BEFORE I LEFT UTAH, I joined Twight for a bike ride. He was training under the guidance of Dr. Massimo Testa, a sports physician whose résumé includes work with Miguel Indurain, Lance Armstrong, and a peloton's worth of other pros. Testa was helping Twight get ready for the Tour of Park City, a 170-mile race with 9,000 feet of elevation gain. I felt slightly ridiculous when Twight showed up on his carbon-fiber rig, decked out in full race kit, since I was winging it on a rented touring bike and wearing hiking shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt. But anything was better than following him into the dark recesses of his pain cave, even if it meant chasing him around the mountains outside Salt Lake.

Thankfully, this was a recovery day for him, and we spun along a winding canyon road at a pace I could manage. Twight likes to describe himself as a "control enthusiast," and he told me that, as much as Gym Jones seemed poised for bigger things, he was willing to grow the business only if he could do so without compromise. He'd hired a business coach at the end of 2007 to help him sort out the process, and a few things were already in the works. He planned to increase the number of seminars, which routinely sell out despite costing $1,500 per person, from four to 12 times a year. A set of training DVDs (working title: Unfuck Your Head) was in production. He had six part-time trainers and 30 paying clients and would bring on more as demand warranted. At night, or early in the mornings, he was chipping away at a book, a comprehensive philosophy behind his training methods. And he's currently finishing a dimension of the Web site that will cater exclusively to paying members, who will be able to interact with Twight and other coaches, exchange ideas, and create the kind of virtual community that will mirror the real ones beginning to materialize all around him.

The trickiest part, he said, is communicating the essence of his project. Changing your body is just mechanics; it's changing your mind that presents the real challenge.

"If the mind is not first trained to enjoy hard work, to relish suffering, to address the unknown, then no program, no amount of training can be effective," he told us during the seminar. "The muscle we are interested in training is inside the skull."

For all the clanking iron and sweaty caterwauling, what Twight has created at Gym Jones is not a place where its denizens are guaranteed to succeed but an environment in which they're allowed to fail—sometimes catastrophically. "The risk of failure, social or physical, is paramount, because failure and dissatisfaction are the parents of thought," he said. "Success and fulfillment do not inspire or require introspection."

We reached the top of a high pass. Twight wanted to keep going down the other side, but I told him I was too spent from the weekend. "Fair enough," he said as we about-faced.

I wondered if the world is ready for what he has to offer, if people are prepared for such serious commitment. Clearly, at least a few are. No-frills outfits created in the spirit of Gym Jones are beginning to sprout everywhere—Mountain Athlete, in Jackson, Project Deliverance, in St. Louis—places devoted to helping us endure the kind of flogging that training like this entails. Twight had told me about a young climber from France who'd found out about him on the Web, flown to Salt Lake, slept in a city park, and showed up at Twight's house the next day. No e-mails. No phone calls. "I want to train at Gym Jones," he told Twight, who was so impressed he invited him to stay for the next three months.

What Twight rails against is mediocrity—not in terms of output, but effort—and, for him, too much of what fitness has become in America engenders exactly that. He's matured considerably since his days as a tortured alpinist, but he hasn't relinquished his rebellious inner punk, pushing back against so much of what we're told and sold every day. Fitness for him will never be a program, because, by definition, it has to be a perpetual and ever-evolving process—individually crafted and constantly reevaluated and revised. "It's easy to be hard, but it's hard to be smart," he wrote to me, quoting an old Marine saying, but it was cold comfort, since such insight implies that the progression never gets any easier.

Worse, perhaps, was my gathering awareness that I'd bought it. Gym Jones had introduced me to the whole picture: How to create a rock-solid foundation and how to build off that to achieve my specific athletic goals. What that might be I wasn't quite sure, but I'd lost five pounds since I started training with Carolyn Parker, and despite the beating I'd taken in Salt Lake, I already felt stronger. I realized I'd drunk generously from Twight's rancid punch and, in a strange, masochistic way, looked forward to returning to the grassy field in Albuquerque, where Parker would continue doling out the punishment.

I tried to keep Twight in sight as we descended, whooshing past a few other cyclists grimacing through their long grind up the canyon. I couldn't remember the last time I'd gone so fast on a bike, and it was exhilarating and terrifying at once—hunched over the handlebars, swooping around the switchbacks, hurtling toward a future in which I imagined that what we were doing and what we were capable of doing had somehow, suddenly, become the same thing.