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Ease the Effort


In the off season, I relish in the ability to practice yoga regularly. One thing I’ve written about on my blog before is learning to identify comfort from happiness. The concepts are easily conflated, but I think separating these concepts can mean the difference between fulfillment and mundanity.

I’ve hashed out this comfort vs. happiness issue, perhaps without even realizing it, in the midst of breathing through a lot of chair poses. One of the first lessons I took from yoga is to welcome the discomfort of practice. To find ease within effort and learn to breathe through challenging situations. The discomfort is temporary, and when it goes away the strength and calm found through physical meditation will remain. Lately though, I’m not seeing this as just a way to get through the burny-poses in yoga class. It’s a way to welcome discomfort in life instead of shying away, and a positive thought to return to during the hardest training sessions, hardest races, or hardest life events. The discomfort is hard, but getting past it will bring strength.

Yesterday I watched a documentary on Alex Honnold’s free solo climb up El Capitan. For those that don’t know (I certainly didn’t), Alex’s accomplishment is tantamount to winning an Olympic gold medal in his discipline, but if he makes a mistake the stakes are not slipping from gold to silver; the stakes are slipping to his death. I think on the surface it’s easy to assume Alex does free solo climbs because he’s a reckless, thrill-seeker, but that was not my takeaway from the film. Alex spoke a bit about his perception of risk versus reward. The chance that he falls is minimal, but the reward in terms of the personal satisfaction he feels by soloing adds value and meaning to his life. In other words, Alex foregoes the comfort of the rope to achieve greater athletic feats, and find deeper life satisfaction. He speaks of an existential rift, where we must accept that each day there’s a chance we might die.

I have been stuck on this thought for the past day— the idea of boldly taking on our human fear of death in order to live a more fulfilled life. It’s a conundrum—do we have to get close to death to feel more alive? I see a lot of parallels to Alex's climbing philosophy in cycling. Every day I ride I know there are great risks presented by training and racing. Like Alex, I mitigate these risks by taking certain safety precautions, but I know they are there. I’ve often said to live life avoiding a fear of death is not living at all, and that’s why I continue to race despite the risks. It’s comfortable to pretend that death is not always a non-zero probability. But to be happy, I need to forego the comfort, accept the reality, and live my life like I’m not afraid. In fact, we all do, no matter what pursuit.

Voluntarily finding safe, yet uncomfortable, situations trains our minds to handle the discomfort when it presents for real. Cycling is 90 percent a mental battle, life even more so. Practiced methods for breathing through physical discomfort can translate into finding calm in the most complete chaos, and ultimately lead to (at least, I think) happiness in the

midst of even the hardest discomfort.

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