I did a 30-minute Tabata class on the Peloton today.
Not familiar with Tabata? It’s the opposite of fun. A thing to endure.
If you call it fun, we can’t be friends
Tabata is a brutal form of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), developed by Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata. It’s simple in theory, so hard in practice: 20 seconds of all-out effort, followed by just 10 seconds of rest, repeated again and again. For four minutes. Or twenty. Or however long you choose to torture yourself.
There are variations on the main idea, but the essence of it is: Your work-to-rest ratio is 2 to 1. Like any given Monday.
I started trying Tabata workouts on the bike – not because I’m any sort of performance athlete – but because experts say people my age should do these for heart health, metabolic conditioning, and building the kind of strength that actually helps you age well.
I’m into aging well…and so it goes.
But man… I was counting down the seconds like a kid in detention, backpack zipped, half off his chair, eyes locked on freedom.
About halfway through, despite my love of Hannah Frankson and her British accent cheering me on, my mind started to wander, and this One Thing Thursday was born.
We do hard things. And we avoid them all the time. And sometimes, hard things are on the menu whether you like it or not.
I started a fitness challenge at my gym. It started with a fitness test. I think my last fitness test was in the 8th grade. Now I know just how much I can bench, squat, and burn in 1 minute on the assault bike. I also know my body fat, and just in case I don’t appreciate those numbers, I have pictures to remind me. This type of thing, old hat for some. An intimidating kind of hard for me.
Yesterday, we benched, and because of my fitness test, I’m now motivated to get a better result at the end of this challenge.
It’s the kind of hard where comparison is both the thief of joy… and your greatest motivator.
Good for me? No doubt.
Never mind the girl, 20 years younger, lifting 50lbs heavier at the same time. Another kind of hard – a humbling one.
This weekend, a friend of ours, who loves to cook, planned a night for all of us to spend our Saturday evening with a chef learning to cook a 3 course meal. Fun for some. A fear-of-humiliating-myself kind of hard for me.
My idea of cooking was marrying well (thanks to the foodie in my life who keeps our meals nutritious and delicious).
Doing anything for the first time is hard. Worse if you add the pressure of it being tied to your work, your reputation, your paycheck.
The hard conversation with someone you love. The friendly conversation with someone you don’t even like.
The breakup. The illness of a loved one.
The marathon you signed up for in a drunken haze. The friend who won’t let you forget it.
Here’s what I know about hard things:
100% of the time, I feel better, stronger, prouder after.
Even the hard things you’d never wish on anyone, the kind that break your heart or shake your world, still teach you something. They make you wiser. Stronger. More resilient. And that resilience? It becomes rocket fuel for the next hard thing. It makes you better at helping other people through their hard things.
Hard things are good things.
So why do we burn so much mental energy resisting them? We talk about them. We loop them in our minds.
We give them prime real estate in our beautiful brains that could otherwise be creating something, making someone happy, solving a problem.
We turn them into excuses for missed workouts, missed deadlines, missed opportunities.
“I was going to do it, but then my calendar exploded.”
“I can’t even think straight. My inbox is a war zone.”
“I’ll start when things calm down.”
Things don’t calm down. We know that.
They get louder, with toddlers, teams, tech issues, coffee orders gone wrong (the worst).
And still, we wait for the perfect window. The perfect energy. The perfect alignment of stars and Slack notifications.
But what if… the hard thing wasn’t the problem? It’s our relationship to the hard thing.
One of my favourite lines of any book is the opening line of The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck.
Life is difficult.
He calls it one of the greatest truths. Because once you accept that life is difficult, it stops being quite so difficult. You stop resisting. You stop being surprised when things are hard. And you stop wasting your energy wishing it were easier.
You just… do the thing.
Dr. Steven Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has studied this. His work reminds us that it’s not the hard thing itself that causes the suffering.
It’s the story we tell ourselves about the hard thing.
“This shouldn’t be happening.”
“I’m not good at this.”
“Other people don’t struggle like this.”
What happens if we flip the script:
Instead of “I don’t know what I’m doing,” “What could I learn here?”
Instead of “This isn’t fair,” “How might this shape me?”
Instead of “I’m not good at hard things,” “Maybe this is how I get stronger.”
I’m no expert in this area. This whole thing started with me whining about Tabata, but I do recognize:
- Hard things aren’t signs you’re failing.
- They’re clues that you’re in motion.
- They’re where the growth is hiding.
- They’re you… building your superpowers.
I had a lovely conversation this week with a friend of mine, Maurice Patane, who shared a learning he had years ago that guides him today.
Would you rather be right or happy? You’re right. Life is hard.
How can you find meaning in the struggle?
As for me? I’ll keep Tabata-ing. And lifting alongside people half my age and twice as strong.
And putting myself in new, potentially embarrassing, probably character-building situations.
Things will be hard. I will complain, hopefully less.
And you have my permission to call me out any time I do.
What hard things can you see differently today?
You can listen to my full conversation with Maurice, out in a few weeks, on our podcast And That Changed Everything, where I interview leaders from around the world to understand the pivotal moments that shape who they are and the work they do today.
New to One Thing Thursdays?
Each week, I share something I’m learning, living, or working out in real time. It’s part storytelling, part reflection. I hope there’s something in it for you too.
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Mary
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