How to Push Through the Pain Barrier When Running
Mile 20 and your legs feel like they belong to someone else. Your brain is running one loop: stop, stop, stop.
Here's what to actually do about it, starting with the one move that has to happen before any mantra or pacing trick can land, and then the specific techniques elite runners use once that space is created.
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What to do the second it starts hurting
Before you try a mantra, a pace check, or anything else, get some space from the sensation first. When the pain hits and the urge to quit shows up, picture yourself from a few feet outside your own body, like a spectator watching yourself go by.
Notice your stride, your posture, the road ahead, the way someone in the crowd might watch this runner and think "they've got this."
Hold that outside view for five or ten strides. Doing this gets you enough distance from the panic that your thinking brain comes back online and can actually use the tools below instead of getting drowned out by the alarm.
Once you've got that space, here's what elite runners reach for.
Use a short, repeatable cue word. Ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter leans on simple phrases like "embrace the pain" and "right foot, left foot" to get through the roughest stretches of a race.
She also pictures a specific place, what she calls the pain cave, as the location where the actual work of enduring happens, which gives the discomfort a container instead of letting it spread into everything.
Reframe what the pain means. Scott Jurek's mantra "Pain only hurts" is one of the most repeated lines in ultrarunning for a reason. It hurts, and that's all it is.
One runner who used the single word "Smooth" during a hard workout found it shut down a spiral of negative thoughts fast enough that she finished the effort 30 seconds per mile quicker than a similar workout a month before.
Break the distance into pieces. Instead of thinking about the miles left, think about the next lamppost, the next aid station, the next three minutes. Your brain handles a small, defined target far better than an open-ended wall of remaining distance.
Check your hands, shoulders, and cadence. Unclench your fists. Drop your shoulders away from your ears.
Count your foot strikes for ten seconds and see if you can nudge them slightly quicker without changing effort.
Eliud Kipchoge is known for smiling rather than grimacing when a marathon starts to hurt, and he's said that when the pain shows up, he thinks back on the training he already banked, using that memory as proof the effort is under control rather than a warning sign.
Try the outside-view step first, then pick whichever of the others fits the moment: a cue word for the mental spiral, a body check for the physical tension, a segment goal for the sheer distance ahead.
Why this works
Sports psychologists have noticed for a while that runners tend to use one of two attention strategies when things get hard: tuning into body sensations like cadence and breathing, or tuning out to something else entirely, like scenery, music, or mental math.
Both are well-documented approaches, and which one helps depends on the runner and how hard the effort is.
That's part of why "focus on your cadence" works for some people and does nothing for others. Tuning into your body only helps once you're not already flooded by the sensation you're trying to focus on.
Try to count your foot strikes while you're in full panic about quitting, and the counting is the gap the outside-view step fills. Watching yourself from a few feet away creates just enough room between you and the sensation that you get to choose which strategy to use next, instead of the panic choosing for you.
Once that room exists, a mantra like "pain only hurts" isn't fighting against a wave of alarm, it's landing in a mind that has a little space to actually hear it. Same with a cadence check or a segment goal. The technique isn't magic on its own, it works because of the state you're in when you use it.
Building up your tolerance over time
Pushing through in the moment is one skill. Raising the point where things start to hurt in the first place is another, and it comes from training.
Workouts that take you slightly past your current threshold, like tempo runs, hill repeats, or intervals that leave you working hard for the last quarter, teach your body and brain what that discomfort feels like in a controlled setting.
Over weeks, the same pace that used to feel like the edge starts to feel manageable, because you've practiced staying present in that state instead of panicking at it.
The outside-view step is worth practicing in training too, on a moderately hard run. The first time you try any new mental tool shouldn't be during your biggest effort of the year.
Next time a run starts to hurt, try the outside-view step before you reach for anything else. Give it five or ten strides, then bring in a cue word or a body check and see if it sticks in a way it hasn't before.
Ben is an ICF-certified coach and NLP master practitioner. He dives into psychology and neuroscience, then turns what he finds into tools athletes and high performers can use under pressure.
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