How to Deal with Pain and Suffering: The Calm Conversation

Putting Space Between Stimulus and Response

My brother had called and texted, telling me to find a place to stay in Pennsylvania. Like any mid 20’s know it all, listening to my older brother wasn’t something that came naturally. It wasn’t even snowing at that point in the 4 hour drive from Penn State back home to the Washington DC suburbs of Northern Virginia. It didn’t help that we were three post collegiate runners living on shoe string budgets where an extra night in a hotel would actually put a sizable dent into our bank accounts.

I’d started the journey the day before with my two teammates and friends Moises Joseph and Nikeya Green. We ventured up to Penn State to compete in one of their indoor meets and like most trips with Moises and Nikeya we never came home without at least one story to tell. But this isn’t about the races themselves, but instead about our experience coming home.

You see, we were about to encounter one of the busiest blizzards that the Norther Virginia area had experienced in almost 100 years, that would limit us to trudging through snow, doing repeat 800m underneath an overpass, and repeats on a track with waist high snow everywhere except lane one for the next few weeks. Being young, brash, and with a little dumb luck of having Moises, who grew up in Florida, driving and myself, who grew up in Texas, navigating undoubtedly compounded the problem. Generally a Texan and Floridian don’t have the best winter driving expertise. With our only Virginian, Nikeya, in the back seat, we drove along with only a slight fear of the impending weather.

The weather was actually quite deceiving. It was simply cold all the way until we made it to Virginia. As soon as we crossed the river on 495, things began to change drastically. The snow began to pummel our car as the freeway became an icy and slushy mess. Needless to say, in Mo’s rear wheel drive car we weren’t exactly built for dealing with this mess. Despite taking it exceedingly cautious, we found ourselves in the far left lane of a four lane highway taking our time. We knew not to be in any rush and Mo was handling the situation as best he could as us and a number of other seemingly bright people were out on the slush covered freeway that night.

And everything was fine, except at one instance we must have hit a patch of slush or ice in a particular way, and our car began to spin. All of the sudden we were performing a nice little 360 across the freeway. As time slowed, we spun so that we were facing the shining headlight of the middle two lanes of on coming traffic. Luckily for us we kept spinning and eventually ended up in the far right lane facing the right direction.

What is interesting about this story though is not the sweet maneuver across the freeway, but instead what happened during it. You see, as Mo lost control an interesting thing occurred. First, both of our perceptions changed as time began to slow. Secondly, we had the calmest conversation in the world.

“Well, this is not good Mo.” “No. This is definitely not good.”

We both said in the calmest, most monotone voices that either of us could muster. Meanwhile in the back of the car, Nikeya wasn’t so calm, in fact she was screaming. You can’t blame Nikeya as this would seemingly be the “normal” reaction. But after we settled into our spot on the far right side of the freeway and relished our escaping harm, we had a good laugh about the calm conversation me and Mo were having in the front, with Nikeya’s rather opposite reaction in the back seat of the car.

Following this surreal moment, the fun didn’t stop as we eventually had to push Mo’s car up a steep icy hill before getting going just long enough to make it to Nikeya’s house where we simply abandoned our cars and crashed at for the next few days, even though our homes were only a few miles away.

The point isn’t the crazy story though, it’s that moment. The moment of calmness during chaos. It was the calm conversation.

The Run

5 miles in, 2 miles to go. After starting at a relatively controlled 5:30 pace we had finally ventured down where my watch was now showing splits of under 5:00 pace for each passing mile. Although there isn’t anything special or different about going from splits that were just a shade over 5 to ones that began with 4, it can play with your mind. As long as the pace is over 5, you can convince yourself that you are okay and that your still clicking off at hard but controlled tempo. Now, we were venturing into the other side of that line, even if it was largely symbolic.

The issue wasn’t the slight change of pace, but instead the fact that after 5 miles of cranking it down, I was starting to hurt and we still had 2 more miles to go. Normally in these spots on longer grinding workouts, I go through a routine of essentially convincing myself I’m fine. I’d learned these tricks of the trade through countless miles at near 5 minute pace through over a decade of training.

Step one was simple; listen to my breathing. So for a brief moment I would redirect my attention inwards and listen to my breathe go in and out and visualize my chest rising and falling. For as long as I’ve run, I’ve been a fairly relaxed breather. It was a way to compensate for some asthma issues I had growing up, so I naturally adopted a style that kept my breathing under control for as long as possible. It wasn’t until I was in the lung searing depths of fatigue that I would let it go and hyperventilate like the rest of the running world.

Step two was the talk test. If I couldn’t convince myself that my breathing was under control so that meant I still had more in the tank, I’d resort to talking. The logic was that if I could still blurt out a sentence or two, then I’m fine to keep going. A Younger and a slightly less mature 19 year old me actually put this to the test with my friend Andy by running right at our lactate threshold, as measured by a lactate measuring device, and tested how long of a sentence we could get away with saying without feeling that pressing need to breathe. After our scientific testing, the sentence that survived was a slightly more immature version of the sentence we now stick with which is “I feel good, I feel great, I want to communicate.” We found that we should start to feel the urge to take in another breathe during communicate and if we felt it before then, we were in trouble.

If I made it through the talk test, I could normally fake my way through it for a bit and convince myself to man up and suffer for just a little more. You see, during these long tempo runs, it was all about tricking myself.

I was trying to delay the panic attack. No, not a real panic attack. But that moment that we’ve all experienced where our body starts making the connection that we might be a little over our heads and that the pain that is building might be a little more than we want to feel for how long we still have to go. If you let your body fully come to this realization, then what occurs next is the panic attack. You get a shot of stress hormones that flows through your body and your mind goes a million miles a minute, freaking out that you won’t be able to make it to the finish. Our minds begin to race and we turn into the worst, most impulsive versions of ourselves. To make matters worse, as this wave of panic flows through you, it triggers your physical posture to change. Our running mechanics start to go crazy as our arms start to flail, our head starts drifting backward, and our posture starts to resemble a strange contorted version of our previous self. All of that, from our mind simply realizing the pain and stress we were under at the moment.

That’s what my simple tricks were developed to keep at bay. I’d learned through the years that if I could delay spastic running Steve from making an appearance, I could run or race faster. It was all about keeping myself calm.

But, as I ran that 7 miler with the sole job of toeing Brian and Yonas along for a ride, I went through a different process. Instead of attempting to fake my way through it, convince my brain otherwise to the obviously increasing sense of effort, I embraced it. No, I didn’t consciously say “I’m going to embrace the pain” or some lame mantra. Instead, naturally I had a calm conversation. There was no holding the impending panic at bay. Instead, it was simple.

“Well This is starting to hurt a little bit. Makes sense, just a gentle reminder from my body that we’re running fast now. Yonas and Brian are still hanging on. It’ll probably start to hurt a little bit more.”

There was no panic, no judgment, no rationalizing or trying to fake my way through anything. Instead, it was rather simple. I had a calm clear conversation in my head that assessed where I was with no judgment or jumping to conclusions afterward. There wasn’t a jump from this is starting to hurt..so I should do X. Instead, it was a simple acknowledgment of the statement with no connected response. In essence, it was as if I was simply an observer of myself.

So the run went on and we continued to work down the pace over the next 2 miles, with no panic or emotional reaction in sight. This experience continued for the rest of the year as I began to find that even during intense, race-like efforts, I was getting the same experience.

I’d made a breakthrough. I wondered where this ability had come from and was attempting to relate it to other experiences I’d had. And that’s when it hit me:

I was experiencing the calm conversation.

Slowing The World Down

You see in the world of neuroscience, where people smarter than me study the brain, they’ve figured out how to explain this. There’s an actual perception of the sensation and then there is an emotional reaction to that sensation. While one might think it is simply a linear path from sensation to reaction, what researchers have found is that there’s an individual nature to it. In other words, someone can have a greater awareness to the sensation but have a much reduced emotional reaction to it, or vice versa.

So when we are under a state of stress, fatigue, or emotion we are triggered to respond in certain ways thanks to the hormonal milieu that floods our bodies during such states. These hormones might bias us to behave in certain ways. For instance, it makes sense that if we saw a lion in the jungle in the past that our bodies would flood our body with stress hormones to prepare us for escaping that predicament. The hormones would bias us towards performing certain actions and being attuned to certain perceptions and sensations.

The thing is that how we respond and react to these stressors and the bodies hormonal nudging can be altered.

And in fact, with people who are experts at mindfulness, they’ve found this disconnect. You get the strange finding of people having either the same or increased activity in the areas in the brain related to experiencing/attending to a particular sensation, but a much decreased activity level in the areas related to emotional response. In a study by Lutz in 2012, they compared how expert meditators in comparison to novices responded to a painful stimuli. What they found that the intensity of the stimuli was the same, but the experts found less unpleasantness than the novices. Additionally, the experts showed reduced anxiety towards anticipation of the pain and a quicker habituation to the pain once it came. In other words, they adapted to the painful stimuli much quicker.

And as I make the case in my recent books, this process is likely what occurs during “The calm conversation. While I’ve had glimpses of this throughout my running career, it’s only been as I’ve gotten older and perhaps calmer that I’ve regularly experienced it. And perhaps, just like mindfulness training needs a lot of practice and work until you can regularly get this effect, it probably takes just as long to translate it to running.

While attempting to avoid getting “new age” on you, running in many senses is an act of meditation. When we go on longer runs by ourselves or even with a less than talkative group, we’re alone with our thoughts and we decide what to do with those thoughts. As pain or fatigue increases it forces us to attempt to cope and figure out what the best strategy is to deal with negative thoughts that creep into our awareness.

And as shown by a study by Wilson in 2014, people don’t like being alone in their own head:

“What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid,”

-Steve

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