I thought this applied perfectly to climbing
“There is a certain amount of pain that we must experience in life. There is no escaping it. Life just isn’t easy and there is a certain amount of suffering that we will all have to endure,” local UNLV philosophy professor explains to me on a climbing trip to Mount Charleston.
He said, “This is the only theory I’ve come up with that is really useful.”
“Imagine the amount of pain you will experience contained in a box. You can’t escape the pain but you can decide which form of pain you want to experience. You must either experience the pain of failure or the pain of working hard towards goals. Life comes down to a deciding the ratio of hard work to failure.
My students often choose laziness over failure because they have tried before and failed and in some ways it is easier not to even try because there is at least an excuse for sub par performance. If they try to do math and still fail they have acknowledged that it was worth their time to pursue and have proven to themselves that they are not capable. It’s easier to dismiss math as not important and not cool because no one sees you fail.
Another teacher at the school is notorious for assigning copious amounts of homework to prepare students for AP government test. When students were complaining about it, I tried to teach them the pain box theory and ask them if they would rather experience the pain of writing papers and reading now or the pain of failing the AP test later.
Teachers often make the decision to suffer in different ways. If I suffer on the weekends to plan good lessons class goes well and students are successful. If I have fun or relax and plan boring lessons I suffer when students are in the classroom. Clearly I can’t spend all of my free time planning amazing lessons so the ratio of suffering is somewhere in between.
The other part of the theory is that as you become more successful it takes exponentially increasing amounts of effort to decrease the suffering caused by failure. As you become very nearly perfect at an activity it is very difficult to improve without expending huge amounts of energy.
As usual this applies perfectly to cycling. In a race you decide if you want to suffer chasing down a break or attacking. You decide if you want push through the pain on the five mile hill. In the final sprint you decide just how much you can make your legs burn and how many risks you are willing to take. The winners are those who suffer the most while they train and on the race course. Winning brings happiness but as you advance it becomes more an more difficult to improve. Winning the Tour de France takes almost complete devotion to the hard work side of the pain box. Most people do not have the drive to do this.
In my own cycling career I’ve decided not to focus on success and downplayed the pain of failure by making it less important. My excuse is that I stayed late to help my kids and am usually too exhausted to do anything but base pace after work. And the pain of sprinting to not get last seems less than the pain of watching my kids fail and knowing there was something I could have done to fix it.
