The Comfort Trap

The Comfort Trap

Today I realized something…in the past several months, perhaps even the last year I became comfortable in my physical training.  I would run further, but not faster…running further is really not much of a challenge for me, it’s the running faster part that becomes very uncomfortable. 

Following the Rock N’ Roll DC Marathon I came to the realization that I needed to run faster to improve my race times!  Today I ran just over 7 miles, at 8:27 pace.  This was a “recovery” run!  This is the pace most of my runs were run at last year.  The problem with that is last year I had to many “recovery” runs…

Recovery runs are comfortable, slower paced, they are intended to get your body moving and blood circulating…They are healthy, active, and very important for recovery.  The truth is many people never push their bodies beyond this, and for many people that is just fine!

It took me at least four years to get to the point that running at just over 7 mph for hours at a time (Yes, literally hours 2, 3, and sometimes 4 hours) was comfortable.  In fact it is relaxing, healing, and soothing…there are days that it feels difficult but for the past year it was relatively easy day after day.  I’d typically throw one or two harder workouts in, but for the most part 4 or 5 days a week was easy paced, relaxing running.

This is why my times did not improve as drastically as I wanted them to! I did improve…just not like I wanted to!  Thinking about this today made me wonder something…

How many times in life do we just settle into the comfortable pace?  How many times have we fallen into the “Comfort Trap”?

Whether it’s at work, home, or in our spiritual life, we settle into our routine and stop growing!

It’s time to get uncomfortable.

Remember:

Times of great pain bring even greater growth!

Times of sacrifice bring great reward!

Battle the desire to be comfortable and accomplish the great things God created you to do.

What areas have you become comfortable in?

Are these areas that are important to you?

How can you grow in these areas?

We can fall into the “comfort trap” in many different areas of our life. Maybe we’ve been caught in the comfort trap when it comes to being a parent, spouse, employee, boss, or anything else, we must remember when we allow ourselves to become comfortable typically it means we aren’t accomplishing much.