Suffering Endurance

And enduring suffering

The long, warm, dry summer has made me soft. I woke up on Wednesday morning, my alarm set to run, and heard wind and rain lashing at my window, flails of outrage and excess. The particular configuration of my house makes weather sound more dramatic than it actually is, the wind batting off corners and ricocheting without an exit. I knew this, but still I stopped my alarm, pulled the duvet over my ears and closed my eyes again.

The second alarm went off; I know myself. I hesitated to open the blind, I didn’t want to see anything that might scare me away, but like ripping off a plaster I pulled the cord in one quick, sharp motion. The view was disgusting. So sad. My bright, light world of the past few months had turned battleship grey, gun-metal grey, huge globules of rain dotted across my window, the walls streaked with tears and the roads in need of mopping. If I hadn’t endured this transition every year of my life thus far, I would surely have recoiled in shock and simply given up running until May. I might have closed the blind again and hibernated. Everyone would understand.

But I know this is where resilience for the coming months starts to build. It’s why I set two alarms. This is nowhere near as bad as it gets. Yes, a lot of those bright, shiny conkers have been trampled to mush, and the long, happy sunflowers are not as tall as last year and are already dying. But there’s still beauty to be found. There always is.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the amount that any one person has to endure. We all know people who go through tough times, who do not seem to catch a break, who are in an impossible deficit of sleep and proper nutrition, with cortisol levels through the roof as a baseline. Yet they manage to go to work, make jokes and function even more impressively than someone without all of those troubles. It makes one look at the people who are struggling and wonder in awe at what more they could achieve, if only they could catch a bit of sleep. Some people would have a total breakdown long before this point. But if to do so would leave yourself and your family in a vulnerable position, is it even a choice?

This week I was working with a man who used to be in the parachute regiment. He talked about carrying his own bodyweight on his back and walking 50 miles a day. I asked him about the mentality of that, of enduring that, and he said that all he was thinking was about getting from A to B. We compared it to running a 50 mile ultra marathon, and all the existential questions that throws up. It’s laughable really. The point, he said, is that you have a choice. “You choose to run these races.” I think it’s true that if you tell yourself that quitting is not an option, you have more chance of success. We all know you can quit and catch a minibus to the finish line, it’s not the same as being a paratrooper, but I suppose it’s a game of imagining a similar level of commitment.

An ultra is a good place to observe the spectrum of what I’m talking about, though: some people finish the race on a sprained foot, others drop out halfway because they’re not in the right headspace. Is one really mentally stronger than the other? Does resilience come from nature or nurture? Probably a bit of both, but also, surely there’s only so much one can endure in a lifetime. Surely.

I don’t have conclusive thoughts on the human capacity for enduring suffering and suffering endurance, it’s just something I’m churning over. I’m loathe to include first world problems in the raft of things that ask us to dig deep, but actually, sometimes that can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, can’t it. Everything has already gone wrong, and then you can’t connect to the WiFi. Absolute chaos ensues.

Regarding my run, well yes, I did get outside, and the rain had stopped and the wind was nowhere near as rough as it had sounded. I had to take off my waterproof. It was quite humid. The ground wasn’t even very muddy or soggy. It was all surprisingly pleasant. I felt like a right wimp. Boo hoo, the sun isn’t shining for a 5 mile run I’ve chosen to do, in a beautiful part of the country, before I go to a job with a fascinating ex-paratrooper. However will I cope? My resilience will fade back. As I said, the summer has made me soft. The 110k race in the Lake District next week should sort me out. And I have no choice but to finish.