Exploring the Brosh Pain Scale while Running
A micro essay about calves, pigeons, and the role of stillness in thinking.
I consider myself a sporty person but running humiliates me. The first two kilometers are usually fine and I feel like a Greek Olympian1. But then I get summoned from the divine heights of Olympus through the foibles of my mortal body: between the second and third kilometer, my calves get increasingly tenser. On the Brosh scale, a super scientific pain scale that I did not select for its comic content at all, it would be located approximately between 3 —"This is distressing. I don't want this to be happening to me at all." and 5 —"Why is this happening to me??".
Between the third and fourth kilometer, the intensity on the Brosh pain scale climbs up toward 7 —"I see Jesus coming for me and I'm scared."
When I finish the run, around the fifth kilometer, my feet are numb. I suspect it's because the blood does not get through the calves, which feel like solid logs of wood by then. Or maybe bars of lead. Yeah, bars of lead sound better. That is, of course, if I get that far — some runs I was forced to cut short early because either of my calves decided to explore the high end of the Brosh scale, around number 10 "I am actively being mauled by a bear.", probably because the gastrocnemius muscle couldn’t take the load (which it was designed to take, dammit!).
Upon recounting the “usual run” to my physiotherapist, he remarked — in the stoic and disinterested manner that only people who don't suffer from the same issues that you do — “this does not seem healthy”. Well, gee.
Anyway, all this whining about my calves is only tangentially relevant. Because what I actually want to tell you is what happened after a level 10 (“I am actively being mauled by a bear.”) calf pain killed my recent run. I was three kilometers deep in the forest, with nothing on me besides clothes and my watch. So, I do the natural (and only possible) thing and start walking back. A few minutes into the walk, I started to notice a peculiar thing — I was thinking! And not just any flabby, redundant, meaningless kind of everyday thought like what will I eat later, italicized thinking, the substantial stuff like:
How would it feel to suddenly teleport next to a star?
Why aren't there any unicorns? We have rhinos and they sure can use the horn. It seems like an evolutionary advantage and I don't know why this random process did not endow horses with horns.
And, of course, the usual Cioranian pondering of the emptiness of being.
Joking aside, I thought about the future, the past, and important events that shaped me. You know, the real, deep, human stuff that probably differentiates us from pigeons.
Anyway, as I continued walking, I started to wonder: why don't I think in italics in my everyday life so much anymore? Am I a pigeon? I gently set that thought aside to explore later. The next conclusion seemed more fruitful: movement is crucial to thought. I was satisfied with this — many famous thinkers have been known to take walks and swear by the practice. Darwin, Thoreau, Aristotle… good company, I’d say.
But then I thought about mindfulness and meditation and I remembered something I had forgotten: it's not movement that's required for thought. It's actually stillness; movement facilitates thought because it empties the mind. But you can substitute many other activities for movement. Breathing, observing sensations, whittling, rosary counting, or watching pigeons enter a frenzied, squawking death battle over a few breadcrumbs. Whatever gets your juices flowing.
Ultimately, probably, what you want is to cultivate all-purpose awareness: being aware of the patterns of thought (and associated emotions) that your mind weaves and re-veawes, like an infinite tapestry. People usually call this mindfulness. But since I come from psychology, I tend to disregard established concepts and come up with a different name for the same thing to confuse anyone out there.
And so, with a throbbing calf (by now probably a 4 — “My pain is not f---ing around.”), I comb through the forest, thinking deep thoughts. The mind, finally free of the stuff I constantly feed it in the hopes of brute-forcing insight and learning, starts to breathe. “I wonder what I will cook when I come home...”