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“Pain and suffering are often the catalysts for life’s most profound lessons.” ~Dean Karnazes

Pain is a physical feeling, like when you get a headache, breaks a bone or stomachache. This feelings act as sensors and massagers to your brain as physical pain.
Suffering may be qualified as mental pain; it may occur as a result of many fields of human activity, a death of someone, a sentimental loss or may be concerned from their own points of view, attachments or aversions.

In Life and when running an ultra, we should know how to differ pain from suffering and treat each one with their own medicine, we may not be able to avoid physical pain but as suffering is a none physical pain and a mental process, it may be very helpful to deal apropietly when this demon call suffering appear during the race. It has been said that you can’t direct the wind but you can adjust the sails or as the Buddhist proverb says “Pain is inevitable, Suffering is optional. .”

Some interesting views about dealing with suffering:

So next time you run, enjoy your pain.

“Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.”~ Ken Chlouber

“Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is…The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds. ~ Dan Millman / Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

“We’re in a free fall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.”~Joseph Campbell

Perhaps the genius of ultrarunning is its supreme lack of utility. It makes no sense in a world of space ships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot.

There is no money in it and no fame, frequently not even the approval of peers. But as poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time, there is more to life than logic and common sense.

The ultra runners know this instinctively. And they know something else that is lost on the sedentary. They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort.

Running

“In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being–a call that asks who they are…” -David Blaikie

Many of us live in urban environments where noise is all around us regardless where we live. Even elevators, stores, banks and all type of indoors are filled with ambient music where silence is something rare to find. That is why I have always rejected myself to run with music.

 Running has different type of sounds. Leaving the iPod at home and Running alone for a long period of time will give us a good opportunity to listen to the sounds of nature and to the ones of our own mind. But somehow we are addicted to noise and we fear silence.

We treat silence like a disease or perhaps like an antipode, something that resides outside, distant or different from us. Through silence, we experience solitude and we think of solitude like an awkward feeling, like the awkward silence of silence.

We cannot be at home without television and we search for entertainment to make the time pass. We work all our lives; we sacrifice sleep, relationships and energy towards standards that some times, not even our own standards. At the end of the day, every once we achieve free time, we ended up killing it, not realizing that it is time who is killing us.

Humanity has always been driven by dreams which have as counterpart the quest for the big questions and the need for the great responses. For many years, we have been looking for those great responses through philosophy, religion, psychology, science, technological development, macroeconomics, democracy, globalization and all those things that delight the intellect of a man, but who do much to bring it to its true nature. The search is temporarily suspended, finding that immediate material satisfactions can only entertain and distract.  That is, the more we move away from nature, the harder it is to find our own nature.

Runners go running without knowing that is not running they are after. Thorough physical effort and long and taxing distances in solitude and in contact with nature, Runners find their own answers by connecting to their own nature.

Running has the rare quality of stopping time, putting the world on pause and letting us be fully connected, completely absorbed by the present in a place where there are no fears, neither patterns, concepts, masks, distracters or the need to be entertained as time passes. All our senses lean for a moment to see ourselves being alive. 

~RunAddicted

“The fish of reality is more like water–it always slips through the net.

And in water youknow when you get into it there’s nothing to hang on to.

All this universe is like water; it is fluid, it is transient, it is changing. And when you’re thrown into the water after being accustomed to living on the dry land, you’re not used to the idea of swimming.

You try to stand on the water, you try to catch hold of it, and as a result you drown.
The only way to survive in the water is to learn how to swim. And to swim, you relax, you let go, you give yourself to the water, and you have to know how to breathe in the right way.

And then you find that the water holds you up; indeed, in a certain way you become the water.”~Alan Watts