For most of my 20s I trained the way most adults train. I went to the gym. I followed some random program or winged it completely, without any real goal or purpose. I pushed hard for a few weeks until motivation dipped or life got too “busy”, then I quietly faded for a month or so. Repeat.

The shift from "working out" to actually training came when I gave myself something to train for.

For me, that's obstacle course racing.

I sign up for at least one OCR every quarter, and at least one per year that genuinely scares me. Longer distance. Brutal elevation. Obstacles that expose every weakness I've been ignoring.

I treat them as anchors. They give structure to how I train, eat, recover, and live every day of the year, not just race week.

The race itself is almost beside the point. The real value is what the commitment to racing does to every other decision you make between now and the start line.

There's something about having a date circled on the calendar that rewires how you show up.

When you know you're lining up for a Spartan Race in 10 weeks, you don't skip training because you're "not feeling it." You don't stay up until midnight scrolling. You don't eat like garbage for a week and tell yourself you'll make up for it later.

The race creates accountability that no app, coach, or motivation video can match. You either show up prepared, or you don't.

Here's why the quarterly cadence specifically works for me:

It prevents burnout. One race per quarter means I'm cycling through build phases and recovery phases naturally. I'm not grinding year-round toward one event and then falling apart after it. There's always a next target, but there's also always a deload built into the rhythm.

It keeps training fun. OCRs demand everything. Running, climbing, crawling, carrying, gripping, pulling, jumping. You can't just be strong. You can't just have endurance. You have to train like a complete human, and that variety keeps things from getting stale.

It forces me to use my entire body. When's the last time you hung from a bar with mud on your hands while your legs were already cooked from a hill climb? OCRs put you in positions that normal gym training never touches. Grip strength. Odd-object carries. Technical balance under fatigue. Uneven terrain. You find out fast where your weak links are.

It pushes me to my actual limits. We rarely get to go there in modern life. Everything is comfortable, controlled, and on demand. An OCR strips that away. Mile 8, hands are toast, arms are dead, legs heavy, and here comes another wall to get over. You have to find something inside yourself that comfort never asks for.

It makes recovery feel non-optional. This is the one most people don't expect. When you know a race is coming, you stop treating recovery as optional. Sleep matters more. Hydration matters more. Your drawn to the sauna, the cold plunge, the mobility work, or whatever else you need to get back to your best. You can feel the direct impact on your readiness. The race makes you take care of yourself.

Race performance is an output. The inputs are everything I do between races.

I organize my preparation around a simple pillar system. None of these exist in isolation. They feed each other. When they're aligned, performance becomes repeatable. When one slips, you feel it everywhere.

And I want to be clear about something: I don't follow this perfectly. I'm human. I travel, I have a family, I have a full time job, and build Life Domination in my free time. Some weeks the training is dialed in. Some weeks it's not. I’m not after perfection. This is simply a map that keeps me pointed in the right direction no matter how many detours I take.

What I eat determines how I recover, how I perform, and whether I'm building my body up or quietly breaking it down between sessions. For OCR training specifically, I keep it simple:

Quality protein, every meal. I aim for roughly 0.8–1.0g per pound of bodyweight daily. Animal protein anchors every meal because it's the most bioavailable source for muscle repair and connective tissue health. When you're asking your body to run, climb, grip, and carry, it needs raw materials to rebuild.

Carbs as a tool. Higher around hard training days and long efforts. Lower on recovery days.

Real food over everything. Grass-fed meat, pasture-raised eggs, seasonal produce, fermented foods. The closer food is to its natural state, the better it performs as fuel.

I go deeper on this in Simplified Nutrition: 7 Food Rules and The Primal Diet Blueprint.

You can have your training, nutrition, and sleep dialed in and still perform like garbage if you're dehydrated.

Daily non-negotiables:

Training days: I’ll often add hydrogen water pre-training, especially before long or high-output sessions.

Your body is electric. Every heartbeat, nerve impulse, and muscle contraction runs on minerals. When those are depleted (and they deplete fast under training stress) everything suffers: energy, focus, recovery, sleep. Replenish intentionally.

I covered the full mineral picture in Minerals 101. If you're tired and can't figure out why, start there.

This is the pillar I care about most, and and the one most people neglect.

Training breaks you down. Recovery builds you back up. If you're not recovering as hard as you're training, you're not getting stronger. You're accumulating wear and tear that eventually shows up as injury, fatigue, or plateaus.

For OCR training specifically, recovery isn't one thing. It's a rotation of tools matched to what my body needs that week.

Daily: Light mobility work, spine and tissue care, and some form of nervous system down-regulation through breathwork or 10 minutes of stillness. I also use red light therapy daily for muscle recovery, soreness, and pain relief.

Weekly (rotated). Sauna for heat stress adaptation, cold plunge or shower for inflammation and nervous system resilience, hyperbaric oxygen for tissue repair, Vagus nerve stimulation with the Pulsetto for deep parasympathetic recovery.

Monthly. Chiropractic care 1 to 2 times. IV therapy 1 to 2 times for hydration and nutrient support during high training volume.

The key word is rotated. I'm not doing everything every week. I'm listening to my body and choosing the tool that matches the demand.

Notice training isn't first on this list. That's deliberate.

I've learned (at least for me) that nutrition, hydration, and recovery are the foundation, and training is what you build on top of it. Get the foundation wrong and no amount of training volume saves you.

That said, here's my weekly structure:

3 hard days. Strength and conditioning combined in the same session. This is the key for OCR prep. You need to be strong while you're gassed. Lifting fresh is one thing. Lifting after a mile of hill sprints or an extended Stairmaster session is a completely different demand, and that's what race day actually feels like.

2 medium days. Aerobic capacity, running economy, rowing, Stairmaster, or skill work. Mostly done in Zone 2. These build the engine without crushing recovery.

2 recovery days. Mobility, walking, breathing. Non-negotiable. These keep joints healthy, the nervous system regulated, and the body ready for the next hard session.

The goal is repeatable output across months and years. Anyone can go hard for 3 weeks. The system that wins is the one you can sustain quarter after quarter, year after year, without breaking down.

I don't have a complicated mental performance system. When you're at mile 10, covered in mud, your grip failing, and your legs are asking you to stop, complexity disappears.

What survives is simple:

Me vs. me. I'm not racing the person next to me. I'm racing the version of myself that wants to quit.

Never quit. Not the race. Not the obstacle. Not the process. You can slow down. You can rest. You can even fail an obstacle. But you don't quit.

Just keep moving. When everything hurts and nothing feels fast enough, forward is forward. One step. One obstacle. One more.

Have fun. I do this because I love it. The mud, the challenge, the discomfort, the feeling of finishing something hard. Lose the fun, you’ve lost the plot.

Supplements fill gaps. They don't replace the work.

Daily staples:

Around training:

Everything has a purpose. Nothing is random. And none of it works if the nutrition, hydration, sleep, and recovery aren't handled first.

You can't out-train bad sleep. And you definitely can't recover from the kind of training OCRs demand if you're getting 5-6 hours of broken rest a night.

Sleep is where growth hormone peaks, where tissue repair happens, where your brain clears metabolic waste, and where everything you trained that day gets consolidated. Skip it and you're training on a deficit that compounds in the wrong direction.

My approach:

I wrote a full breakdown on this in Sleep Like It Matters. It's one of the most important pieces I've published.

👉 You need something to train for. A target turns "working out" into training. OCR is mine. Yours might be something different. It needs to be specific, scheduled, and hard enough to demand your respect.

👉 Nutrition, hydration, and recovery matter as much as training. Probably more. The race doesn't break most people. The neglect between races does.

👉 One race per quarter is the sweet spot. Enough to stay accountable year-round. Not so much that you burn out, lose the fun, or put a huge strain on your quality of life or schedule.

👉 The race is the checkpoint, not the goal. The goal is to live in a state of readiness where your training, nutrition, recovery, and lifestyle all support each other instead of competing for a medal or notoriety.

👉 You don't have to be perfect. You just have to have a map. Life will pull you off course. The system brings you back.

Ready to build your own system? Start with the foundations:

Stay well,
Cameron