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Dealing With Pain...

Saturday, 30 April 2016 00:10

ATTENTION: Great racing at Falls Duathlon this morning. Several records were rewritten. Story and photos on Monday.  RESULTS

By Carrie Cheadle (triathlon.competitor.com)

Pain. Suffering. Misery.

As an endurance athlete, you’re going to encounter pain. You’re also expected to be able to tolerate and manage that pain. Even love it. The experience of pain is a complex combination of physiological and psychological factors. It is both a sensory and an emotional experience and some of us deal with it better than others.

If you haven’t put in the hours (not trained) and you don’t feel prepared for your race (not confident), you are going to suffer. It is going to hurt no matter how mentally tough you are. That being said, your ability to tolerate the pain of exertion is as much mental as it is physical....

If you find yourself dreading the pain of race day or find that at the end of a race you had more to give, it’s time to dive into the psychology of suffering. Here are three of the most important things you can do to go deeper into the pain cave.

1. Trust it Will Pass
There was a fantastic research study done with ten former Olympic cyclists that explored the cognitive strategies they used in order to deal with the pain of exertion during training and competition1. One of the strategies used to manage the pain was to establish an end to the pain; the point at which the pain they were experiencing would stop.

Oftentimes, it’s the emotional experience of the pain that convinces you to give up. As humans, we have an innate desire to always try to gain some ground beneath us and feel like we are in control. Trying to gain control is your way of managing your feelings of discomfort, fear, and anxiety. On race day, the quickest way to eliminate those uncomfortable emotions and gain control is to stop moving. READ MORE