The Art of Sucking It Up

*~SpRiNg BrEaK 2007~*

Have you ever woken up to a pack of raccoons tickling your feet? I have. I was 18 years old, camping on the eastern end of St. George Island with Russ. It was spring break and we were backpacking with our skimboards in tow. Two seniors in high school living on the beach for spring break? I had high expectations. I can't speak for Russ but I had envisioned the trip to be like hiking into the actualized lyrics of Katy Perry's "California Girls." But my eighteen-year-old brain vastly overestimated how many "daisy dukes, bikinis on top" would be hiking to a primitive backcountry campsite on the beach. The sum total was zero.

Instead, the trip went like this: Russ and I backpacked into a desolate campsite by the bay. It was cold. Sand filled every crevice of our bodies while sand gnats and mosquitos ravaged every exposed piece of our flesh. We wore makeshift burkas to shield our faces from the bugs. Even the skimboarding was bad. A couple of nights in, I forgot to hang our food and awoke under my tarp tent to a pack of raccoons tickling my feet, searching for treats. I got Russ up, packed our bags and hiked out. 

Some cherished memories happened that night, like hiking without headlamps by the starlight over the Gulf of Mexico (Russ told me years later, it was so beautiful he cried). But that doesn't change the fact that we gave up. We quit. When it got hard, we went home. That wasn’t the only time something like that happened either. In fact, Russ and I began making “a thing” out of hiking out in the middle of the night to find the nearest Waffle House. It was fun. But as I began to spend more time outside and the trips got longer and more remote, there weren’t any Waffle Houses to retreat to. Eventually, I had to learn the art of sucking it up.

You should read Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. There's this line: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” I think about that all the time when I'm out trail running or rock climbing because I have a choice in how I respond to pain and discomfort: give up or keep going.

Renowned psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl maintained that between stimulus and response, there is a space. And, “In that space is our power to choose our response.” Whether climbing mountains or running long distances, I think human-powered endurance activities help build the muscles used to make the responses required for suffering in the real world too.

Whether you’re running an ultramarathon and every muscle in your right foot is screaming...

Or you’re festering in a tent while bad weather batters your high camp... 

Or you’re working two jobs to pay off medical debt from a routine hernia surgery because Americans pay 40% more for healthcare than the rest of the industrialized world...

Each creates a space where the pain is inevitable but the suffering is optional. 

"Suffering," here, is the choice made to see it through. I don't mean this to romanticize or make light of anyone's actual physical, emotional, existential suffering. I think there's a difference between suffering and "things that suck." Yet it's all very subjective. And to be fair, navigating a pandemic, working an unsatisfying job, or arguing with a partner is not the same thing as trad climbing, ultra-running, or waking up to raccoons sniffing your feet. But the ability to take a deep breath, figure something out, and keep going when you're in the mountains might also help when you need to plan a budget, discuss your feelings, or finally find a therapist. 

Alpinist Kelly Cordes said of ultrarunners, "To keep going when given the option to quit is hardcore." If you're reading this then you made it through 2020 and you probably suffered something. We all learned a little about the art of sucking it up this year and I think we all got a little more hardcore. On a recent bikepacking adventure with Russ, I brought up that 2007 spring break trip. I talked about how thankful I was that playing outside taught us the same lesson running taught Haruki Murakami. Russ looked at me and spoke through the cloud of mosquitos and campfire smoke."It's funny you mention that," he said, "because I really wanted to call it quits today." We laughed and kept eating our ramen bombs and then we got back on our bicycles the next morning.

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