Why I Can’t Quit Extreme Workouts

I am not a person who tends toward extremes. I shy away from skydiving or deep sea exploration (too high; too low). I don’t like incredibly spicy food. I prefer my drinking water at room temperature. I do not like horror movies or very sad movies or even movies when a sad part lasts longer than necessary. Suffice it to say, in a vast majority of my life, I enjoy the comfort and safety of the moderate middle.

Except in fitness. In fitness, I want to hurt as much as is humanly possible.

I like workouts that burn, workouts that sear, workouts that leave me on the ground gasping for air. I found my current gym by googling “hardest workout in D.C.” If you tell me your workout is hard, I want to try it. And if your workout is described as “low impact,” my interest is equally low.

When I started doing CrossFit in 2015, what hooked me wasn’t the Olympic weight lifting, but the brutal workouts of the day (or WODs, as they’re called). There was the “Karen” workout: 150 wall balls as fast as possible, a workout that required squatting with a 20-pound medicine ball 150 times and then throwing it at a target about 10 feet above the floor. And then there was “Fran,” a horrible combination of 95-pound thrusters (a squat followed by an upward press) and pull-ups. (Fran might be the only workout I’ve ever done that has a form of pulmonary edema named for it: “Fran lung.”)

These workouts might not sound appealing to you. But for the people who enjoy them, the unpleasantness is part of the point. Take Heber Cannon, a producer and director best known among CrossFit aficionados for his work on documentaries that cover the elite side of the sport. He told me that a brutal workout can brighten his day. “It’s easy to go about your day when you know it can’t get worse than that lactic acid building up in your legs and your lungs gasping for air when doing something short and demoralizing like Fran.”

Those kinds of workouts, he said, have real appeal to him as a filmmaker: “There’s something really compelling about the journey of someone riding the razor’s edge of implosion. Then when you add the element of competition, it makes for excellent entertainment.”

But something intrigued me about another comment he made. When we spoke, Cannon told me that he and his documentary film partner Marston Sawyers wanted to try one notorious workout — “Acid Bath” — because when they filmed CrossFit competitors doing it, he said, he “had never seen so much physical destruction in all my years of filming the sport,” with athletes bear-crawling to the finish line because they could barely stand. I told him that I’d had that same reaction: This looks terrible — I want to try it right now.

For comparison’s sake, this is like if you watched someone struggle to climb Mount Everest, fight for every breath and narrowly avoiddeath, and thought: “That looks awesome! I’d love to do that!”

Why are Cannon and I — and, for that matter, the Mount Everest climbers — like this? Why are a lot of people like this? Obstacle course races like the Tough Mudder and the Spartan, which sometimes force racers to crawl through electrified wires, have attracted millions of participants. And the number of people running in ultramarathons — races longer than 26.2 miles — has skyrocketed 345 percent over the past decade. Clearly, we are not alone in loving pain.

I asked Leigh Cowart, author of “Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose,” what makes extreme workout pain appealing. They told me that in studying why people like putting themselves in painful situations — whether through exercise, religious asceticism, climbing mountains or consensual sadomasochism — they found that no matter what, “at the end of the day, people who deliberately engage with pain are all, in their own ways, using their body to alter their mental state.”

Cowart added that what we want out of the painful experience determines the reward we get out of it, whether that’s pleasure, achievement, release or spiritual absolution: “For people compelled by surrender, withstanding the crucible of ultra hot peppers can be a tantalizing exercise of letting go and taking the ride. Those who want to feel the heady rush of accomplishment might feel more drawn to activities that challenge them to push themselves into that sweet spot, like endurance athletes.”

I work out hard because I want a physical release. I’m a person who thinks a lot — perhaps too much. But when I’m doing what feels like a million burpee tuck jumps or running 400 meter repeats on the track, I’m not thinking about work or World War I or anything, really.

That makes sense to Cowart, who told me: “Pain brings us, unequivocally, into the present moment. For many people, myself included, the appeal of high-sensation aversive experiences is largely due to the mental quiet that comes with opting into consensual pain. It’s hard to think about anything but the pain when you are deep in a high-intensity interval training workout or swimming in an icy sea!”

Intense workouts are an escape for me, a time when time and space cease to exist and all that matters is the right here and the right now: the next rep, the next box jump, the next lift. I get through the workout, I lie on the ground in a heap, and then I get on with my day. The next day, I do it again.

It’s not for everyone. But neither is mountaineering, competitive hot-pepper eating, religious asceticism or any of the main ways humans consensually cause themselves pain for some reason perhaps known only to themselves.

Because maybe, humans just like to hurt sometimes.

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