Mindset Training

Message from the Founder

Made by the storm.

When I started ASRV, I wanted to build its world around one simple idea: physical training is one of the most direct ways to create a confidence-competence loop, a positive cycle that carries into every part of our lives.

Training isn’t easy, but it’s clean, honest, and tangible. Like the calm after a storm, the results of hard, consistent work are something we can see and feel. Over time, this builds a visceral connection in our minds between struggle and progress, reinforcing the idea that the challenges we endure are often what make the rewards meaningful.

Anyone who has trained to failure, again and again over years, knows what that honesty costs. Muscle tears so it can grow back, and the soreness shows up the next morning like a receipt. Then slowly, almost without noticing, the bar gets heavier and the runs get longer.

But when we hear the word struggle, our first reaction is usually negative, and sometimes rightly so. The struggle we mean is the kind we choose. From day one, ASRV’s messaging has explored a different way of seeing challenge, struggle and resistance, treating struggle as something to look for and resistance as the thing that actually creates the outcomes we want. It’s counterintuitive, but when we change how we see them, we change our relationship with them. What we used to avoid becomes something we look forward to, woven into our lives instead of left as an afterthought. That’s the Relentless Pursuit.

We chose the harsher word, relentless, on purpose. No matter how many times we remind ourselves to move toward the resistance, our bodies and minds still want to avoid it. Changing our relationship with struggle takes constant effort, and that effort never really ends. It has to be relentless.

“The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Marcus Aurelius

With every new seasonal campaign, we look for something in the world outside the gym that reflects this same lesson. Nature is full of these parallels, and for winter, it’s the contrast between the storm and the calm that follows. The clarity of the air, the stillness, the renewed beauty of the landscape. A reminder that the storm doesn’t just precede the calm, it helps create it.

I grew up in a mountain town in Oregon, and I still remember one of the first big storms that came through. It was loud in a way I had never heard weather be loud before. The wind didn’t let up for two days, the snow came in sideways, and if you stepped outside you couldn’t see five feet in front of you.

And then it was over. I woke up to a kind of quiet that felt almost strange after so much noise. The sun had come out over everything covered in fresh powder, and the light was doing something I had never seen. It came down from the sky and came right back up off the snow, so everything looked lit from underneath. Every sound had been pressed flat under the snow, and the whole town was silent. It was an almost ethereal version of the world, one I had never seen before, and even then I could feel something special in the contrast.

I didn’t have words for it then, but snowboarding eventually taught me. Once the mountain became my world, I started welcoming storms like that one. Most people dreaded them and the chaos they brought. I was tracking them, waiting for them to clear, because I knew what they would leave behind. The days right after a big storm were some of the best I ever had on the mountain.

Everything I loved about those mornings was made by the storm that came before them.

This winter will bring its storms again, with colder days and harder mornings. On the other side of each one is a quiet that only the storm could have made.

– Jay B.

Worth the Weather

Winter makes a strong case for staying inside. The alarm goes off in the dark, the weather brings cold, rain and snow, and the excuses to skip a session start to come easier. The mind is the first to use the changing elements to keep us safe, comfortable and warm, and the run that felt easy in August turns into something to negotiate with.

But the same way the morning after a harsh storm is more beautiful because of the contrast, getting up and going in defiance of the cold and the dark makes the post-session feeling that much more rewarding. We know it took a little more to get it done, and we didn’t let the conditions outside break the promise we made to ourselves.

In the winter months, storms are both literal and metaphorical barriers, and that gives us a unique opportunity to be more present and to notice how we react as the resistance increases. Paying attention to those reactions builds a stronger connection to the idea that the stillness only exists because of what came before it. The wind and the cold are what laid down the snow, and without one we don’t get the other.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus built much of his thinking around this idea. To him, the world held together through opposites pulling against each other, the way a bow works because the string pulls against the wood. He called it a harmony, and it’s the idea behind this season. Winter just makes it easier to see. Without darkness we wouldn’t appreciate the light, and without the cold we wouldn’t find comfort in the warmth. Discomfort is usually where growth starts.

Some people look for peace by getting away from everything, somewhere quiet where nothing asks anything of them. We’ve always found it somewhere else, in the middle of the work, fully engaged in something difficult. It’s what we mean by Stillness in Motion, and it’s the same calm that settles in the morning after a storm. It’s earned the same way, too.

Training in the cold is a small version of that storm. The first minutes of a winter run are miserable, lungs burning in the frozen air and hands numb inside our gloves. Then somewhere around the second mile the body warms up, the breathing settles, and the run turns quiet and clear. Winter supplies plenty of resistance. A path without obstacles leads nowhere, and the months that push us hardest to stay inside are the ones that shape us most when we don’t.

The elements shift with every season, but the pursuit remains unchanged. Conditions evolve and environments fluctuate, and through all of it our commitment to progress holds steady.

Neuroscience Highlight

The cold changes our chemistry.

In a study published in 2000, researchers had a group of young men sit in water up to their necks for an hour at a time, at three different temperatures. At a comfortable 32°C, not much changed. At 14°C, about 57°F, the level of noradrenaline in their blood rose by 530 percent and dopamine rose by 250 percent. Both are chemicals tied to alertness and mood.

Those numbers come from the bloodstream, so they don’t map perfectly onto what’s happening in the brain. But the direction is hard to miss. The cold is unpleasant while it’s happening, and the body answers that discomfort by sharpening us. The exposure we spend all winter trying to avoid comes with a lift built into it.

In the Research

After the storm, look up

In a 2020 study out of UC San Francisco, older adults took a 15-minute walk outside once a week for eight weeks. Half of them were simply asked to walk. The other half were asked to notice things that gave them a sense of wonder, like the size of the trees or the way the light fell at a certain hour. The awe group reported more joy and warmer feelings toward other people during their walks. And when they photographed themselves along the way, they took up less and less of the frame over time, as if their own worries were shrinking next to everything around them.

Why the hard thing starts to feel good

Most models of motivation treat effort as a cost, something we naturally try to keep to a minimum. In a 2018 review, psychologists Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav and Christopher Olivola argued that this is only half the picture. Effort also adds value, both to whatever it produces and to the act of trying itself, which may help explain why so many of us sign up for the marathon when the couch is right there. An older line of research called learned industriousness points the same way. When effort is repeatedly paired with progress, the feeling of effort itself becomes less unpleasant, and that shift carries over into new challenges.

The storm will come through again this winter, probably more than once. When it does, the comfortable choice will be waiting inside, and the quiet, bright morning will be waiting on the other side of it.