On recommendation from one of our academy delegates I started to read ‘the Comfort Crisis’ by Michael Easter which is a fascinating concept.
This is not really anything new but is described more concisely and clearly than it may have been before.
The premiss that applies here is that we’re hardwired for discomfort, yet we continually seek comfort.
The world is now set up to make us as comfortable as possible with temperature-controlled rooms and cars, transport to take us wherever we want, enough food in the fridge and entertainment constantly so electrical devices are barely ever switched off.
It seems that success has now become eating as much as you want while sitting on a very comfortable sofa in a temperature-controlled room watching as much of whatever you like.
At the same time as comfort is increasing exponentially so are issues with mental health and it may well be that there is a link between the two.
When I was a caveman my life was entirely uncomfortable almost 99% of the time.
Nowadays I’m hardwired to seek out comfort and to try to make sure that there are no bumps in my road.
Perhaps the more comfortable we become the less likely we’re able to deal with the inevitable discomfort that comes with normal life.
We’re then starved of the ability to deal with the difficult situations that we absolutely cannot avoid in day-to-day life, yet we seem to want to insulate ourselves from more and more.
It was back at the start of the 2000’s when I started to ride a bike again for the first time in many years.
I’d always done a little bit of running outside and even tried my hand at a half marathon in 1996 but never really embraced the world of endurance training or outdoor adventure sport.
In the early 2000’s I found myself with a mountain bike entering mountain bike races where I would get filthy and fall off and be freezing cold and be decidedly and terribly uncomfortable for a lot of the time only to finish, get dried off and enter another one.
This passed on to road cycling and so 3 years out of 4 I entered the Etape Caledonia in Scotland which was a 90-mile closed road race which meant me travelling 450miles north with my bike to ride as fast as I could on highland roads in the rain before traveling 450 miles back.
I first competed in this in 2008, did ok and then went back again and then had a year off and then went back in 2011.
The sense of achievement at completing that race would keep me cycling all winter, meeting at 6.45 on a Sunday morning and riding for 4 or 5 hours on my long rides wrapped up in all manner of gear but still freezing.
Regularly, Alison would question why I was doing that, but she is a horse rider.
She would think nothing of turning up every Saturday and Sunday in the winter at 7am and mucking out stables and fields and brushing yards and riding horses even though it was, to lots of other people, very uncomfortable.
Some of the people that I admire the most have the most atypical pathways to what you might call success but have encountered the most uncomfortable of times.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to build the practice that I’m now sat in.
No one believed it was possible and even when we were building it many people thought it would never work.
I went from a position of complete comfort and complete financial security to a place in 2020 where I thought I’d lost everything for my family to where I am now.
It’s impossible to reach any sort of high without significant degrees of discomfort.
Maybe that is the point, maybe that is the goal. Maybe seeking out discomfort is the recipe for achievement.
In a recent trip to Bilbao in Spain, where I accompanied Louis (the boy wonder) while he became the U20’s European middle distance triathlon champion we were on the way home and stayed in the Barcelona airport hotel.
We both had big bike boxes, and both had big, wheeled bags and both had rucksacks and as we checked in at the hotel at 9pm the night before our flight they reassured us that we would be able to easily get a taxi to the airport the following day which was a mile and a half away.
The following morning, I turned up at reception at 5am to book the taxi and as they phone through to the taxi company, they were informed that no taxis were available.
And so, after what was quite a long weekend, we found ourselves walking with our bike boxes and wheeled bags and rucksacks down dark country roads with no lights with both oncoming and rear-facing traffic.
It was possible there to delve into the depths of despair, exhausted and completely spent from an emotional and really active weekend and wonder why this had happened to me or why this had happened to us.
Ultimately though, we switched the narrative and tried to beat the time that had been set by google maps for the 1.5-mile trip to the airport.
We beat it by 15 minutes and although I was dripping in sweat (ewww!) it actually felt like we had done something that we would not forget.
I think if we had got a taxi to the airport that Monday morning, we’d probably never have remembered the trip. I think because we’d turned it into something uncomfortable, a challenge and embraced the circumstances, it’s probably something that we’ll never forget.
Please don’t get me wrong, I like nothing more than sitting on a sofa in the warmth eating crisps and watching a movie but the problem with that is that it’s addictive and too much is heading in the wrong direction.
Blog Post Number - 3217
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