By: Kristin Wood

You can look at endurance athletes and think, “These people are a strange breed.” Truly. Who chooses to get up at 4 a.m. to swim for two hours, or run 26.2 miles and not because they are being chased by gun-wielding assassins? Or, better yet, combine them and add in miles of cycling to compete in Ironman events?

But something American cycling legend Lance Armstrong, 7-time winner of the Tour de France, said really strikes me as the key to understanding these highly disciplined, dedicated athletes. He noted, “Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”

Endurance athletes are a special breed of people who face the pain and keep going anyway. The pain may stick around for each step, or stroke, or revolution, and the race may end before the pain does. But, their ability to stay with their pain until they get through it or the event is over teaches one of the most important lessons we can learn about life: sometimes, staying with what pains us until we can move through it can be just as important as finishing what we set out to accomplish.

How many of us quit before the pain ends? As a life and nutrition coach, I can tell you that there are several clients I’ve had who wanted to quit because the pain got to be too much. Not physical pain, but the emotional or psychological pain that was keeping them from experiencing every part of their lives. Facing it was extremely hard, but every single one of them said afterwards that the effort of avoiding the pain was far worse than just “being” with what was causing them pain. One even said while laughing, “That’s IT?? THAT’S what I’ve been worried about all these years?!”

Ready to do some spring cleaning of any mental baggage you might be carrying around? You can start by asking yourself whether there’s someone or something you absolutely refuse to think about. Is there a past incident with someone you refuse to discuss with anyone? Or, in the opposite case, are you dwelling on the pain and letting some failure eat away at you?

Take a look at how you felt at the time and STAY WITH THE PAIN. Let it wash over you. Once you’re really connected to that moment, ask yourself what the incident taught you about yourself. Write it down to get it all out … remember, this is spring cleaning! What behaviors do you have now as a result of what you learned?

Look at the situation again, but this time as you are now: was what you learned back then really true? How has this thinking held you back in life? Do you still want it to?

The real magic is that 98 percent of the time, we don’t need to change anything in our past but our own reactions to what happened. All we have to do is shift our perspective: we can say that this happened and it really hurt, but in really looking at it we can see the situation differently and say this is how I’m going to go forward.

This bravery has tremendous rewards. Your life, athletic performance and work opportunities are likely to improve dramatically if you, like Lance Armstrong, can see pain as something to move through and learn from. MS&F