The pain in gain falls mainly on the brain…

You ever heard the phrase, “No pain, no gain”? Sure you have. And you probably know that most athletes know this is a load of rubbish. The correct idea is that if you exercise to the point of pain, you are exercising too hard – to the point of injury if you have not already injured yourself.

Yet there is some truth to this phrase nevertheless. The problem with using words or phrases as catch-all descriptions is that they are so black and white. And so the English language (and I presume any other language) evolves. Like paleontologists and evolutionists who search for missing links, new words are created to ease the stark contrast between black and white. Words such as “gray”. But then people think, now there are only three things, black, white, and gray. So others try to fill in the gaps by inventing “shades of gray”. And so the battle of specificity rages on eternal.

My point is that there must be some pain sometimes. It is a matter of shades of pain, of degrees. So you work out and the next day you feel pain because your muscles are sore. As long as the pain is not too severe and you heal in a day or so, nothing harmful has occurred and you have this good feeling of having worked out. So I guess there is no one alive who can work out without feeling some pain.

I read or heard this a while back: If you did not know how old you were, or when you were born, how old would you feel? The implied message here is that you should not place so much importance on your age. If you dwell on it and accept what is expected of you in our culture then you probably shouldn’t be doing or attempting to do what you are doing because you are too old.

I invented the title of this post, adapting a well known phrase for it in order to show that pain is relative and heavily influenced by your mental state or by your attitude. Having said that, a young person heals really quickly and does not generally speaking have any strange pains. But at my age strange things happen.

I take a lot longer to heal. I sometimes get these weird pains like someone is jabbing a needle into one of my joints or muscles. Just like someone has a voodoo doll of me somewhere and is sticking pins in it. Heck, sometimes I feel like I am the voodoo doll. So I feel like maybe some high energy cosmic ray the size of a pea has just ripped through my body at the speed of light, leaving a trail of destruction in it’s wake. (I’m fond of that cosmic ray thingy, especially for facetiously explaining why my brain sometimes skips).

Then there is the constant background pain that gradually seeps into your body as you age like some sort of low level background radiation that you unconsciously block out. You only know it’s there when you have those rare moments of pain free existence. It’s all good really, and part of life. Nothing special or unique about it or about me, I’m just reporting it from my perspective.

So where do I feel I am in the grand scheme of my life? I say I have a good 50 more years at least of running and working out, of learning and self-improvement. I can see nothing but an increase in my future activities and in the challenges I take up.

And I remember now where I heard the quip about what if you don’t know how old you are. I heard it from Fauja Singh, the 94 year old marathon man. Google him, and when you do DON’T fall into the trap of thinking, “ya, but he has always been fit and healthy and a natural, I have *real* problems…” That would be bullshit, wouldn’t it?

What do you think you should put your energy into? Into self-pity or self-improvement?