Fifteen years ago, I stood on the Great Wall of China with two small boys in tow, exhausted, nearly fainting on the winding stone steps that seemed to go nowhere and everywhere at once. The worn photos from that trip show three people having fun — but the truth behind those smiles was closer to survival. The grandeur of one of humanity’s greatest monuments was largely lost on us. We were just trying not to collapse.
I never imagined I would return to run it.
In his book The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter describes the concept of the Misogi — a Japanese practice of annual ritualized hardship — with a deceptively simple rule set: the challenge must be something you are uncertain you can do, and it must not kill you.
The point is not punishment. It is recalibration. Modern life has engineered discomfort almost entirely out of existence, and in doing so, has quietly stolen something from us — the vivid, hard-won memories that make life feel full and meaningful.
Easter calls these “memory dividends.” Suffering voluntarily, it turns out, pays extraordinarily well.
My first withdrawal from that account came in 2024, when I ran the Polar Circle Marathon in Greenland at -12°C.
Having grown up in a tropical country, walking on ice with crampons felt profoundly strange — almost absurd. I did not know if I would finish. I did, and I had the time of my life. Something broke open in me that day on the ice sheets, surrounded by glaciers and a silence so vast it felt geological. It was proof of concept: I was capable of more than I had allowed myself to believe.
Once that dam broke, there was no going back.
The Great Wall Marathon became the next logical act of voluntary suffering — and a deeply personal one. Returning to that same ancient structure not as a tourist, not as a mother keeping two little boys from tumbling down stone steps, but as a runner.
The preparation alone was its own kind of Misogi: months of research, training plan revisions, gear obsessions, accommodation logistics. Every bit of it is a major production, and deliberately so. The investment of attention is inseparable from the experience itself.
Race day on the Wall is not a metaphor — it is brutally literal. The course climbs and descends thousands of uneven stone steps, each one a small negotiation between your legs and your will.
By Kilometer 37, I was in trouble. It had taken me 31 minutes to cover a single kilometer. I did the math in my head, the way runners do when fear starts doing the calculations — and the numbers pointed toward a DNF. Did not finish. The two most demoralizing words in any runner’s vocabulary.
But I kept moving. One step, then the next, then the next.
I crossed the finish line in six hours and 56 minutes. The cutoff was eight hours. I had more in the tank than I thought — but I hadn’t known that at Kilometer 37, and not knowing was precisely the point. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the Misogi design. It is the design.
Easter was right about the memory dividend. The Greenland ice. The Beijing stone steps. The panic at Kilometer 37 and the relief at the finish. These are not the kinds of memories that fade into the beige blur of comfortable, predictable days. They are vivid and load-bearing — the kind that, when you return to them, make you feel more alive than you did when they were happening.
After Greenland, I said the dam had been opened. After the Great Wall, I realize the dam is gone entirely.
The only question now is: what kind of suffering shall I plan next?
