Nigh on thirty years ago as a group of friends and I were planning a sea kayaking trip my friend Terri asked me “Mike why does everything you do have to be so hard?” I didn’t really have a “because it’s there” type answer at the time, but this one question has been rolling around in my brain ever since.
I’ve just completed the Comfort Crisis, a book about “embracing discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self” by Michael Easter. In the book Easter brings up something called a Misogi Challenge. The idea of Misogi originates in Shintoism and I’m not going to get into the backstory here, but basically the 2025 definition of a Misogi Challenge is to do something – typically physical – that is beyond what you think you can pull off. Something with a 50% chance of success.
Throughout my adult life I’ve held onto this concept of “one great thing.” Do one big thing and then coast. Well as most folks can guess the rush of completing what you defined as that singular great thing wears off, usually sooner rather than later. During my late teens and early twenties my one great thing was earning an engineering degree. On my best day I’m of average intelligence and school didn’t come naturally, but I worked hard and not only made it to graduation, but I also received a job offer from Boeing.
I showed up for my first day of work thinking that I have arrived, this is it, the summit has been reached, but within a year I was back in school chasing a masters degree. During this time period my goals went from cerebral to physical, could I ride a century, could I complete a marathon, could I climb Mt. Rainier, could I climb Denali, could I ride a double century, could I climb Liberty Ridge, could I climb an 8000m peak, could I ski off the summit of Rainier, could I do an Ironman, could I complete a 24 hr mountain bike race, could I complete the cross Washington Mountain Bike Race, could I ride a 400Km rando event, could I do the 200 mile Unbound race?
The one event from that list that really stands out to me is Ironman. That was the one challenge that I simply couldn’t get my head around. The swim was terrifying, but I knew I could do the distance, the obstacle was riding 112 miles and then running a marathon. That didn’t seem possible. I had trained smart and hard, I’d done everything right but when I showed up on that beach I really had no idea of whether I could actually pull this thing off. This is how I now feel about Unbound XL – can I actually do this?
This brings us back to the Misogi Challenge. What really speaks to me is the idea that success is seemingly just out of reach. This is the important part, that you are pushing yourself past what you think you can realistically accomplish. It’s super easy to fall into a rut and let life go on around us, to be an observer and not a participant. Biting off more than you can maybe chew is how we free ourselves from the rut. We don’t feel alive when we are comfortable, and it’s how we deal with hardship and discomfort that define us.