I don't do rituals while I work out, but I make offerings to the mountain afterward and invoke Mars sometime in the days before I go skiing.

I think that deliberately dealing with fear, stress, pain; learning self-discipline, independence, how to be in the flow, and how to reach out with your subtle senses to feel the obstacles before you can see them; truly relaxing and tuning into the environment afterward, and letting your "self" shut up while you sort of mentally fly; all of these help make you a better person, and magician.

Getting hurt and getting back up with a fat bruise is the kind of experience that makes you face things that otherwise you might avoid - and, while you're avoiding them, miss out on life.

Finding yourself in a situation you don't mentally think you can handle, but realizing that the only way out is to do it anyway, and then succeeding (even if after multiple falls), PROVES to you that your self-imposed limits are false. I've fully been in situations where I went into limbic mode and started crying with fear, but I handled it past the "give up point" and got down the mountain on my own two feet. This is a key piece of knowledge. I was never in the service or anything, so I don't know how else I could have gotten the breakthrough that I CAN do what I believe to be impossible.

I got more out of doing this than being passively initiated by magical organizations, that's for sure. Even extreme initiations involving enduring pain do not show you your full strength the way conquering a mountain does.

I'm an introvert who used to practically have agoraphobia, so you know being alone in a forest going 20-50 MPH on some sticks took more balls than I ever, ever thought I'd have. Then when I became an instructor I had to conquer my fear of public speaking. D: Getting here wasn't my idea, to be fair; I married a skier, and got dragged into it kicking and screaming; but I did my part and never gave up.

P.S. I love the petrichor concept - I once blended essential oils trying to get that scent after it rained after a long hot summer in Arizona; here in Western Washington it's always raining and the effect is not nearly so dramatic.