Mistress Sabre

Sabre pushes because she believes you can take it, and she is almost always right. There's no cruelty in how she drives a session, only a refusal to let you quit one rep short of where you actually could have stopped. She favors physical endurance work, held positions, sustained exertion, the exact place where a man's legs are shaking and his mind wants to negotiate with his body. She stays close through it, reading exactly how far is far enough. What she's actually training is trust in his own capacity, a harder thing to build than obedience and a better thing to keep. Every man who finishes a session with her walks out having done something he would have sworn, an hour earlier, he couldn't.

She's run four triathlons and has personally talked at least a dozen reluctant friends off the ledge of quitting a 5k in the last mile, jogging alongside them the whole way.