Suffering Is Guaranteed: A Conversation with Harsha Misra
A marathoner’s view of the value of adversity.
I hate to run. I did a lot of it when I was younger, but I hated every step. And I was never good at it, even though I look like I should be; I’m slow and plodding and just have no natural talent in that realm. (I like to swim.)
I’m with Neil Armstrong, who during the glory years of NASA, when asked by reporters what he did for exercise, replied, “Sir, I believe the Good Lord gave each of us a finite number of heartbeats, and I’m damned if I’m going to use mine up running up and down the street.” The story would seem to be as apocryphal as that of him saying “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky” on the surface of the moon. (Neil was known for many things, but his wicked wit was not one of them. Sounds more like Alan Shepard.) But apparently it’s true.
Someone who is a good runner is my friend Harsha Misra, who recently completed his 14th marathon, and draws lessons from his running career that are applicable to life at large.
The son of an engineer who was the head of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, one of the most prominent scientific universities in that country, Harsha was plucked from his home in Delhi at the age of 16 and sent on scholarship to boarding school in England. From there he went to Cambridge where he studied math, following in the footsteps of Newton and Dirac and Hawking. After earning an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, he worked as a consultant for McKinsey and in private equity before starting his own firm focused on value investing.
We spoke at his office in downtown Brooklyn.
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THE KING’S NECKTIE: How did you get into running?
HARSHA MISRA: I started around 2010. I was totally out of shape; my workout at that point was to swim for like five minutes and then go sit in the steam room. But my wife Nidhi and I used to live near Central Park in a building that had this beautiful roof deck, and I used to go up there and look down at all these people running. You could see actually the New York City Marathon finish line, so I would watch, and I thought, “These guys are amazing.” So partly it was just shame, like: “I should be able to do this. I'm still in my early thirties, but I feel like I’m 90.” [laughs]
So one day I told Nidhi, “I'm just gonna go to the park and run.” Honestly, I have no clue why. I ran maybe—I don't know—like 600 or 700 meters. But the next day I ran a mile and I just couldn't believe it. And then I ran around the reservoir, which is about four miles. And it was beautiful; there was something very relaxing and calming about it. And then I ran the whole loop of Central Park, which is like six miles.
TKN: How long did that take?
HARSHA: A few months. It's amazing how the body adapts.
In those days, it was not that hard to get into the New York City Marathon. I put my name into the lottery system and they said “You're in.” And I was like, “I can't run a marathon.” But I thought, well, maybe I'll give it a shot. So that summer I did a ton of running, entirely by myself. I wasn't really training—I had no idea what training meant. I was just running around the park, and maybe two loops was the most I'd run, 12 miles or so. And I ran the marathon directly from there, and it was the greatest feeling I've ever had.
I've run five New York marathons now and I still feel the same way.
TKN: My dad used to be a big runner; he started in the mid ‘70s when the running craze was just taking off in the US. He was in the Army, so he was used to running in formation, but there was no “running lifestyle” industry in those days. Nike had just begun to break through. He and his friend, who had run track in high school, used to run in blue jeans and Chuck Taylors. Within a couple years he was running 10Ks and half-marathons.
HARSHA: It’s a huge addiction. But as addictions go, I think it's probably the best one you can have.
TKN: Do you have a favorite marathon?
HARSHA: Well, there's something about the New York City Marathon, from the early morning when you get up at four a.m., and take the ferry across into Staten Island and there’s people from all over the world, and you feel like this excitement, but also fear and trepidation about what’s going to happen. And then you sit in this starting village for three or four hours and it's freezing cold, and you're wearing garbage bags and sipping coffee and talking to random strangers. To me, it's an incredible experiment in humanity. Probably the closest I’ve come to that are these huge religious festivals in India where you have hundreds of thousands of people coming together, singing and chanting. It kind of feels a bit like that.
And then you start, and there's all this cheering, and you're on a high and you sprint as fast as you can, and then you reach half the halfway mark and you’re in agony [laughs] because you went out way too fast. My first marathon, at the 18 or 20 mile mark, I thought I literally was going to die, but Nidhi and some of my friends were there cheering me on, and I thought, “Okay, maybe I can do this.” And before I knew it, I was in Central Park, which I had run many times. And then you cross the finishing line and the first thought is, “I'm never doing this again.” [laughs]. But then five minutes later you're like, “I need to do this again.” [laughs].
TKN: The marathon goes right by our building on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, and every year we watch the top racers sprint by, running every mile at a faster pace than I could run a single mile. Like five-minute miles. Which is mind-blowing to me.
HARSHA: Yeah, those guys are really, really gifted, and they work very hard and are super motivated, and they run insane timings.
I'm certainly impressed by the folks who are running sub two hour thirty minute marathons. But I'm equally impressed by the folks who are taking eight, nine hours and still finish. Do you know how hard it is to be on your feet for eight or nine hours—without even moving, just standing, let alone running?
TKN: Exactly. Because at the other end of the spectrum, I see regular runners go by, tens of thousands of people, and some of them are really hurting—I mean REALLY hurting. And we’re only at the seven mile mark! Who am I to judge, because I’ve never run more than nine miles in my life, and the last time I did that was more than 30 years ago. But I always think, “There's no way that guy is gonna finish. He looks like he’s going to collapse, and he’s still got 19 miles left to go.”
HARSHA: But most of those people you see hurting so badly at seven miles do finish—about 85%.
TKN: Really?
HARSHA: Not everyone, of course, and they may not finish in the time that they wanted, or in the way that they wanted; they might walk a lot of it, they might throw up, they might need medical attention. But they’ll finish.
The first part of the New York City Marathon is the hardest part in terms of incline. You have to cross the Verrazzano Bridge from Staten Island into Brooklyn, which is a pretty steep bridge. And so people go out too fast—and I've done this myself—so by mile five or six it starts to like creep in that, “Oh my goodness, this is just the beginning.” So maybe your apartment is right at the spot where people realize that.
A lot of people get punched in the gut by the marathon. But one of the things I love about the club that I'm part of, the Prospect Park Track Club (PPTC), is that there are folks who’ll wake up at 4 a.m. to get to the marathon start, they'll run a very good marathon for themselves, and then they'll go volunteer at a school that our club runs for finishers to help them celebrate their finish and give them nutrition and whatever they need to recover. Then they come back to the finish line at like 10:30 p.m., when all the excitement is, is over, the cheering crowds have gone, and everything is done, but the last finisher is not yet finished. And they will wait there and cheer them on—the last finishers who finish at like 11:30 at night. And it's amazing.
MOVE WITH A PURPOSE
TKN: Years ago I was visiting some friends in Oakland, and they said, “Oh, we’re running the Bay to Breakers tomorrow,” which is a 10K run in San Francisco. And I hadn’t trained at all, but I was young (ish), like 40, and said, blithely, “Oh cool, I’ll run it with you.” And I did. But it’s a pretty easy run, in that the first half—when you’re freshest—is all uphill, and after that it’s downhill all the way to the sea.
Today I could never do something like that without training, if at all. I get winded going from the couch to the kitchen to get a cookie.
HARSHA: When I run a marathon I'm still always worried about whether I’m gonna finish or not, even after all these years. I have finished them all, but there's always this doubt in your mind that maybe this is the one where I'm not going to make it. Because when you train, you don't run the full distance. In the beginning, the most I would run in training was like 12 miles. Now I run 20 miles, but I'm not running 26.2. Those last 6.2 are the money miles, where everything is breaking down. At that point, it's uncharted territory, and your body's really, really hurting and your mind is really, really, really hurting as well. Those six miles can feel very, very, very long. They can feel harder than the 20 you've already run.
TKN: Talk to me about some of the psychological strategies you use to manage the pain when you’re running.
HARSHA: One is that you should always write down the purpose. Before every marathon you write down, why are you doing this? Some people are like, “I wanna qualify for the Boston Marathon, so I want to get a certain timing.” Very good reason. Another could be, “I wanna prove to myself that I can do this.” Also a very good reason. Another could be, “This is what I promised myself I would do when I was going through a very difficult time, maybe at work or emotionally or personally or health wise.” It doesn't matter what the reason is. But if you don't know why you're doing it, when you're struggling, you don't really have something to go back to.
The second thing is having a mantra. It doesn't have to be like religious or spiritual; some people’s mantras are full of profanity. But it needs to be short and easy to remember. And you don't have to say it out loud, but you have to have something in your head that you just keep repeating again and again and again. And it is insanely powerful, because it blocks out everything else. It just makes the miles go past. Growing up in India, we spent every summer in the Himalayas surrounded by these spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama and sadhus and teachers of Vedantic philosophy. So mantras were very much part of my upbringing. But to hear this in the marathon context I thought was fascinating.
The third thing is this notion of a “pain cave,” which these ultra-marathoners I know came up with. These guys run 50, 100, 200 mile events, and sometimes they actually win them. They believe you have to have this place in your brain that you can almost think of as a physical cave, and as you train physically, you also train mentally, and you kind of decorate your pain cave. You put a couch in it, you put a big screen TV, a beanbag chair, you hang up posters of the Lakers and the Indian cricket team or whatever. And when you're about to quit, you go sit in your pain cave and pretend that you're in this awesome place, and it helps you get by.
TKN: You also mentioned dedicating miles.
HARSHA: Yeah. That's another thing I think is very powerful: to dedicate each of those final 6.2 miles to a person or a thing or a concept that has a lot of meaning for you. “I'm gonna get through this mile for my grandfather, and then I'm gonna get through the next one for my other grandfather, and then I'm gonna get through the next one for my mother.” It kind of takes you out of yourself to say, “I'm not doing this for me. Whatever happens, I'm getting through this mile. I don't want to let them down.” I don't know why it works, but it does work.
None of these are things that I came up with, by the way. They are all things that I've learned over the years, from other runners, and from pioneering people in the running world. Those are the four things that have really stuck with me that I learned from those guys.
CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE DALAI LAMA
TKN: One of the things I learned in the Army is that the mental aspect of enduring any kind of physical hardship is much more important than the physical. Obviously, you need a minimum baseline level of fitness, and the higher that level is the easier things will be. But that’s not enough, or even the main thing.
Because I was not a naturally good runner, I had to work very hard at it. And there were guys who I knew were much better runners than me—much, much better, because I’d trained alongside them in a garrison environment and seen it. But when we were on these runs that you had to complete or fail the course, some of them quit, or more shocking, just couldn’t keep up and dropped out….not because their bodies couldn’t hack it, but because they psyched themselves out. “Oh my god, we haven’t eaten or slept in days, and we’re not going to, and it’s cold, and we have three more miles to run.” It’s also the opposite of the supportive environment that you described, because as soon as the instructors sense weakness, they start whispering in your ear that you can’t make it and you should quit. But it’s all mental.
HARSHA: I totally agree.
With a marathon, it's a 100% guarantee that you're gonna suffer. You know this in advance. It's just a question of when and how much. But it's also certain that you can get past that suffering. When you're at the point of maximum suffering, that's when I try and go to the pain cave in my head, and then when I get out of it, I'm back to the mantras and enjoying the crowds and seeing my family and stuff.
TKN: So talk to me about how you apply that in your life in general. I know that you’ve written about this.
HARSHA: Last summer I was in the Himalayas and we got a chance to meet the Dalai Lama. This was just before his 88th birthday, and he was in a good mood, and talking about things like mindfulness and gratitude and having purpose and meaning in your life. Basically he was talking about how to suffer well and get through it—all these different techniques that have been developed over thousands and thousands of years in the Buddhist spiritual tradition.
Then a few weeks later, I was back in the US at this mental strategies clinic at my running club, PPTC, led by this guy Adam. He’s like six foot four, all muscles, he looks like Captain America, and he wears these like tiny shorts with the American flag on them and bright pink shirts. He's an awesome guy, but he's the exact opposite—superficially—of the Dalai Lama, this frail old monk, very gentle, wearing these maroon robes. But the things he was saying could have come from the mouth of the Lama. “You're going to suffer. You have to get through the suffering. You need a mantra, you need purpose, you need a meaning, you need gratitude. You need to be able to dedicate this difficult period you're going through to something greater than yourself.” You couldn't pick two more different people, but the philosophies—and not just the philosophies but the actual practical strategies—were the same.
In marathoning, a lot of us have “hit the wall,” typically around mile 20, where physiologically you have burned through all your energy and you feel like you’re literally going to fall apart and you can't go on, but actually you can. It’s a classic marathon story. Both your brain and your body are just done. But you go through it and then you finish and then suddenly you have this euphoria.
So when I'm going through difficult things in my life, I think back to mile 20 of the Stockholm Marathon, which was my hardest one, and my body just collapsed. I'd been on a vacation with my family beforehand, so I was not training, I was drinking too much wine probably, and it just smacked me in the gut. And unlike the New York City Marathon, they don’t have medical tents and stuff in Stockholm. So I was in pain and I remember this guy was selling ice cream along the route, and he looked at me like, “Are you okay?” And I said, “No, I'm not.” [laughs]. And he took out a block of ice from his cart, and I put it on my knees. Some random guy who basically took pity on me. [laughs] And somehow I finished.
Once you've been through that, you can apply these strategies the next time you're in a work setting and you've got some deadline that's really stressing you out, or you saw something terrible has happened, or your business plan is failing, or there’s some horrible thing in your personal life or whatever. These things happen. Generally in life, suffering is guaranteed.
So now, when that sort of thing happens, I think back and say, “Look, I've been here before. I know how it feels—it feels like it's never gonna end, but it's gonna end. So let's get through it.” I think people testing their bodies physically and getting through it, obviously you become fitter physically, but I think what you gain mentally is orders of magnitude more useful. You start doubting yourself less.
TKN: Absolutely. Once you've gone through something like that, psychologically, it changes your whole life. Before this one particular school in the Army, somebody who had already been through it said to me, “If you think about the whole course, you'll never make it. It seems impossible, and psychologically you’ll defeat yourself, because it’s too daunting.” He told me, “You have to get through it day by day—and sometimes, when it’s really bad, you have to get through it hour by hour.” And he was totally right. And I never forgot that. It’s something I use in my daily life even now, when there’s real hardship of any kind.
HARSHA: I think that's very true—very true in running and very true in work as well. Just get through whatever the next step is that you have to do. Ultimately the whole journey is a bunch of steps and you'll get through it.
TKN: There aren't many people like this, but I always say that the rare people who've never experienced adversity, at least not in an appreciable way, who’ve been very lucky and always had things go their way, are simply not equipped when adversity does come, which it inevitably will.
HARSHA: A hundred percent right. That was me, at one point. Everything was storybook in my life for a while and then some stuff happened that I was so unprepared for, I couldn't believe what was going on. I was like, “This is not part of the script, man.” I was so ill-equipped to deal with it. And people in my circles will tell you that, for a while, I was just shattered. I didn't feel like getting out of bed. And it's because I'd never gone through that kind of adversity. I didn't have the tools to cope with it. And now I feel so much better. I think adversity is an amazing teacher.
TKN: Of course, many of the people who appear to be blessed like that have problems we can’t see from the outside. But it’s also why, as parents, watching your kids suffer is hard, and a helpless feeling, but it’s also necessary—within reason—because if they don't go through it, they won’t learn those essential skills.
HARSHA: A hundred percent. I couldn't agree more.
PHEIDIPPIDES WAS A PIKER
TKN: So what’s your next goal as a runner?
HARSHA: That's a great question. Until now, for 14 years, I've always run just for fun. I've never had a goal, never had a training plan, never had a smart watch, never measured my miles. For me, numbers tend to be all or nothing—I can either ignore them completely or I'm gonna get obsessed. In the Philadelphia marathon that I just ran, I had no idea what pace I was running. I actually ran a pretty good marathon, like three hours, 39 minutes, which for me is pretty quick, but….
TKN: Is that your personal best?
HARSHA: I think it probably is. I really don’t know.
TKN: That’s unusual, isn’t it? Because I remember a few years ago, when he was a rising star in Congress, Paul Ryan told a reporter that he’d run a marathon in under three hours—"the high twos,” is what I think he said—and there was a lot of skepticism because, first of all, that is nearly a world class time, and secondly, every marathoner on earth remembers their times to the millisecond. And it later came out that he’d run it in just over four. Which is still a very good time, but the fact that he felt the need to lie and make it even faster was very telling about the man.
HARSHA: Yeah. But it's very deliberate for me not to track that stuff. Running is a way to get away from measurement and achievement; it’s like my therapy time.
But all that changed recently. I'm 46 now, but I feel like I'm in better shape than I was ten years ago, and I'm enjoying running more than ever before.. And because I'm running with PPTC, I've gotten faster almost in spite of myself, and in spite of not having a plan.
There's this thing in marathoning called the Abbott Six Star Series, six major marathons, which is like the Grand Slam in tennis, and if you run all six of them, you get a special medal. [laughs] Now what's the point of this medal? I don't know. I guess like everything else, it just hangs there and you stare at. But it's kind of a milestone that you look to. I've done four of the six, so I need two more: Tokyo and Boston, and both are really hard to get into. For Tokyo there's a lottery and I've tried the last five years in a row and I haven't got it. But there's other ways you can get in, by running some virtual races, so I wanna do that. And then for Boston, unlike many marathons, most of the field gets in by hitting qualifying times, which differ by age and gender. There's various other ways of getting in, but the most glorious way, the sort of “running nirvana” way of doing it is to qualify. In running, it's called chasing the unicorn. I would like to try and run Boston before I'm 50.
TKN: And how close are you to qualifying?
HARSHA: I'm not close, but I think it's okay. The official time that I need is three hours, 20 minutes, which means I’d have to shave 19 minutes off my Philadelphia time. So that's a lot. But I ran that Philly marathon with very little training and I was chatting the whole time. I had no idea what timing I was running; I was having a party. I felt very good and relaxed at the end, and I was running again the next day. So I don't think it's impossible. But maybe I'm fooling myself. [laughs]
So now I've gotten myself onto Strava, which I've never been on before, which is an app where you can measure your runs and stuff. I have a smart watch for the first time, arriving today. I haven't worn a watch of any kind since I was 18 or 20. [laughs]. And recently I’ve gotten a running coach, who I was introduced to almost by accident—not a professional coach, but like a running savant who got into running himself late in life, and who is very analytical and engineering-oriented, and who coaches people in his spare time, for fun. He has a history of taking mediocre and middle aged runners and getting them into Boston. He believes it takes 10 to 15 years of proper training for your body to achieve its full endurance potential in terms of the muscles and bones and mitochondria and blood vessels. So he told me that I can definitely get better, even though I’m 46. In fact, he said, “You're lucky that you're starting later in life, because people who start in high school, their body has already fully adapted to endurance.” They probably got injuries and probably are not gonna get faster. But folks who start later in life, the runway is huge because you haven't done it yet.
So before last week, I had no measurement of runs, no Strava, no watch, no coach, no goal, no plan, nothing All this happened after Philly. Like I said, for me it's all or nothing, right? So I’ll give this a shot for this next year and see how it feels. If I don't enjoy it, I'll go back to my previous, unplugged version.
TKN: I’ll check in with you in a year. I'll be curious to see if this new way of thinking changes your running, which has been so purist up to this point.
HARSHA: I hope it doesn't. If it ever becomes a source of stress as opposed to a source of relieving stress, then I'm just not interested in that. But you've got to have a learning mindset. So far it feels good.
Thank you so much, Susan!
Thank you for this verdant conversation; I will be mulling over many of these ideas on my runs! Harsha, My money’s on you! Have a wonderful time going after this next set of goals👊🏼