10/18/2025
Sixteen Hours in Coach vs. Two Minute All-Out Run: Which Feels Worse?
I’m sitting on another ten-hour Delta Air Lines flight—this time headed to Honolulu, Hawaii for a two-day layover before continuing on to Australia (another ten hours). Surprisingly, this one doesn't feel so bad. Maybe because last month I survived a sixteen-hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa.
Between these two marathon trips, I was back home in Atlanta, settled into my familiar morning routine—meditation, coffee, gym. At the gym (I go to Orangetheory Fitness), my coach, Koko, called out “All out for two minutes!”. Two minutes of running as fast as I can felt completely impossible. But then again, so did sixteen hours on a plane.
And yet—I got through both. Neither killed me. And truthfully, neither was as bad as I’d imagined.
It made me think about two things:
Time is relative.
Things are usually not as bad as we expect them to be.
1) Time is relative.
How is it possible that sixteen hours of sitting still can feel as daunting as two minutes of all-out running? Both experiences distort time in completely different ways. When I’m running with my lungs on fire and it feels like my legs are about to collapse, two minutes stretches into eternity. When I’m on a long-haul flight, time folds into itself—I drift between sleep and semi-consciousness, movies and meals, daylight and darkness. What day is it even?
Both are exercises in endurance—one physical, one mental—and both remind me that time isn’t fixed. It bends around our experience, our attention, and our discomfort.
As an art therapist, I’ve learned that our perception of time is deeply connected to our perspective—to how present we allow ourselves to be, rather than how much we resist the moment. When I can simply be on the plane, I start to see this uninterrupted stretch of time as a gift—it becomes a chance to do the things I never seem to make time for at home: organizing the thousands of photos on my phone, diving into that virtual drawing class I bought six months ago, or, like now, finally writing this blog.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Echart Tolle,
“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.”
2) Things are usually not as bad as we expect them to be.
Our brains are powerful tools and are programmed to avoid pain at all costs. My brain really wants me to avoid anything that may be slightly uncomfortable. I'm sure when I land in Honolulu, Greg will want to go immediately into the ocean, and my first response will be reluctance - not because I am afraid of sharks or the undertow, but because I don’t like being cold. How ridiculous is that?
And yet, every single time I push past that initial hesitation—whether it’s stepping into the ocean, boarding a long flight, or sprinting for two minutes—I’m reminded that most of my fears live in my imagination, not in reality.
So here I am, thirty thousand feet in the air, somewhere between Atlanta and Hawaii, realizing that endurance is mostly a mental game. The hardest part is rarely the doing—it’s the thinking before the doing.
Maybe that’s what growth really is: learning to sit with discomfort long enough to realize it’s not out to destroy you. Sometimes, it even takes you somewhere beautiful.
And, like me, you can bring a sketchbook and some watercolor paints on that next long flight.Delete ima
