I'm Picking a Misogi This Year. Here's Why You Should Too.

I’ve been researching Misogi and am excited to share this with you. My friend from medical school, Marty Clark, who is an orthopedic surgeon and former professional squash player, brought this up to me, and I am considering that a sign! I decided to do it: I'm committing to a misogi, that is, one challenge. One thing that genuinely scares me. Something I'm not sure I can finish. And I'm telling you about it now so I can't back out.

But before I get to mine, let me tell you where this concept comes from, because the history is part of what makes it powerful.

The Origin

Misogi is a Japanese Shinto purification ritual that dates back centuries. The word translates roughly to "water cleansing," and the traditional practice involved standing beneath a freezing waterfall while chanting sacred texts. It was designed to purify both body and spirit, to strip away what's unnecessary and reconnect with something essential. It was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be transformative.

The modern Western interpretation of misogi was adapted by Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained physician and sports performance scientist who runs P3, one of the most advanced athletic performance labs in the country. Elliott distilled the ancient ritual into a contemporary framework with two rules: it has to be extraordinarily hard, and you can't die. The challenge should be something where, even after months of preparation, you have roughly a 50% chance of completing it. Not 90%. Not 80%. Fifty. That uncertainty is the point.

NBA sharpshooter Kyle Korver was one of the first high-profile athletes to adopt the practice, completing a 25-mile paddleboard crossing from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara. Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler helped popularize the concept further, describing it this way: do something so hard one time a year that it has an impact on the other 364 days.

Why You Should Care

I want to reframe this for our demographic, because most of the Misogi content online features 30-year-old men carrying rocks underwater or running 100-mile ultramarathons. That's fine for them. But the Misogi framework isn't about replicating someone else's challenge. It's about finding the thing that tests your limits, in your body, at your stage of life.

A Misogi might look like completing a sprint triathlon for the first time. Hiking a fourteener. Swimming a mile in open water. Doing your first unassisted pull-up. Running a half-marathon after never having run more than a 5K. Completing a multi-day backpacking trip. Learning to rock climb. The specifics matter less than the criteria: it must scare you, it must require preparation, and you must not be certain you can do it.

This is not about fitness performance in the conventional sense. It's about what the psychology literature calls self-efficacy, the belief in your own capacity to execute a behavior or accomplish a goal. A 2020 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin confirmed that self-efficacy is one of the strongest predictors of sustained health behavior change, including exercise adherence, dietary modification, and chronic disease self-management. For women in midlife, when so many messages are about decline, limitation, and "being careful," a misogi is a direct counter-narrative. It's evidence, created by you, that you are not fragile. That you are still becoming.

There's also a physiological argument. Acute exposure to hard physical challenges triggers a hormetic stress response, the same adaptive mechanism behind the benefits of sauna, cold exposure, and high-intensity interval training. Short-term physiological stress, followed by adequate recovery, produces resilience at the cellular level. Your body doesn't just survive the hard thing. It adapts to it and comes back more capable.

Why I’m Doing This

Here's the thing: I have always done hard things. I've done triathlons. I completed a 77-mile bike race in Colorado. I went through medical school, surgical residency, two board certifications, a master's degree, live national television for 12 years, and a very public personal life that tested me in ways no race ever could. When I look back honestly, I think I've always treated my whole life as a kind of rolling mini-misogi, one hard thing after another, each one proving to myself that I could handle what came next.

So when I learned about the formal Misogi framework, my first reaction wasn't "that sounds terrifying." It was "oh, there's a name for what I've been doing." And that recognition is exactly why I want to do it intentionally now, with a structure and a purpose, rather than just letting life throw the hard things at me and reacting.

At 57, I have a temperamental Achilles, so a marathon is off the table. That's a real limitation, and I've accepted it. But accepting a limitation is not the same as accepting a ceiling. There are plenty of challenges that don't require 26.2 miles of running, and the Misogi framework doesn't prescribe a specific type of suffering. It prescribes uncertainty. It prescribes the honest question: Can I actually do this? I don't know yet what mine will be, and when I decide, I'll share it here in Off Duty. But I wanted to tell you the concept first, because I think it's one of the most important things a woman over 50 can give herself: proof that she is not done surprising herself.

You don't have to be an elite athlete. You don't have to be 30. You just have to be willing to be uncertain about the outcome and try anyway. If you take on a Misogi, I want to know! Post it on Social Media with the hashtags #ReclaimMisogi #AjendaStrong

One thing. One year. Fifty percent chance you make it.

That's the Misogi.

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