Suffering is…well you just know. It’s not a conscious decision for me and not always possible no matter how much I want it. But I would say 4-5 times in my life, always in a race I have truly left everything out there with not an ounce remaining. Feels awful and amazing all at same time- knowing everyone hurts so bad but they are slowing down and I’m not. As I said, rare for me to go that deep and can’t decide to just do it…It’s just happened sometimes!
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Suffering is relative to you. It might be tunnel-vision and projectile vomit for someone and totally different for you. Your mind is the arbiter of it and it is totally contextual to your fitness, drive, love of what you are doing and ability to override any physical discomfort.
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I just had an FTP bump and decided to celebrate with Denali +1 last night. With 3min to go in the last interval my rpm dropped from 110 to about 85 with everything hurting and slowing down even more. Somehow, I managed to go another 3min and ramped my rpm back up to 100+ and gave it everything I possibly could. Couple sprints here and there just to pull through. I’m glad I did because there is absolutely a psychological aspect to training and I definitely scored a few points last night even if at the end I started pass out but caught myself before falling off of the trainer. I feel that most of us quit before the engine and lights go out.
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…and I used to deliver them.
I think suffer is in the eyes of the beholder. It’s that point where you’re like okay I don’t think I can finish but damnit I have to.
Example. I was doing the bike leg of a tri relay. I realized about 3 miles into the 24 miles (first 3 was downhill, latter 21 was up), that I pulled my groin (playing a lot of soccer recently). For the next 21 miles I was essentially in tears as I road. But I knew I had a teammate waiting, and I needed to finish.
Didn’t know what suffering was before that. PT starts on Tuesday! Not condoning what I did, it was stupid, but my point is there is no science. It’s pushing yourself past the limits you thought were possible.
This, to me, is as good a definition as any and matched my feelings exactly.
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For me it is those moments in workouts where your brain is telling you it doesn’t want to do this anymore and then you consciously tell it to keep pushing.
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I hope you go to confession often because I will never forgive you. 
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I sometimes worry about passing out at the end of a TT, but I don’t actually think I would allow myself to do that.
Obviously, as cyclists we are not truly “suffering” on the bike in the way that someone in a war torn country would be and I find it useful to keep a sense of humour about what I’m prepared to put myself through. But like Jonathan says, training is just a metaphor for other “stuff”. So it’s best we make our own choices about when and how hard to suffer.
I have found suffering for 12/24 solo races to be very different from 1 hr xc or 10 mile TT. Recently I’ve got alot better at racing at high intensity and HR data indicates I’m pushing myself hard. I have begun to get my head out of the way more which makes it easier to push my body further.
However, last week I did 2 TTs and a 1hr xc race and gave it everything for all 3. Then I had a kind of pay back. For a couple of days I was less able to regulate my emotions. I knew it was just from pushing hard, but it wasn’t fun to go through.
Does anyone else experience this kind of thing? (Or other psychological repercussions from suffering)
And how do you manage this?
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Suffering to me recently was pushing myself so hard up the final climb at the end of a race that almost IMMEDIATELY after crossing the line, my body was able to relax and I threw up off the side of my bike while still coasting, mostly water, but still…TBH it was embarrassing, but totally involuntary, I guess I pushed myself too hard…
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I am reminded of the three rings of marriage. First, you have the engagement ring. Next comes the wedding ring. And finally, you have the suffering… 
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Too hard? No man, you nailed it!!!
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As others have stated suffering in cycling (to me) is a mental state more than a physical condition. Yes, I have pushed to a point that I’ve gotten tunnel vision, but I don’t feel that’s commonplace or advisable. My “suffer scale” starts when my fatigue or discomfort reaches a point that I have to play mental gymnastics to keep going.
This may be a simple as distracting my mind from the task by doing math in my head as a ride. “If I can keep up this speed it will be “x” time when I get to the next aid station”
As the RPE increases I may move onto “Just get to the top of this climb and then…”. Sometimes I reward myself with a drink, or a bite of food. It could even be a drop in intensity for 2 minutes.
Suffering in some form is necessary to improve. It may be nearly imperceptible, but you have to push boundaries both mentally and physically in order to expand your fitness.
There are different types of suffering. I think most of your replies are people talking about the shorter efforts, but there’s a different sort of suffering in the last five minutes of a long interval & again at the long session.
Unfortunately I’ve not seen much evidence of overlap eg. does being able to suffer over a 5 minute interval mean you can suffer better at the end of a 30 minute interval… it’d be nice if you could just concentrate on one type of suffering and that would mentally improve your performance at all types… just not convinced that is true.
do the climbs without looking at power, and truly go as hard as you can go. Don’t let the watt meter limit your brain.
It’s a powerful thing.
I’ll try it next time. On longer climbs, I get in bouts where I lose focus, my mind wanders, thus the bike computer can help remind me to get back on track.
try not to lose focus; think of someone trying to keep up with you; you have to stay on the gas or they will drop you; as you near the top, turn the screw to jettison them. It’s all a game in the mind, and ignore the pain.
Cool topic! I am just a yahoo who likes to train, has some coaching, and enjoys the challenge of completing some monster-length rides. The biggest so far was a 380-mile bikepacking race.
Suffering for me varies between “geez minute 2 of this VO2 max interval is really hard - I want to quit - but I will hang on and finish” to “geez day 4 riding a loaded MTB 100 miles+ per day through the desert is really hard, I want to fall asleep on the side of the trail and nap but I will keep going”. For a world champion it would probably be more extreme and painful perhaps. But any level of “geez this is hard” is going to produce a beneficial adaptation if you recover from it well. Obviously if there is sharp pain, vomiting, not seeing straight, it’s probably a good idea to let up a bit!
Training is the process of breaking the body down, i.e. suffering PLUS recovery and adaptation. What is suffering now, after you are adapted to it is not suffering later, so you need a bigger challenge (or in TR terms, your FTP increases and your workouts get harder). Or as someone famous said, “It never gets any easier, you just get faster”.
In high intensity short racing as well as long endurance events, we purposely are sometimes seeking that breaking point. How hard can I go? How much can I endure? is my mind and body strong enough to handle it? So for some of us it is “fun” to test those limits. I believe that for most of us physical limits are FAR above mental limits. On the TR podcast, often the Tim Noakes’ central governor theory comes up: Central governor - Wikipedia
But the suffering we’re talking about, we are blessed to be able to endure - the level of “suffering” is entirely up to you and under your own control as opposed to challenges that are foisted upon you unwillingly - which is real suffering. We all know life is full of that.
Having big goals and big motivation I think, enables you to endure more of the “suffering” part.
I like to think of it more as nurturing myself through something that I think is hard for me rather than suffering. I don’t have all the answers, but this is what I am playing with now. The payoff is a greater sense of self-efficacy and less fear and stress in life in general.
If you are not suffering at all, ever - perhaps you have some room to make more fitness gains faster or your FTP is set too low. 
But It’s entirely up to you the rate at which you want to ramp up. All of this type of suffering is optional.
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Here’s maybe my attempt to at least quantify suffering:
Assume you have a power meter and assume you have a local hill that you’re motivation to climb or set a PR against. Let’s say you averaged 250 watts up that climb. Next time try to hold 260. If you’re able to do that, try 270. So on and so forth. You’re just extending your range a little bit each time. And you’ll hit a wall but it should be pretty painful.
The other data point I look at on these climbs is HR data. Looking at HR ramp on strava segments where I have tried really hard, my HR goes asymptotically ramps up to my max without any true dips. If you see your HR come down, it means you eased up in that period and it wasn’t a true max effort.
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