Your Training Plan Is Missing This One Brutal Day
I've recently turned to trail running as part of the training for my next endeavor.
However, the best thing I've got in the suburbs of North Dallas is a 3-mile loop at a nature preserve, at which point I am no more than 400 meters from civilization.
Still, it's heavily wooded, and there is solitude for most of the trail. Until, amid the mini forest, a sign marks the spot of an old barn and a well of the settlement that started there in the 1860s.
It's a good reminder, with my shoes made of space-age foam and a smartwatch that can alert me to likes on my Instagram posts, that people once lived there alone.
Similarly, a statue in Vail Village memorializes the 10th Mountain Division. It honors their military service and pays tribute to the veterans who founded the mountain resort.
Like the pioneer trail sign, it provides thought for après-ski that the black diamond I braved wasn't much compared to the soldiers who parachuted behind enemy lines and took ridgelines with wood planks attached to their feet.
My point is that we've got it pretty good.
The Comfort Trap
I'm not saying we should give up our soft beds or the technology that keeps us entertained.
But we do need things in our lives that challenge us—sometimes to the extreme.
As Michael Easter writes in The Comfort Crisis:
"As we experience fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem."
An article in Outside Magazine titled The One-Day-A-Year Fitness Plan first introduced me to a solution.
The article proposes that once per year, we should "take on challenges that radically expand your sense of what's possible."
The act is called a Misogi—a Japanese term describing purification through challenge.
While the article glamorizes paddleboarding between islands and miles of underwater running carrying a stone, living without a car for a week or getting by on less than a dollar per day are still monumental feats.
Then, hopefully, as part of the challenge, you realize that people less capable than you have done even more—this perspective frames every other difficult thing that you will encounter.
For more, check out Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis or this podcast that he did.
