A Winner Runs Through It

A few facts and some strategies for pushing through the pain.

November 28, 2012

"Run through it."

"Dig deep, now."

"You've got to want this."

You've heard them before, and probably used them too: the cliches spouted to motivate runners in that critical moment when the wall of pain and fatigue from a tough workout or race reach their evil zenith. Those cliches are as much a part of running as . . . well, pain and fatigue.

Coaxing a runner through that wall is one of the sport's greatest challenges. It's the not-so-secret ingredient in the sport's formula for success: run + run harder = PR.

Learning to push through the pain requires more than a few cliches; in fact, it may be even more complicated than many runners and coaches think. Top sports psychologists and researchers say that to do so successfully, you have to understand a few things about the brain, and as much as you possibly can about yourself as a runner. Even then, you're up to a challenge as complex as the brain itself.


Dominic Micklewright studies fatigue and body/brain interplay at the Sport, Performance and Fatigue Research Unit at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, in Colchester, United Kingdom. Micklewright says the problem is that the sensation of pain isn't directly related to physical changes in the body; it's a reaction to a signal sent to the brain. In short, pain is literally all in our heads.

According to Micklewright, as an athlete increases speed in active muscles, hundreds, even thousands, of neurological impulses arrive in the brain. As the athlete works harder, this neurological deluge intensifies. That's when things get complicated.

"What muddies the waters is that pain is very subjective. No two people's experience is alike," Micklewright says.

In other words, one person's "excruciating" could be another's "tolerable."

Micklewright points out that when some runners compete in front of a crowd, they say they don't notice the pain in the same way as when they run alone–evidence, he says, that each of us, depending on the situation, can process the raw data differently. He says this point is further underscored by an odd reality shared by people who are ticklish: If you tickle yourself, you don't react; if someone else does the tickling, you end up giggling like a 2-year-old.

And if you think your gregarious Uncle Leo, who holds his hand over the candle flame every year at Thanksgiving in a display of macho bravado, tolerates pain better than the shy kid brother who used to yell bloody murder when you jabbed him in the ribs, it's not your imagination. According to John S. Raglin, professor and director of graduate studies in the kinesiology department at Indiana University, "There are inherent differences in pain tolerances. For example, extroverts tend to have a higher tolerance for pain."

These differences in the way individual runners process pain make it difficult to formulate a generalized approach to getting through it. Researchers still have work to do.

One conclusion is clear: A one-runner-fits-all approach does not work. Runners not only interpret pain differently, but are also motivated by diverse reasons to run. A runner who simply wants to beat his goal time each race is, in all likelihood, not going to push himself quite as hard as the would-be scholarship winner or Olympic trials qualifier.

"Even if [two] runners are 90 percent the same, the 10 percent that they're different will be what's important," says Darren Treasure, the performance psychology consultant for Nike's Oregon Project, the Portland-based program headed by Alberto Salazar that trains many of the nation's elites, including Mo Farah, Galen Rupp and Dathan Ritzenhein.

"There comes a moment when a runner has to ask, 'Do I step up or step back?' That individual asks, 'Can I do this? It hurts,'" Treasure says. "You have to become more in tune with what's happening."