Is this Dangerous? A lesson learned in (almost) dying

On running, suffering, and learning to play with pain

I ALMOST DIED last night.

It felt that way, anyway.

There I was, stumbling down the path, huffing and puffing, as though an extremely lazy elephant were sprawled across my ribcage.

Before I could finish catching my breath, fitness watches buzzed all around me and the cadence of footsteps picked back up. The words “TWO MINUTES: RUN” flashed across my own watchface, in all caps.

I groaned. Or tried to. It came out more like a disgruntled rasp—a death rattle I think it’s called. I’d scarcely managed to recover from the previous interval, and it was already time to run again. How was I going to do this for <checks watch> eleven more times?¹

☙

I apologize in advance. Today I’m going to do that annoying thing runners sometimes do, which is humble brag about a deep life lesson they learn while pounding out the miles.

To be fair, there’s also a decent amount of pain and personal humiliation baked into this one, which will hopefully offset the cringey self-congratulatory tone we runners can be prone to. And while it may resonate with other endurance athletes, what I’m sharing today is relevant to anyone who regularly has to choose between avoiding discomfort or embracing pain for a bigger purpose. Which, I think, is all of us.

To set the stage: it’s coming up on marathon training season. It’sthe time of year I have to start squeezing in miles wherever I can—before work, during lunch, in that narrow gap between dinner and my next existential crisis.

Most of my runs are long and slow—that’s how I like it. But on their own, those runs won’t get me across the finish line. At least not without collapsing in a heap of tight hip flexors and life regrets.

Which is why, once a week, to build power and aerobic capacity, I’m supposed to do speedwork, also known as interval training, also known (by me) as a violation of the Geneva Conventions. These workouts come in many varieties, but generally involve alternating “short” (but never short enough!) speed intervals that drive your heart rate up near its maximum with recovery periods—then repeating that cycle until you start wondering whose sick idea this was (spoiler: your own). If at any point you feel like you may be dying, you’re probably doing it right.

These workouts are short but intense—or rather, harrowing. Like the harrowing of Hades. I don’t think St. Bernard of Clairvaux was right when he said the road to hell is paved with good intentions—I’m pretty sure it’s paved with V02 max intervals.

They say torture is better with company, so sometimes I attend a local speed clinic run by a literal Olympic marathoner. The workouts he designs are notoriously brutal (for my wimpy lungs, anyway). They’re designed not just to push you, but to drag your cardiovascular system kicking and screaming to the very edge of its limits, and then just dangle it over the cliff for a while.

Last night’s clinic was particularly miserable: it was humid, there was little shade in the park, and the pre-warmed breeze blowing in off the harbour smelled like algae and goose droppings. To top it off, I hadn’t been in a while, so I was a little out of form, the workout was longer than usual, and… I could tack on a few more complaints, but I’ll leave it there. I trust I’ve painted a realistic picture of speedwork for you—it’s painted by Edvard Munch. 👇

Actual depiction of me during a speed workout.

Remember that annoying life lesson I mentioned? Here it comes…

For me, the hardest part of speedwork isn’t physical—it’s mental.

It’s learning to touch the flame of my discomfort. It’s overriding all the internal signals telling me to slow down, or stop, or scream obscenities into the malodorous winds. And it’s figuring out how to do all this in a safe and controlled way, not just hurling myself into the fire of a workout and relying on momentum (or pure dissociation) to carry me through.

It’s hard. It’s painful. And in its own way, terrifying.

For a long time, just knowing the pain that was to come made me tense and anxious before I even began an intense workout. Even now I catch myself holding back on challenging runs—not because I fear actual injury (or demise), but because I fear the pain itself. What limitations it might reveal. Where it might lead. How it’s going to feel in the meantime. I hover near the flame but stop just short of touching it.

Strangely, holding back like that generates a tension that makes everything harder. When I’m clenching my fists or shoulders, when I’m internally bracing against the raw intensity of the experience, I can’t relax into the pain, can’t trust myself, can’t fully engage with what’s being asked of me.

Worst of all, though, I never get the thrill of breaking through my limits—because to break through them, I have to feel them. And feeling my limits sucks. So I hold back.

The Pain of Avoiding Pain

I’ve been running most of my life, but I’ve always been afraid of speed and the pain it brings up—this is why, in highschool track, I always asked to run the longest races (then 1600 m) rather than sprints. It’s why, today, I tend towards longer, slightly slower endurance races like marathons. Something in me is less afraid of the more drawn out, almost passive pain of enduring than of the shorter, sharper pain of speed and intensity.

Outside of running, I’ve faced pain in much the same way: facing moments of pain not with courage or creativity, but with resignation and fear—opting for situations that require me to “endure” distress rather than engage meaningfully with it.

What I’ve learned is that it’s impossible in this life to fully escape pain. Avoiding one kind of pain inadvertently opens the door to other forms of pain. Out of a fear of certain kinds of pain, I’ve accepted situations that wear me down to the point of nearly destroying the God-given self inside me. What looked on the outside like endurance, patience, or longsuffering in my relationships was often thinly veiled enabling, codependency, or fawning—choosing the dull, soul-destroying pain of acquiescence over the sharper, life-giving pain of setting boundaries or standing up for myself.

I think what scares me most about pain or discomfort—in life or in running—is that I’ll give it too much of myself. That, in avoiding constructive forms of pain, I’ll lose myself again in the algae-infested slough of passivity and powerlessness. I’ll let everything and everyone deplete me again.

Last year, I began working more intentionally on these inner demons as they related to my running. As trite as it may seem, speedwork—with all its self-chosen pain and intensity—is one of the things that’s helping me regain a more balanced and well-developed relationship with pain.

To ease my anxiety with it all, I started asking myself a question on these intense runs:

“Is this dangerous, or am I just uncomfortable?”

This one question has shifted my experience of pain and uncomfortable situations in running and beyond. Most of the time, I am “just” uncomfortable. (“Just,” here, not serving to minimize discomfort, but to differentiate it from situations that pose actual, immediate bodily harm.) Somehow, the simple act of naming discomfort allows me to stay with the experience rather than retreating or resigning myself. The ability to create inner space for awareness makes the pain feel more voluntary, and thus less scary, because I realize this pain is something I’m actively choosing—not something being forced on me.

Sometimes, of course, the discomfort is sharper or lasts longer, and I need to stop or slow down. But most often, what I’m dealing with are gradations of discomfort—and I’m getting to know them all. I’m becoming more connected to my constantly shifting window of tolerance around pain and discomfort. I’m learning that discomfort in service of a bigger goal is okay and often makes me feel more alive rather than less. I’m learning I can always choose to say no—or yes… Or slower, or faster, or first a drink of water.

Not all suffering is life-giving

These realizations are not just for running.

Uncomfortable experiences are part of life—hot weather, poor sleep, hard conversations, resurfaced memories, global uncertainty. And for those of us healing from trauma or serious life wounds, even everyday forms of discomfort can be enough to escalate us into a full-blown alarm mode inside. In the past, pain may have taught us to be cautious. Sometimes it taught us to leave, or protect ourselves. Sometimes it taught us to shut down, because it was not safe to express our pain. Those lessons taught us to survive and they were—are—wise in their rightful contexts.

But once we begin to heal… If we avoid all discomfort all the time, our lives and our windows of tolerance begin to shrink. Our world gets smaller.

If I stop doing speedwork, the world will not end, but the fitness I’ve managed to acquire—or could acquire with more training—will diminish. Likewise, if we avoid every form of discomfort in daily life, we may lose the capacity to visit certain places, try new things, take bolder risks, or ease into the stretch of our own alive-ness.

Some of the most meaningful aspects of life—and faith—require embracing pain in service of a higher calling. The longer I live, the more I believe that a huge part of building a meaningful life starts with learning to tell the difference between danger and discomfort, and choosing how I want to respond.

In an essay on martyrdom as a universal vocation, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware distinguishes between two forms of suffering:

1. Life-giving (creative) suffering has a purpose and makes us more free and alive

2. Destructive suffering is not tied to any larger purpose. It is often coersive, rote, or performative. Instead of making us more free and alive, it can lead to inner death.

Ware takes issue with the idea common among people of faith that suffering is inherently beneficial—only by relating to suffering in a creative way does it bring life.

And “only by confronting [suffering] affirmatively,” he says, “with willing acceptance, can we make the suffering creative.”

He’s talking about the interior stance we take toward life’s inevitable pain—emotional loss, personal disappointment, mental anguish, even the physical pain of a workout that feels like it came straight from hell.

He continues:

We can meet suffering with resentment and rebellious defiance, in which case it may well annihilate us spiritually. Or we can meet it with passive resignation, in which case it may act like an acid, corroding our character, making us unpersons, moral zombies. Or we can meet it actively, in a spirit of love; in which case the suffering can be accepted, offered, and through this offering transfigured.²

I run for many reasons. Here’s just one: like Liturgy, like fasting, like other forms of askesis, it gives me a place to play with the posture of offering, of chosen suffering.

So that when the real flames come, maybe I’ll know how to walk into them without holding back.

☙

Back to last night. As my watch buzzed again, I did think about quitting. Maybe grabbing an ice cream on the way home.

Instead I paused.

Is this dangerous, or just uncomfortable?

I returned to that question again and again throughout the workout, and eventually, I finished. It wasn’t my best, nor my worst, and I was neither the fastest nor the slowest, but I finished.

As I ran a few miles of cooldown, the sun was setting over the harbour. The breeze had softened, and I no longer noticed the smell. The lily pads and boats were bathed in pink light. My legs were tired but strong, and my heart—to the best of my knowledge—was still beating.

And in the afterglow of a slight runner’s high (another occasional benefit of intense speedwork), I was grateful—for the world, for what my body can do even when my mind is afraid, for the gift of even holier suffering that has brought life to the world.

I can choose to face discomfort creatively.
I can choose to do hard things for a time.
I can find glory on the other side…

All of us can.

Me after almost dying but in a good way.

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1. NOTE: I was never actually at risk of dying in the events described in this article. Yes, I find speedwork seriously challenging, but most people do. I have an inhaler, I know how to push myself without overdoing it. It just **REALLY** SUCKS IN THE MOMENT.

2. Bishop Kallistos Ware, “The Seed of the Church: Martyrdom as a Universal Vocation,” in The Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 111-126, here p. 116.