Rants from Rob Straz!

Pain

I'm not really too much into sci-fi (sorry Alan) but one of the episodes of Star Trek that I remember most was one where Spock was doing his Vulcan mind meld thing with some alien blob type creature and started crying out repeatedly "pain... paaiinnn...... PAAAAAIIINNNN....". The theory was that this creature was acting in an evil manner due to all the pain it was suffering.

You have people in life who are in serious amounts of physical and/or mental pain and you'd never know it. They go about life pretty carefree while others will be the first one to bemoan the fact that they have a hangnail that requires immediate surgical attention. That's why I put little stock into the common medical practice of asking someone to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being a very minor pain and 10 being an excruciating pain). It's just such a relative measure and you'll find such discrepancies in opinions.

With my first triathlon of the season this weekend coming up this weekend I was thinking about the issue of pain, and more specifically pain tolerance, during my am run today. This run was a fartlek speed run so the topic was quite timely.

I thought about how at the root of improving and dropping times it pretty much comes down to pain tolerance. Many other factors are in play: recovery, progression, consistency, genetics, etc, but without the will to tolerate some pretty uncomfortable efforts your ceiling for performances is lower than what's possible.

I've read that regarding pain while racing there are two camps: those who embrace and monitor the effort and those who focus on other things to distract (counting foot strikes, singing). I'd say I'm more in the former category. I like to feel proud of the level of pain that I'm in knowing that it corresponds to my performance. Singing songs, doing things of a repetitive nature would irritate me since I've gone that route and have gotten one chorus stuck in my head and it got tiresome fast. There was a difficult olympic race some years back and I had the epic 80's song "Everybody's Workin For The Weekend" in my head. Then there was Mystic '99 and I had Cher's "Life After Love" in my head. Ugggghhhh... thank god it was only a sprint.

A buddy of mine and I, let's call this gentleman "Farty Bashin", have an ongoing difference of opinion regarding the role that genetics plays in sport, more specifically triathlon. Farty believes that they don't play that much of a role while I am of the opinion that they have a greater influence than what the general public may tend to believe. My argument I feel has a bit more teeth when you consider the example of Chrissie Wellington in particualr. She took racing up at a relatively advanced age and has had incredible success. Yes, from what I read she is very dedicated and has a sport background. Why is it then that she trained with the Sutton group for a while and had far different performances from those whom she trained with on a daily basis?

To me there is not an ideal one type of body for this sport. I do feel that the most consistent, successful athletes do seem to usually fall into the category of naturally lean (duh) and about 5'10 - 6'2 for guys and 5'4 - 5'8 for them womens. There are many exceptions to this range but for the most part time has shown that this is the size range that the long term consistent performers belong to. Men smaller than this size tend to lose time on the swim / bike due to less leverage (my opinion) and women greater than this height seem to suffer injuries at an increased rate.

I haven't quite made up my mind if pain tolerance and this resulting correspondence to a drop in race times is genetic in nature, fostered by experience and desire or maybe a blend of the two. Either way, I believe that mental preparation prior to race day is a very underrated resource while thinking during the heat of competition can be counter productive. If we are analyzing the every portion of damage that we are inflicting on ourselves at a particular time the incentive to continue the damage decreases. It's the mind's nature to stop pain, not continue and ask for more.

With each first triathlon of the year I get excited due to the unknown nature of the performance I'm going to put down. The years of good shape usually bring about a feeling of 'well, I haven't been in the pool much but the bike / run will save me' while the so-so years thoughts of 'well, I haven't been in the pool much and my bike and run really aren't that good now."

I'm excited for Sunday. Sure, I can end up being in worse shape than I think I'm in or my form won't be reflected in my time but I don't think that'll be the case. Months of consistency don't lie. They may lie for one race but not for an entire season. More than anything, fitness brings about a confidence that will bail you out of trouble if you go and do something stupid like line up at the front even though your swim form is suspect.

Enough about me though... I know we're not solving life's problems out there but I look at competing as another avenue to maximize our potential while on this planet (however you judge potential). In the same way that businesses succeed on planning, developing something that people want, knowing your area, marketing, customer service and hiring good people, successful racing sometimes just comes down to who has suffered the most in training and who is willing to suffer the most on race day. It's simple and honest. I like that because those are two words that I would use to describe myself.

Spring brings about a thaw and a new race year.. kind of like a clean slate for the next season of racing and I'm really excited. When you're in a good place in all areas of your life and have bought some new tri toys over the winter you can't help but be excited for the tests to come.

While the news is full of murders, houses burning, layoffs, economy, sky falling, training is a nice way to keep us all even. Pain is just an added bonus for us masochists.