Why We Need to Suffer: The Key to Discovering Our True Potential

Pushing the limits and embracing suffering during the 2011 World Championship Time Trial in Copenhagen. Photo credit: CorVos

Much to my dismay it seems that one of my favorite pastimes, and the very thing that has helped me to grow so much as a person throughout my life, has become something that most people actively avoid, something they think of as “bad”. I’m referring to suffering, which has sadly become a dirty word these days. As a society, it seems we want to alleviate all pain and we are willing to go to great lengths to do so, and think nothing of numbing ourselves by any means possible so that we can spend our days feeling comfortable. I cannot emphasize this enough: comfort, not suffering, is the dirty word. Comfort might as well be a synonym for complacency, as ultimately they are both keeping you from fulfilling your full potential in life. Comfort is designed to prevent you from discovering what you are actually capable of instead of what you have allowed yourself to be conditioned to believe you are capable of, or what you tell yourself you are capable of.

In the movie “Without Limits” about the life of Steve Prefontaine, the late, great American distance runner, he says “I can beat anyone I’ve ever met because I can endure more pain than anyone you’ve ever met” (whether or not Pre actually said this during his life is unclear, but it captures his mentality perfectly). There is no denying he was a genetically gifted runner, but it was his ability to endure pain, to push his body to lengths that others weren’t willing to go to, that set him apart and made him a legend in the annals of American distance running. The secret that no one seems to want to tell you, or acknowledge, is this: we are all capable of tapping into that source that Pre did on a regular basis. We are all capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for and I am of the firm belief that the key to unlocking our full potential as human beings, in all aspects of life, is best pursued through physical undertakings. In the rest of this post I’m going to tell you why, and how, I’ve come to this conclusion. I hope that by the end of reading it, if you haven’t already, you will rid yourself of the comfort you have told yourself you need and begin walking the path towards living a life that brings you much closer to experiencing the power of your full potential.

I’ll start by sharing my own story. My experience with suffering and discomfort in general, in both subtle and not so subtle forms, goes back a long way in life and in sport. I didn’t have a bad upbringing by any means, but my childhood seemed like a constant downward spiral as far as my family life went. We went from a big house on the water, to a smaller home, to my parents getting a messy divorce, to my dad declaring bankruptcy, to spending my high school days sharing meals eating on the ground with my mom and her boyfriend Boris because we didn’t have room for an actual dining table in our little apartment. I was a loved child, but there was a lot of discord in my home and I was always well aware that money was a constant source of stress. Despite having some good stretches, instability was always lurking in the background. 

School was more of the same. While I went to a great school as far as academics was concerned, outside of the classroom I was the loner, the odd man out most of the time. From about sixth grade onwards I was bullied, made fun of, you name it, I probably experienced it. I tried to “fit in” but I never really did and, as any adult can attest, those youthful years before we are truly confident in ourselves, before we become more secure in who we are, can be some of the most brutal from an emotional and mental standpoint. There are plenty of people who have dealt with genuine hardships, abuse, and other more tangible issues and, while I didn’t face those, my childhood was lived in a constant state of discomfort, a constant state of fight or flight and uncertainty, which ultimately led me to discover the other, far more positive, side of suffering as sports became my refuge.

In sport, I’ve suffered for as long as I can remember, and always by choice. I wasn’t the best swimmer in middle school, so every practice was a two hour ass beating morning and evening. I wasn’t the best runner, but I wanted to prove that I belonged on the team, so every workout I did felt like it was flat out, and I’d still struggle across the line well behind the top guys (and girls). I like to say cross country taught me how to really suffer in athletics, and then I was able to apply that to cycling. It would be fair to say that the majority of my life I have sought out suffering. When I was unhappy with my home environment, unhappy with my place in the social hierarchy of school, I poured myself into sport, into intentionally suffering because doing so alleviated the pain I felt in other areas of life. Writing this down it seems odd that inflicting pain on myself in one arena was actually what alleviated it in another, but the suffering of pushing my body beyond its physical limits was so complete that it never left room for any mundane thoughts about family or the convoluted social dynamics of high school. So, it was during my youth, through my experiences at home and in school and of course through swimming, running, and then cycling, that I built the foundation of what would become an intimate, lifelong relationship with suffering.

The same feelings that I first discovered in the pool in middle school, of overwhelming presence and peace that I could attain through extreme physical effort, carried into my days as pro athlete. During my professional career I looked forward most to the moments when I knew everything would fade away, when the pain would become so great that my mind would go blank. Those moments were spiritual in a sense, a communing of my soul with the natural world around me, where my physical body felt like it would dissolve, where the limits disappeared and the harder I went and deeper I dug the better it felt, the clearer everything became. Suffering was, and still is, my path towards peace. The important part though wasn’t just the suffering, it was what I learned from it: that I was capable of far more than I was taught to believe, that I could do far more than others had told me I could.

It’s time for a story now, one that I think exemplifies how our preconceived limits are nonsense: I never raced a single time trial in my entire cycling career relying on a power meter or heart rate monitor. Yes, the power meter was on the bike recording the data, and occasionally I’d wear the heart rate monitor so my coach could look at the numbers later, but the only thing on my little computer screen on the bike during the race was speed and distance, not even time. I did this intentionally because of something I learned early on. While the numbers could be valuable to guide me in training, in a race they only served to slow me down, to set an artificial barrier that I could potentially use as an excuse as to why I couldn’t go harder or to set a performance ceiling for myself that was far too low.

One of my early time trials as a professional solidified this belief. It was probably the first time I had done a time trial with a power meter on my bike and I decided I wouldn’t look at it, because I never had one before and the results had been pretty good. The venue was Tour de Romandie in Switzerland and I came in sixth place, right behind Tony Martin who would go on to become time trial world champion later that season. It was an unexpectedly good performance, or more accurately unexpected to those around me. It didn’t surprise me quite as much. That first year I had learned something very valuable in regards to time trialing. Everyone was always looking for a way to go faster, a better position, a faster wheel, but I had learned that in the end there was no secret, only suffering, and that was something I excelled at.

Every time trial that year, and throughout my entire career for that matter, followed a similar pattern. I would be dying within the first five minutes, sure that I had completely screwed up my race, that I was going to have to pull over to the side of the road to catch my breath, but then every time I got to that point a strange thing happened: I kept going. Each time I thought I couldn’t suffer any more, I found another place to go, a deeper internal reserve that I hadn’t known existed. It surprised me, in a pleasant way, and I came to cherish the times that I got to tap into it. It was also a source of constant frustration, because I wondered what I might be able to do if I could tap into that place more often. Eventually I was able to access that space more frequently but it was an art that took years to master. It was also a source of fear, because I knew that the only way to get to that transcendent state, to access my full capabilities on the bike, was to endure a great deal of pain. I knew how badly it was going to hurt until that switch flipped, until my body felt like it disappeared and then pain became pleasure. 

It was only once a time trial was done that I would allow myself to take a glance at the numbers, and I was always shocked. In my first year as a pro, I was a good trainer, I put the work in, but I was never one of the people who posted race winning numbers in training. My strength as a cyclist lay in the fact that there was another gear that I could tap into in races that I consciously prevented myself from going to in training. The numbers showed this. Without fail, if in training you told me to go out and do the power I could do in a race scenario in a time trial or uphill finish, I really struggled to do so. I came to realize that I could trust my body to deliver, that all the hard work in training would yield something special come race day, and that I could trust that it would be there. Some guys were always testing themselves in training, always pushing, trying to reassure themselves that their form was there, but I developed a sense of faith that allowed me to avoid doing that. Faith that was of course based on a foundation of hard work.

The key takeaway was a big one: once I learned that this other gear was something I could access in races, it put a whole new perspective on training. It allowed me to work incredibly hard, but always have that last one percent in the tank for race day, never fully tapping into my reserves. By discovering just what I was capable of in races, how much pain I could endure, it allowed me to take my training to another level in the years that followed. One where from the outside people often thought I was training too hard, or giving too much of myself, but where internally I knew there was always more, and I could choose how and when to unleash it. 

Another way to think of it is like this: If you can run a marathon in three hours then a three and a half hour marathon feels pretty controlled. If you then break through and run a two hour and forty five minute marathon, all of the sudden that three hour one that you used to think was everything you had feels relatively tame. When you raise your barometer of what you are capable of, more specifically of how much suffering you can endure, you raise your ability to succeed in all aspects of life, not just athletically. I didn’t fully grasp that during my cycling career, the broad reaching impact that expanding your athletic limits could have on life as a whole, but I certainly do now.

That fact was driven home to me one day by a close friend just a few months back, almost one year to the day after leaving professional sport. We were hanging out, talking about what might be next for me, and I must have been complaining about something because he stopped me and said, verbatim, “You know Andrew, you are the toughest motherfucker I have ever seen in sport. You’ll do whatever it takes no matter how much you have to hurt, how much you have to suffer, and you’ll keep coming back for more. But when it comes to life, you can be a pussy sometimes. You need to learn to be that tough motherfucker in all aspects of your life”. I was taken aback. Not because I was angry, but because he was right. 

I did consider myself a “tough motherfucker” in sports. I took great pride in believing, and I would venture knowing, that I could endure more pain than the majority of my competitors. If there was a clearcut way to measure who could suffer the most, go the deepest, I’m sure I would come out near the top. But what my friend said was true. While there was no obstacle that could stop me when it came to putting in the work on the bike during my cycling career, in life I was prone to letting every obstacle frustrate me. There was no bad race or training ride that ever shook my belief in myself and what I could do on two wheels. But after my friend calling me out, my view of myself as a “tough motherfucker” was shaken. I realized that I had naturally, and incorrectly, assumed that since I was tough as an athlete that meant I was a tough person, one who could persevere and overcome any obstacle I was met with. The reality was different: I was tough when it came to training, to sports, to coping with physical pain, but where was that approach to my life as a whole? 

I’ll admit, even up until a few months ago I was the kind of person who would get frustrated about a traffic jam, angry about missing a flight, stressed when my kid decided to throw a tantrum at what I viewed as the worst possible time. I’d come up with excuse after excuse for not doing something, for not taking action to move in the direction I wanted to go. I’d allow myself to get derailed by everyday bullshit. I was a savage competitor in sport, but in life I was like a domesticated kitten, waiting for things to magically change, hoping that they would, blaming others for when they didn’t. That all changed when my friend told me the truth. That wasn’t the end of the conversation. He went on to explain to me that I needed to take that tenacity, that ability to endure anything, that I had honed in sport and apply it to life. He told me I had already learned how to persevere, and if I wanted to go do something different in my life, another athletic pursuit, an intellectual one, or anything in between, to “get off my fucking ass” and do it. I left that conversation feeling ashamed but also grateful that I had finally been given the wake up call I needed to get on with life. The tough exterior that I had taken so much pride in cultivating was just a shell, albeit a good one that very few could see through, and it had been cracked wide open. I finally realized what good was it to be able to endure anything if I couldn’t apply it to all aspects of my life? I knew there was another gear I could tap into into as an athlete so why hadn’t I been able to see that I could also tap into it while pursing my goals after my professional career had ended? Why hadn’t I realized that I was short changing myself by not allowing myself to reach my full potential in my non athletic pursuits?

What I did realize after looking closely at my life after this conversation was that sport had shown me that I was capable of far more than I could have imagined, that my body could endure things beyond what I had thought possible, and that my mind was the tool that helped me to do it. It was my mind that had allowed me to go to extremely deep places while racing, to endure any obstacle that was thrown my way: illness, crashes, poor race results, family issues. While I certainly suffered through all of those, I always bent, I never broke, because I had cultivated an unshakeable belief in myself where I trusted that no matter how difficult a situation was, or how bad it felt in the moment, it would pass. I fully believed that the struggle was temporary and that good would always somehow come from it. To be fair, I wasn’t always sure exactly when it would come, but it always came eventually. 

In my life away from sport I was the complete opposite. As long as I was racing a bike it was not a stretch to say that my life was sport, so the two often blurred together. It was easy to allow myself to believe that my mental strength cultivated through cycling would carry over to my day to day, and while at times it did, most often it didn’t. My greatest mistake back then was that I never made the effort to look at myself as a person or a complete human being. I was a professional cyclist, I suffered for a living and did so willingly, so that also meant that I was mainly surrounded by people who reinforced my view of myself as someone who was not dismayed by obstacles, but who embraced them as a challenge. 

When I left sport, it quickly became clear that I was not as tough as I had once thought. The year after I left professional Ironman was spent trying to distract myself, to keep up the image of myself I had worked so hard to create in my own mind, all the while failing to actually take any action in my life or do anything to change it, or to move forward in it. It took me nearly a year after leaving professional sport to commit to writing again, to commit to the process, to commit to practicing and honing a new craft. It wasn’t that I didn't want to do it sooner, in fact writing was the first thing I wanted to do when I left sport, but I was afraid. I was afraid of the obstacles I would face. I was afraid of starting something from the very beginning. I was afraid that others might not find value in what I was writing and therefore I wouldn’t feel valuable myself. I was afraid of many things and for far too long I allowed that to discourage me from doing something I truly loved. I used all of that as an excuse to not pursue something I love doing.

When my friend shook me out of my passivity with that one brief conversation, it became clear to me that I needed to piece apart the approach I took to sport, find the good parts of it, and apply them to life as a whole. I realized that just as I had done in physical training, I needed to cultivate an unshakeable sense of self belief in anything that I chose to pursue, one that would make it irrelevant what others think, one that would allow me to do something simply because it is what I knew I needed to be doing and to treat everything along the way as a necessary part of the journey, just as I did as an athlete. Much of the person I was in cycling I could leave behind, but there was also a lot of good to be carried forward, lessons learned that could serve me well as I embarked on a new challenge. 

Sport can teach us and help us discover so many positive things in our lives: dedication, perseverance, and of course the ability to suffer and endure both mentally and physically. That suffering isn’t pointless though, it is for a very clear purpose. You know the phrase “nothing worth doing is easy”? Well, that just about sums it up. The dedication we show to sport, the suffering we willingly engage in to better our bodies and our minds, is what makes race day so special no matter what the results sheet says. But the real reward isn’t lining up on race day, it is what happens before it. It is realizing that by pushing yourself as an athlete, by challenging yourself day in and day out to endure more than you thought you could, by creating an unbreakable belief in yourself, an unbreakable mind, you are actually making yourself a better human being. One who is far more resilient and far more likely to live the life you have dreamed of rather than settle for one full of complacency, comfort, and distraction. When you realize that your mental strength honed through the undertaking of transforming your physical body can transfer to life as a whole you will clearly see that sports, exercise, and adventure aren’t optional. They aren’t choices or luxuries. They are something that you have to do, that you must engage in, in order to live life to your full potential rather than staying stuck beneath the glass ceiling you had been content to reside under before.

What this all leads to is embracing the realization that actively pursuing a life of discomfort is a necessity. I know it might sound strange, but when you consider the alternative, a life spent in pursuit of comfort, I think it’s an easy choice to make. The best way I can describe my view of comfort is that it is like a poison that we don’t know we are drinking, one that will eat away at us until we are a shell of who we could be, one that will not stop until it erodes every last bit of self will and self belief that we once had. Living a life of comfort isn’t something that should be aspired to, it is something that should be avoided at all costs. I would go as far as to say there is nothing more dangerous or stunting to personal growth than a comfortable life.

On a personal note, athletically, there are new goals I have set for myself that I will share over the coming months, a form of putting my money where my mouth is you could say. If I’m going to talk about suffering, about living a life in pursuit of it in order to better oneself, I want you to know that I am right there with you in the journey, not just watching from the sidelines. Writing this piece I can easily see how someone reading it might think “well, sure you pushed yourself when you were a pro, but how are you challenging yourself now?”. It’s a valid question, and one that will be answered in due time. The desire to keep challenging myself, to keep myself uncomfortable, is alive and well and I believe I have found some new and creative ways to do so.

Away from sport, the process of beginning to rediscover myself as a writer has been one of the most educational and emotional of my life, one that I will continue to share with you here on my blog and ultimately in another form as well. It has required me to dig deeper than I have before to gain a better understanding of myself, my relationship with those around me as well as the natural world that I love so dearly, and to confront things that were buried long ago. For a time during this process, I tried to convince myself that I could leave the extreme athletic pursuits behind, that I could content myself with just moving my body a little bit each day, sitting down to write, and focusing on being a good husband and father. I told myself, “you’ve suffered enough, you don’t need to do this anymore.” A life like that sounded appealing, it sounded comfortable. After all, that’s what most people do, they seem to live, or aspire to live, a happy and comfortable life, so I figured why couldn’t I be content with that too? It seems so foolish looking back on it now. Through this process of introspection it became clear to me that I would be going against my true nature, shutting myself off to wonderful possibilities, if I didn't acknowledge the need for incredible physical challenges and adventures in my own life. The often extreme athletic challenges that I set for myself not only make me feel good but they help me to continue discovering my full potential across all the important areas of my life. They help fuel my writing, they bring me peace, they connect me to the natural world, they make me a better father, husband, and certainly a more pleasant person to be around. They help me to be the best version of myself. 

And the thing I realized in the process of analyzing this on a personal level, and which I debated sharing for a while due to the pushback I anticipated receiving, was that all people need these challenges, all people need to physically learn what it means to suffer, by choice, although perhaps not to the extreme that I do. The fact is, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you need it. You need to embark on physical challenges in your life that will test you to the core of your soul. Not because you have to be an elite athlete, but because you owe it yourself to maximize your potential as a human being. Throughout my life I have both witnessed and experienced no better way to do that than through sports. I have seen sport change peoples lives, save them from a life of addiction, pull them out of depression, save them from a life of obesity that would surely end in heart disease, and perhaps most importantly save them from a life of comfort. For those who have not yet experienced it, the odd thing you will soon realize is that discomfort is strangely addictive in its own way. I am willing to venture that once you start down the path towards it, you won’t want to stop. The comfort that you thought you craved, that filled your life before, will quickly become a distant memory.

I’ll leave you with an anecdote from one of the most powerful experiences sport has provided me with to date. One that I think is quite relatable as I didn’t finish this event with a win, or even a podium. Instead, I was rewarded, once again, with the realization that I could endure far more than I ever could have imagined.

I’ll never forget my first Ironman in Whistler, Canada. It was the middle of a heat wave in mid July in 2018 and I was almost six hours into it, hoping I could get to the end of the bike leg simply so I could get to the medical tent in the transition area. The lights had gone out an hour prior and I had tunnel vision. It required everything I had not to lose focus and run into the age group athletes I was still passing. Delirious, dizzy, and dehydrated, I was so happy to get off that bike, but when I did something odd happened. Instead of falling over after dismounting, I walked into that changing tent after grabbing my run gear bag out of habit and I started to put on my shoes. I can’t tell you why I did that, it made no sense to me even as I did it. I clearly needed to head to the medical tent, not get ready to run a marathon. I was stumbling and struggling to see straight as I walked towards one of the seats inside the tent. Every chair looked like two chairs in my distorted vision so I had to physically grab onto one before I could sit down. On went the number belt, my hat and sunglasses. I threw a handful of gels into my pockets and out of that tent I ran.

Once I was on my feet I decided I would just get through a mile or two as the course looped back on itself, that way when I quit, as I was sure I would shortly, I could say that at least I had tried, that I wanted to complete my first Ironman but my body simply wouldn’t allow me to. It crossed my mind, almost hopefully, that maybe I would pass out on the course and that would provide me with a perfectly justifiable reason to stop. I had the fleeting thought that running even just a few miles would allow me to look both my wife and my good friend and sponsor Gary Erickson of Clif Bar (who was also competing) in the eyes at the end of the day and tell them I had given my best. But then those first miles passed and I kept going. Little by little, the logic, the reasons in my mind of why I should keep going, or stop, faded away, replaced instead by the overwhelming pain I was in. Everything filtered down to one thought: keep moving. One step, then another. When I ran by one of the many beautiful, ice cold lakes on the course I wanted to lie down in it, to put an end to the pain I was in. “Are your legs broken?” I asked myself, “are you actually physically incapable of taking another step?” “No!” was the resounding answer. I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t incapacitated, it was only in my mind that I thought I needed to stop. 

Despite the pain, despite the misery of the moment, I recall a brief second where I smiled, although every photo I’ve seen from the day looks like I’m about to keel over, so maybe I just thought that I smiled. I smiled because it hit me that I had found what I was looking for, without knowing that I had been looking for it. I had gotten my body to that place where I knew I was going to have to learn, going to have to dive deep inside myself if I was to make it through. All the external goals, the ego, none of it mattered anymore. My sole motivation for continuing was to spend as much time as possible in that place where nothing existed but the present. To see just how far I could take my body and my mind. To expand my limits beyond what I had imagined possible. I had gotten to this space briefly on several occasions during cycling, but never for this length of time. Thinking back on it now, from running out of that changing tent, to crossing the finish line 26.2 miles later, I still don’t understand how it happened. It was probably the most I have ever asked of my body to this day and I came away from that experience knowing that I had mental and physical reserves beyond what I had ever imagined. I thought that I had already broken through my own glass ceiling, that I had discovered my true potential through cycling, but I was wrong. It has led me to believe that even that day in Whistler will be something I look back on in the future as just another glass ceiling, though I’m not sure exactly when or where I will break through it. It was a special day in my life in that it was the ultimate proof that we can truly do anything when we allow ourselves to. 

My challenge to you now, by writing this piece, is to start walking down this path yourself, to begin this process towards a life spent in pursuit of discomfort! And I want to make this clear, this post isn’t intended just for athletes. In fact, most athletes probably know or have experienced at least some of what I have written about and are already enjoying their uncomfortable lives. For those of you who already consider yourselves athletes remember this: there is more in you. There are other levels you can take your mind and body to, and I encourage you to pick your challenge and pursue it wholeheartedly to discover what you are capable of. And for the person who has hardly moved their body a day in their life, this challenge is also for you. For anyone who considers themselves content, comfortable, who thinks they don’t “need” an athletic challenge in their life. I promise you, you do. I don’t doubt that you’ll get through life just fine if you choose not to embrace this challenge but you are short changing yourself, missing out on just how incredible life can feel when you live it a bit closer to your full potential. 

For many who choose to take on this challenge, or are already in the midst of it, you will quickly discover that the point of an athletic pursuit isn’t just the pursuit itself. Rather, it is the commitment to the process of becoming the person who can accomplish it that shows you how strong you are, how capable you are. It is the process that shows you that you, yes YOU, who might consider yourself to be as quiet and timid as a house cat are indeed a “tough motherfucker” when you need to be! And you certainly don’t need to be every moment of every day. But knowing that that person is inside you, knowing that you can endure when things become the most difficult, that you can bring that side of yourself out at will, is a skillset that will serve you well in every aspect of your life. 

While I can only speak from my own experience, I have found that life can at times feel like a never ending obstacle course, but by choosing and dedicating yourself to an athletic pursuit you can change the way you handle all of it. The inner strength you will discover through sport will give you a newfound self confidence and a well deserved sense of pride in who you are and who you are allowing yourself to become, and that will allow you to overcome any obstacle you are met with. I hope that reading these words here today can be the catalyst for you to begin your own athletic journey and to embark on a personal process of self discovery of your full potential through sport.