CHAPTER 4
PAIN COMMUNITY
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: Make use of suffering.
—HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
It is one minute before three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 1989, and Dave Scott and Mark Allen are running beyond known human limitations on the Kona Coast of Hawaii. Meanwhile, Mike Atkinson is caught up in an adolescent’s Saturday rituals in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada—playing video games, hanging out at the mall with friends—unaware that the thirteenth Ironman World Championship is taking place. If he did know, he wouldn’t care. He has never heard of Dave Scott and Mark Allen.
Nevertheless, Mike will one day be among the persons best able to explain how—or at least why—Dave and Mark are able to achieve what they are now achieving in the greatest race ever run. As a prominent sociologist of sport and the world’s foremost triathlon ethnographer, Mike will define triathlon as a kind of “pain community.” This concept will be used to reveal that Dave Scott and Mark Allen are exploding the limits of human endurance together on the Queen K Highway at this moment because they have cultivated an inexhaustible appetite for a certain kind of suffering, which, thanks to a perfect storm of circumstances, is being stoked to a never-before-seen degree of intensity.
MICHAEL ATKINSON was born in the charming southern Ontario city of Kingston and raised mostly in the town of Bedford, near Halifax. His was a typical middle-class Canadian family of the 1970s and ’80s. Mike’s father, Tony, taught at the local university. Mike and his brother, Spartacus, played the usual sports, mainly hockey, until they were weeded out by the sudden elevation of competitiveness that occurs at the start of high school. Over the next decade, as he completed high school and discovered a love for sociology at the University of Waterloo, pursued a master’s degree in that subject at McMaster University, and earned a doctoral degree at the University of Calgary, Mike got little exercise beyond the occasional set of bench presses or recreational game of ice hockey. Lack of exertion wrought predictable effects on his physique.
One evening in 1999 Mike, then a PhD candidate at Calgary, played a pickup game of hockey with several of his undergraduate students. Not ten minutes after the first face-off, Mike was spent. Lungs heaving, he coasted with his hands on his knees as the other players, only slightly younger, whizzed around him. For the first time in his life he felt old.
A week later Mike began training for a marathon. His stated goals were to lose weight and to feel healthier. He achieved these goals well before he ran the marathon. But when he crossed the finish line Mike felt such unexpected euphoria that he immediately decided to run a second marathon—only faster. Staying lean and fit were now side benefits. The new main objective was to grab another dose of that incredible finish-line feeling. And then another. After three years mere marathons were no longer enough. Guessing that an even greater challenge would yield an even better finish-line feeling, Mike moved on to multisport racing, completing seventeen duathlons and seven triathlons between 2005 and 2007.
“Triathlon is like heroin in a lot of ways,” Mike says. “Once you get hooked on it, it’s like ‘Wow, I don’t care what anyone says, I’m staying on this stuff.’ ”
As junkies find other junkies, Mike traded his old bookish friends for a whole new set of athlete friends. He married a triathlete, joined running and triathlon clubs, and trained regularly in groups. A sociologist cannot operate in any particular social environment, no matter how far removed from his work, without studying and analyzing it, much as an artist cannot contemplate a landscape without applying a creative eye. And so, almost despite himself, as Mike trained and socialized with his athlete compadres he also surreptitiously studied and analyzed them, trying to figure out what made them tick. Epiphany came one day when Mike went for a five-hour bike ride with his friend John.
It was one of those wet, windy, miserable days when the elements seem to have been conjured by a malicious supernatural intelligence bent on making a single target, or two, feel wretched. Mike just didn’t have it that day. He faltered with many miles left to go.
“I don’t think I can make it,” he told John.
“Yes, you can,” John said. “You’ve got more than enough to do this. Keep pushing.”
“I don’t know,” Mike lamented.
“Listen,” John said, “you wouldn’t be here right now if you didn’t want to be, so just stop thinking yourself out of it. We’ll take it stroke by stroke. Just stay with me and you’ll make it.”
He was right—Mike made it home. And as he relished a hot shower and basked in the pride of having toughed it out, he thought, You know, I never would have finished that ride if John hadn’t been there to talk me through it. Mike was reminded of how he saw this phenomenon play out day after day in group training sessions. People pushed their physical boundaries together as they never would individually. With a flash of inspiration, Mike rediscovered triathlon as a sort of intentional community centered on suffering. He recognized suddenly that the pain that everyone acknowledges as a big part of the triathlon experience was in fact the very essence of the sport and that it served distinctly social purposes, helping men and women satisfy needs not met in their everyday lives.
Mike spent the next four years interviewing triathletes and developing his idea. He heard the same things over and over. Either Mike was right or everyone he talked to was in on a vast conspiracy to make him believe he was. All of the triathletes he questioned acknowledged that the sport hurt intensely, yet they described the pain as rewarding and as a major factor in their continued involvement in the sport.
One interviewee, a 36-year-old triathlete named Ashley, told him, “I trained for nearly a year before I entered a race, but all of that training, all of the adjustment to becoming more athletic didn’t prepare me for how much it hurts. I never spent a minute of my life gasping for air with muscles in my body cramping like that.” She added, “It’s terrifying when you start, but after a year or so in the sport the pain of the race becomes like a drug. You become addicted to the adrenaline surge you feel when you are hurting and the release you go through when it’s over.”
Among the questions Mike was most keen to answer was why that finish line feels so damn good. His interviews led him to the conclusion that crossing a triathlon finish line satisfies a pair of specific needs that people experience with particular urgency today. One is the need to challenge the body and mind in ways that everyday life no longer does. In his best-known paper, “Triathlon, Suffering, and Exciting Significance,” Mike notes that numerous sociologists have observed how the ever-increasing comfortableness of the modern lifestyle has bled everyday life of “exciting significance” and how sports have increasingly stepped into the gap to give people a way to live adventurously, even a little dangerously, in an otherwise too-easy world.
“People are really tired of living a sort of dull, boring, and sedentary lifestyle,” Mike says. “Most triathletes have white-collar desk jobs. They don’t use their bodies. They use their minds or their voices all day, and they really like the physical aspect of doing something grueling like triathlon.”
Mike offers Oliver as a typical case. Oliver told Mike that, before he discovered triathlon, each day brought the same, safe, unexciting routine. He woke in his soft bed, enjoyed a hot shower, and ate an instant breakfast. He spent an hour in the car on autopilot and then nine dreary hours sitting at a desk, earning his ample biweekly paycheck without taxing himself on any level. Upon returning to his empty house Oliver mechanically switched on the television, nodded off, then woke up the next day and did it all again. He explained to Mike, “I had money; I had stability; but I had nothing to make me feel alive, to make my body and mind work in different ways.”
Triathlon changed all that and brought Oliver back to real living.
“I think that’s the essence of being human, to feel alive, to move beyond the comforts of familiarity,” Oliver said. “It’s about s
aying to yourself that you don’t want to feel dead on earth.”
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, pleasure is not the magnetic north of all human behavior. People are more complex than that. As Oliver realized, it can be better to feel anything—even pain—than to feel nothing. Sometimes pleasure and pain are derived from the same source. There is no pleasure in doing a triathlon, but it metes out a kind of suffering that is satisfying in the context of our soporific modern existence with its all infernal conveniences. Driving your muscles, heart, and lungs against the gravitational press of extreme fatigue does indeed make you feel as alive—as fully present in reality—as any experience life has to offer. It’s an acquired taste but, once acquired, addictive.
In the hardest moments of a long race, the athlete’s entire conscious experience of reality boils down to a desire to continue pitted against a desire to quit. Nothing else remains. The athlete is no longer a student or a teacher or a salesman. He is no longer a son or a father or a husband. He has no social roles or human connections whatsoever. He is utterly alone. He no longer has any possessions. There is no yesterday and no tomorrow, only now. The agony of extreme endurance fatigue crowds out every thought and feeling except one: the goal of reaching the finish line. The sensations within the body—burning lungs, screaming muscles, whole-body enervation—exist only as the substance of the desire to quit. What little of the external environment the athlete is aware of—the road ahead, the competitor behind, the urgings of onlookers—exists only as the substance of the desire to continue. The desire to continue versus the desire to quit—the athlete is this and this alone until he chooses one or the other. And when the choice is made he briefly becomes either persevering or quitting until, after he has stopped at the finish line or, God forbid, short of it, the stripped-away layers are piled back on and he becomes his old self again. Only not quite. He is changed, for better or worse.
Many sports provide forms of exciting significance without subjecting participants to the kind of suffering triathlon does. Yet triathlon and other endurance sports have gained popularity over the past few decades at a far greater rate than playful pastimes such as tennis and pickup basketball. Mike Atkinson believes that triathlon is more attractive than less painful alternatives precisely because of the suffering element. Although many sociologists before Mike observed that sports in general have moved in to provide the exciting significance that is lacking in everyday life, no one before him identified suffering specifically as a source of exciting significance. His colleagues always treated suffering—which has a small place in most sports—as a negative that athletes had to put up with to gain the real rewards.
In triathlon, however, the suffering is so central and the other rewards so peripheral that one could only do it for the suffering. And since triathlon has gained popularity faster than more pleasant sports, Mike reasoned, it must be because people feel a specific need to suffer, not just a need for any old kind of exciting significance. Why?
Mike’s ethnographic work in the triathlon community has led him to the conclusion that the need to suffer stems from an underlying need to feel special, distinct from, and above one’s neighbors in meaningful ways. People today don’t just want to escape their boring lives, Mike argues—they want to take pride in being among the minority that does. Human beings are competitive. We constantly compare ourselves against our neighbors, and we are happier when we compare favorably, less happy when we compare unfavorably. Driving a better car than one’s neighbor is satisfying. But proving oneself tougher than one’s sedentary neighbor by completing a triathlon is more satisfying because it says more than the car does about who one is, especially in an environment where most people, like the poet T. S. Eliot’s character J. Alfred Prufrock, vaguely despise themselves for having allowed the modern world to make them so soft.
Simply put, crossing the finish line feels good in large measure because it makes people feel good about themselves in comparison to others. One of Mike’s more hard-core interview subjects, a moderately experienced 29-year-old triathlete named Chris, told him, “Most of my friends take the weekend to lounge around the house or relax on the couch. I couldn’t think of a stupider way to spend life.” Although most triathletes do not bask as consciously in a sense of superiority as Chris does, even the most outwardly humble enjoy the thrill of proving themselves tougher than average. If they didn’t, if it was all about the private, personal challenge, then people would not gather in the pain communities of triathlons at all. They would cover great distances in the water and on bikes and in running shoes all alone, and no one else would know.
Some of the best feelings in life are experienced in moments of overcoming immense challenges to claim meaningful rewards—moments of discovering what one is made of. A person needs to be tough to survive in this world. It is a great comfort to the soul to know that one is tougher, more courageous, more capable of enduring suffering than the next person. And the only way to know this is to prove one’s capability in a socially recognized way. Robinson Crusoe would have gained little satisfaction from completing a triathlon alone on his remote island because he had no neighbors to be tougher than, no fellow pain community members to make the finish line meaningful, its crossing excitingly significant.
But in today’s real world, triathlon is one of the best ways to demonstrate toughness and courage, and the finish-line feeling is one of the best feelings imaginable. There is nothing like it. It is a deep, warming satisfaction—an embracing, healthful pride—a moment of well-earned self-love. People weep at triathlon finish lines. Strong grown men who shed tears nowhere else do so openly at triathlon finish lines. People lift their arms and faces to the sky and shout at the top of their lungs. Some speak in tongues. At triathlon finish lines people allow themselves to do things they never do in the rest of their lives because they feel something they never feel in the rest of their lives. Something that not only rewards all the suffering but makes all the suffering rewarding.
THE TENS OF THOUSANDS of triathletes who have discovered the finish-line feeling in recent years owe a debt of gratitude to the men and women who first rebelled against this soul-killingly cosseted modern life to create the sport of triathlon in the mid-1970s.
It all started in San Diego, where a vital community of over-the-top exercise fanatics had recently coalesced. Most of the community’s members were lifelong athletes, former hyperactive kids of the kind who stared longingly out the window during class and threw tantrums when Mom called them home at dusk. For reasons few of them fully understood, at least not in Mike Atkinson’s terms, these exercise fanatics felt dissatisfied with the usual challenges of open-water swim races, century bike rides, and marathons. They craved new challenges.
The archetype of these fanatics was Tom Warren, who owned a thriving beachside bar called Tug’s Tavern. A former competitive swimmer, Tom could no longer be classified as any particular kind of athlete by the time he had reached his late thirties, which coincided with this moment of special ferment. He swam, he biked, he ran, and he lifted weights—pretty much all day long. He competed in just about every local race of any kind, including hybrid swim-bike events that he organized under his own bar’s sponsorship and usually won. But Tom’s local reputation was built mainly on the zany feats of endurance that he performed spontaneously apart from organized events. In 1974 he pedaled a $75 beach cruiser home to San Diego from a vacation in Canada, wearing surf shorts and a dress shirt to prevent sunburn. He told people it was to save the cost of airfare, but that wasn’t the real reason. Another time he jumped off a cruise ship that was preparing to dock at a Caribbean port and swam a half mile to shore. He told people it was to save time, but that wasn’t the truth. On another occasion a friend saw Tom running along the boardwalk late at night. The friend asked why, and Tom explained that he’d been at home looking at his training log, had realized he’d miscalculated his running mileage for the week, and had decided to correct the error by running the extra miles instead
of changing the number in his log. And that was the real reason.
It wasn’t so much boredom with everyday life or J. Alfred Prufrock–style self-disgust that impelled Tom Warren and his fellow fanatics to pursue greater endurance challenges at this time. After all, they had been spared the worst of such modern afflictions by having been swimmers, cyclists, or runners since childhood. Instead, what drove them toward new athletic horizons was the sudden influx of new participants into their sports—an unwanted incursion of recent couch potatoes who had become unbearably bored with their own everyday lives and disgusted by their own softness.
A sea change was occurring in American society. The pampering of modern life had crossed a threshold beyond which the average person simply could not tolerate it any longer—something had to be done.
“At the same time,” Mike Atkinson says, “there was already alarm over the growing obesity crisis. People were being pushed to get outdoors and become active.”
Kenneth Cooper’s 1968 book Aerobics, followed by Frank Shorter’s gold medal in the 1972 Olympics, had kicked off the so-called running boom. Suddenly everybody was running marathons. Just as suddenly the exercise fanatics who had been running marathons all along didn’t feel so special.
Human beings are competitive. The members of San Diego’s community of exercise fanatics depended on challenging themselves more than the average person to enjoy feeling tougher, more driven, and more disciplined than the average person. So if the average person was now running marathons, Tom Warren and his buddies had to do more.
The first triathlon took place on the afternoon of September 25, 1974, on San Diego’s Fiesta Island, a small lump of dirt peeking through the sparkling waters of Mission Bay and connected to the mainland by a 100-yard man-made isthmus. Tiny as it is, the island is a popular training spot for local runners and cyclists because of the flat, lightly trafficked road circumnavigating its perimeter. Hosted by the San Diego Track Club, this first triathlon comprised a bike leg of two laps around the island, followed by multiple short swims and runs. On that day forty-six aerobic thrill seekers went where no human had gone before. All of them agreed that, whatever it was they had done, it was an exercise worth repeating.
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