Training for Adversity: My Misogi Experience
My Garmin watch said I’d taken 45,000 steps, it was 11:57 PM, and I was heading out the door to run my 25th mile of the day.
Before I explain, let’s flashback three months, to an email and a text message I received in the same week from two different people.
“You have to read The Comfort Crisis!” they said.
So I grabbed a copy of Michael Easter’s new book and was mesmerized by what I found. I couldn’t put it down. I recommended it to friends and family who cruised through it as fast as I did.
The basic idea is that modern humans are too comfortable. We wake up on our Tempurpedic mattresses in rooms set to our preferred temperatures. We pop a frozen burrito in the microwave and eat it on our cell-phone summoned, chauffeur driven commute. Our cars have heated seats and turn by turn directions. Our phones pump constant content through our thick skulls, preventing even a moment of boredom. Nothing in life is hard, at least not like it was centuries ago.
This train of thought struck a chord with me. I’d written about the same topic. People have more of everything than ever before. More debt, more processed foods, more mental stimulation. And in turn they have more stress, more obesity, more anxiety and depression.
We’re at an inflection point in human history, and if we don’t do some soul searching, I’m afraid the future won’t be bright.
Michael Easter holds the same opinions, and he conveyed them with entertaining stories and scientific studies for support. The Comfort Crisis is a lecture on the softening of society and the things we can do—as individuals—to improve.
What is a misogi?
Central to Easter’s story is the Japanese concept of misogi.
As he explains in the book, the word misogi has roots in Japanese mythology, but it’s basically the idea of a difficult and transformational journey. A rite of passage, in a sense.
Some modern humans (read psychopaths) have adopted the concept of a misogi. They interpret it as an insanely difficult challenge of body and mind. As Easter relates the misogi, it has two primary rules:
It has to be really fucking hard.
You can’t die.
Within those boundaries, you’ve got a lot of room to play.
Let’s talk about number one. “Really fucking hard,” as defined by the experts, means you have about a 50% chance of completing it, if you do everything right. So if you’ve been training for a marathon, running a marathon isn’t a misogi.
If you run 5-10 miles each week, a marathon might be a misogi. Turns out, “really fucking hard” is a relative term. It’s different for everyone.
On to number two: don’t die. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this one. If you’re going to attempt something dangerous, take the proper precautions. One of the guys Easter wrote about attempted to paddleboard 25 miles across open ocean. He had a boat team accompany him to ensure his safety. Basically, don’t be reckless.
My misogi begins
By now you’ve probably guessed that the opening sentence of this article is about my misogi. That’s right, I’m one of those psychopaths. But in my defense, so is my wife.
On Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 8 AM, Ashleigh and I set out to complete our first misogi. For our challenge, we decided to run 1.5 miles every hour for 24 hours. At the top of every hour, we had to be outside running. We had 15 minutes to complete the 1.5 miles, then we could rest for the remaining time.
Ash and I are in decent shape. You won’t find me on the cover of Men’s Health or her in the SI Swimsuit Issue, but we don’t wear t-shirts in the pool either. We’ve each run a marathon—although it’s been a couple years—and we both exercise regularly. At the time of the misogi, we’d been running about 8 miles per week.
We thought it would be challenging, but we both thought we had more than a 50% chance of completing it. As I sit on the couch a few days after finishing, typing this article with ibuprofen in my belly and a heating pad on my knee, I can say for certain that our misogi was really fucking hard.
The first four hours were easy. We were still excited, loose, and well rested. The sun was still up. We posted up at our favorite park, and at the top of every hour we’d run a different path past the battlefield statues and through the falling leaves. In between runs, we’d eat Clif bars, talk on the phone, talk to each other, read, and write in our journals. We laid on our blanket in the warm autumn sun, enjoying the beautiful day.
After hour five, my IT band was starting to tighten. I still had energy. My legs still felt fresh. My spirits were still high. I just had a little twinge in my right knee. So I started rolling on a mobility ball and doing the pigeon pose between laps. Strangely, Ash was feeling similar pains in her IT band.
The afternoon brought a change of scenery, along with some Icy Hot and ibuprofen.
By 5 PM, I was having some doubts. We had ten hours and 15 miles down with 14 hours and 21 miles to go. We were both in consistent pain every time we ran. We had more ahead of us than we did behind. I didn't say it out loud, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish.
Why attempt a misogi?
Let’s take another break to talk about why we were attempting this crazy thing. During one of our late night laps—in an effort to motivate my wife and myself—I started thinking out loud.
“We’re out here putting one foot in front of the other,” I said. “ We’re feeling the pain with every step, and we’re doing something most other people couldn’t do.”
“Not only something they couldn’t do,” Ash replied. “It’s something they don’t even understand why we want to do.”
This captures it perfectly.
We’re all as comfortable as house cats laying on sunny windowsills, and most of us are content to keep it that way. Nobody wants to do hard shit. Nobody wants to feel pain. Nobody wants to test their limits.
And you know what happens when you don’t test your limits? Your limits shrink.
Honestly, most of us will never have to test our limits. We don’t have to hunt wild animals to feed our families. We don’t have to carry water for miles to clean our dishes. We don’t have to walk for days on end, carrying all our possessions, as we migrate from hunting grounds to winter grounds.
But we will have some struggles, and the thing with adversity is you don’t get to plan for it. You don’t have a fortune teller giving you advance notice of bad luck. If you don’t prepare for adversity, you’re going to be in a tough spot when it comes knocking on your door.
In a recent Books of Titans podcast, host Erik Rostad compared Man’s Search for Meaning and The Gulag Archipelago. Before reading the books, he asked himself, “who is the type of person who survives a concentration camp?” Aside from luck, Rostad notes that the survivors “were becoming the kind of person who survives a camp well before they ever arrived.” Long before the bad times necessitated it, these people were using the good times to become strong.
This is why we attempted a misogi—to train for adversity long before it arrives.
How do you train for adversity? You create it. You build a misogi and you get after it. You push yourself to your limits. Then you dig deep, push a little further, look back over your shoulder at the you of yesterday and laugh at that little bitch.
Adversity today looks a lot different than historical adversity, but most of us will experience tough times. You’ll lose a job. You’ll get divorced. You’ll lose a sibling, a parent, a friend, or a child. The bank will foreclose on your house. Your humvee will drive over an IED, and you’ll lose your legs.
If you haven’t hardened your body and mind, you might not survive. You definitely won’t thrive.
I’ve been robbed at gunpoint, which I guess you could call adversity, but that was honestly more of a “lucky I survived” event than a “wow I really overcame” situation. Ash made it through med school, which is a pretty daunting challenge. But it’s not a life or death, limits of your potential, test your mettle type of experience.
The adversity I’m talking about is escaping from slavery, surviving the holocaust, or living in the war torn mountains of Afghanistan. That shit is hard. Go through those experiences, and you’ll know what you’re made of. You’ll know what your body and mind can endure.
The type of discomfort most of us experience is when Domino’s forgets the sausage on our pizza. It’s the make believe nonsense of our comfy modern world.
The misogi continues
So that’s why we were doing it. We were preparing for the adversity to come in our lives. We were testing our bodies and hardening our minds. We were training to keep putting one foot in front of the other when all we wanted to do was curl up and cry.
It was a painful beating. Here’s my journal entry from 2 AM:
The last two were hard as shit. We slept from 12:15 to 12:50, and it was really hard to wake up and loosen up. I was in a dark place again. I just finished two eggs and toast, so my spirits are higher. Five hours and 7.5 miles to go.
It only got harder from there. I needed to sleep, but sleeping meant not moving my knee, which meant stiffness and a lot of pain on the next run. My leg was too bruised from rolling to roll any more. The ibuprofen didn’t touch the pain. The Icy Hot didn’t do anything except burn my skin.
But we kept getting off the couch, tying our sneakers, hobbling down the stairs, cursing quietly at the moon, and clicking the start button on the Garmin.
Every painful lap around the parking lot was one closer to the end. That was how I got through it.
Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Just complete the smallest action over and over again. Just keep making progress when all you want to do is quit.
We ran all the night miles at our apartment complex. The loop around the parking lot is three tenths of a mile. Five laps every hour for the last 13 hours.
On the first lap it was still light out, and I spotted a condom on the ground. We passed that condom 65 times—each time being careful to step left or right of it. I think that’s the key to pushing through shitty experiences. Find the smallest details and focus on them. Obsess over them. Laugh at them. 65 trips past that condom, careful to avoid it every time.
I could control my next step. I could avoid that condom. I could ensure I didn’t make a bad situation worse. I zoomed in and tuned out. I controlled what I could control.
We completed our misogi. We hit our goal. Every round was under 15 minutes. Every round except the last one which we decided to walk. We walked our last mile and a half while we watched the sun rise. We reflected on our crazy stupid accomplishment and what it meant.
Then we went to bed.
In the moment, those 36 miles didn’t really matter. I actually felt a bit of regret. Our bodies were smoked. It’ll probably take weeks to recover. And there’s honestly no clear, immediate benefit.
But the best benefits in life aren’t immediate, despite everything society tells us. The best rewards come years after we put in the work. And I know the same will be true with this one.
Someday when Ash and I experience that pain, loss, adversity—whatever it is—that’s when we’ll see the benefits of our misogi. And we’ll appreciate it then because we already prepared. We gave ourselves a gift before we needed it.
That’s not to say the adversity won’t hurt. It’ll still be awful. But we’ll know we can face it, look it in the eyes, and charge ahead. We’ll take each other’s hands, grit our teeth, and tackle it together. That’s the power of the misogi. Nothing will ever beat us harder than we beat ourselves.
It’s a good feeling. Well, you know what I mean.
Photo by Brian Erickson on Unsplash
