On the THPL journey I am quite confident that pain will be felt at one time or another. And so it will not be surprising that you will wonder, or someone will ask you along the way – do you have a high pain tolerance? And when you think about it how you tolerate pain can indeed affect your performance. So, the way to consider it is that you have a pain threshold, which is when you begin to feel pain, and pain tolerance, which is the maximum amount of pain you can sustain. And from both observation and personal experience there really are objective differences between what one person can tolerate and another can. It is sometime hard to know if it is learned or innate but what we know is that a higher pain tolerance is important for outstanding performance. And practice and familiarity with pain just makes you better at pain tolerance.

The big thought to consider is that the ability to tolerate pain goes beyond fitness. If you have inculcated pain tolerance in your fitness routine then it would be logical that you can transfer this control system to the day-to-day stress that you have in your life. Essentially, it is all about a strong mind-body connection that you have embraced and employed across all of your life. The confidence that comes from knowing that you can still perform well even when you feel pain can allow us to tolerate just about any stressful encounter in life—like traffic jams or conflicts at work or running your fastest mile. It is a great place to end up and a good outcome that comes from living an intense version of THPL.

Loving life, especially when in pain