Suffer Sundays

By Josh Nobleman

This past Sunday, I did four circus classes back-to-back, and I'm not sharing this to brag. It was a sufferfest, plain and simple. So intense, the phrase "Suffer Sundays" got tossed around by a few others in the classes. Nice ring to it. Except that word, suffer, gave me pause. It felt harsh, negative—a word we’re told to avoid. Reflecting on that hesitation led me to write this post.

In circus, we are confronted with suffering.

It is fair to say that we embrace it. The gnawing burns of aerial silks, the nagging shoulder strain of aerial straps, the deep bruises of lyra, the aching joints of contortion, and the frustration of balancing a handstand: the body’s suffering in circus is a testament to ... what?

The easy answer is our ability to endure! The moments when I felt like quitting—when the weight of exhaustion bore down on me—were also the moments that lit a fire within me. But of course I could say the same thing about the persistence of gym-goers. The grind. But something is different about circus for me; a few things, really.

For one, the gym feels more like a numbers game. My experience of (much of) modern fitness culture is the treatment of the body as little more than a machine: a tool to be fueld by calories, calibrated with discipline and measured by numbers. You count your reps, track your heart rate, and guage your progress on a scale. Our bodies as a cipher of numbers— blood pressure, cholesterol levels, height, weight — dictating our health, at the doctor’s office, and our worth, for the actuaries and lawyers.

Why do we do this? We give ourselves an illusion of control: change your numbers, change your fate. We count the calories burned, heartbeats per minute, pounds lifted, telling ourselves the story of perfect willpower: that with enough discipline we can triumph over decay. And we do it in the name of "health," but it’s about control. Control over our bodies, over nature, over mortality. The endless pursuit of the six-pack, of being as thin as possible, of maintaining a perpetually hard body.

It’s a bizarre economy of loss, where the goal is always to have less—less fat, fewer flaws, fewer signs of age. For women, things seem to have improved in the last few decades, but the pressure to conform to an ideal shape persists. A shape that must always be smaller, stripped of everything, almost disappearing. Take up less space. Be seen but not too much. For men, a different kind of trap —the six-pack, that segmented exoskeletal armour. Harden your shell: make your body into a fortress. Protect yourself from the outside. Grow more so that you can feel less. This is still a form of lessening. And this rigid dichotomy leaves little room for those who don't identify themselves squarely as “man” or “woman”.

The StairMaster (what are we mastering?), the endless crunches, the punishing diets— is this really for health? I drew these ideas about gym culture from Mark Greif's thought-provoking essay, "Against Exercise.” Greif gets into how thinness and muscularity, taken to their extremes, flirt with self-annihilation. Acts of aggression against the body, thinly disguised as discipline.

Circus is different.

The traces of self-erasure aren’t the [bruise/burn] marks of circus apparatus. We don’t try to erase who we are. We welcome bodies, flawed and imperfect, but alive. Yes, we feel pain, but it’s not a punishment or even a necessary part of the grind. We push ourselves because we want to feel everything there is to feel: the fullness of what it means to be human. The body isn’t something to control or erase. It’s something to live in.

The constant pressure to maintain a specific form—a form that society has deemed desirable—distracts from the real question: what do we want our bodies for? In circus, we use our bodies not to fit an ideal, but to explore, to express, and to connect with others. Our worth isn’t in our appearance, but in our ability to push through discomfort, to share in collective effort, and to celebrate the fact that we are alive.

Circus is not a numbers game. It’s not about how many reps you can do, how much weight you can lift, or how long you can hold a stretch. It’s about being fully present in the effort, embracing the suffering, and connecting with others in that struggle. It’s not about living longer; it’s about living more fully, right now.

We don’t hide behind a fortress of muscle. Your body, however it appears, is asked to perform, to endure, to express. It doesn’t matter whether you have a six-pack or fit into a size zero; what matters is your connection to the apparatus, your ability to climb, to hold, to balance: to trust your own strength and awareness. The body is not a tool, a project or a battlefield except as far as you use it to express to yourself who you are. Circus invites you to explore your body’s potential without the pressure of molding it to a shape someone else designed.

We aren’t here to preserve ourselves in some optimal state for the future. We’re not interested in hoarding our fitness like a miser hoards money, eking out a longer life. It’s not about preservation for its own sake. Circus asks us to feel everything in the moment, and to connect more deeply with our bodies and with others. We live now, not in some far-off future where we’ve perfectly maintained ourselves for as long as possible.

Speaking of now: I hope you come to suffer with me this Sunday.