“Anja only knows how to do things the hard way,” is a joke permeating throughout my network right now.
Take, for example, my new bike seat. It is the first bike seat I’ve ever purchased that hasn’t come stock with the bike. I have spent the last decade of mountain biking assuming that numb feet, pinching SI joints, low back pain, and screaming labia were just the price you paid for cavorting over rock and dirt for fun.
This new bike seat has, however, eliminated all of those issues (next, we must figure out why my hands go numb…), and I look around now at my peers on their cushy bike seats feeling as though they were cheating this whole time.
How dare you, I think to myself. Pain is the price we agreed to pay for this!
Except no one but me agreed to it.
I similarly signed up for one of the most challenging bike races in Colorado this summer as one of my very first races because I’m simply of the mindset that suffering is the price of admission to wonderful things. (With just 10 days to go, I’m realizing that I will likely have my ass absolutely handed to me and the odds of making the mile-25 time cutoff are growing slim.)
I could have gotten better bike seats when I started learning to mountain bike to make it hurt less. I could have opted for easier races while I got the whole race thing worked out.
But I’m not good at easing in. I hate it.
My disdain for easing in is almost certainly how I ended up learning to ski in the Colorado backcountry, how I found myself on a 65 foot sailboat for a week in the Exumas notching 18 dives under my belt just a few months after getting open water scuba certified, how I ended up in graduate school at the only school I’d applied to for a program I knew NOTHING about, why I lived in a 100 square foot camper for a year with my partner, how I ended up moving my entire life across the country in the middle of a pandemic to a town I’d basically never been to, and most assuredly how I ended up with an overpriced, green horse as a person who knows absolutely nothing about horses.
I don’t regret any of these decisions. And I don’t know if it’s true that I picked “the hard way” or if I just opted not to ease into any of these things.
It’s not because I find something morally wrong with easing in (I really don’t!), it’s just because everything I’ve ever eased myself into, I’ve abandoned as soon as I fully realized the complexity, difficulty, stress, and possible financial repercussions it would have.
Easing in provides a lot of exit ramps, and god, I love an exit ramp.
For example, the way to ease into horse ownership probably would have looked like:
Leasing a horse for a couple of years at a nice barn
Taking lessons from multiple trainers in multiple disciplines to figure out what I wanted to do (Barrel racing? Jumping? Dressage? Endurance racing? Just derping around?)
Scouring the market looking for a horse that would suit a beginner, with the help of multiple knowledgeable people, researching reasonable price ranges, and finding the best place to board where we would both be well supported
Creating a consistent plan and schedule for training and schooling once the horse was purchased
So calm. So measured, right? But I know me. Somewhere between step two and three of “easing into it,” I would have gotten overwhelmed by my options, the opinions of others, my own self-doubt, the cost, the time, the uncertainties, the motherfucking GRAY HORSE MELANOMA. And I would have marched my cowboy boots right on over to Goodwill and said, Sorry, it’s too much for me, and left them there to sell to some poor schmuck who thought they could get into horses.
I know this because I just exited a long stretch of overwhelm with horse ownership, where I spent most days muttering under my breath, Holy shit, I can’t do this, what the hell was I thinking?
If there had been an off-ramp to take, I would have taken it.
Commitments keep us honest. Diving headfirst into life creates commitments.
I think about it this way: Let’s say you want to get into cold plunging, but you’re going to ease in. So instead of jumping straight into an icy lake, you slowly wade in. You take a few big steps into the lake until you’re up to your shins and think to yourself, “Wow, this is really uncomfortable and the thought of going any deeper sounds awful.” So you walk back to your car and promise yourself you’ll come back and go an inch deeper tomorrow, and every day after that until you’re submerged in the lake.
But when you get home:
You start Googling the benefits of cold plunging, because really, why are you getting into this anyway if it’s so uncomfortable?
You read conflicting information.
You see one story about how cold plunging nearly killed someone.
You start wondering if you should buy some warmer towels or splurge on one of those super-expensive changing robes.
You make a mental note to dig out some beanies from the winter gear bin.
Then you question if you’ll spend too much money on gas driving to and from the lake.
And also, do you really have time to do this every single day? If you’re not doing it every single day, what’s even the point?
Also, shoot, you forgot about summer. What are you going to do in the summer? Are you going to have to get some kind of pricey membership to a gym where they have a cold plunge tank? Can a person cold plunge all winter but not summer and maintain the benefits?
Also, is it really safe to be cold plunging in a lake alone? Maybe you need to find some kind of meetup so you can do it with other people and get to know a little more about it. Will the meetup people be cool though, or is it going to be a bunch of Joe Rogan buttholes who think cold plunging makes them “alpha males?”
Oh no, is cold plunging just some alpha male cult bullshit?
Are people going to think you voted for Trump if you really get into this?
Okay, you know what? When you really think about it, cold plunging isn’t all that interesting anyway, and the whole thing is too complex to figure out. Might as well call it a good attempt, but ultimately not for you.
Or…and hear me out…YOU COULD JUST JUMP INTO THE FUCKING LAKE.
I know there are people who have the ability to ease into new things without overthinking them within an inch of their lives, but I am not one of those people. I know some people can walk one step further into the lake every day for a year and finally be submerged. But not me. I have to JUMP into the fucking lake. If given the chance to dip my toe in and think about it, I will think about it until the day I die, having never touched the water.
So just buy the horse and learn (quite literally) by the seat of your pants. Show up for the dive trip trapped on a sailboat for an entire week with nothing more than a wetsuit and a good attitude. Make the cross-country move. And then make another. Keep your commitments. Bedazzle any tempting exit ramps with traffic cones and spike strips. Cannonball through life!