That was terrible, let's do it again

Why do we repeat painful voluntary experiences?

What is something painful that you have subjected yourself to on more than one occasion, where you regularly question why you’re doing it, but inevitably decide to do it again?

Nearly two weeks ago, I ran the Around the Bay race in Hamilton, Ontario, the oldest long-distance road race in North America. It’s a hilly course that I was lucky enough to run on a below zero, wet day where 23 of the 30-kilometres were run into a bracing headwind. It was terrible. After months of training and mental preparation, somewhere around the 25km mark, I was frustrated with myself. Around the Bay is far from my first long-distance race. I’ve run numerous half marathons and the 2019 Toronto Marathon, but crossing the wooden footbridge to the dreaded Valley Inn Hill, all I could think was, why am I doing this to myself? I’m never running further than a half marathon again. When I passed the Grimm Reaper at the 27km mark (not a hallucination, I promise), it felt like an appropriate moment to lay down on the sidewalk and die. Everything was hurting, and all of my resources were drained. But, three days later, I was looking up the fastest fall marathons I could reasonably travel to as an articling student. 

And maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but if I am, I’m not alone. In addition to the thousands of individuals who run their second or third marathon every year, millions more engage in other painful activities like giving birth to a second child. As you may have noticed, I’m focusing here on doing something painful for the second time. This is because no amount of reading or anecdotal evidence could have prepared for me the physical suffering involved in my first marathon. Not knowing how much I was going to suffer probably impacted my decision to sign up in the first place. While I don’t know, I assume the same is true of childbirth, but at least there, you walk away with a baby. When you finish a marathon, you walk away with a banana. 

But the second time around, you know exactly what you are in for. And at least in the case of long-distance running, you are making the deliberate decision to do something that you are entirely aware will be extremely painful. 

Why? 

Marathon running is a fundamentally strange activity. Name another sport centred around doing something that killed the first person to do it. Countless articles investigate the “runners high” and the euphoria and adrenaline of doing something difficult or painful. But in my experience, there is no runner’s high 39km into a marathon. There is also no adrenaline rush when it’s over. Instead, there’s a week of not being able to walk up and down the stairs. While I do not doubt any of the science about what engaging in painful activities does to your brain, I also don’t believe that’s why we do them for a second time. 

When I was a ballet dancer, the mark of having worked hard that day was if you bled through your tights. There was a sort of cachè in showing how hard you had worked and how much pain you were willing to endure. Of course, bleeding through your tights may have had nothing to do with working hard and everything to do with a seam rubbing in the wrong place, but I digress. 

In a long-distance race, most of us aren’t really racing. The elite runners are, but the rest of us are racing against our goal times; we are racing against ourselves. And in that vein, suffering becomes a metric for accomplishment. If you can walk fine the day after a marathon, what’s the point, right? 

The glorification of suffering is not limited to the world of athletics. I’m sure that every student has seen the self-satisfied twinkle in the eye of a classmate when they tell you how they regularly stay awake all night to get work done. Pushing yourself to do something physically terrible gets worn like a badge of honour. 

There is no amount of working smarter that will make a marathon not hurt. And yet, even when we walk away from a race thinking that it was the worst thing we’ve ever been through, we find ourselves at the starting line again the following year.  

I don’t have an answer to why we repeat harrowing experiences, especially where they don’t lead to something greater. I’ve spent considerable time over the last two weeks thinking and reading about it, but I still can’t explain why I and so many others engage in this behaviour.

So, I’ll put it to you, if it was so terrible the first time, why did you do it again?