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Utah Valley Marathon celebrates ‘Pain You Enjoy.’ And, yes, that’s a real thing

Participants in the 2022 Utah Valley Marathon. The marathon, which is a Boston Marathon qualifier, goes through Provo Canyon and ends in downtown Provo.
courtesy Noah Hales
Participants in the 2022 Utah Valley Marathon. The marathon, which is a Boston Marathon qualifier, goes through Provo Canyon and ends in downtown Provo.

The Utah Valley Marathon is June 3, and signs all over Utah and Salt Lake counties advertise the race as “pain you enjoy.”

As weird as that may sound, athletes can actually harness pain and use it to enhance their performance, said clinical psychologist Eric Yelsa. He’s a clinical health psychologist at the University of Utah Hospital’s Pain Management Center and a cycling coach.

Yelsa said when people first start training, their bodies are building muscles and connective tissues — and that can hurt.

“The brain really does not like that initially. It's saying to stay away from that,” Yelsa said. So your pain signals are typically pretty high, but over time there is this adjustment to it. The brain becomes used to that experience and actually reduces pain intensity and normalizes the process.”

So athletes can learn to handle more pain and use its presence to evaluate how they are improving.

“When they start to experience pain that is familiar, then that's a signal that what they're doing is working,” he said.

Eric Yelsa is a clinical health psychologist at the University of Utah Hospital’s Pain Management Center and a cycling coach.
courtesy Eric Yelsa
Eric Yelsa is a clinical health psychologist at the University of Utah Hospital’s Pain Management Center and a cycling coach.

Seasoned athletes can even learn how to fight through the pain. The first step is to recognize when negative thoughts creep in. Yelsa said he did this while competing in LoToJa, a 200-mile bike race that starts in Logan, Utah, and finishes near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“It takes all day,” he said. “And in that process, you'll experience a lot of fatigue and pain at different times. It kind of ebbs and flows. My typical response initially when I start to experience that [is] I start to doubt my own sanity. It's like, ‘Why am I doing this? This is horrible.’”

After acknowledging those thoughts, Yelsa reinterprets them so he doesn’t drop out of the race — he tells them to “go away,” “quiet” or “focus now.”

“You'll see that with more seasoned athletes — they start to understand their own process of thinking and start to challenge those thought processes to refocus back on what they're trying to accomplish,” he said.

And while some people shy away from pain, others are attracted to the experience.

“They find that the pain and working through that barrier is a challenge that they see as a growth experience,” Yelsa said.

And, just like the Utah Valley Marathon says, some people actually do enjoy pain.

“It is almost addictive,” Yelsa said.

He explained that during a competition, people produce endogenous morphine, or endorphins, which can cover up pain. It feels good, and athletes start to associate pain with that good feeling.

“Because what [the body is] saying is that you're doing this endurance event,” he said. “Maybe your life is in danger. Let's have you keep running, and it buffers that pain down. But in the process, it's also a euphoric feeling.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ciara Hulet: How can people know the difference between the good kind of pain they can work through and the bad pain that means they should stop?

Eric Yelsa: Athletically related pain is more of a chronic type of experience — deep and dull and throbbing — versus what we would call acute pain, which is more of that sharp tingling type of pain that some people would say feels like electric shocks or pins and needles. If the pain is something that you haven't felt before, then typically that's a signal to stop.

CH: How do you help people who are anxious about pain prepare for it? 

EY: I do a lot of guided imagery and visualization. I also teach mindfulness meditation and in some situations I do hypnosis. But really it's doing a mental rehearsal in any of those formats, imagining themselves ahead of time doing the event over and over again and actually creating goals of what they want to achieve when that pain level goes up. [I will say], “I want you to imagine that you're moving through that pain, that you're going through the other side. Imagine how good you feel.”

Also, there are some different strategies that you might do once you do recognize that you want to drop out or you want to lower your performance in order to keep you going. And that's where the positive self-talk might come in. A lot of athletes will start doing a thing called chunking. So for instance, LoToJa is this 200 mile race I’ve done. [I tell myself], “It's really not 200 miles. It's just 100 miles. You've done 100 miles before. That's easy. And 100 miles is really just 50 miles. And 50 miles is really just 25 miles.” It’s taking that enormity of the event and breaking it down into doable chunks that you're familiar with.

CH: How do emotions impact how people experience pain? 

EY: Emotions really have to do with interpretation. One of the things that happens is, as we're doing these events, our body sends us these different cues: I have muscle tension, I have lactic acid, I have maybe some cramping. If I interpret that as some type of damage, then I go into an avoidance response, and the body will actually start to tighten up a little bit and my performance level will go down. But if I'm interpreting it as, “Look at me, I'm exercising. I'm starting to feel some of this pain, some lactic acid. I'm really doing well. I'm doing exactly what I want to do,” that reframing helps to improve motivation and stay with the goal.

Ciara is a native of Utah and KUER's Morning Edition host
Emily Pohlsander is the Morning Edition Producer and graduated with a journalism degree from Missouri State University. She has worked for newspapers in Missouri and North Carolina.
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