Pain Is Pleasure

Lately I've been mulling over a couple of related blog posts. In the first, Justin Roth muses on the "too cool to care" attitude, where people, - although he is specifically referring to climbers the notion could extended to any athletes - "closet train", and make little of their achievements because it is uncool to care. In the second, Bill Ramsey explicates his philosophical view on what he dubs "the pain box" and the "pleasure box."

To me, the key concept that both blog posts share is the idea that to improve at your sport you need to make some deposits into the pain box - train hard, forgo social occasions, watch your diet, scare yourself silly, push hard - in order to withdraw some pleasure - sense of mastery, achievement, satisfaction - from the pleasure box.

In an ironic twist, I think I've got the pain and pleasure boxes transposed. I love training and have serious withdrawal symptoms if I go more than a day without a "beat down" workout. Training hard, theoretically, should be making deposits into the pain box, so that later, I can go out climbing, climb well and make a withdrawal from the pleasure box. But, as I'm discovering, if you make too many deposits to the pain box, in the form of too many hard workouts (particularly without adequate refueling and rest), you're so burned out and fatigued that, when you do go out climbing, your performance is actually worse.

To get strong, as the trainers repeatedly tell us, you must rest. Theoretically, rest should be neutral, neither a deposit nor a withdrawal. For confirmed exercise junkies, however, rest most assuredly is a heavy deposit to the pain box.

After climbing this 8 pitch route, I went into the gym

 for a workout. Smart, no, addicted, yes