The Meaning of Suffering: Victor Frankl & Endurance Athletes
In this video, I'll share an article that I wrote for a friend's triathlon training newsletter.
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*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***
Hi, everyone. Recently I was asked to write an article about the psychology of suffering for a friend's triathlon training newsletter. This is a different audience, but I thought I'd share it with you all nonetheless!
I have to confess -- I don't really understand endurance athletes. Now don't get me wrong -- I am properly impressed. I'm awed by the effort, tenacity, and grit that is required to train for and ultimately finish something like an IronMan race. But I have to say, I don't really get it. Your body takes a beating, the training requires a huge amount of time from your life, and in the end -- all you get is the satisfaction of knowing that you completed an outrageous physical feat. So, I guess maybe I can see doing that once? But committed endurance athletes do not just do it once. They do it over and over and over again. There is an almost addictive quality to it.
My friend Ali is such an athlete. When Covid shut everything down two years ago, she endured the disappointment of major plans being canceled just like the rest of us. But one of her races kept getting rescheduled and then canceled and then rescheduled again -- multiple times. Which is irritating for any event that requires planning, but when you have been intensively training for 6 months for an IronMan race just to have it postponed at the last minute, it is a special kind of anguish.
As we were talking about this latest disappointment, she announced that she was going to do it anyway. She was going to find a local place and she was hoping to get at least one friend to join her. I was kind of dumbfounded. When I asked why she would do this, she responded, "There is something about feeling that degree of exhaustion and pain with other people that makes it meaningful." And just like that, she answered a question that had been plaguing me for some time.
Victor Frankl wrote that there are three ways to find meaning in life. I don't have difficulty in understanding the first two. The first way is through creating something or doing a good deed. This explains artists, writers, crafters, gardeners, and do-gooders of all kinds. It makes sense that leaving something or someone in a better place is a way to find meaning. The second way to find meaning is through experiencing and appreciating love, and beauty, and goodness. This makes sense to me as well, but I had some difficulty understanding Frankl's third way to find meaning -- through the attitude we take towards suffering.
Frankl had extensive experience in this area. He wrote Man's Search for Meaning in 1946 after surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. His basic premise is that the most important aspect of a life well lived is not pleasure, as modern life has sought to convince us, but meaning. He claims that meaning can be found in the most despairing and grim of circumstances. In fact, he says "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete." I understood the words, and yet, it wasn't until this pronouncement from a friend -- that she would go out of her way to endure pain, suffering, and exhaustion as long as she could do it alongside a single fellow athlete -- that I started to understand how suffering could be meaningful.
I remember a conversation that I had with a devoutly Christian friend whose husband had just passed away in a difficult, painful death. In the immediate aftermath, all she could ponder repeatedly was "What was the meaning in his suffering? There had to have been some meaning." She needed to know that his suffering in the end meant something -- otherwise, it was just pain. Frankl talks about how our suffering has the potential to turn an unspeakable predicament into a human achievement -- to make something as wretched as torment and starvation in a concentration camp into a noble and passionate rebellion. . . .
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