Life Is Suffering, or Is Suffering Life?

[ornoth_cycling]

Pain. The bicycle is a pain machine.

I really didn’t know much about pain before I climbed back onto a bike in 2000 and started training for my first Pan-Mass Challenge. But the endurance athlete’s mantra of “no pain, no gain” quickly proved its verity beyond question.

It’s a strange thing: training. The whole idea is to push yourself, to stress your body so much that it triggers short-term adaptations to handle the ever-larger challenges you give it.

That is the proverbial house of pain where the athlete lives, learning to value, even to relish it. There’s a very real reason the training videos I spin to are marketed as “The Sufferfest”: riders come to identify pain with improvement.

Group rides are especially notorious, where everyone tries to push everyone else to work harder, go farther and faster. Tim Krabbé sums it up nicely in “The Rider”, his novelization of a typical bike race: “Pain, commonly seen in my circles as a signal to stop doing something, has ceased being that to me ever since [I bought my first bike].” I relate to that like some hard-won, hidden truth. And maybe it is.

From a Buddhist standpoint, I think the bike is a great place to practice with pain, to play with separating the physical experience of pain from the mental reaction that demands that we make it stop. Unless it kills you or does permanent damage, all pain is endurable. Every steep hill you climb, every time you take a pull at the front, every time you go long: those are all opportunities to see just how far you can push your pain threshold, as well as how long you can sustain it.

On my PMC rider page, I wrote, “On the road, riding 200 miles takes stamina, strength of will, and the ability to overcome pain. Those attributes are demanded in much greater quantities from cancer victims and their families.”

Cancer victims are suddenly thrust into this same arena of having to deal with pain, both physical and emotional. It’s something I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.

But in a strange parallel to the training cycle, going through the pain of cancer treatment can make an individual immensely strong, especially emotionally. If you’ve been through chemo, radiation, and a life-threatening disease, your sense of the scale of what you can endure increases exponentially, and the other little trials of daily life seem downright trivial in comparison.

In that sense, cancer is a crucible that teaches people the true value of life and every moment that comprises it. I’ve heard such stories again and again; I just wish that they didn’t come at such a terrible cost.

Yes, cycling can be painful. I have ridden over 26,000 miles, many of them at or near the limit of my endurance. I’ve biked 150 miles in a single 12-hour day in the saddle, climbed the slopes of Mt. Hood, pushed myself to reach 47 miles per hour, and done more hard and/or long training rides than I could count.

But I am truly in awe of the strength, stamina, and resistance to pain that cancer patients young and old demonstrate every day. The temporary “good pain” of cycling seems silly in comparison. Theirs is the true “Sufferfest”, and I can only do this one small thing to bring about a future where such heroics are no longer necessary.

My PMC mantra is this: Through this little pain, hopefully everyone will gain.