When it comes to exercise avoid the three Ts. Too much, Too soon, Too fast.
> I’d have stopped if I felt like I was truly injured
I think what the author is talking about is that we start as children from a position of trusting discomfort unconditionally. It distresses us, and we avoid it. Through experience, we learn that that the distress that many types of discomfort causes us is disproportionate, and we start to react to it differently. We even learn to associate certain types of discomfort with the reward of hard work. If life doesn't force these experiences upon us, we have to get them by choice, or else our lives can end up overly constrained by discomfort that we never learned to put into context.
But you're right as well. In the gym, people first learn what their bodies can do when they use emotion and bravado to unlock levels of effort and discomfort they had never experienced before. As they gain that ability, they also learn to moderate it, to use it wisely in the context of how their body responds to what they're doing with it. The first without the second is dangerous, and the second without the first is constricting.
Learning to manage it is truly an art. If you're too conservative you leave a lot on the table. Being too aggressive absolutely will get you injured.
The one consistent thing though that research shows is that if you are considtently doing workouts that you would rate as a 10/10 on your own internal uncalibrated scale, you are at much higher risk for injury.
The art of knowing how hard to push yourself isn't something that people just intuitively know. It takes experience of failing in both directions to nail the sweet spot. It's not impossible to learn, but I agree that most athletes don't even have it nailed. Thats one of the things a good coach is for.
As a former college athlete I can't agree with you. It's nearly impossible to tell when you are pushing yourself too hard and when you are just pushing yourself.
The first workout of the year feels like you will die. A few weeks later that same workout feels like a warm up. Pain is always involved.
Either way, there's no need to skip training for a year and then hit the gym in one go (too much, too soon)
In training, absolutely. If something doesn't feel right, back off, let your body recover.
But during events? Whether it's the big through-hike or that marathon or the ironman, you need the ability to push past the pain and suffering, and learn that your body is better than you think at fixing itself. It's effectively impossible to injure yourself in a permanent way, I promise you.
Few marathon runners will run a full marathon during training, even at slower paces. Before I ran my first one, the longest training run I ever did was about 35km, with most runs below 25 (for comparison, a marathon is 42.2km). The sheer amount of suffering you'll endure during those last 7.2km is probably the worst you'll ever feel in your life, but slowing to a walk or dropping out at that point is ridiculous.
Like the author said, having the mental fortitude to tough it out when the going gets tough is what separates athletes from wannabes -- and knowing the difference between "this is just a training run" and "this is the event I've been preparing for over the last 12 months" is key.
I know plenty of people who I have tried to train and work with who would give up on the first bead of sweat.