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My wife and I have been talking about this quite a bit lately with regard to physical pain and suffering. What do other people experience? Of course, we can never know that for sure, but it's interesting to ponder. One place this came up is in the context of footraces, where the expected norm for anyone that cares even a little bit is deliberately incurring a large amount of cardiovascular stress and suffering, sometimes to the point of collapsing and vomiting after finishing. I have some reasonable degree of confidence that in this context I'm significant tougher than someone that isn't trained at all, but how could I have any idea whether I'm tougher than the guy that I'm racing against on a given day? I suspect that the difference isn't large, but I don't know, I might be gutting by someone strictly because I'm more willing to hurt than they are, but it might also be true that I'm a total pussy and they were able to drain their tank a lot more to even keep a race even. In any case, I know that people that habitually run as fast as they are physically capable of for a few miles will have more ability to tolerate this sort of suffering than people that get winded from going up a flight of stairs.
So how does that translate to the rest of life? When someone says that their back is sore or that they're feeling under the weather, are they experiencing something different than me? It seems to me that they must be, based on the way they react to illness. The number of times per year that I'm too ill to pull up a computer and work is maybe a couple days per year, but I've talked to other people that think it's completely unreasonable that a given company (with strictly non-physical work) only allows a couple weeks per year of sick time. We must be feeling quite different, right? I ultimately don't know, but I suspect that these differences in tolerance translate to differences in experience and result in part of the gap between people that allow setbacks to wreck them long-term relative to bouncing back and getting right. Treating everything as massively damaging seems like a form of anti-resilience that will lead to continually diminished physical and mental capacity to deal with future insults. Sub-cultures that treat these insults and corresponding diminished capacity as an identity unto themselves seem likely to spiral this further, possibly to the point where you have people lying in bed, convinced that they can't do anything, and they're actually correct.
RE: Illness, as I've gotten older, the brain fog I get from even a simple cold has gotten worse. To the point where there isn't much sense in me logging into work to sling some code, when I know I'm running at maybe 50% speed, and most of the code I write won't work either.
Doesn't help that I get sicker, more often, on account of having a kid in school who drags home everything and insist on sharing/stealing my breakfast every morning. I could say no... and sometimes I do when she's especially booger faced. But giving her half my bagel and egg in the morning is a nice daddy/daughter ritual I'd rather not give up. Plus it's one of the surest ways to get food in her before school.
At least she's not eating chocolate frosted sugar bombs.
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I think part of this might be, as you say, subjective differences regarding the experience of the same illness, but this could also be just a difference in immune systems/health in general.
That is to say, I wouldn't be surprised if the gap there may be doubly influenced by your running- first in just being healthier and getting sick less/getting less sick and second by then being better at coping with whatever level of discomfort you get from that sickness.
Edit: There is also the noted vicious cycle for chronic illness (real or perceived) where feeling like shit makes you less likely to practice the habits which make you less likely to feel like shit, which then causes you to feel like shit even more/more often. Once again to some extent this applies mentally, but is also a very real thing physically.
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