You gotta do what you gotta do
Yet another marathon reflection on pain, suffering, joy and freedom in running and work.
Mathias is a recovering writer and late-life aspiring athlete who loves running and riding road bikes.
Hello Amazing
It turns out that running a marathon can give you all sorts of new ideas. The CPH Marathon was sponsored by Nike and the route was covered in Nike running slogans like "You've always dreamt of this nightmare" and "Running is awful. I love it."
They are catchy but I don't really connect with these statements. They seem to be so grounded in a myth where pain is the foundation, and running is reduced to the act of overcoming this omnipresent pain.
In my experience of running, both in general and for the marathon, pain is a very real possibility. It gets likelier to occur the faster and longer you run. And it's part and parcel of having a body and using it. But it's not the foundation.
I think my desire for running comes from a place of joy. The joy of moving. The sense of freedom I experience when my legs feel like they can keep going. And the sense of freedom I experience when my legs feel like they can't go anymore, and I see that I am actually still going, despite the pain.
Running from a place of joy, however, doesn't mean that everything I do is joyful. Joy is too fickle to rely on. There are days where running doesn't feel as joyful, and that's ok too. I also find zero joy in swallowing an energy gel. It defies my principles around food and nutrition, and a part of me would prefer to avoid it altogether. But it also works really well and makes a huge difference in performance.
For me, it's important to have a more uplifting focus in general. A positive definition of what running can be, when it's at its best. And then the other aspects, like physical pain or the act of chomping energy gels, can co-exist in the perspective of the larger purpose, without taking too much focus.
It’s the same with my work: working isn’t just suffering. Work can be very fun and full of learning. And occasionally it also involves overcoming difficulty, stress, difficult feedback, and other forms of unpleasantness. Some of it I can learn from. Some of it can be overcome, which gives me a sense of freedom. And some of it just is. And then it passes. Next.
I’ve not yet managed to read more than a few excerpts but my friend and former coworker at SYPartners Bree Groff just published a book about having fun at work. I’ve pre-ordered it (because a pre-order is the love language of author-friends). I think she has a really nice take on the balance between my own millennial generation’s sense of fun-work-entitlement and earlier generations’ work-suffering-ethos, which is something I still struggle to navigate from time to time.
With love
—Mathias