Last week, we drew a line between two ways of persisting through time: endurance, the total presence of a self in each moment, and perdurance, the understanding of the self as a long story made of temporal parts; but we deliberately left a question dangling. If those are the two frameworks we carry into difficulty, what happens when the difficulty is pain? Not fatigue, not discomfort, not the romantic suffering of a long expedition but actual, unwelcome, unexpected and sometimes unbearable pain?
This week, we go there.
The Stoics were half right
The Stoic tradition, which has enjoyed an enormous revival in sports psychology and self-help culture over the past decade (thank you, Instagram!), offers what sounds like a complete answer to pain. Marcus Aurelius put it plainly: pain is not an evil (quote adapted from Meditations). It is merely a sensation. The mind that refuses to add judgment to sensation is free. Epictetus, who was enslaved and likely tortured, agreed: some things are in our control, most things are not, and the body's suffering belongs firmly in the second category.
This is genuinely powerful. Athletes who have absorbed even a shallow version of this teaching tend to be more durable under pressure. The ability to observe pain without immediately catastrophising it is a real and trainable skill.
But this is where the Stoics ran into trouble.
They treat pain as a static object. Something to be looked at, assessed, and then cognitively dismissed. What they do not fully account for is pain's relationship with time, the fact that pain is not a thing but a process, and that how long it has been going on, and how long it might continue, entirely changes its nature. A sharp pain that lasts three seconds is categorically different from the same intensity sustained for three hours, not just quantitatively but qualitatively. It becomes something else. It occupies you differently.
This is where endurance and perdurance enter, and where they complicate the Stoic picture in useful ways.
Pain through the Endurantist lens
The endurantist is wholly present at each moment. There is no temporal distance. What exists is what is happening now, and the self meeting it is complete and continuous.
For the endurance athlete in pain, this framework is both a gift and a trap.
The gift is intensity. When a climber's fingers are screaming on a cold hold and the next move requires everything they don't have anymore, there is no room for the story of how they got there or where they are going. The endurantist stance collapses time helpfully : there is only the hold, the breath, the move. Pain, in this mode, becomes an information rather than a narrative. It tells you about grip, about limit, about where your edge is. The great free soloists and ultra-runners often describe something like this : a strange clarity in extremity, where pain stops being suffered and starts being used.
The trap arrives when that intensity has nowhere to go. Chronic pain, for exmaple, with the torn ligament that won't heal, the stress fracture that returns every (damn) season, the cumulative damage of decades of hard sport; they cannot be collapsed into the present moment without cost. When pain is not an acute event but a permanent condition, the endurantist who insists on full presence is forced to be fully present to something and somewhere that never ends. This is exhausting in a way that goes beyond physiology. It is existentially exhausting. You cannot rest from something you are wholly inside of.
There is also the question of what endurantist pain does to identity. If you are completely present to your suffering, and it is total, then your suffering becomes who you are. Athletes dealing with serious injury often describe that the moment the pain stops being something happening to them and starts being something they are. The injured body is no longer a context; it is the self; it is you; your self. Getting out of that state is not just physical rehabilitation, but also a philosophical one.
Pain through the Perdurantist lens
The perdurantist holds a different relationship to suffering. The current moment of pain is real (not denied, nor dismissed), but it is one temporal slice of a larger self extended through time. The pain happening now is genuinely happening and it is also, in a meaningful sense, already behind you, because the self that will exist on the other side of it is equally real.
This is the cognitive move that rehabilitation psychologists often try to teach without naming it. When a surgeon tells a patient the first three weeks will be extremely painful, but by week eight you will be weight-bearing, that's classic perdurantist textbook stuff. They're asking the patient to locate their identity not in the current slice of suffering but in the longer shape of recovery. The pain is real, but you are more than the pain.
Adventure athletes who have survived catastrophic situations often report similar things. The mountaineers caught in a storm who tell themselves they've been cold before and will be warm again, are not denying the cold. They are doing something philosophically precise: they're refusing to let the present slice (of time) define their whole. They're locating themselves in the film, not on the frame.
The perdurantist approach to pain has a particular advantage with duration. Because the framework already expects the self to be distributed through time, suffering that extends over weeks or months does not threaten identity in the same way. The injured runner who understands themselves as a four-dimensional entity, and whose story includes injuries, returns, seasons of strength and seasons of fragility, can accommodate pain as one chapter without it defininr their book.
But the perdurantist trap is somewhere else: detachment. If the present is just a frame, it can become easy to skip past it, to live so thoroughly in the imagined future self that the actual body in actual pain goes unattended. This is the athlete who trains through a stress fracture because their long-arc identity as a competitor cannot accommodate the identity of a person who stops. The perdurance framework, taken too far, can become a very sophisticated way of ignoring what the body is urgently trying to say (i.e. ouchie).
What pain actually is (philosophically speaking)
Here is the part the Stoics, the endurantists, and the perdurantists all tend to sidestep: pain is not just a sensation, and it is not just a narrative. It is, according to contemporary philosophy of mind, an intentional state. Pain is always pain of or in something, always pointed at the body, always carrying information.
The philosopher Drew Leder, in his book The Absent Body, made an observation that any serious athlete will recognise immediately: under normal conditions, the body disappears. When you run well, you do not experience your legs; you experience the path, the rhythm, the air. The body becomes transparent. Pain reverses this. It makes the body present, suddenly, forcefully, undeniably. Pain is the body refusing to be a tool. It is the body insisting on being attended to.
This means that neither the pure endurantist collapse into the present moment, nor does the perdurantist retreat into the long arc that is fully adequate on its own. Pain is asking for something specific: attention (it might even be begging for it). Not catastrophising, not narrative, not dismissal. Attention. The question it always raises is: what is wrong here, and what needs to change?
The most sophisticated athletes, and the most resilient adventurers, seem to have developed a three-stage response to pain that moves through all of these frameworks in sequence.
- First, the presence (endurantist). They meet the pain fully, without flinching from it. They locate it, describe it internally, understand its quality. Is it sharp or dull, constant or pulsing, worsening or stable? They do not flee into the future.
- Second, the context (perdurantist). Having been fully present to the sensation, they zoom out. Is this pain meaningful, is it the body sending a genuine warning, or is it the predictable discomfort of a system being asked to do hard things? Where does this fit in the longer story?
- Third, the decision (neither, or both). Based on the first two, they make a choice. Push through, back off, or stop. Not as a reflex, not as a performance of toughness, but as an informed response from a self that is both present and long-sighted.
The resilience that comes after pain
There is one more dimension worth sitting with, particularly for those who have been through serious injury or hardship: what pain does to the self over time.
The endurantist who has survived great suffering carries it differently than the perdurantist. For the endurantist, the suffering is part of the continuous self : it happened to me, the same me that stands here now, and it changed me then and forever. This can be a source of enormous identity strength. Many athletes describe their worst injuries as defining. Not because they enjoyed the experience, but because surviving it updated their sense of what they can withstand. The continuity of the self through suffering is its own form of testimony.
For the perdurantist, the relationship is more structural. The suffering is a temporal part of a larger whole : it is there, in the story, but the current self is not that suffering slice. This can make recovery faster, psychologically. The return to sport is not a return to the self before injury (which, for the endurantist, can feel like trying to retrieve something lost forever). It is simply the next slice of an ongoing story.
Neither way of carrying pain forward is wrong. But knowing which one you tend toward is, in itself, a form of preparation. You will get hurt again. The question is not whether you can avoid pain. The question is what philosophical relationship with it you have been building while you are not in it.
A final thought
The word pain comes from the Latin poena, referring to a sort of punishment. For most of human history, pain was understood as retributive, something you received, something done to you, a verdict passed by circumstance (or even Gods). Modern physiology has largely dismantled this model. Pain is a word, not a sentence.
But the ghost of punishment lingers. It is why injured athletes so often speak of guilt, of betrayal by the body, of feeling that they have done something wrong. The endurantist framework can intensify this, because if you are wholly present to suffering and the suffering is vast, it can feel like it must mean something damning. The perdurantist framework can gently dissolve it, as you are not the pain, you are the story, and stories have more than one chapter.
Both insights are real. Both are insufficient alone.
The most honest thing philosophy can offer about pain is not an escape from it, but a richer vocabulary for meeting it; and that, in the end, is what endurance and perdurance give us: not answers, but better questions to ask while we are hurting.