No Pain No Gain

Last year, before I got sick, I sharpied onto my leg, "no pain no gain." Some people thought it was weird, but as a newly motivated runner, I really believed in it.

You see, if you want to be a faster, better runner, you have to challenge yourself and train your muscles, including your heart. That means doing hill workouts, intervals, dashes, and running for longer than you think you can. It hurts, but without doing that, you can't get better. It makes sense right?

Right....but, the past few days, I spent hours trying to make sense of this saying in my life. The pain that I feel is a different kind of pain, it's not the kind of pain that I purposely bring on myself. It's intense, physical joint pains that come out of nowhere and make you cringe. Physically, you gain nothing from it at all. It's a type of pain that doesn't only affect you. You literally feel it, but that physical feeling manifests into emotional and mental pain for your loved ones. So now, it's not just a one-person pain, it's a several people pain. Where is the gain in that? Maybe it'll come later for some of those people, but what if it drives one to the point of literal craziness and into the depths of despair and it never brings them back? What kind of gain is there if all gain something but one does not? Or what if this pain never brings back gain, or it takes away the strength you had and replaces it with a new and different strength, such as endurance. Is that a gain? Because in order to receive that, you had to lose something, and maybe that something you lost you valued more than your new gain?

I couldn't figure it out, so today, after a long break, I decided to run hard so that I could feel the pain and the gain again. It's weird and it's hard to understand why, but during the process, I think I literally ran away from the confusion in my head. By experiencing the pain and realizing what I will sow a few days later, I could understand life again.

At the end of our run, one of my running group members finished our session with the exact words I was thinking in my head.

"No pain, no gain"

I nodded in approval, but for me, it meant something totally different