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| THE FORGE | Issue No. 009 The Outdoorsman |
The Outdoorsman:
The Training Course That Humbled One of America's Toughest Warriors
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The Outdoorsman is defined by his relationship with environments that require something real from him. He is not necessarily a survivalist or an extreme athlete — he is the man who has refused to let the edges of his world shrink until the only territory he knows is managed, climate-controlled, and predictable.
Modern life makes this easy to let slide. The outdoors became optional the moment it stopped being necessary, and the Outdoorsman archetype belongs to the man who makes it deliberate again — who chooses exposure to demanding environments because of what those environments build in him, not because circumstances require it.
That number is the result of a world designed to eliminate every reason to go outside. Climate-controlled offices, climate-controlled homes, climate-controlled cars connecting them. The outdoors became optional the moment it stopped being necessary, and optional things get skipped. The men who suffer most from this shift are the ones who drifted there without noticing.
The research on what time in natural environments does to the human brain is consistent and largely ignored. A University of Michigan study found that ninety minutes in a natural environment significantly reduced activity in the part of the brain associated with repetitive negative thought. Reduced cortisol, lower rumination, improved attention, measurably better mood — all from ninety minutes outside.
Simple enough to dismiss. Specific enough to sting if you think about the last time you actually did it.
I have been through several versions of SERE training. That's Survival-Escape-Resistance-Evasion (SERE) for the uninitiated. The wilderness survival version — the one that pits you against the mountains with minimal gear, a team of trained manhunters after you, and tells you to live off the land — I have not. Several colleagues I have served alongside overseas have. This is one of their stories, told through the lens of what it did to his understanding of the outdoors, and what I think it means for every man who has ever confused exposure to nature with competence inside it.
He grew up hunting, using deer stands with feeders, mostly — the kind of hunting that gets you outside, gets you up early, and produces the genuine satisfaction of a harvest, but does not particularly require you to read land, track an animal, or develop the kind of patient competence that the wilderness demands on its own terms. He was a Scout — not an Eagle Scout, but had made it pretty far — and had spent enough time outdoors to consider himself comfortable in natural environments. More comfortable than most anyway. That was the operating assumption going into SERE.
Navy SERE Level C runs nineteen continuous days — classroom instruction followed by a multi-day survival and evasion phase in the mountains, followed by the resistance and escape phase that most graduates describe as the hardest part. By a certain point in the survival phase there is no food provided, and students are expected to forage for what they can find. In a January forest or arid California mountain range, that turns out to be very little.
He spent the first day of the field phase confident. He knew how to build a fire. He knew the basics of shelter construction. He had a general sense of what was edible and what wasn't, knowledge assembled from camping trips and outdoor magazines, and the ambient confidence of a man who has never been genuinely tested by the environment he's standing in.
By the second day, focused on the growing hunger, he started setting traps. None of them produced anything. He tried foraging — identified a few plants he thought were edible, found less than he expected, and ate less than he needed. The wilderness training portion is supplemented with a limited food supply, but even that won't satisfy the hunger, by design. The caloric deficit accumulated quietly and what surprised him wasn't the physical difficulty — SEALs are accustomed to physical difficulty — it was the specific humiliation of being genuinely incompetent at something he had assumed he understood.
He told me this while deployed together overseas, years after it was over. The hunger was the teacher, he said, and the thing he remembered the most. Rather than the instructors or the curriculum, it was the hunger that lingered in his mind. Because hunger makes the gap between knowing something in the abstract and being able to do it in the field impossible to ignore. He knew the trapping principles. He couldn't catch anything. He knew what the edible plants looked like in a field guide. He couldn't find enough of them to matter. The outdoors, it turned out, was not an environment he was comfortable in. It was just an environment he had visited, which is a different thing entirely.
The outdoors was not an environment he was comfortable in. It was just an environment he had visited, which is a different thing entirely.
What came out the other side of it surprised him more than the difficulty had. Graduates emerge not just with a set of skills but with a profound and quiet confidence. The course doesn't make you an expert, but it gives an honest baseline of where you stand and the foundation to keep building on. He knew exactly what he couldn't do, which meant he knew exactly what was worth building. He came home from that course with a genuine respect for the men who had lived in these environments by necessity rather than training exercise — the frontiersmen, the Native American hunters, the scouts who could read a piece of land the way a literate man reads a page. Men who had developed the Outdoorsman domain as a fundamental competence rather than a hobby or weekend activity, the kind built over years of genuine engagement with an environment that demands something real from you every time you enter it.
He has spent the years since building it, not just performing it. There is a difference, and SERE showed him which one he had been doing before.
The Outdoorsman domain doesn't get built by reading about it. It gets built in repeated, deliberate exposure to environments that require something real from you. This week's challenge is about starting that practice — or restarting one that went quiet.
Reply when done: "Outside."
| Reply — Done → |
Ninety minutes per week in a natural environment with no phone in hand — deliberate time outside. At Day 90 reply: "90 days. Here's what it changed."
The human body and brain were not designed for the environment most men spend ninety-three percent of their time in. Fluorescent light, climate control, and the constant low-level stimulation of screens produce elevated cortisol, shortened attention span, and increased activity in the part of the brain associated with rumination. Natural environments do the opposite.
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