A thoughtful interview. I’ve followed Sam for a while, so this won’t be new to him, but it resonated with what I’ve seen in practice.
People who’ve experienced significant hardship (whether structured, as in training or military service, or unstructured, as in poverty or instability) don’t tend to seek comfort so much as structure and responsibility. Sam mentions not tracking metrics, which some might read as a lack of structure, but I think there’s an important distinction between rhythm and rigid scheduling. One can commit to “I do this every day” without fixing it to a specific time or place.
I run a very small strength gym, and the people who do best are rarely those who’ve had lifelong comfort. More often it’s the shift worker with two kids who outlasts the single desk worker. Hardship didn’t make them noble, but it taught them to respond rather than withdraw.
They also tend to seek a sense of community and common purpose; something people encounter, to varying degrees, in the military.
I’m curious whether you and Sam see the modern problem as primarily a lack of hardship, or a lack of structures that make hardship containable and meaningful.
Both. I’m suspicious of ideas and environments that pull us too far from our evolved, biological nature. In the modern developed world we have many choices that others never had and some of those choices are terrible.
It is our nature to survive heat and cold. It isn’t comfortable. It is our nature to burn up any calories we could be so lucky to hunt or forage. What protein and berries we might find beat starvation but aren’t convenient or hyper palatable. It is natural to challenge each other in search of trustworthy tribes. It is modern to lie that all habits are equally healthy.
Comfort is okay. Being nice is… nice. These modern virtues are moderate and beige. They are good enough to mindlessly reach for. But they aren’t what makes life worth living. The things that I love are easier found with people who have known brutality. Brutality is bad, but it is hard to relate to people who have not been introduced.
The first time that a strong person hit me hard in the face was terrible, but I (barely) maintained consciousness and after a few seconds a wave of euphoria swept over me. I realized that I didn’t die or even lose and that it was something I could handle. That feeling requires getting punched in the face one way or another.
Few of our ancestors or my friends in eastern Africa need to search for hardships. But 21st century Americans and others in developed countries are at risk of meaninglessness – air conditioned, sedentary, poisoned, isolated, sexless, safe slow death. But there is a roadmap to the way out because it is the men who came earlier and the men with less who we need to emulate.
Find the line – let your body get as hot and cold as it can tolerate. Run as far as it will go. Everything is runnable. Find the rockiest, steepest way. Squat deep and heavy. Find an open mat and ask to roll with every belt, every size, and every style of opponent in any country you visit. The first time that I went way over the line was paired with a far stronger skier who I tried to keep up with until my lungs burst, I could taste blood in my mouth, and had to check to see if my ribs broke from heaving. That was over the line, but I found it. Without that discovery, there is a chance that what someone thinks is 100% is really 60% so on a day you plan on going 60% he is wasting his time going 36%. 100% is unavoidably intensely painful and somewhat dangerous.
So hardship can be found – drag a 300 lbs. sled across the tundra, watch a sunset and sunrise on the same ridge run, volunteer in Burma and challenge the local with the worst ears to a Lethwei bout. But today we need to structure such things. Ultimately what matters most to me is being able to do hard things together. I’d add “with people who love each other” but at the depths sometimes a more accurate description is tolerating each other enough to not be murderous in the worst moments. You want to go in at a 10 so we can survive -8 events. Start with a 7 out of 10 team and you could be fucked.
My youngest son’s environment is indoors, suburban, safe, and almost completely feminized. Comfort and niceness rule. The rulers are some of the least empathetic people on the planet, yet they use the word “empathy” dozens of times per day. None of the old virtues – strength, honor, courage – get a mention. Yet get him in the wild and he’s a savage. We have a 7 minute row we do together and he wordlessly doesn’t stop at the end. With no explanation, 45 minutes later he’ll be rowing and pouring sweat. Sometimes we do hill repeats together Wednesday mornings before sunrise on a steep route that winds around some even steeper cliffs. After an hour of that he almost whispered “let’s just go straight up” so we did. On the crux he turned his head to me and matter-of-factly notified me that, “Dad, if we fall we will die” beaming with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on his face.
Contained challenges are good, I think. As I tell people in my gym: any time you find a challenge and overcome it, you get "wow, I can do this." And you increase capacity. Problem with life is, it tosses random challenges at you. One year there's nothing, next year you lose your job, one parent, your dog all in three months, oh and there's a storm and part of your ceiling caves in. Good thing about the gym is that it has contained and incremental challenges. Do a little more than you did before.
Obviously the gym's not the only place, you've got university, military service and so on.
The gym is close to my vision of heaven. It is where my emotions are most purely aligned with my people and most wanting their success. I wish I always felt this way towards others. I don't.
I gave my littlest guy his Christmas present early this year -- 1.25 lbs. change plates with the note "you can always do a little more"... He went straight for the barbell and slipped ahead of his mom's 1RM PR... by 2.5 lbs.
The world leaves some people unchallenged and blows up others, neither of which is good. The gym and a great coach knows where to land in between. I love mine because he sees through and calls me on any bullshit but never actually breaks me.
This is well framed. I can see why the way I wrote it would appear a lack of structure. I will train every day as surely as I breathe, but I don't predetermine the time or length of the session. I allows it to ebb and flow within the confines of a 24 period, and treat everything else outside of reading and writing the same way. Great distinction. The problem, at least to me, is the lack of structure for deliberate and controlled hardship, not merely the lack of hardship.
“the burpee is a joyless and wretched movement that should not exist.” YES! Thank you Sam. I love you for saying that. Are you listening @KyleShepard?
There are some wonderful insights in this post. I particularly like the one on over training versus under recovery. Sam is a virtual cornucopia of information from a vast variety of fields. When I grow up, which unfortunately will be never, I want to be like Sam.
One my favorite sayings from my time in the Teams was this: “There is brilliance in the basics.”
I do not have a single hardcore trip or physical test planned for 2026. I look forward to a test like this every few years, but not yearly. It does not strike me as it once did. My autoimmune issues also make it far more difficult than it used to be.
My sense is what 990 out of 1,000 people would fail at present has radically changed. The true test is no longer some extreme and elite level test of endurance like climbing ten 14,000 peaks or surviving in the Amazon for two weeks with a backpack. Nor is it the mental fortitude of doing a five-day water fast or making it through military selection.
The true test at present is the basics.
• Can you do sixty minutes of dedicated physical activity every single day, no matter what, with no exception other than death itself?
• Can you eat zero grams of artificial sugar, processed foods, or seed oils for the entire year?
• Can you refuse to look at a screen after 7pm at night, every single night, assuming it is not for an existential threat to family or profession?
• Can you read at least one paper book per week, every week?
• Can you find meaning and purpose in every task you set yourself, and if the task has no meaning, get rid of it and make the new task the task finding a more meaningful task?
These are the basics. These are probably the truest test of an ancient human in the modern world of 2026.
A thoughtful interview. I’ve followed Sam for a while, so this won’t be new to him, but it resonated with what I’ve seen in practice.
People who’ve experienced significant hardship (whether structured, as in training or military service, or unstructured, as in poverty or instability) don’t tend to seek comfort so much as structure and responsibility. Sam mentions not tracking metrics, which some might read as a lack of structure, but I think there’s an important distinction between rhythm and rigid scheduling. One can commit to “I do this every day” without fixing it to a specific time or place.
I run a very small strength gym, and the people who do best are rarely those who’ve had lifelong comfort. More often it’s the shift worker with two kids who outlasts the single desk worker. Hardship didn’t make them noble, but it taught them to respond rather than withdraw.
They also tend to seek a sense of community and common purpose; something people encounter, to varying degrees, in the military.
I’m curious whether you and Sam see the modern problem as primarily a lack of hardship, or a lack of structures that make hardship containable and meaningful.
Both. I’m suspicious of ideas and environments that pull us too far from our evolved, biological nature. In the modern developed world we have many choices that others never had and some of those choices are terrible.
It is our nature to survive heat and cold. It isn’t comfortable. It is our nature to burn up any calories we could be so lucky to hunt or forage. What protein and berries we might find beat starvation but aren’t convenient or hyper palatable. It is natural to challenge each other in search of trustworthy tribes. It is modern to lie that all habits are equally healthy.
Comfort is okay. Being nice is… nice. These modern virtues are moderate and beige. They are good enough to mindlessly reach for. But they aren’t what makes life worth living. The things that I love are easier found with people who have known brutality. Brutality is bad, but it is hard to relate to people who have not been introduced.
The first time that a strong person hit me hard in the face was terrible, but I (barely) maintained consciousness and after a few seconds a wave of euphoria swept over me. I realized that I didn’t die or even lose and that it was something I could handle. That feeling requires getting punched in the face one way or another.
Few of our ancestors or my friends in eastern Africa need to search for hardships. But 21st century Americans and others in developed countries are at risk of meaninglessness – air conditioned, sedentary, poisoned, isolated, sexless, safe slow death. But there is a roadmap to the way out because it is the men who came earlier and the men with less who we need to emulate.
Find the line – let your body get as hot and cold as it can tolerate. Run as far as it will go. Everything is runnable. Find the rockiest, steepest way. Squat deep and heavy. Find an open mat and ask to roll with every belt, every size, and every style of opponent in any country you visit. The first time that I went way over the line was paired with a far stronger skier who I tried to keep up with until my lungs burst, I could taste blood in my mouth, and had to check to see if my ribs broke from heaving. That was over the line, but I found it. Without that discovery, there is a chance that what someone thinks is 100% is really 60% so on a day you plan on going 60% he is wasting his time going 36%. 100% is unavoidably intensely painful and somewhat dangerous.
So hardship can be found – drag a 300 lbs. sled across the tundra, watch a sunset and sunrise on the same ridge run, volunteer in Burma and challenge the local with the worst ears to a Lethwei bout. But today we need to structure such things. Ultimately what matters most to me is being able to do hard things together. I’d add “with people who love each other” but at the depths sometimes a more accurate description is tolerating each other enough to not be murderous in the worst moments. You want to go in at a 10 so we can survive -8 events. Start with a 7 out of 10 team and you could be fucked.
My youngest son’s environment is indoors, suburban, safe, and almost completely feminized. Comfort and niceness rule. The rulers are some of the least empathetic people on the planet, yet they use the word “empathy” dozens of times per day. None of the old virtues – strength, honor, courage – get a mention. Yet get him in the wild and he’s a savage. We have a 7 minute row we do together and he wordlessly doesn’t stop at the end. With no explanation, 45 minutes later he’ll be rowing and pouring sweat. Sometimes we do hill repeats together Wednesday mornings before sunrise on a steep route that winds around some even steeper cliffs. After an hour of that he almost whispered “let’s just go straight up” so we did. On the crux he turned his head to me and matter-of-factly notified me that, “Dad, if we fall we will die” beaming with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on his face.
Your son is hardcore. I'm just glad mine squats.
Contained challenges are good, I think. As I tell people in my gym: any time you find a challenge and overcome it, you get "wow, I can do this." And you increase capacity. Problem with life is, it tosses random challenges at you. One year there's nothing, next year you lose your job, one parent, your dog all in three months, oh and there's a storm and part of your ceiling caves in. Good thing about the gym is that it has contained and incremental challenges. Do a little more than you did before.
Obviously the gym's not the only place, you've got university, military service and so on.
The gym is close to my vision of heaven. It is where my emotions are most purely aligned with my people and most wanting their success. I wish I always felt this way towards others. I don't.
I gave my littlest guy his Christmas present early this year -- 1.25 lbs. change plates with the note "you can always do a little more"... He went straight for the barbell and slipped ahead of his mom's 1RM PR... by 2.5 lbs.
The world leaves some people unchallenged and blows up others, neither of which is good. The gym and a great coach knows where to land in between. I love mine because he sees through and calls me on any bullshit but never actually breaks me.
This is well framed. I can see why the way I wrote it would appear a lack of structure. I will train every day as surely as I breathe, but I don't predetermine the time or length of the session. I allows it to ebb and flow within the confines of a 24 period, and treat everything else outside of reading and writing the same way. Great distinction. The problem, at least to me, is the lack of structure for deliberate and controlled hardship, not merely the lack of hardship.
“the burpee is a joyless and wretched movement that should not exist.” YES! Thank you Sam. I love you for saying that. Are you listening @KyleShepard?
There are some wonderful insights in this post. I particularly like the one on over training versus under recovery. Sam is a virtual cornucopia of information from a vast variety of fields. When I grow up, which unfortunately will be never, I want to be like Sam.
Your humility, Marshall, is simply beyond measure.
As far as burpees are concerned, I already gave Kyle a hard time…
Dude looks like a bad SOB.
Fact check: true.
Sam Alaimo on 2026 challenges:
One my favorite sayings from my time in the Teams was this: “There is brilliance in the basics.”
I do not have a single hardcore trip or physical test planned for 2026. I look forward to a test like this every few years, but not yearly. It does not strike me as it once did. My autoimmune issues also make it far more difficult than it used to be.
My sense is what 990 out of 1,000 people would fail at present has radically changed. The true test is no longer some extreme and elite level test of endurance like climbing ten 14,000 peaks or surviving in the Amazon for two weeks with a backpack. Nor is it the mental fortitude of doing a five-day water fast or making it through military selection.
The true test at present is the basics.
• Can you do sixty minutes of dedicated physical activity every single day, no matter what, with no exception other than death itself?
• Can you eat zero grams of artificial sugar, processed foods, or seed oils for the entire year?
• Can you refuse to look at a screen after 7pm at night, every single night, assuming it is not for an existential threat to family or profession?
• Can you read at least one paper book per week, every week?
• Can you find meaning and purpose in every task you set yourself, and if the task has no meaning, get rid of it and make the new task the task finding a more meaningful task?
These are the basics. These are probably the truest test of an ancient human in the modern world of 2026.