Talent or Tenure?

Today whilst digesting the quote “we must build the defense of peace in the minds of men…We are living in a culture of war let us build a culture of peace” by Federico Zaragoza  former Director-General of UNESCO from the book Wisdom, Andrew Zuckerman. I started to wonder the great cost demanded for peace, the price revolutionists and martyrs like Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Che Guevara, MLK had to pay to the merchants or oppression and war for peace and I wonder if I had the courage to cast my lot and stand against all odds for a cause.
Do we all have the capacity to withstand pain both physically and mentally till we attain our desired goal? Is it a predisposition apportioned to some but withheld from most or a skill that is guilt like a muscle and grows larger with every concurrent stroke of conviction… Is it like Talent?

Where does raw talent start? could it be pointed to as being that guy having never before ridden a bike can jump on and hang with the Cat 2 racer or is that novice who can struggle through the pain and hang with the A group on a tempo club ride which ends with pats on the back for him and statements like “keep riding, by this time next year you will be a beast”? When it comes down to it, do we really all know what we are capable of? I had been riding for about 2 years when in conversation with another rider I complained about my inability to get a high suffer score on Strava, I feel like I’m pushing to the limit and I am confident when I upload my data my suffer score would be Epic, alas it is always less than desired. He asked me if I had ever puked at the top of a climb to which I answered no, he said you still have a lot of suffering you have not touched yet and he was right, with the us of a heart rate monitor I am now all too aware of my body’s aversion to pain which is the antithetic for what serious bicycling represents.

I think about Alberto Contador on the day he withdrew from the Tour de France, the guy had a broken leg and still pedaled for a couple miles before succumbing to the pain and doing so in the most undramatized fashion, I would have been crying asking for my mummy, or Andrew Talansky as he valiantly finished stage 11 after so many crashes and I wonder what it takes for one to push pass all the fail safes the body has set up to circumnavigate discomfort, what it takes to sit in the pain cave boiling in lactic acid…. Can we accept the fact that we might lack the mental fortitude to suffer be it in real life or on a bike. I don’t have the answers to these barrage of questions but I think we need to be able to identify where our strengths lie and our thresholds top out, this way we are able to safely bite what we can chew. Personally I pray my threshold for pain experience in support of my spiritual convictions are much higher than my threshold for trivial peril. I guess when it comes down to it I really hope God helps me grow in my conviction that physical pain is no longer a deterrent to standing firm and pushing on.