Flock Talk: Bleak Midwinter

 

The Lonely Winter Calls

Winter workouts arrive in the bleak midwinter, when the ground feels iron-hard and the air itself seems to resist you. The season is stripped bare. No ceremony. No promise of relief. Just cold, repetition, and the quiet understanding that this work must be done anyway.

There is a stillness to it — earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone — the kind of stillness that makes even effort sound loud. Breath hangs in the air longer than it should. Muscles ache before they’re warm. Football feels distant, almost theoretical, yet somehow closer than ever.

I remember winter workouts maybe as much as fall camp. They were a different kind of pain.
It bears mentioning that I played at Eastern Oregon, and that is a different animal altogether.

I didn’t have a car. I lived a couple of miles from campus. There was no going back to the house after conditioning. It was straight to classes, then after class another weight room session, followed by the walk home. In La Grande, in winter, that meant plenty of mornings walking through the dark and cold at five a.m. to get to workouts. Frozen sidewalks. Numb fingers. A military duffel bag over my shoulder with books and food for the day, because once you left, you were gone until night.

It was lonely.
It was exhausting.
And I loved it.

Those days lived snow on snow, one stacked quietly on top of the next. Lift. Run. Class. Lift again. Walk home. Repeat. No audience. No affirmation. The process wasn’t a means to an end — the process was the moment. I loved the work because it asked nothing but presence. Show up. Carry it. Do it again tomorrow.

For Oregon’s players now, the details are different. They aren’t trudging miles through the cold with everything they need on their backs. But the truth of the season remains. Winter still takes away comfort. It still asks the same question it always has.

What do you bring when the work is lonely?
What do you give when there is nothing to give you back?

These workouts are the foundation of the season to come. This is where strength is forged without witnesses. Where habits take root. Where players decide, quietly, who they are going to be. The team put it simply on social media: this is when the work begins.

It is also where the season starts.

Long before spring. Long before fall. Long before noise returns.
In the bleak midwinter, when fields are empty and expectations are distant, football is reduced to its most honest form.

Not what you receive —
but what you are willing to carry.

This is the season that asks nothing flashy and promises nothing immediate. No depth charts are settled here. No games are won. Winter only asks whether you will show up when there is no reward attached, whether you will carry the work when no one is counting the days for you.

It is quiet now. Empty fields. Early mornings. Long repetitions that blur together. The kind of work that feels small in the moment but decides everything later.

Winter workouts are football reduced to its core. Alone with your body. Alone with your thoughts. Alone with the work.

And if you learn to love that, the rest has a way of taking care of itself.

 

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