Discomfort is a friend.

The way we judge our pain does more damage than the pain itself. The second the mind steps in to resist it, the messages the body receives are amplified. Label it “bad” and you may as well drop a 40-kilogram weight on your back.

Judgement is like velcro. The more you throw at the weather, the course or the athlete beside you, the more the discomfort sticks. And the mind will always make a story of the pain, attaching it to some past experience. Once it is personal, it is no longer neutral.

The more personal you make a moment, the more painful it becomes. When coaches talk about an athlete’s ability to suffer, this is what they mean. It is not a physical ability. It is a refusal to judge.

Much of our suffering comes from putting it in the wrong place. Take it into your head and you unload a truckload of stories onto a feeling. It’s too hot. My legs are burning. I don’t want to be here. That is a mental tax you don’t need to pay.

“I am suffering my experience” and “I am experiencing suffering” are not the same thing. Take the discomfort back into the body, where it belongs. It is there to be felt, not thought.

So stay with it. Feel it, allow it, keep softening into it. As you do, it expands, moves, changes, and becomes more bearable. Then you find out something most athletes never do: you can relax while you suffer.

Discomfort in endurance sport is a signal, a teacher, and occasionally a liar. Most of it is not physical at all. It is how you judge what is happening.

So learn the difference between tired, sore and hurt. The burn of a hard effort, heavy legs, the urge to stop: that is the discomfort this page is about, and it is worth meeting.

Sharp, localised pain that gets worse as you go is different. That is your body asking you to stop, and listening to it is part of the skill, not a failure of it.

The lump in your throat, the racing thoughts, the heart rate climbing on the start line. Most of the time it has nothing to do with real danger. It is a projected future, and a low tolerance for not knowing how things will go. Sport is uncertain at best.

You don’t overcome fear by charging at it. You invite it to sit at your table. Move towards what makes you uncomfortable, gently, methodically and consistently, and the fear slowly turns into flow.

The feeling of fear is safe. No one has ever died of the feeling. Stay present with it in training and you are training yourself to stay present with it on race day, where, by the way, it always leaves as soon as the gun goes off.

And if anxiety comes along too, do it anyway. It eats its meals on your resistance. The more you do, the more you will.

We are lousy at surrender. Say the word and people hear “give up”. I mean the exact opposite. Surrender says: I accept this challenge, and I will stay present with it whatever happens. I will flow like water and bend around the difficulty.

Bracing against a hard effort adds to the hurt. Soften into it instead. Check your tension in the hard sessions and see how relaxed you can become at speed. Smile into it. It tells your nervous system to settle, and it saves the energy you would otherwise burn on tension.

The shift most athletes describe is from running away from the feeling to sitting next to it. It sounds small. It changes the whole experience of racing.

Like everything else on these pages, it is built in training and tested on race day. Four things to work on:

• Name the sensation. Don’t flinch from it.
• Learn the difference between tired, sore and hurt.
• Relax into the hard efforts, at speed.
• Practise responding, not reacting.

Pain is temporary. Suffering is optional. Stop running from it, stand your ground, and give it a way through you. Letting go is what lets you hang on.