But just because I have a high tolerance for pain doesn’t mean I enjoy it. In middle and high school, I dreaded every single race. Not because I was anxious about finishing well but because I was terrified of the pain that came with it. I had a very specific daydream that I would entertain before every race: An alien spaceship would land in the middle of the track right before the starting gun and I would get to go home. Nobody could ever make us run after such a dramatic extraterrestrial disruption. But no matter how much I fantasized, the Martians never came and the starting gun always fired—followed by the inevitable onset of pain.
I have never been able to fully recall the exact sensations of pain during those races, but I do remember certain details, gestures of pain. Salt-sweat residue chafing between my legs, my vision blurring with sunscreen, a pool of sweat gathering between my thick eyebrows, which furrowed so deeply they fused with my poorly mascaraed eyelashes. My entire body was an ant farm swarming with pain, transparent and open, my suffering on display for all to see.
Despite days of anxiously anticipating races, the pain still shocked me every time it arrived. I would think back wistfully to all the times when I wasn’t in pain and scold myself for not being grateful enough for every leisurely second watching cartoons, eating fried calamari, or doing anything besides running.
After every single race ended, even when I won, my joy at finishing was tainted by the trauma of the pain I had just experienced. I would stomp directly from the finish line over to my dad, who I remember as having a camera for a nose, and report to him that seriously, this race could have killed me, and I simply could not go through this again. My dad would say the same thing every time: “It’s okay, Lex.”
When I went to college and started training to compete at the Division 1 level, intense pain became part of my daily routine. Every morning I woke up dreading the inevitable pain to come and by the time practice started, I felt mentally drained. It became clear that if I wanted to survive as a college runner, I needed to develop a technique to manage my fears about pain. I could no longer afford to spend the days leading up to workouts and races steeped in anxiety. Negative thinking drains energy, and I needed all the energy I had to keep up with my new teammates. Pain and I had to come to a new understanding.
I thought back to middle school when I got into a fight with this girl I really didn’t get along with. When our teacher finally intervened, she quarantined us in a room called “the pod” for an hour to figure things out, just us two eleven-year-olds. My adversary and I spent a good forty-five minutes in silence, glaring at each other from under our unibrows. But in the end we agreed that while we didn’t want or need to be friends, we could be civil for both our sakes. I resolved to be similarly civil with pain. Before my races and big workouts, I worked on consciously shifting my mental energy from dreading upcoming pain to simply recognizing that the pain would always show up no matter what, and even though I utterly despised it, I should try to greet it politely like a guest at a dinner party and be fully prepared to open the door when it does. Sometimes pain arrives slowly, like butter melting on toast. Or it can be quick, like butter hitting a very hot pan. Whichever variety of pain I’m getting, I know it is coming and I am prepared to handle it gracefully.
The next step was to teach myself to manage the pain once it arrived. Visualization became my most powerful tool: I learned to anticipate which parts of a race would be the most grueling, either by studying the course beforehand or talking to people who had run the race before. In the days leading up to the race, while jogging, cutting my nails, or scrambling eggs, I’d visualize an Alexi-inside-my-head approaching a specific painful moment along the course and pushing through the rough patch with composure, strength, and even beauty. When I actually faced the challenge in the race, I knew the pain was coming—and, most crucially, I had already made the decision to persevere.
I also discovered using physical triggers, playable actions, as a tool to help my mind overcome the anxiety associated with the onset of pain. For example: “When the pain hits after the third mile, remember to shake your arms out and drop your shoulders.” Or even something as simple as: “When it hurts, force yourself to smile.” By converting a mental struggle into an actionable objective, internal battles felt less elusive and more grounded. It’s much easier to tell myself to move my arms than it is to tell myself to “feel better.”
After I finished school, I started running professionally with my eye on competing in the Olympics. Thrust into this new world of elite runners, I had a surprising realization: My competitors were all experiencing pain, too. I idolized pro runners when I was growing up and I assumed that these mythical creatures must have figured something out about pain that I hadn’t. There’s no way that these professionals hurt as much as I did. But now that I was up close to this new tier of athlete, I saw that I wasn’t the only one struggling. As it turns out, running hurts for everyone.
At the top level, everyone has their own method for managing pain. Some runners wear their pain openly while others hide it very well. But in the same way that it’s usually unhelpful to compare my life to how other people’s lives look on their Instagram feeds, I had to stop comparing myself to how other people in my races looked. Looks can be deceiving, and more often than not, we try to show only the most glamorous parts of ourselves.
I remember in one of my first competitions as a post-collegian, I found myself running side by side with an accomplished Olympian who maintained a calm face and strong posture despite our grueling pace. I felt intimidated—was this woman not in pain? But then halfway through the race, she suddenly fell behind the pace and completely dropped back, seemingly out of the blue. I’d been so sure that her steady breathing meant that I was alone in my suffering, when in truth she must have been feeling even more pain than I was. Without a doubt, I learned that day that pain is the one thing my competitors and I definitely have in common.
My deeper understanding of physical pain has helped me cope with emotional pain, too. First of all, I know that pain shows up differently for each person and I can never tell just how much somebody else might be hurting. I also understand that whenever I feel bad, I’m probably not alone. I may not always know when emotional pain is coming, and I do get sad sometimes—I get bouts of sadness that come out of nowhere and feel like a sorbet scoop to the heart. Sometimes it’s related to a memory of my mom, and sometimes it doesn’t have any reason for being at all, but I am equipped to greet the sadness when it arrives.
When I was unexpectedly quarantined in Greece for five months during the COVID-19 pandemic (I initially planned to spend only the month of February 2020 there for pre-Olympic training), I had nothing to do but train very hard since my support network there was just my Greek coach. I was already in an emotionally vulnerable place, on account of just learning that the Olympics had been postponed by a year and that I’d be away from my family for an unknown amount of time, when during one very challenging and windy workout, my Greek coach started yelling at me like I’d never been yelled at before. He was screaming at the top of his lungs to be heard over the wind. This wasn’t anything new, shouting was just his style, but suddenly I felt a tidal wave of unexpected sadness. His yelling, which felt completely unmerited and disproportionate to the situation at hand, woke something up inside of me related to the little-kid memories of my mom screaming at the top of her lungs in the kitchen. Back then I had to hold everything inside, but now I allowed myself to burst into tears as I continued the workout. Crying was my playable action.