Do elite pros hurt as much as mid and back of the pack runners?

After winning the NCAA 800 meters earlier this year, Will Sumner said "it hurt. It hurt a lot."

If the pain of training is endured, then the race, if run properly, is comfortable, until it shouldn't be.

Breathing reserve on a CPET is another objective measure of effort level and therefore discomfort. I was tested in January with a negative reserve not due to pathology. Then again, the test was difficult anyway because the incline was raised every 15 sec. I stopped at 22%.

I don't think elites feel the same pain as your average community marathoner because they have the advantage of consistent training. I've ran marathons with consistent training and with spotty (run when it's convenient or i feel good) and the pain varied greatly. Consistent training i only felt tired but could've ran further. With spotty training it hurt tremendously at the finish and I was doing the "marathon walk" and went straight to the massage booth. I learned my lesson and won't enter a full marathon without consistent training. I believe pro athletes mostly feel fatigue rather than pain due to their frequent training days in a row.

The better conditioned you are, the less it hurts. It's why people say the race wasn't uncomfortable when they pr.

Hurt is a word for those whose vocabulary is lacking. I've never hurt in any race except to injury, or smacking a barrier. Its discomfort, sometimes extreme discomfort ... but never pain. Even in a marathon its not painful. When the gremlins start biting at your legs that's not pain, that's a failure to communicate. Your muscles are no longer listening to what they are being told to do.

Smack a barrier -- that's pain.

When I was younger, and as a Brit, I thought calling training ‘practice’ as you guys do a bit daft. But having been away from the sport for a long time, and coming back to it fairly seriously, I think practice is the right term. The hard sessions do get you fitter, of course they do, but what they really do is let you practice living in the hell of a serious effort, so you can endure it longer and know it can be sustained.

Not elite by a long shot but I’ve run a 2:33 marathon and a 4:10 marathon and I can say that I was able to tolerate way more pain for way longer when I was training for the 2:33 as compared to when I was running 3:30-4:00

Pain is in your head. Yes, elites experience pain signals magnitudes greater than a mid packer, but they are able to ignore them when they hit their brains. So do they hurt as much? It's really all a matter of perception, and mid packers give in to their pain and focus on how awful it is. Elites feel much stronger sensations of pain, but they're able to compartmentalize it, and deal.

My fastest races were my easiest races.

I recall reading an interview with Grete Waitz after she ran the NYC marathon with Fred Lebow. She said that run felt much harder for her than any of her other marathons. As an elite she was exerting herself intensely, but for only about 2.5 hours. When she ran with Lebow, the intensity was obviously much lower, but it took them 5.5 hours to finish. So a different sort of fatigue, which I suppose she wasn't really used to!

Chipping in here, I was somewhat elite when I was in my 20s (multiple time DI All-American, National Champion for my home country). I'm now a mid-pack runner and from my experience, the biggest difference is that for "normal" people, the effortless phase of the race does not exist. When you are elite/frontpack/whatever, you are probably both talented AND trained. So the early part of a distance race feels effortless - it starts hurting, yes, but your stride is so light and flowy that you don't worry much about it, your body is doing it's thing and you are kind of along for the ride. So it used to be much easier to handle pain because the movement itself is so smooth that you have a lot of capacity to handle the hurting. It's only very late in the race, that you have to focus on holding your form together and driving forward, while also handling the hurt. So it's a completely different feeling. Nowadays, when I race, I really have to work for it constantly. I have to make the body move forward, push through the hurt, each step is an effort, etc, and then it feels so much longer because I can't get to that flow where I used to just click off the kilometers on autopilot because the physical movement was detached from the hurt. By the end of the race, it's the same pain as in my good old days, but I'm mentally so much more exhausted from having to manage it all to even get there.

There are definitely other takes on this & I welcome them. However, ignoring the variable that mid & back of the pack runners are more likely to go out way too hard & blow up, I would argue the duration spent running determines the type of discomfort experienced.

For example, a well-paced 2-hour half-marathon runner would face the same fatigue & discomfort caused from depleting glycogen stores in the muscle fibers as a 2-hour elite men's marathoner would. This is because it takes about 2 hours of steady state effort to mostly deplete glycogen stores.

Same for a 5-hour marathoner. Their experience on race day would be similar to an elite runner racing a 50-mile race in about 5 hours (given both raced on the same surface).

This is by no means a perfect argument, but it gives insight into the shared experience we have as runners, regardless of our ability levels.

Look at the guys after a world class 5k race when they crash to the ground. I've heard so many say 5k is the most painful distance on the track because of the combination of speed and endurance it takes. Some pros just look like hell after a world class 5k track race!

There are different ways/modes of tolerating pain while running, regardless of level. Top pros clearly find a way to handle it. But do they hurt bad? Yes. Sure, there are races where an athlete is in the zone, and it rolls out handily. But the best come through when it's tough.

Think of Kip Keino, winning the Olympic 1500 while suffering. What was it, bladder stones? He'd been advised to skip the race. What the heck, he already had silver in the 5000.

Think of Kipchoge during his first shot at breaking 2:00:00 in an exhibition run. He was literally turning gray at the end of the run. I'd say it wasn't easy.

Everyone experiences discomfort (hurt) differently.

It used to be that endurance athletes measured discomfort (perceived effort) on a hurt-pain-agony scale, so hurt was the most relatively minimal level of discomfort.

See this article from 1963

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Swimming: Formula: Hurt, Pain, Agony

Big Ten swimming is like Big Ten football, the best; and Indiana University's swimming team is the best in the Big Ten. Last week at Oak Park, Ill., the Hoosiers showed how good they are by...

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Today Kelvin Kiptum set the marathon world record, and has never run slower than in the 2:01s, for any of his three marathons. He said he has never experienced pain in any of his marathons.

What does that mean? Did he hurt?

It did look like he was grimacing and gritting his teeth a little bit toward the end of his run today, and most people do that when they are putting in a higher than normal amount of effort.

But was it enough effort so that he hurt?

A long time ago, Greg Meyer (previous Chicago Marathon winner) was asked when he first started to hurt when he won the Boston Marathon in 2:09:00. He said he never hurt during that race.

Sifan Hassan was definitely experiencing hurt at the end of her 2:13 marathon today, second fastest female marathon ever.

I’d say no. Some of the very top elites finish barely breathing and smiling after they cross the line. Running mid race on record pace breathing through their nose. Compare that to top college or high school runners at the finish. Way more out of breath and pain faces at the finish.