Episode 6: with Brian Hanna

In this episode of Sisters-in-Law of Attraction, Sam and Christine sit down with special guest Brian Hanna — an endurance runner, athlete development professional, and MBA candidate — to talk about what happens when you stop choosing comfort and start choosing growth.

We open with the idea from Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis: our ancestors chased comfort to survive, but today our constant comfort is making us weaker, more anxious, and less connected to purpose. Brian chose to push against that. One day, he just started running. Since then he’s run six marathons, two ultramarathons, and more halves than he can count.

Brian walks us through the difference between a marathon and an ultra. A marathon, he says, can end in tears of joy. An ultra ends in a different kind of tears — the kind that come from grit, pain, and choosing to take one more step when everything in you wants to quit. After 26.2 miles, it’s not just about the body anymore. It’s about who you’re willing to become.

He shares how it started: watching his older brother go from half marathons to a 50-mile race in Leadville, Colorado. Seeing that transformation lit something in him. He began running in high school, drifted, then came back to it during COVID. While the world shut down, Brian decided to speed up. He used that global interruption to ask, “Who do I want to be on the other side of this?”

From there, the conversation moves into discipline, faith, and purpose. Brian talks about the mindset shift from chasing motivation to practicing discipline: showing up daily, doing the hard thing when the easy thing is right there. He shares a core belief — it’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great. He also talks about honoring his body as a gift from God and pushing past comfort as a form of spiritual stewardship.

We explore how comfort can quietly rob us. When life is too easy — food delivered, work from home, constant entertainment, no need to leave the house — we stop testing ourselves. We stop needing each other. And when we stop engaging with challenge and community, anxiety and depression creep in. We lose purpose. We numb instead of grow.

Sam and Christine connect this back to what we see everywhere: people retreating, self-protecting, staying home, staying small. We tell ourselves it’s safety, but often it’s fear. Brian argues that purpose comes from the opposite. Purpose lives in the reps of doing hard things. Getting up before dawn to train when the bed is warm. Running in the cold rain because you said you would. Choosing “the hard right over the easy wrong.” How you do anything is how you do everything.

The episode closes with a powerful reminder from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena.” The credit belongs to the one who shows up, gets scraped, bleeds, tries, fails, and tries again — not the “cold and timid souls” who avoid risk and never find out what they’re capable of. That’s Brian’s challenge to all of us: stop waiting to feel ready. Get in the arena. Do something hard on purpose. Not to suffer — to wake up.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, unmotivated, disconnected, or anxious, this one matters. It’s not about running 50 miles. It’s about deciding you are not here to sit in comfort. You are here to build resilience, find purpose, and lift others by the way you live.