Motivation

After the ninth piece I am in a world of hurt. Number ten will be a character builder. I fear it only briefly, and then embrace its inevitability. That, in and of itself, is empowering.
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Warmed up to my 2.5 mile long hill that tops out at 9200ft altitude. Then I ran a progression run done as:

1 mile at HR 160-170
1 mile at HR 170-175
.5 mile at a best effort. I held 180+ for the entire last .5 miles with a max of 187. 
I threw up at the finish. Awesome.
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On that point, I don’t want to assume that you are not accustomed to doing really hard workouts, but in my experience very few runners at our “recreationally competitive” level do really hard workouts on a regular basis. I’m talking about going to the track and blasting 12 quarters at mile race pace, running hill repeats until you’re literally lightheaded, and planning threshold runs that are so tough you actually get butterflies in your stomach before you do them. If you are doing anything less, then this is the single most effective training change you can make toward improving your performance. Increasing mileage is often the lazy, copout way to seek improvement. Making brutally hard workouts a consistent part of one’s routine is far more potent, although tough for many runners to face.
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"You've got to love to suffer as much as you love the feeling of having done it." Steve Ilg
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"The iron ore feels itself needlessly tortured as it passes through the furnace. The tempered blade looks back and knows better."
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Self-pity

by D. H. LAWRENCE

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
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I was cramping and suffering, and after one of the attacks with less than 5k to go, I had suffered enough and let a gap open. As I looked at the racers in front of me, I just thought about how bad I would hate myself if I let them go, so I hunkered down, ignored the pain in my legs, and pulled them back"
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"The key to successful time trialing is winning the fight with yourself. You must never give into the pain by reducing your effort. Always remember that every other good rider is hurting just as much – you are not the exception. Pain is normal and it is necessary. Just look at Francesco Moser’s face during his rides for the world one-hour record! Anyone who does not hurt is not going as fast as he can. Pain is what guarantees success. So don’t think about pain as a negative thing, think about it as proof you are riding the race correctly. Let the pain build your psychology. Make motivation the dominant force. Concentrate on just the one thing: steady hard work." Eddy Borysewicz
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You can quit and they don't care. But you will always know
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It is so easy to back down… damn every race I want to quit at some point. I always think of what I heard Kent Bostick said to my friend John Hart… "little buddy..Your pain is not special." I live by these words during the hardest part of the race. Sometimes as I am gasping for air or my legs hurt so bad I want to cut them off… I just remember that “my pain is not special.” As I spit on my top tube unable to see straight…. I remind myself again… “your pain is not special”
...
So next time your are out racing at Defcon 4..try to smile… you should be amped that you are killing it. If you are crying then you know you are pegged. Pegged is pegged. The guy in 10th is just as pegged as the guy who won. Neither effort has more value.
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THE PROS TRAIN. And they train consistently and indefinitely. In other words, they commit.
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"Nobody ever drowned in sweat." U.S. Marine Corp saying
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"The body can always do more than the mind thinks it can." David Horton
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Bontrager wrote, "It always hurts when you go as hard as you can." 
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“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” Lance Armstrong
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"When you think you are done, you're only 40 percent into what your body is capable of doing." David Goggins
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"It hurts to a point and then it doesn't get any worse."  Ann Trason
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There are no shortcuts. Nor is there a hidden path to success (though there is a lonely one). There is no easy way. There are no "breakthroughs" in racing or training (and if there were, they'd only come after long spells, making them less of a breakthrough and more of a 'wait-your-turn-and-squiggle-through'). Quite simply, there isn't anything that will help your cause other than old-fashioned hard work. The harder, the better. So roll up your (compression) sleeves, losers.
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"Crawling is acceptable. Falling is acceptable. Puking is acceptable. Tears are acceptable. Pain is acceptable. Injury is acceptable. Quitting is unacceptable." Unknown
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"Running, like Wetmore said once, is like getting up every morning and shooting yourself. You know that you are going to put yourself through something painful, but you also know how much strength and speed are going to come with it." The passion of the runner is to force forgetfulness on that pain and embrace the benefits that will without fail make you a better person." Adam Batliner
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A quote from the team's coach (Mark Wetmore): "In football, you might get your bell rung, but you go in with the expectation that you might get hurt, and you hope you win and come out unscathed. As a distance runner, you know you're going to get your bell rung. Distance runners are experts in pain, discomfort and fear. You're not coming away feeling good. It's a matter of how much pain you can deal with on those days. It's not strategy. It's just a callusing of the mind and body to deal with discomfort. Any serious runner bounces back. That's the nature of their game. Taking pain."
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I was talking to a friend last night who was a pro mountain bike racer for three years. I asked him what racing and training was like. He said "you just peg your heart rate at 180 beats per minute for 2 hours, and suffer". I asked him how he was able to manage the pain he said, "you look over at the guy next to you, and usually he looks like he is suffering more than you, so you figure that you probably must have some more left in your tank, so you just keep pushing." He shrugged his shoulders and said, "you have to like pain to race."
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"At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and whiter than before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. At that moment you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings. There is no more precious moment in life than this, the white moment, and you will work very hard for years just to taste it again."
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"I want to live my life so that when I get up in the morning, Satan says, "s**t, he's awake". Unknown
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"If I am still standing at the end of the race, hit me with a board and knock me down, because that means I didn't run hard enough." Steve Jones, Welsh athlete and former marathon record holder
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"It never gets easier, you just go faster." Greg LeMond
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Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men.
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"A lot of people run a race to see who is the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, at least I can live with myself." Steve Prefontaine
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"Marathon runners talk about hitting 'the wall' at the twenty-third mile of the race. What rowers confront isn't a wall; it's a hole - an abyss of pain, which opens up in the second minute of the race. Large needles are being driven into your thigh muscles, while your forearms seem to be splitting. Then the pain becomes confused and disorganized, not like the windedness of the runner or the leg burn of the biker but an all-over, savage unpleasantness. As you pass the five-hundred-meter mark, with three-quarters of the race still to row, you realize with dread that you are not going to make it to the finish, but at the same time the idea of letting your teammates down by not rowing your hardest is unthinkable...Therefore, you are going to die. Welcome to this life." Ashleigh Teitel
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Your lungs will not burst no matter how hard you run or breathe.
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"When the guy says go, you start to suffer—or you might as well not be out there. It's a small piece of your life, make it hurt." Aaron Cox, Winner of US Mountain Biking Championship
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"There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy." Mark Rippetoe
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"If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great." Unknown

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Carrie Graves, 1984 Olympic gold medalist and Texas Longhorn crew coach, refers to rowing in its most basic element as “pain management.”

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Today’s carnage is five times 500 meters with 3 minutes’ rest. Again, the idea is to remain consistent from first piece to last. Without fail, this is how these things go — the first piece you get the kinks out, get your breathing settled, and get dialed in. The second and third pieces are usually your best efforts; you are warmed up, acclimated, and confident. You start the fourth piece with those same qualities. About 200 meters in, your reality begins to shift. You go to another, less hospitable place. It is a tide of pain. With every stroke, every ebb and flow, it washes over a little more of you. You cannot stop the tide as you sink in deeper and deeper. The walls close in. You fight for breath. There is ringing in your ears and the hint of nausea. As the hydrogen accumulates faster than your body can get rid of it, your muscles begin to lock up. Your
stroke begins to shorten as your body collapses in on itself. You are submersed in the pain tank with 100 meters to go. What you do now defines you. Fight or flee. Today it is fight. That fourth piece was everything that you had. You left it all right there in the parking lot. There is no fifth piece. How could there be? There is nothing left. This is the reality. How can you ask for something that doesn’t exist? I lied. I lied to you and I lied to myself. I had to. It was a coping mechanism. The truth is that it is the fifth piece that defines you. The reality is that there will be a fifth piece. How can that be if your reality says there is nothing left? These two realities can not coexist. Either you don’t do
the fifth piece or you find another gear. The fifth piece can’t not exist. Therefore, you have to take control of your reality, which brings us right back to metaphysics. Damn, rowing is hard. My demon’s done. Today I win.