There's a moment TJ Eisenhart describes that I keep coming back to.
He's in a cold-water tank in April 2020. His wife has dragged him to a session run by a Wim Hof certified teacher. The water is around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Around him are five or six other people — most of them in their 50s to 70s. TJ is a pro cyclist. He's trained at the highest level. He's got an athlete's ego.
"I was the first one out and they were in there for another 15 minutes. I just realised geez how weak my mind is and that I need to do something about that."
That moment — being out-meditated by pensioners in a cold tank — became the start of one of the more interesting career shifts in modern cycling. Eisenhart went on to develop a daily breathwork and meditation practice that reshaped how he related to cycling, eventually leaving the World Tour for gravel, art, and a more sustainable life.
I sat down with him for the Road Less Travelled episode of the Roadman Cycling Podcast. The conversation is about more than cycling. The lesson for amateurs is direct: the mental practices most riders skip are part of the recovery infrastructure that determines whether the training actually compounds.
This is the breakdown.
The collapse and the catalyst
The setup matters. April 2020. COVID is shutting down the racing calendar. Eisenhart had just started Imaginary Collective, his new team and brand. The financial uncertainty was acute. "I just was a mess. I started this brand new team and brand. All of a sudden you can't go to races and you're like how am I gonna get paid? And then you're thinking like man if people don't have jobs how they gonna buy art?"
He was riding, but he wasn't enjoying it. The stress had reached the point where he couldn't get on a bike without his head running through worst-case scenarios. The bike, which had been his livelihood and his refuge, had become another thing he was failing at.
His wife found a Wim Hof session run locally. He went mostly to humour her. Then the cold-water moment happened, and the realisation landed: the mental side wasn't a separate thing he could ignore while focusing on training. It was the foundation under everything else.
This pattern is one I see constantly in serious amateur riders. The training is dialled in. The bike is sorted. The fuelling is reasonable. But the head is loud. Anxiety about results, about progression, about how they compare to riders they follow online, about whether the training is "good enough." The noise consumes mental capacity that should be available for execution. The result is a rider whose physical engine is bigger than the mental capacity to drive it.
The fix isn't more training. It's the practice that quiets the noise.
What the breathwork actually does
The Wim Hof breathing protocol is structured. Roughly 30 deep cyclical breaths, then a breath hold on empty lungs for as long as possible, then a recovery breath. Three rounds. The whole thing takes about 15 minutes.
The physiological effects are documented. The hyperventilation phase shifts blood pH temporarily, alters CO2 levels, and produces measurable changes in autonomic nervous system function. The breath hold produces a controlled stress that the body learns to handle. Studies have shown shifts in inflammatory markers, cortisol response, and immune function with consistent practice. Wim Hof himself participated in research at Radboud University showing voluntary modulation of immune response — work that surprised the researchers because it suggested a degree of nervous-system control most physiology textbooks didn't allow for.
Eisenhart described the experience as a kind of nervous system reset. "You can feel all your energy relax as you do it. I like to describe it as like a tuning fork — when you hit a tuning fork it's like all crazy at first and then it slowly rolls down. That's what our energy is when we allow it to be."
For a cyclist, the practical value is direct. The capacity to consciously down-regulate the nervous system is what allows you to recover between hard efforts. To sleep deeply after a hard session. To start a race calm rather than spiked with adrenaline. To handle a mid-race setback without spiralling. These are trainable skills, and breathwork is one of the more reliable training methods.
The breathing techniques piece covers the cycling-specific applications in more detail. The point worth making here: breathwork isn't a wellness add-on. It's a performance variable.
Meditation, daily, integrated
The breathwork was the entry point. Daily meditation was what stuck.
Eisenhart's framing is important. He doesn't treat meditation as a 15-minute compartment. "I started realising the meditative state — the longer I was there, I started realising okay this is something I can carry into the rest of my day." The practice migrated. It started as a morning ritual and became a way of being present in the rest of his life — including on the bike.
This is the move that matters most for cyclists. A rider who meditates for 15 minutes in the morning and then spends the rest of the day in the same anxious mental pattern hasn't actually changed anything. The 15 minutes were a holiday from the noise. The noise resumed at minute 16. The change happens when the meditative state becomes the default rather than the exception — when the rider learns to bring that state to the start line, to the climb, to the moment of decision in a sportive when the lungs are screaming and the brain wants to give up.
For amateurs, the path in is simpler than it sounds. An app like Insight Timer, which Eisenhart uses, gives you a structure. Ten minutes in the morning. Same time every day. Don't try to "clear the mind" — try to notice what shows up and let it pass without grabbing onto it. After two weeks the practice starts to feel different. After two months it changes the baseline. The riders I've worked with who developed a real meditation practice talked about it the same way — not as a wellness practice, but as a tool that made them better at the rest of their life.
Why cold water specifically
There's a question that comes up every time cold-water exposure gets discussed. Does it help cycling performance directly?
The honest answer is mixed. Cold immersion immediately after hard training can blunt the inflammatory response that drives some training adaptations. If you ice-bath after every hard session, you may slow down some of the strength and aerobic adaptations you're trying to produce. Russian-school sprint coaches figured this out years ago — there's a reason their sprinters didn't ice-bath in the build phase.
But cold exposure separated from training, or used after low-intensity sessions, is a different story. The mental practice is real. Sitting in cold water for two minutes when every signal in your body is telling you to get out is a rehearsal of the same skill you need on a hard climb at the top of a sportive. The body wants to stop. The mind has to keep going. Building that capacity in a controlled environment — cold tank, deliberate breath, focused attention — translates to capacity in the uncontrolled environment of racing.
Eisenhart's experience is the textbook version. He started cold-water exposure with the wrong mental framework — "my whole attitude was to beat people" — and the older meditators around him modelled the right one. They weren't competing. They were settling in. They were holding a state of relaxed attention while the discomfort happened around them, not around their reaction to the discomfort.
That's the skill. And it's the skill that separates riders who can hold a hard effort for 20 minutes from riders who blow up at minute eight when the discomfort lands.
The departure from the World Tour
The breathwork and meditation didn't make Eisenhart leave the pro peloton. They helped him see his situation clearly enough to leave it for the right reasons.
The World Tour pulled at him in directions that didn't fit who he was — high pressure, financial precarity at the team level, a life on the road that conflicted with the art practice he wanted to develop. Without the mental practices, he might have stayed longer than was right for him, pushing through the discomfort because pushing through is what athletes do. With the practices, he could see the difference between productive discomfort and unproductive friction. Productive discomfort is what training produces. Unproductive friction is what happens when your life shape doesn't match your values.
He moved into gravel. He ran Imaginary Collective. He kept making art. The cycling didn't disappear — it shifted into a form that supported the rest of his life rather than competing with it.
This pattern echoes the Lachlan Morton story we covered before. Different riders, different paths, same underlying pattern. The pro version of cycling is one shape. There are other shapes. Some of them are sustainable for longer.
For amateurs, the parallel is direct. If you're training 10 hours a week and dreading every session, the question isn't whether you should train harder. It's whether the shape of your cycling life matches the shape of who you are. Most riders don't ask this question because they've never built the mental practice that makes the question accessible.
What to do with this
Three positions, in order:
Start with breathwork before meditation. Wim Hof breathing has a clearer initial effect than open-ended meditation, and the structure makes it easier to begin. Three rounds of cyclical breathing and a breath hold, every morning. Two weeks in, you'll feel the shift. The Wim Hof Method app is good for this.
Add daily meditation, ten minutes minimum. Insight Timer, Headspace, Sam Harris's Waking Up app — pick one and commit. The variable that matters is consistency, not which app you use. Same time every day. Don't skip. After 60 days the practice changes you, not just your morning routine.
Be cautious with cold water immediately post-training. The mental practice is valuable. The blunting effect on adaptation is real. Use cold exposure on lower-intensity days, in the morning before training, or as a separate practice. Don't ice-bath after every hard session.
The full conversation with TJ — including his art practice, his thoughts on professional cycling's structures, and his approach to gravel racing — is in the Road Less Travelled episode. The other community-pillar conversations cover similar ground from different angles.
The mental practices aren't a luxury. They're the part of the program most cyclists skip and then wonder why their training doesn't compound. Build them in. The performance follows.
