Run-Down Forums

[Paul]

Couple of things here:

1) There are a number of sports where you can still be quite effective even with a slight injury. There are some events where the slightest injury makes such a difference in your performance that it would be best not to show up.

2) Workouts are finite. So you are able to figure when the discomfort is going to end. It doesn't matter if you are doing a 20 minute threshold run or 12 x 400m. The discomfort levels may be different but you know there is an end in sight. This, to me, is the big difference between comparing POW's and Concentration Camp victims with running, because the former do not know when their misery will cease. It remains open ended.

3) The threshold for pain varies greatly between individuals. Someone's beginnings of discomfort could be off the scale for others.

As I go through the posts on this thread, it occurs to me that Jogger's Digest has actually gone after the low threshold market. Where else would you get advice to find a nice flat 2-3 mile route that you could walk/jog in 30 minutes. Or as Mike Logan at 10ktruth says to John Bingham (aka "the penguin"), why don't you get off your butt and tackle a few hills!!

I also prefer the use of the term discomfort over the term pain because pain has some injury connotations to it.

Paul

[Micah Ward]

Good points Paul, especially 2. Enduring the pain when you don't know when it will end is infinitely more difficult than anything else. That is why I think the key is the mental strength to endure.

Point 3 could be explained by some people being tougher mentally than others. Go back to Race For The Soul and especially Topher Gaylord. The pain was evident but look at the mental attitude he maintained!! Never got down, kept plugging away, smiled and finished.

And finally, you are right about the difference between discomfort and pain.

[Dan]

Don't forget about Brett Favre's addiction to prescription pain killers...

No doubt there's a huge mental component, but there's also a threshold that has to be different from one individual to the next as far as when something registers as painful. Beyond that point becomes a mental issue, but up to that would seem to be physical and/or genetic. Whether either component can be measured is questionable, though.

Dan

[Distance_Guru]

In the cases of both the Joggers Digest crowd and the Navy SEAL you end up going back to my theory about training. Why don't Jogger's Digest followers do training that leads to discomfort, because they are not trained to. Why can a Navy SEAL take extreme discomfort and hardship and still perform things that most people would find very difficult even under the best of circumstances, because they are very well trained to do just that. Although I will admit that to be a SEAL you are required to start off with a certain level of "natural" toughness.

I also like the idea of using the term discomfort rather than pain in discribing effort related vs injury related sensations. Although there have been times when I would have definatly described some effort related sensations as pain
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