I confess: I have often answered the question of why I run by saying, “Because I have fun.” Then I thought about this answer and wondered if it was really fair to say that I enjoy doing it. Mind you, I find it fun to see a show or a funny movie, I laugh a lot with the friends I love when I’m with them, I enjoy doing a thousand other things but can running be categorized among these types of fun? Mmm.
Honestly, no. When I run I don’t enjoy it: I struggle, I feel the body as I don’t normally feel it, I feel every muscle and every joint saying, “Enough.” Yet I continue to do it, not even being a masochist.
There must be more.
Maybe it’s not really fun
Maybe I was always wrong to call it a funny thing. Running gives satisfactions (but also frustrations, albeit to a lesser extent), perhaps gratifies but it is not that during a training session or a race you smile or laugh as if that was the best moment of your life. You do it, thinking you’ll feel better later by showering or eating something. Living.
Perhaps the fun part of running is not the running itself but extends a little before and a little beyond: before, in the anticipation and knowing that you will be just fine afterwards and afterwards, when, indeed, you will be just fine.
At this point I could consider myself satisfied: I have found exactly where the fun part of the race lies and why it is correct to call it something, indeed, fun. It is not in the while you are doing it but in the before, during (in part) and after: in short, it is an experience with a longer time duration than the event itself, as if to say that running is more than running. This is a big thing.
Yet there was still something that didn’t quite convince me.
The discomfort
Then one day I heard something that made me think. I was listening to a podcast that was about something else entirely but the speaker said this, “Dealing with situations that made me uncomfortable taught me to be comfortable in discomfort.”
The British would call it “Mastering the art,” meaning having the ability to master something, to do it well. Being comfortable in discomfort seems to me to be another big thing, perhaps bigger than being comfortable after a run, because it is not limited to that but extends to all of life. When you know you can endure uncomfortable situations without losing control you know how to experience them with a certain ease as well.
If you think about it, we are categorical in many areas: there are things we like to do and some we don’t. Others we detest and would rather have a wisdom tooth pulled without anesthesia than have them done. Making them is not submission, but more often it is the result of the ability to accept them, bear them, and give them the proper weight. Of course, I am not talking about the tragic or really complicated aspects of our lives; rather, I mean that set of things that we do not do willingly. Which make us uncomfortable because they are boring or annoying in themselves or which confront us with our limitations. Or those things that put us, precisely, in a condition of psychological or physical discomfort.
Think about it: if you only had pleasant experiences in your life, you would never have had the chance to prepare yourself to deal with even the less pleasant ones that, sooner or later, come along. Facing them allows us to train ourselves to manage and overcome them.
Running is a kind of simulation of a less than pleasant situation: there is fatigue, sweat, pain even. And then there is the reward, which comes only if you have endured and met the challenge. If you have finished the training or competition. If you did it even though you didn’t feel like it or the fatigue was overpowering. You were uncomfortable but you did it anyway. The reward was greater than being well afterward: it was being comfortable in the discomfort. You realized you could do it in running and, therefore, you could succeed in other situations as well.
Why do I love running? Because he taught me how to be comfortable even in discomfort. Oh yes.