On Tuesday, I set my new personal record: 4.5 hours badminton workout. 3,000 calories burned. Heart rate averaging 155 the whole time.
That’s not a workout. That’s my heart filing a complaint.
Here’s what I got out of it — three things, simply.
1. Extreme conditions are better discovered on purpose
A workout, a marathon, an Ultraman trail — these aren’t really about fitness. They’re stress tests. They’re me finding out, on my own terms, how I actually respond when things get hard. Not how I think I’ll respond. How I actually do.
And here’s the thing: better to find that out at hour three of a workout than in the middle of a crisis where the stakes are real. My limit isn’t a wall — it’s more like a lease I keep renewing without reading it. The only way to know what’s actually in the fine print is to break it early, somewhere safe, before life breaks it for me.
2. Pain is what shapes you. Comfort just passes through.
Comfort is nice. But comfort doesn’t build anything — it just sits there while time goes by. Pain is different. Pain is what actually shapes me.
Think about it: what do I actually remember from my life? Not the easy days. The hard ones. The failure, the setback, the session that nearly wrecked me. Happy moments are like a photo — nice to look at, easy to forget. Painful ones are like a tattoo. They stay, and they leave a mark on who I become.
That’s not an accident. My brain doesn’t file memories by how good they felt — it files them by how much they cost. Pain is expensive, so it gets written in permanent ink. Comfort is cheap, so it gets a sticky note that falls off by Tuesday.
3. The actual point of this post
Well, I didn’t mean to write a lengthy essay about pain, endurance, or whichever life lesson I had. The whole point for this post is that ‘m looking for a partner in crime — someone to train badminton with, regularly. Not a one-off. A standing match, a rivalry, someone who shows up and makes me chase the shuttle a little harder each time. DM me : dio AT diophung.com
Because the best kind of pain is the kind that comes with companionship 🙂