For the first twenty years of my life, I spent most of my time avoiding any serious exercise. Chalk it up to minimal exposure to the outdoors in my late teen years, being cut from the JV volleyball team, or just an innate lack of aptitude — reasoning aside, it was rare to see me hiking, running, biking, or working out for a span of many years.
Eventually, I got to a point where my marked lack of athletic ability seemed as natural a part of my existence as my hair color; I was simply not a sporty person and I would probably never be one. I felt like I had missed the cutoff, the developmental years when my peers cultivated the skills that would propel them through years of casually picking up whatever sport they pleased. It was just too late for me to be like that and anyways, it was just easier not to be. But eventually, I realized that — of course — twenty is not too old to decide to be something new, and I started to take up running, leading me to really think about the principle of mental toughness in earnest for the first time in my life.
This shift was actually originally characterized by an interest in rock climbing. My step sister has been a serious climber for the bulk of her life, and my junior year I convinced her to take me to her gym and show me the basics during winter break. Immediately, I felt myself enjoying the instant gratification of pulling my body weight up a wall, and the slower enjoyment of learning the holds of a boulder problem until I could scale something that I previously couldn't.
At school I started to climb with a friend, who eventually convinced me to play in a few intramural soccer games. That summer, I found myself planning long bike trips while I studied abroad in Amsterdam — waking up each day excited to venture out into the countryside on my rental bike.
When my program in the Netherlands came to a close, I knew that I would only be able to climb once or twice a week at home, and that I would be itching to get outside and really move, but wouldn't have a bike (or the calf muscles) to traverse the hills of San Francisco. At that point, it had been four full years since the last time I ran a mile without stopping — an expedition with a high school friend after graduation that also involved an ill-fated decision to take a pre-run shot of vodka. The morning after I got home, I laced up an old pair of my mom's running shoes and ran, my limbs awkwardly adjusting to the feeling.
This past summer was also a time when I began to consume media about rock climbing at a significant rate — even if I only made it to the climbing gym once a week or so, I still spent a lot of my waking hours thinking about the peculiar world of professional climbing.
Much of what I was reading and watching was mainstream and geared towards people with little to no climbing knowledge, largely centered around climbers who had garnered enough publicity to be household names outside of the insular climbing community. At that time, I was particularly interested in Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden, both of whom wrote memoirs about being kidnapped by militants in Kyrgyzstan in their early twenties, propelling them to relative fame overnight.
Caldwell's memoir is called The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path and he writes about how his climbing ethos has been shaped by the six days he spent as a hostage abroad, the philosophies his parents imparted on him as an initially subpar child athlete, his long and inevitably fraught marriage to Rodden, and the story of accidentally cutting his left index finger off with a table saw (and being the first person to free climb the hardest wall on El Capitan anyways). In sum, he spends a lot of page space talking about perseverance as foundational for a lifetime of unthinkable achievement.
The content of mental toughness being integral to growing up, the way that it was for Caldwell, felt foreign to me as I read the book. I have always considered myself a hard worker, albeit one who has been pulled forward due to circumstance and some natural skills, but I have never considered myself a particularly disciplined or tough person. In fact, growing up in the suburbs of Northern California, the beliefs my parents handed down to me often focused around an emotional way of being in the world — practicing empathy and inclusion, maintaining a sense of academic curiosity, and feeling free to be whoever I wanted to be.
On principle and at large, I don't believe in criticisms hurled at modern parenting for creating a "participation trophy economy." The standards set for children in competitive environments ought to be based on personal achievement, enjoyment, and the spirit of collaboration. More often than not, those who denigrate the idea of everyone winning are people who want to push unreasonable and unhealthy pressure onto children that leaves them worse off.
But it seems that we have conflated creating safe supportive environments with removing difficulty whatsoever. I recently told a friend that I think the world I grew up in fostered very little mental toughness — I simply never needed it. When I was initially unsuccessful at something, I moved on until I found another activity I had a gift for. When I didn't want to do something difficult, I negotiated and argued my way out of it. When I started a project and decided I was done with it, it stayed unfinished. I was, by all accounts, unable to commit to something I didn't want to do which required me to demonstrate genuine discipline.
My mom and dad's parenting style is certainly not unilaterally to blame for my decision-making as a teenager — their decision to instill in me more emotionally sensitive principles has benefited me greatly in my relationships and personal life. But, as I have gotten older, I have begun to wonder if we have begun to distinctly under appreciate the value of pain.
I recently picked up a copy of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running at the airport and read it cover to cover on my flight. Murakami — largely known for novels like Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore — also happens to have run at least two dozen marathons in his lifetime, not to mention an ultramarathon and regular triathlons. Murakami's running philosophy is simple — he pushes himself relentlessly, with everything he has, for no other purpose than the simple fact that those largely intangible efforts make him feel something of value.
He begins the foreword by relaying a quote from a marathon runner — "pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." To Murakami, the notion that we must suffer because we hurt does not reflect the fact that we get to decide what we push through.
Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren't involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of dealing with being alive — or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.
The idea of pain, or even discomfort, as a threshold for achieving something that holds emotional weight is not a new one, of course. Religious and spiritual practices like meditation are built on the idea of pushing past a lack of comfort in the body to achieve ascension. Competitive athleticism is about taking the human body to its limits of performance and stamina to see how far we can get.
I recognize that many (if not most) of the people in my life have a strong awareness of these principles and employ them in their daily lives. In a way, it feels redundant to write about my realization of the importance of perseverance, discipline, and physical endurance as though those values haven't been formative to my peers and their well-balanced lives.
At the same time, it seems to me that the world is moving away from the idea of discomfort as a necessary aspect of a life well lived, beyond how it applies to running. With the convenience the world affords us, that seems to be increasing by the minute, it has become eerily easy to go weeks on end without experiencing any situation that requires us to genuinely build mental toughness. Certainly, that was my experience growing up in a well-off environment where all of my basic needs were met — I had a notably low threshold for discomfort.
Collectively, we view discomfort as a personal affront. Our newly-decided principles for emotional wellbeing stem from the idea that we ought to protect our own peace, love ourselves first, that we can do it all and have it all alone. A dangerous idea, considering the significant evidence that humans are inherently community-oriented animals who truly need each other, not just to survive, but to live a life worth having. Our societally-accepted tendency to cut off relationships rather than push through difficult conversations, to walk away from anything that might challenge us, and to put our own desire for ease over serving our communities leave us all isolated, compensating by relying on the vices that make life easier.
Murakami writes about an interview he did with a famous Olympic marathon runner, where he asks if the runner ever wakes up feeling like he does not want to run. The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. Everyone who runs is faced with days when they are not thrilled to put on their shoes and get outside, but many do it anyway, because they know the endorphins and health benefits that wait for them on the other side.
The same principle, so obviously upon reflection, applies to our willingness to show up for each other. The discomfort I may feel when spending long days out in the sun working on little sleep seems to fade when I'm doing it for the sake of the children at the summer camp I work at. The burden of taking hours out of my day stuck in rush hour traffic feels inconsequential when I see my friends at the airport.
In one of my classes recently, I read this quote: "All things beautiful and good are scarce and hard." I remind myself of it when I am out for a run in the morning and feel humbled by the fact that I am without a doubt the slowest runner in Forest Park. And, I remind myself of it when the easiest way out presents itself as a distraction from the difficult, worthwhile, beautiful life that I know I want to be living.