# 28: Strava

On the gift of struggle and the temptation to spare our children from it

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I, along with most of the running and cycling communities, catalogue our training in app called Strava. It turns out strava is a Swedish word that means to strive, to struggle. I learned this only recently, after years of uploading my runs to the application without ever considering why it was named that. Every morning, we record the distance, the pace, the suffering and send it to the cloud alongside millions of others who have chosen, voluntarily, to measure their effort. We are a strange species. We invent gods of difficulty and make offerings to them.

I have been thinking about strava because I have children, our 6th came this week, and I have been thinking obsessively about their education. Not just where they go to school, though that too. The deeper question. What actually educates a person? What turns a child into someone capable of navigating an uncertain world?

The answer, I have come to believe, is struggle. And the terrible irony of my life is that I have worked hard precisely so my children will not have to struggle the way I did, only to realize that struggle was the very ingredient that made me who I am.

My first wife died of colon cancer when she was twenty-nine. Our daughter was two. There is no preparing for this. You wake up each morning into a world that has been rearranged, and you learn to walk through it anyway. I survived it, which is what people say about grief, though survival is the wrong word. I was changed by it in ways I could not have been changed any other way. The person who emerged on the other side was forged in a furnace I would never have chosen. No one cleared that path for me. Honestly, no one could have.

I know this. I believe it. And still, every instinct in my body screams to protect my children from pain.

When you run long distances, you learn about pain, but eventually you learn about zone two training. The principle is counterintuitive. To get faster, you have to spend most of your time going slower. Zone two is the pace at which you can still hold a conversation, where your body burns fat for fuel and builds the aerobic base that everything else depends on. Most amateur runners make the same mistake. We run too hard on our easy days and not hard enough on our hard days. We never build the foundation. We just accumulate fatigue.

I spent years trying to break three hours in the marathon by training harder, pushing through more intervals. Then I slowed down. I ran easy when the plan said easy. I let my heart rate guide me instead of my ego, and within a year, I ran 2:50.

The lesson was humbling. You cannot shortcut the adaptation. You have to trust that the work is working, even when you cannot see it.

This is also a theory of parenting. The temptation is always to speed up the process. Provide the answer. Smooth the difficulty. Fast-forward past the discomfort. But the discomfort is where the adaptation happens. Skip it, and you skip the growth.

A generation of American children is growing up in material comfort their parents did not have, mine among them, living in nice houses, and getting opportunities their parents had to manufacture: education, travel, connections, the soft scaffolding of an upper-middle-class childhood. And I worry that all of this abundance is functioning as a kind of anesthesia, numbing them to the experiences that might wake them up.

The word anesthesia comes from the Greek for without sensation. I spent a decade as an anesthesiologist, putting people to sleep so they would not feel the pain of surgery. It is useful work. It is even, sometimes, holy work, but you would not want to live your whole life that way.

There is a moment every parent knows. Your child is struggling with something. A math problem. A social rejection. A failed attempt at a skill they care about. And you can see the answer. The solution is right there. You could give it to them.

Last summer, my son came home from a friend’s house in tears. A group of kids had excluded him from a game, suddenly and without explanation, with the casual cruelty children specialize in. I knew, with the clarity of someone who has watched this pattern unfold a hundred times, that this would pass. By next week, the social landscape would shift. The best thing was to listen, hold him, and let him feel the weight of it.

But I also knew him, and this was something else. For months, we had been watching the same pattern at home: outbursts, arguments with siblings that escalated too fast, a temper he could not control. He was not learning how to recognize his own feelings, let alone handle them. Beth and I are physicians, which qualifies us for almost nothing in the territory of a six-year-old’s emotional life. So we made some calls and found a counselor who specialized in exactly this. We intervened.

They did play therapy. They talked about feelings: how to name them, how to sit with them, how to let them pass. Slowly, week by week, he got better. The outbursts softened. The arguments with his siblings became arguments instead of explosions. He started to catch himself mid-frustration, to pause before reacting, and we had seemingly stepped in at the right time.

This is the part that resists every philosophy I want to write about parenting. Sometimes intervention is exactly right. Sometimes the struggle is just damage. The line between productive difficulty and genuine harm comes without signs posted along it. You feel your way forward, wrong as often as you are right, and you live with the wrongness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

When I err, though, I try to err on the side of letting them struggle.

My twelve-year-old had a math packet due last month. A big one, a week of work. The night before, she went to print it and discovered the printer was out of toner. She came to me in a panic, expecting me to fix it. Drive to the store. Email the teacher. Make it go away.

I told her it was her problem to solve.

She had to sit at her computer and write an email to her teacher, in her own words, explaining what had happened, admitting she had waited too long, and asking if she could turn it in late. I watched her agonize over the wording, embarrassed to be in this position, wishing she could disappear. She sent it. The teacher wrote back the next morning, gave her extra time, and reminded her to plan ahead.

It was small, almost nothing, but it was hers. She had faced a consequence of her own making, navigated it without me, and come out fine. The next time a big assignment looms, she will check the printer a few days early. And somewhere underneath that, unseen and more important, she will have learned something about her own competence that she could only learn by being trusted with it.

There is a finding in cognitive science called desirable difficulty. Certain kinds of challenge enhance learning. If information comes too easily, it does not stick. If a problem is solved too quickly, the lesson evaporates. When you have to retrieve the answer from your own mind, when you have to fight for it, the learning becomes durable.

The things I know most deeply are the things I had to fight to understand. If this is true, if struggle is the feature and the bug at the same time, then what am I doing when I protect my children from it?

This is the question I keep circling. The answer is probably not to manufacture hardship or withhold help as a matter of principle. The answer involves restraint. Trusting that my children are more capable than my fear allows me to see. Sitting with my own discomfort while they work through theirs.

The marathons I remember are the ones where everything went wrong. The ones where I hit the wall at mile twenty, where my legs screamed at me to stop, where I had to reach into some reservoir of will I did not know I had. Those are the races that changed me. Those are the ones I came back from as someone slightly different than I was before.

I want that for my children. The knowledge that they can endure, and that when they hit the wall, they will find something on the other side of it.

As much as I’d like to, I cannot give them this. I can only get out of the way and let them discover it for themselves.

Every morning, I log my run, recording the distance, the pace, the suffering. I upload it to the cloud alongside millions of others who have chosen to measure their effort. Then I go home to my children, and I try, imperfectly, inconsistently, with all the love and fear any parent feels, to give them the same gift.

The gift of struggling. The gift of striving. The gift of becoming, through difficulty, who they are meant to be.