Welcome To the Cave
“When it feels scary or sounds too hard, that’s the thing we should probably try to do.”
Up the top!
He kept finding it in the travel books. We’d find them, the books from the library about traveling Australia, mysteriously laid out on the coffee table, images of fossilised diprotodon skeletons open to the light. Our 7-year-old can’t speak. His communication pathways at the moment are..pretty sparse. Most of the time it feels impossible to figure out what he wants or what he’s thinking, so when this book thing started happening, we tried to listen. By the third and fourth time it was decided, we were going to Naracoorte Caves, South Australia.
When you arrive at the Visitors Center at the National Park, you pass these outdoor sculptures of megafauna - giant prehistoric animals set in bronze and fiberglass. Dominating the foyer is a glass case with the skeletons of a Thylacoleo fighting a Wonambi Naracoortensis (enormous snake) and these creepy/awesome recreated figures of a marsupial lion and a giant kangaroo complete with patchworked possum and roo pelts. The excitement was palpable (and by palpable I mean - the kid was bouncing around the room like Sonic the Hedgehog).
Now, to experience the best of the caves you must participate in a guided tour - something about protecting fragile and irreplaceable World Heritage natural relics. When you have an autistic, six-year-old Sonic the Hedgehog, the word “tour” translates to something like, “You can choose to engage in the worst experience of your life or wait outside in the playground.” We’d come too far for the latter. We explained the situation the best we could and booked Sonic and me in for the shortest tour - half an hour in the Alexandra Cave.
Things started a bit rocky. Just trying to gather all the tour participants at the entrance to the cave was proving challenging for one mother and her small blue hedgehog. He did not want to hold hands or be restrained, he wanted to run and shout and climb on things. I kept busy trying to tamp down my rising panic like an overeager barista. In that moment it felt like the right thing to do was bail. Even if I could convince him to descend the stairs into the confined space of the cave, he would be uncontrollable, noisy, agitated, and soon panic himself without being able to bounce off the walls like a pinball. Against reason, I decided to do what felt like the hard thing instead.
After everyone else had taken the steep industrial metal treads into the balmy underground cavern, we took a deep breath and followed. The earth swallowed us. We could feel the weight of it above and we grew very, very still. The ranger handed my son a heavy metal torch and he gripped it like a lifeline. Slowly and carefully he followed the path, stopping to touch the damp limestone floor and shine his beam of light through crystals and stalactites. Eyes wide, I’m not sure which one of us was more amazed.
Caves are something runners know all about. When I first started dipping my toes into the actual physical act of running, on purpose, for more than a few meters at a time, I was astonished at how grueling it was. I called my brother, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this running thing. After about 200m I’m dead in the water. I’m in so much pain I have to stop.” “No you don’t,” he kindly informed me as only younger brothers can, “That’s just runner’s block. You have to get to the other side of it, then you’ll be good. You have to convince your body that this is what you’re doing.” This was my first taste of what longer-distance runners call the “Pain Cave.”
It’s a term that’s been popularised in the Ultra running community where people are pushing distances of 50 - 400+ km over some pretty gnarly and sometimes, downright inhospitable terrain. So an early bit of runner’s block feels pithy compared to what someone like the indefatigable, Courtney Dauwalter (my inspiration for life) goes through at mile 80. But to steal a line from Sam Robinson’s article for Outside, “Ultramarathoning does not hold a monopoly on pain—running’s subdisciplines are unified through deep descents into lactic agony. Racing a 5K is like taking a bath in discomfort. A well-paced half marathon feels like holding your hand in a campfire. The end of a marathon is particularly awful—the last 10 kilometers almost a deconstruction of the self.” I’d wager that anyone who has tried running (or any other sport where the adjective ‘endurance’ can be applied) can identify with the mind over matter battle, the misery of realising that our bodies can go further than our brains thought they could.
I remember a magazine ad that I had blu-tacked above my bed in junior high. Brandishing some big-name sports logo, it was an image of a woman running in the rain. Her body filled the frame and inconspicuous text was set next to her muscle groups with lines that implied that her feet, legs, chest, arms, and head were all saying the single word, “Stop.” Along the bottom of the page, a final line read: “Good thing this isn’t a democracy.” I wasn’t into running then, I’m not sure I had much resilience at all, but I liked the way it sounded. Now I think about it all the time, especially on the climb up the hill to the ridge.
The Pain Cave is a term for the psychological location many endurance athletes enter once they stumble into the complete and utter agony of what they’ve set out to accomplish. Somewhere with the dehydration, lactic acid, fatigue, muscle and tendon distress, oxygen deprivation, hunger, exhaustion, vomiting, blurred vision - you know, all the regular ecstasy-inducing stuff, they enter this deeply focused place. I’ve read about all kinds of mantras and methods athletes use to will themselves to keep going, not necessarily past, but into the pain. Courtney Dauwalter, considered one of the world’s best female Ultra Marathon runners (and former science teacher), literally imagines entering the cave and chiseling out the interior, carving, growing it. “I used to get to the entrance [of the cave] and backpedal. Like, ‘Oh this is the limit, and now I’m going to get out of here as quick as I can..” she said in an interview with Mirin Fader for The Ringer. Now she almost looks forward to it, “because this is actually where the work is done.”
For me, as ludicrous as it seems, an important part of why I run is that it gives me a chance to practice pain. Yes, I’ve got enough of it elsewhere, but I am working to change my perception that pain, discomfort, and difficulty - are bad things.
You wouldn’t believe how often I think about childbirth when I’m running. It’s that bad. Running is like that though, you end up in strange places. The most useful thing the midwife told me, and maybe that anyone has ever told me, was that “it’s just pain and pain can’t hurt you.” Yes. Pain is something that happens in our heads. It’s neurotransmitters giving us information. Sometimes it’s useful. Sometimes it’s not. There is pain and there is injury, but they are not synonymous. The excruciating agony of getting a human out of your body isn’t indicative of injury, it’s indicative of work being done. The incessant grind of running when all your body wants to do is stop, isn’t indicative of injury, it’s indicative of work being done (please note that if you do have an actual injury, you should look after it).
The brilliant and astute scholar-writer-philosopher Joseph Campbell famously noted that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” Dark caves. Scary caves. Caves with hidden passageways and dead-ends. Enclosed spaces with sensitive, dysregulated children. And the problem is that most of the time we have no idea what the treasure we’re seeking even is. So we’re going inside this unwelcoming cavern for what? Humans have survived this long because we tend to defend against loss more ferociously than we seek gains, particularly when they are unpredictable, it’s called the cognitive bias of loss aversion. So - if entering the cave will unequivocally cost us certainty, comfort, or control to get some ambiguous or dubious reward (or worst-case scenario - eaten), we’re likely to give it a miss. Fortunately, we’re no longer dodging sabertooth tigers. Unfortunately, this mindset leads us to dodge the process instead.
It’s so easy, at the entrance of the cave, where things are knowable, safe, and agreeable to trick ourselves into thinking that the easy choice is the right choice. It seems a foregone conclusion that this must be where the trail ends - the outer limit of our journey, a clear sign that it’s time to head home. And maybe it is the right choice if what you’re looking for is the snug, congenial security of being surrounded by circumstances that ensure you feel safe and warm and validated. These are universally nice things.
But the ugly truth of our existence is this: the impossible thing, the untenable thing, the dark and scary thing, that is always where the work is being done. It is, in fact, the only place growth happens and where the parts of us that are limiting, are chiseled away. I have yet to see it accomplished through hacks, shortcuts, magic pills, or behind the dopamine glow promises of screens and shopping carts. I have never experienced it on this side of comfort or certainty or apathy. In short, I don’t think it happens outside the cave. And the older I get, the more I believe that the treasure in that cave isn’t a magical golden ring, it’s me, the fullest most alive version of me.
I’m so scared of pain. I hate being hurt. I hate running up hills. I turn straight into chicken shit when there’s a possibility of injury or getting water up my nose. And that’s just the physical stuff. Because all this running jibberish is still just a metaphor for all the other stuff that’s scary and hurts - relationships, opportunities, goals, personal growth, parenting, growing up, getting old, facing sickness and disability and the crushing weight of our own existence. But I’m also really curious. I’m curious about what’s possible. I’m curious about how strong I am and what I can do. I’m curious about my limits and my capacity. I’m curious what it means for my kids to watch their parents figure that out. I’m trying to be more curious than afraid.
All my love people. It hurts out here. Good thing we’re stronger than we think.
Want to know more? These are some of the things I listened to and read while writing this installment:
The Ringer article about Courtney
Why Are Runners Obsessed With the Pain Cave?
Why More Over-40s Are Taking Up Extreme Sports (is anyone else obsessed with hearing about people who are ahead of you in the life game doing inspiring things?)