Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet

by Jesse Itzler

He is now about 170 pounds and ripped. He has run several marathons and is a workout junkie. “Come on, Yoni, join us,” SEAL says. “We’re doing push-ups.” “I wish. I already ran this morning and swam just now, but thanks.” SEAL whispers something in my nephew’s ear. No idea what he says, but the expression on Yoni’s face goes from happy-go-lucky to furrowed and pasty. Whatever SEAL said it manipulated my nephew. He decides to join us.

After working out, we all grab a quick bite at the restaurant in our building. It’s a bit fancy, but we grab a table in the back and order some light appetizers. The conversation is centered on Yoni and how far he has come with his training. It escalates. SEAL somehow convinces Yoni that he should quit his “bullshit” job running social media for a big hotel chain and join the Navy. And… my cockamamie nephew has bought into it. It escalates even further. Now SEAL is convincing him he can pass the Navy SEAL training and become a SEAL. He is going over the requirements and the basic fit test. It escalates even further. “Fuck this. Let’s start this shit right now.” These two knuckleheads decide to head out for a run.

You can always keep going. —SEAL

“Like lives in your house?” the sweater vest pipes in before I can answer any of the questions. All these guys want to do is talk about our workouts and why I hired SEAL. These guys are looking at me like I just invented the Internet. They’re blown away. It’s like when a stock on the New York Stock Exchange is halted and no business can be conducted. They’re obsessed with our dynamic. They keep asking questions.

Men in suits are fascinated by a guy like SEAL. His work ethic. His workouts. His history.

SEAL once told me that when he came back from a mission, when everyone would sit around and smoke and decompress, he would go running. After a twenty-four-hour mission, he would work out.

Everything except dessert. “Why would I want to waste the calories?” he says.

The day should be over, but my gut tells me it isn’t. It’s sort of like when you’re in third grade and look out at the one inch of snow that fell overnight. You hope school will be canceled, but you know better. So regardless of what my brain and body are rooting for, I make my way to my bedroom to get my shorts and sneakers. SEAL smiles. “You know we gotta do it, right?” “Yes.”

If you’re hungry, run faster. You’ll be home quicker. —SEAL

My time with SEAL has convinced me the days of the fancy gym memberships are numbered. Things like CrossFit and street workouts are going to prevail in the future. All you really need to do is get your push-up and sit-up routine consistent, and you can see amazing results.

I also believe being in really good shape takes a combination of many components. For starters, you have to be strong, but you also have to be explosive, flexible, capable of running stop-and-go sprints and running long distances. You need the full package. So, back to basics.

SEAL pulls me off the couch where I am comfortably watching ESPN. “Let’s do a cooldown” are his exact words. To SEAL, a cooldown is an eight-mile run. To me, a cooldown is the last thing I want to do.

“Honey, this is really ridiculous. You’re overdoing it.”

“It’s not what you do, it’s when and how you do it. It’s all about the conditions. Remember that.”

Today we do the first four miles at an eight-minute pace. Four-mile runs are becoming easy breezy.

“Hey, SEAL, what do you think about when you run?” “Finishing.”

And he does. It’s like he is able to block out all the clutter in his head and the world, for that matter, and just focus on the task at hand. Say what you want, but the dude has mastered the art of being present. There is something really cool about that.

However, with SEAL around, I am learning how to be more present. It’s primarily because I have to. If I don’t, there is no way I will be able to finish the tasks at hand. I just go one step at a time. One rep at a time. And when I’m done, I worry about the next step or rep. I’m finding that there’s some crossover to my life as well. Now I finish the first thing on my list with 100 percent focus and then attack the next.

“I need calories when I’m running that long. I have trained myself to be able to eat while I’m running. I can take in six hundred to a thousand calories an hour, no problem. But it takes getting used to.” I hear the same thing from other ultra-marathon runners.

SEAL tells me the plan is to run four miles every four hours for forty-eight hours!

Twelve runs of four miles each every four hours! He calls it the 4/4/48.

I open up my phone so I can get the light on it to shine and then I use it as a flashlight. I don’t want to put the bedroom lights on because that might wake up Sara. She has been super cool about everything to date, but I’m not sure she would want me running in the snow at 2:00 a.m. in the mountains of Connecticut.

The tougher the conditions, the more I like my odds. —SEAL

Fear is one of the best motivators. Anger is the other. —SEAL

When we get home after the run, I complain that the tendon in my foot is killing me (recurring basketball injury) and my foot is swollen. Really swollen. “I got a solution. Let’s go into the lake and freeze your foot,” SEAL says. “Go into the lake? The lake’s frozen.” “I’m not playing. Let’s go,” he says.

“We got to capitalize on this shit. We got to capitalize on this adrenaline.” What? We do fifteen sets of fifteen push-ups on the minute (225 push-ups).

“Let’s make tacos tonight for dinner,” I say. “Tacos? Fuck the tacos,” he says. “We’re going to go into the steam room.” “The steam room?” “Yeah, the fucking steam room. Setting that bitch at one hundred twenty-five degrees and we’re in there for thirty minutes. No dumping water on our heads, no talking (obviously), and only twelve ounces of drinking water allowed in. I’m going to test your WILL.”

I don’t celebrate victories but I learn from failures. —SEAL

One thousand push-ups! In one day. Holy shit! I take a seat on my couch by the steam room and smile. For the first time during this whole process, I’m truly proud of myself. Not because I did a thousand but because I stuck with the journey. I think back to the first day SEAL was here and the first set of push-ups we did. This proves to me that if you push the body, the body will respond.

A thousand push-ups is something I could never have imagined doing. It just shows that repetition and consistency equal results.

If you don’t challenge yourself, you don’t know yourself. —SEAL

“If you two knuckleheads even think about going through the ice again,” Sara says, “don’t bother coming back inside. It’s frozen solid.” It’s like my wife has a crystal ball or something. I didn’t even see her standing there. She knows the nod. But I know Sara has a conference call later. So we wait.

The ice breaks. I think somewhere in SEAL’s inner ear there’s a tiny orchestra playing the theme song from Rocky. It’s like he’s at the top of the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and he raises his arms in a victory pose. He gives a primal scream of “YESSSS!”

Sara had already told me that SEAL was the best house-guest we’ve ever had. She didn’t have to tell him how to do anything or where anything was. He didn’t need any instructions: He was spotless, thoughtful, and polite.

I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when I’m done. —SEAL

I don’t want what you guys have. —SEAL

“I don’t want the same shit you guys want. I’m not looking for anything else. I’m going to do the same shit I’ve been doing,” he says, “only I’m going to do it better.”

If you can see yourself doing something, you can do it. If you can’t see yourself doing something, usually you can’t achieve it. —SEAL

Pre-SEAL I sometimes would be on the couch and not want to do whatever needed to be done and I’d be like “Fuck it,” and blow it off. Procrastinate. I don’t think like that anymore. Just get off the couch and do it is what I remind myself. SEAL would never say, “Fuck it.” He’d get off the couch and do it. Regardless of the time, the temperature, or how tired he was. I absorbed some of that just-get-it-done and there-are-no-excuses attitude. I’m grateful for that. My perspective on time has changed too. I got so much more done when SEAL was here. I was much more efficient. Now if I have to drive a few hours in the car to get somewhere, I do not get frustrated. Rather, I think about how lucky I am to be sitting in a warm and comfortable environment. It’s weird, maybe I became more present or maybe I’m more appreciative, but whatever it is, I view time differently. Maybe it is a newfound patience or maturity. My will to not stop or quit has also changed… both in training and at work.

He doesn’t give a shit. SEAL does what SEAL wants to do. He doesn’t live the way everyone tells him he’s supposed to live. And he does it with purpose. I admire him for that. His normal has been abnormal.

The first day SEAL came to move in, he told me I needed to control my mind. I thought it was just a saying or a throwaway comment, but I think there might be more truth to it than I originally thought. Our minds sometimes tell us little lies about ourselves, and we believe them. We think we can’t do this or that. It’s not true.

I take a look at SEAL, who’s writing in his logbook. He just wants to get better tomorrow. ...

For example, every bedroom now has a fire extinguisher and a flashlight.

He didn’t want my life and I wanted his life. For starters, I’m going to simplify things. I’m going to try to get down to thirty items of clothing. I’m going through my closets and the extra shit in the garage and getting rid of stuff. I started deleting all of my emails, and it felt great. I started not answering people right away, and it felt fantastic.

The simplicity that SEAL has is one of the most important things in life. He gets to do what he loves every day. He lives stress-free.

But maybe the most important thing I learned from SEAL was the level of appreciation he has for difficulty. The harder the training, the more courage it took to do and the more satisfaction was derived from it. SEAL taught me that you only get one shot at life and you should find out what’s in your reserve tank. Coasting is for “pussies” as SEAL would say and it’s when you dig deep that you feel the most alive. He lives his life that way. And some of that rubbed off on me.

Sadly, SEAL didn’t come flying down from the air to fix the car, AAA did. And in Lazer’s eyes, that wasn’t quite as cool. When SEAL left, it created a void in our family unit; for me especially. It was like I had a fitness hangover. I completely shut down. I didn’t exercise for six weeks. As motivated as I was when he was there, it faded quickly when he left. It might be more appropriate to say it evaporated. It took months for me to get back on the program but after a while, a remarkable thing happened. I started to hear SEAL’s voice in my ear. It was loud and clear like Obi-Wan Kenobi. My Jedi Master was talking to me in my thoughts. I started consistently asking myself, “What Would SEAL Do?” or “#WWSD?” in each situation.

Although he wasn’t in my house, his presence was still there. And many of the life lessons SEAL taught me became part of my DNA. They were innate. I understood on a deeper level how SEAL trained my mind as much as my body. With his challenges of jumping in a frozen lake, the steam room episode, and all of the madness in between, what we were really doing was just exercising my most important muscle—my brain. Specifically, my mental toughness muscle.

I learned that by constantly doing things that are hard and making myself uncomfortable, I improve my ability to handle obstacles. I get comfortable being uncomfortable—and that’s real mental toughness.

And by constantly putting myself in situations that are challenging, I’ve created an environment in my head that makes me want to keep going even when things get ridiculously hard.