Pain therapy for broken men

Men are increasingly finding a sense of self by testing their physical limits

See my previous posts on raising boys and girls in a way that helps their self-actualization.

Due to my obsessive watching of the Tour de France, the YouTube algorithms recommended a video to me. I watched it with fascination. It is the journey of a few Kiwi men completing all the stages of the TDF a day or two before the actual event. These are not elite athletes by any means. They are regular joes who keep fit.

Many of them participated in the event to bring awareness to mental health issues. Some of them are combating depression. It is quite a moving documentation of their journey and one can’t help but shed tears with them when they achieve a milestone despite massive physical and mental challenges. I felt emotional at the 28-30 min mark, as I had the exact same experience after a marathon many years ago.. What is interesting is that people you expect to break do not do so, and those that seem resilient to begin with, often surprise you with their vulnerabilities.

These men follow a code that is well known to casual endurance athletes - leave no one behind. Your own finish time does not matter - you have to support everyone on the team. i.e. if you see a mate struggling, you stick with him.

This is a code well understood by soldiers. A man joins the armed forces due to patriotism. He lays his life for the soldier next to him. As the bard wrote in Henry V.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

Many marriage counselors and therapists recommend that men have male friends for this reason¹². Men, at least Gen X and older ones, find self-actualization and healing by doing activities with other men. Endurance activities, ones involving physical pain seems like a perfect antidote to being in the moment. That’s perhaps, why, like Adharanand Finn, so many of my broken friends and I do them.

As the Japanese marathon monks of Mount Hiei once told me about their challenge to complete 1,000 marathons in 1,000 days, it was a meditation in movement. Ultrarunning, done well, was all about the process, not the outcome. And, like a meditation, that meant staying in the moment.

Eventually, I realised the secret was to embrace the struggle, as they’d told me all along. To stand in the midst of the storm, facing the oblivion, and to say to yourself: this is why I’m here. This is what I came for. A friend who ran two of my 100-mile races with me said an ultra marathon doesn’t begin until 50 miles in. “At the start,” she said, “I have too much energy, but when I get tired, everything melts away and it’s just me and the running.”

Yes, in the oblivion, deep in the pain cave, if we dig deep enough, if we push on through, we come to a place where it is strangely peaceful, where everything else melts away, even, amazingly, the pain in our legs, the tiredness that had seemed so debilitating, it all clears. And there, out in the mountains, or even on a city running track, we find ourselves fully present in the moment.³

Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote this his foreword to Viktor Frankl’s book ‘Man’s search for meaning,’⁴

Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

Viktor Frankl dwells further on suffering in ‘Man’s search for meaning’ as these quotes from different pages demonstrate;

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

….often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.

“What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? —“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

Nietzsche - “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”

“This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

“ quoting Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)”

“The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom”

The post-industrial revolution man needs some sort of validation of being worthy, and of not being an expendible cog in a giant machine. He needs to combat the boredom and despair that Thoreau wrote about in Walden⁵,

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Working towards a finite goal and accomplishing a tough physical task with like-minded men gives meaning. For broken men, it is perhaps, the best way out of mental health crises. “Come, let’s go run a marathon” is a far superior call from a friend to “C’mon, let us drink!”

I found Season 2 Episode 7 of ‘The Bear’ to be the one of the best of any streaming series. It was certainly my favorite of this year. Richie, broken, abandoned by his wife, and without direction in middle-age, finally finds purpose while serving a week in an upscale restaurant. He has to lead a life of immense discipline and service. The ‘personal quality’ aspect of it changes him in a fundamental manner. Read David French’s meditation on The Bear and the need to belong in his fine column in the NY Times. He links to an article in City-Journal about the increasing percentages of males dying from opiod addiction or suicide in the United States. These men have to find purpose, and not give in to despair.

Even tough competitors feel a sense of oneness via shared empathy channeled by extreme pain. Mohoric’s post-race 2023 TDF interview distilled the essence of manhood, and of sport itself.

My heroine Courtney Dauwalter said this about the pain cave

Perhaps, this is why more and more people, especially men, are participating in ultra endurance events.⁶

The runner and film maker Billy Yang who has been recording ultra events for years explains his ‘Why.’

What is your why?

Have a terrific pain-filled weekend!

1. Why Men Need to Prioritize, and Celebrate, Their Friendships, Jeff Stone, Psychology Today. February 2022

2. Why we all need to reconnect with our friends, Richard Goodwin, Men’s Health. January 2021

3. How the sheer hell of ultrarunning led me to a strange peace, Adharanand Finn, The Guardian. June 2, 2019

4. Man’s search for meaning, Viktor Frankl

5. Walden, Henry David Thoreau, Project Gutenberg

6. Ultrarunning finishes, iRunFar