It’s healthy to make yourself uncomfortable from time to time.
Like I did the other day.
I hadn’t attempted this particular feat since high school.
Or maybe ever.
I drove the speed limit.
Not just around town.
But for the entire drive from St. Louis to Kansas City.
It’s about 250 miles.
And usually takes around four and a half hours.
That’s a long time to be uncomfortable.
But I’ve done worse.
As a military guy, I was trained to Embrace The Suck.
Seek pain, and make it your friend.
Which is pretty stupid, if you think about it.
And something I’ve largely rejected as I’ve gotten older.
But I do make exceptions. Especially when I feel like I’m getting soft.
Or if I believe a temporary period of discomfort will yield new insights or long-term benefit.
That was the idea behind the drive to Kansas City.
For starters, I hate road trips.
More precisely, my ass hates road trips.
After about thirty minutes in a car, I get stabbing pains in my backside.
I run a fair amount, and runners have chronically tight hamstrings.
Hence the pain when I sit.
That’s what I tell myself, at least.
I’d much rather attribute a physical ailment to a sports-related activity than to weakness or a feeble constitution.
Sore shoulder? Must have hit it too hard in the pool the other day, I tell myself.
Aching knees? Had to be the deadlifts.
It’s easier that way.
In the car, I get a pain that starts right where my hamstring meets my glutes and then wraps around the outside of my leg down to my knee.
It’s excruciating.
I’ve heard this condition called sciatica.
Which I’m pretty sure is bullshit.
I’m no doctor, but I think sciatica was invented by some marketer so Brett Favre could sell more of those Copper Fit things.
Which are also bullshit, by the way.
But, hey, you’re free to spend your money however you want.
Anyway.
The day before the Kansas City drive, my wife and I had driven from Knoxville, Tennessee, to her parents’ place outside St. Louis.
We’d delivered our daughter back to college.
The drive from Knoxville started out well enough.
The weather was nice, and the mountain vistas on the road to Nashville were quite pleasing.
But then we discovered the second Tuesday of the month is apparently Asshole Trucker Appreciation Day in Tennessee.
They were everywhere.
If there wasn’t one riding your ass, there was one parked in the left lane, backing up traffic all the way to North Carolina.
I mean, who do these dipshits think they are trying to pass each other in the mountains?
They’d start out around seventy miles per hour, then slow to, like, forty-five as soon as they hit an incline.
And there were only inclines. For miles.
As a result, I was constantly on the brakes, decelerating, then on the gas, gunning it, as soon as I spotted an opening to get around one of these assholes.
It was impossible to set the cruise control for more than a couple minutes at a time.
Not only was it infuriating, but it also forced me into an increasingly uncomfortable sitting position as I continually worked the pedals.
By the time I stepped out of the car some seven hours later at the Mexican restaurant where we met my in-laws, I resembled a large portion of the mostly elderly clientele—stooped, stuttering, and shuffle-stepping.
You’d’ve thought I was ninety.
Help me, Brett Favre!
The whole experience sucked, for sure.
But, to that point in my life, I just accepted such things.
The point of a road trip, after all, is to get it the hell over with.
That means you only stop when you’re down to your last gallon of gas and your eyes are watering because you have to piss so badly.
Any sooner, and you’re doing it wrong.
Or are you?
My wife’s parents have been driving to Florida three or four times a year for nearly two decades.
They’re road-tripping machines.
“We stop every two hours, no matter what,” my mother-in-law told me. “Who wants to sit there and be miserable?”
Okay. Maybe that’s a fair point.
“Of course,” she added, “we aren’t in any hurry.”
Ah . . . there it is.
They aren’t in a hurry.
But I, along with two hundred million other drivers on the road, am in a big hurry.
To get it over with.
Still, I went to bed that night, spears of pain shooting through my hamstrings, thinking there had to be a better way.
The next morning, as I was loading the car, I had an epiphany.
What if I drove the speed limit?
Only a small fraction of cars do so.
I could set the cruise control, sit comfortably in whatever position I wanted, and plod along undisturbed in the right lane.
But wait, I thought. You’d have to be some kind of loser to voluntarily drive the speed limit, right?
Or a senior citizen.
Did I really want to subject myself to the judgement of every driver that passed me?
I have my pride, after all.
But, as I thought about it, I realized I had exactly the asset I needed to escape judgement:
A white minivan.
I’d rented it to haul my daughter’s shit back to school.
Anyone who saw me taking my time in the right lane would have to think, “Oh, right. Minivan. He must have a bunch of kids in there. Better to take it easy and be safe.”
It’s like when you drink too much at a costume party. You can always blame it on your alter ego.
I am absolutely not a minivan guy.
But, for the drive to Kansas City, I decided I would be.
We took off driving, and I maneuvered my way into the right lane.
I couldn’t really put my plan into effect until we got to the point outside the city at which the speed limit turned to seventy.
Once there, I set the cruise control for sixty-nine, sat back, and waited to see what would happen.
My first observation was of the awkward discomfort I felt.
It just didn’t feel right to be sitting there, lolly-gagging along at anything less than seventy-five.
I had to fight the feeling.
Stick with the plan, I told myself. Just give it a chance.
The next thing I noticed was how many cars were passing me.
And it wasn’t just cars. The semis were passing me, too.
I was watching the same scene play out as the one I’d experienced during the drive through Tennessee the day before.
Stressed-out drivers were dueling with asshole truckers.
It was an interesting phenomenon to observe.
From the perspective of the right lane, the left lane is The Jerry Springer Show.
Who wants to deal with that?
And as I was watching this all play out, I noticed how much pain I wasn’t experiencing in my backside.
With the cruise control set and my feet comfortably off the petals, I could shift my weight around, stretch out, and avoid the various pressure points that gave rise to the pain I typically endured.
It was fantastic.
Then, to make matters even better, I stopped for coffee.
Real coffee. At a Starbucks.
Not gas station coffee.
And then, exactly two hours later, I stopped at a rest stop.
A rest stop!
When’s the last time you visited one of those?
It then dawned on me that, if you stop regularly, you can drink as much coffee as you want when you drive.
That’s huge.
As we pulled into our driveway in Kansas City, I noted the drive had taken only thirty minutes longer than usual.
Thirty minutes: That’s it.
A very worthwhile investment, I thought.
And while I still felt like I’d been sitting in a car for five hours, I did not feel like the ninety-year-old man of the day before.
My conclusion: All road trips will henceforth be driven at or below the speed limit.
Feel free to judge me as you pass by in the left lane.
Call me an old man.
I don’t care.
There will be plenty of spaces available at the next rest stop.
Where you’ll find me unloading another cup of coffee.
Of which I enjoyed every sip.
At exactly sixty-nine miles per hour.