall and Lesley Paterson, endurance coaches and authors of The Brave Athlete, call this type of suffering “exertional discomfort: the personal sufferfest that comes from increasing exercise intensity.” Paterson and Marshall clarify that when they refer to suffering they mean the feelings caused by the intensity of the running, and not pain caused by actual tissue damage.

Paterson and Mitchell suggest a two-pronged attack to become better at suffering. Here’s how to improve your ability to embrace the suck.

Get more experience

“Think about the suffering you’re not very good at and then force yourself to experience it more often in training,” Paterson and Mitchell say. New research suggests we can train our brains to reduce our perception of discomfort. While every running session shouldn’t send you to the pain cave, consider putting yourself in the path of physical and mental discomfort weekly.

Not sure how, exactly, to practise suffering? The possibilities are endless. Simply “enduring the burn” of anaerobic activity (i.e., running hard workouts) counts; so does dealing with the fatigue of a hard training block or a really tough race. Riding out the frustration or disappointment you feel when you don’t smash your goals is a form of suffering, and so is heading out the door on days when you feel unmotivated.

Learn coping strategies

You don’t need to plunge right into pain–there are strategies that will make your suffer-practice easier, or at least manageable.

Feedforward

Marshall and Paterson suggest trying “feedforward” as a method of building your acceptance of pain. “Feedforward is akin to mental time travel to think about the pain before it occurs,” they say. A form of advance planning, feedforward involves immersing yourself in the experience as if you were already there. “Cognitive neuroscientists have revealed that feedforward is a very effective tool for learning to cope with adversity because it helps us plan for all possible outcomes, rather than just hope everything turns out well.”

Segmentation

Our brains prefer things to be in manageable chunks. Marshall and Paterson suggest breaking down the pain you’re approaching into pieces–don’t think about the entire tough 60-minute workout; instead, focus on the 10-minute chunk that you’re in. “The neurological beauty of segmentation is that once the segment is completed, you get a mini-squirt of dopamine that resets the coping clock,” they explain. Another way to put this is, run the mile you’re in.

Thumb-tapping

Sure, it sounds odd, but it’s worth a try–”in pain management land, thumb tapping is simply a behavioural strategy to control attention and occupy working memory,” Marshall and Paterson say. Make two relaxed fists, similar to holding a pen in each hand, and gently tap the side of your index finger as though you were pressing the clicker on a pen. You can tap both thumbs in time with your leg turnover, or use it to set your cadence; “the rhythmic repetition also provides a metronomic cue for the legs or arms to keep moving,” Marshall and Paterson say. Thumb tapping is ideal when you’re moving through “short bursts of hell–a hill repeat, the last mile of a race, or moments when it’s really hurting.”

Remember that consistently injecting periods of suffering into your training will help you get better at moving through it. You’ll soon be a pro at navigating the home stretch of a tough race, or blasting through the final nasty interval in a hard training session.