The things we don’t see in sport? The painful, uplifting struggle of practice

Before the lights shine and anthems are sung, before the flags and podiums, before applause and skill, before the cameras film and starting pistols fire, there’s this.

The repetitions, the vomit, the pain.

The stuff they rarely show you.

You don’t see Calvin Quek, men’s 400m hurdles gold medallist at the SEA Games, doing 300m flat-out sprints in practice. Once, twice, four times. You don’t see him “lying on the grass, feeling light-headed, body sapped of energy”. You don’t hear him questioning himself, “why did I do this particular (lung-busting) event?”

You don’t see Gan Ching Hwee, Singapore record holder in every women’s freestyle event from 200m to 1,500m, doing 300m reps in water, 10 of them with a minute’s break, at maximum effort.

“If my legs could scream, they would.”

Her arms are sore, her body in mutiny, and the deeper she goes into her repetitions the more the examination turns mental.

“There is an idea in sports psychology I read about,” says Gan, “that suggests your brain has a protective mechanism. It can tolerate a certain threshold till it tells you to protect yourself and slow down. But between the brain signalling pain to when your body actually shuts down, there is a window. In training we’re trying to push that boundary.” Think of it as a negotiation on the way to personal greatness.

In a brilliant interview to the High Performance Podcast, Keely Hodgkinson, the women’s 800m Olympic champion, says, “If you choose the 800, you really like pain.” She talks about her head banging in practice, seeing black spots, feeling sick, crying mid-session.

“How much pain can I put myself in?” Hodgkinson asks. “How much can I tolerate?” This is a gritted-teeth bargaining with the self. The pain, after all, is a choice, it’s an agreement, it’s a challenge.

Hodgkinson laughs. So do some of the athletes I speak to when they talk about pain. As if they’re wryly shaking their heads at their own lunacy. These athletes are divided by sport, gender, nationality, yet bound by a willingness to embrace the brutal set. If the stadium is the glittering showroom, then the practice field is their head-spinning, lung-burning, sweat-stained, here-we-go-again workshop. A factory of fortitude where pain is the route to a polished product.

So Vanessa Lee, 28, the women’s 3,000m steeplechase and 5,000m Singapore record holder, will do five sets of 2km, with a 400m jog in between. “The struggle (when she gets to the third or fourth one) is mental. The struggle is ‘I’ve just got to get through this rep and then there’s just one more left.’”

Ang Chen Xiang, national record holder in the 110m hurdles, glides over 10 hurdles in a race but in practice sets up 12. Go, he tells himself. At full speed. Thrice. Four times. By the last set, he knows what’s coming. “The start line is the hard part because you’re already in pain.” In the final few hurdles, he confesses, “I am barely able to hurdle properly. I am trying not to fall down.”

Boundaries are reset and reserves created. The Indian squash star Saurav Ghosal, once world No. 10, practised “brutal” 50-second sprints up a hill and eventually started to “find pleasure” in breaking through pain. “There’s always more in you than you know. If you can follow your mind where it wants to take you, you always find a little more left.” The limit is only an idea.

As mind nudges body through distress, confidence is assembled. “Internally, you get comfortable being uncomfortable,” says Ghosal. Externally, rivals notice you are able to find more – as players did with Rafael Nadal – and “it keeps the other person on edge”.

Trying to squeeze past pain is a kind of test, a check to see what happens to technique under stress. During his repetitions, Ang might cut his breaks between sets from eight to 10 minutes to six minutes. “You’re trying to hold your form despite pain.”

This is what, Gan says, great athletes are accomplished at. Pain doesn’t trigger panic nor rattle technique. “They have an intrinsic ability to push that boundary without losing control. They stay composed under pressure and pain.” Through the years the swimmer has reshaped her own perspective on pain. Fatigue is shrugged off, discomfort is embraced. “I’ve trained for this,” she tells herself.

Not every triumph of an athlete is filmed. Many occur in silence between retches on lonesome fields. But these are triumphs nevertheless, against a singular rival: The self. Triumphs in agreeing to run a last set of 300m, on burning legs, using willpower as a spade and digging past fibres, ligaments, muscles to find a still undiminished spring of stubbornness.

Race day, they’ll tell you, is never as hard as this. Never as demanding as practices when athletes run, rest, swear, get up from the grass and return to the line. To rise means far more than just to stand up. It means to rebel. To launch, as these athletes do, an unseen but profound rebellion against being ordinary.