The Hardest Training I Ever Did Was Sitting Still

There's a version of training that nobody puts on Instagram.

No weight room, no track, no ice. Just a chair & ten minutes of absolute silence before the day starts. No phone, no music, no conversation. Just you & whatever your brain decides to throw at you when you take away every single escape hatch.

I started doing this in my early twenties at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and I can tell you the first few weeks were brutal in a way I wasn't prepared for. I could handle 12-minute leg press sets without racking the weight. I could do sprint intervals on the ice until my legs felt like they were filled w/ concrete.

But sitting in a quiet room & asking my brain to do nothing for ten minutes? That was a different kind of hard. My mind would race, loop, jump, argue w/ itself, replay old conversations, rehearse future ones, do anything it could to avoid the stillness.

And that resistance, I eventually realized, was the whole point.

Why would an athlete train by doing nothing?

The silence before training wasn't meditation in the way most people think of it. I wasn't trying to empty my mind or find inner peace or whatever. I was training my attention to hold still when every instinct was telling it to move.

That's a different thing, & it translates directly to what happens on the ice when five other skaters are jockeying for position at 35 mph & your brain wants to panic. Your neurons only rewire when there's strain — comfortable repetition maintains what you have, uncomfortable strain builds something new. And those 10 minutes of sitting w/ the restlessness, the boredom, the urge to check something or think about something or do anything other than sit... that was the strain. The reps were invisible but they were real.

Athletes I competed against who crumbled under pressure, the ones who made bad decisions in the last two laps of a final — most weren't less talented than me. They hadn't trained their minds to stay in the room when the room got uncomfortable. Their attention scattered at exactly the moment they needed it most.

In 2014, my friend Mark Fretta — a top triathlete — challenged me to do an Ironman. I'd spent most of my life competing in events that were over in under 90 seconds, so the idea of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, & a full marathon back to back was absurd to me.

Mark said it'd be amazing if I could finish in under 11 hrs. I asked about under 10. He said forget it, no way.

I finished in 9 hrs and 52 minutes. But the part that changed something in me wasn't the time on the clock. It was the last six miles of the run, where every logical system in my body was telling me to stop and I... didn't. There was no crowd roaring, no gold medal waiting, no scoreboard. Pavement & pain & the question of whether I was going to keep going or not.

The mental training I'd done for yrs — the silence, the boredom tolerance, the practice of sitting w/ discomfort instead of running from it — that's what carried me through those miles. Not my legs. My legs were done. It was the mind that still had something left bc I'd been training it separately from the body for over a decade.

At least in my experience working w/ leaders & organizations over the past 15 yrs — most people are trying to build mental toughness by grinding harder. More hours, more intensity, more discipline, more willpower. And that works up to a point, but it's like trying to get faster by only training your legs & ignoring your lungs. You hit a ceiling & you can't figure out why.

The mind needs its own training program. Separate from work, separate from the grind. Entry point is embarrassingly simple — sitting w/ discomfort on purpose & not reaching for an escape.

That can look like the 10-minute silence blocks I used to do, cold showers where you practice settling into discomfort instead of clenching against it, having the hard conversation you've been avoiding. Specific stimulus matters less than the pattern — you're teaching your nervous system discomfort is data, not danger.

I'd be lying if I said the strain part was the whole story. Recovery is the other 1/2, and for most of my early career I was terrible at it.

I used to grind through training blocks w/ zero downtime, treating rest like weakness. Then I'd wonder why I felt flat on race day, why my reaction times were off, why I couldn't find the gear I needed when it mattered most.

Took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand the brain locks in what it learns during rest, not during strain. The strain is the stimulus. The recovery is where actual adaptation happens.

Now I'm pretty religious about it. Five minutes of slow nasal breathing between intense work blocks. Walking w/o headphones. Sleep I protect the way I used to protect ice time. Not bc it feels productive in the moment, but bc I've seen what happens when I don't — quality of my thinking degrades, patience drops, & I start making decisions from a depleted version of myself.

After all those yrs of trial & injury & some painful lessons, I think the cycle comes down to something pretty simple. Introduce friction on purpose, put in effort against that friction, recover & let the learning settle, then reflect on what happened — where you wanted to quit, what kept you going, what surprised you about your own response. And then do it again, slightly harder.

Reflection is the piece most people skip (and it might be the most important part). Writing down what I noticed after a hard session turned fleeting experience into something I could build on. Over time that evidence accumulates, & you're not starting from zero anymore — you're starting from proof.

I wrote about this in Zero Regrets — the cost of what competition demands & what it gives back.

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--AAO