How I Tricked My Brain Into Wanting the Worst Part of Training

Off-season in Colorado Springs is a specific kind of loneliness. No competitions, no media, no crowds. Just you & the ice & the weight room & the quiet of training when nobody's watching.

And the leg press.

The 12-minute leg press sets were what I dreaded most. They built endurance for my finishing kick in the 1500m, so I needed them, but needing something & wanting something are completely different experiences when your alarm goes off at 4:30am and your body is saying no. For yrs I dealt w/ it the way most people do — willpower, discipline, push through. It worked, sort of. But every session that starts w/ dread and ends w/ relief is training your brain to associate that activity w/ suffering. You're not building a habit, you're building a resistance pattern that gets harder to override every time.

One morning I brought a different playlist to the gym. Not a pump-up mix — tracks I genuinely loved, music I'd normally save for driving or downtime. And I made a rule: I could only listen to those tracks during the exercises I hated most.

The leg press got its own playlist. The long-duration bike sessions got another one. The plyometric circuits that made my knees feel like they were filled w/ gravel got a third.

After about a week I noticed I wasn't dreading the leg press the same way. The music had gotten tangled up w/ the exercise somehow & my brain couldn't separate them anymore. I was almost looking forward to it — not bc the exercise changed, but bc the anticipation of the music was overriding the anticipation of the suffering. The entry point changed, and bc the entry point is where most resistance lives, the whole experience shifted w/ it.

I didn't have the neuroscience language for it at the time. I just knew the trick worked & I kept doing it.

Does the brain actually rewire this way?

The short version: yes. Your brain releases dopamine in anticipation of reward, not just during it. By consistently pairing an activity I hated w/ something I genuinely enjoyed, I'd moved the dopamine release to the start of the hated activity. The entry point is everything — fix that and momentum usually carries the rest.

After I retired I started noticing the same resistance pattern everywhere, including in myself. There's always something on the list I'd rather not do, some task that creates that familiar wall when I think about starting it. Post-retirement it was financial modeling, investor decks, the admin work of building businesses that nobody warns you about when you leave sport.

So I did the same thing. Specific coffee shop I only went to for that type of work. Same table every time. My brain eventually couldn't separate the work from the ritual anymore.

A founder I know did something similar — she does all her most dreaded admin at a tea shop she only visits for that purpose. Same spot, same order. She told me once that her brain now associates the smell of that tea w/ focus, not suffering. I thought that was kind of beautiful, honestly.

The other piece that mattered was consistency over intensity. I could've done a single brutal three-hour session & forced myself through it, but that would've reinforced the suffering association. What built the new pattern was doing it the same way, w/ the same playlist, at roughly the same time, every training day for weeks. The brain doesn't waste resources getting excited about something that might happen — it saves that for things that have happened consistently enough to count as predictable.

This is why most habit-building advice falls apart. People go hard for three days, fall off, restart, fall off again. The inconsistency teaches the brain the pattern is unreliable, so it never shifts the reward association. The better approach is embarrassingly modest: do the thing at a low enough intensity that you can show up every day, pair it w/ something you like, and let time do the rewiring.

I didn't become an Olympic champion bc I trained the hardest on any single day. I became one bc I showed up consistently for yrs & structured the experience so my brain wanted to keep showing up.

The leg press is long behind me now. But every week there's still something on the list that creates that wall. And every time, the fix is the same — not forcing myself through it, but redesigning the entry point so the start stops feeling like a fight.

Took me way too long to figure that out. Maybe it doesn't have to take you as long.

I write about how the brain works under pressure, mechanics of performance, and the unglamorous reality of getting better in Hard Pivot. Subscribe here.

--AAO