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To live in a brutal world, you have to accept cold-blooded truths.
a typical week in BUD/S demands up to sixty miles of running.
That night, the only thing that allowed me to continue pushing forward was the knowledge that everything I’d been through had helped callous my mind.
That last message cracked the code like a password.
It showed me what the human mind is capable of, and how to harness it to take more pain than I’d ever felt before, so I could learn to achieve things I never even knew were possible.
Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can.
You must also visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do.
That also means being prepared to answer the simple questions. Why are you doing this? What is driving you toward this achievement? Where does the darkness you’re using as fuel come from? What has calloused your mind?
This challenge doesn’t have to be physical, and victory doesn’t always mean you came in first place. It can mean you’ve finally overcome a lifelong fear or any other obstacle that made you surrender in the past.
He’d either reached or topped a hundred miles, seven times, and he’d achieved his personal best of 144 miles in twenty-four hours when he was fifty years old!
“Keep your pulse steady between 140 and 145 and you’ll be golden.”
I hadn’t run more than a mile in six months, but I looked like I was fit because I’d never stopped hitting the gym.
there is no such thing as a Hell Week simulation. You have to go through it to know it,
Lone Survivor,
who thought the laws of physics and physiology did not apply to them.
In 130 hours, you earn decades of wisdom.
Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success. It doesn’t have to be a big victory either. It can be something small.
You don’t drop one hundred pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in a week first. Those first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment, and it doesn’t sound like a lot, but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible!
We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones.
very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again? Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you.
utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones.
That the human body can withstand and accomplish a hell of a lot more than most of us think possible, and that it all begins and ends in the mind.
Take inventory of your Cookie Jar. Crack your journal open again. Write it all out. Remember, this is not some breezy stroll through your personal trophy room. Don’t just write down your achievement hit list. Include life obstacles you’ve overcome as well, like quitting smoking or overcoming depression or a stutter.
Feel what it was like to overcome those struggles, those opponents, and win. Then get to work.
If it’s a run or bike ride, include some time to do interval work and challenge yourself to beat your best mile split. Or simply maintain a maximum heart rate for a full minute, then two minutes. If you’re at home, focus on pull-ups or push-ups. Do as many as possible in two minutes. Then try to beat your best.
If you’re more focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before, or read a record number of books in a given month.
What am I capable of?
We habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or race course. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole.
I loved waking up at 5 a.m. and starting work with three hours of cardio already in the bank while most of my teammates hadn’t even finished their coffee. It gave me a mental edge, a better sense of self-awareness, and a ton of self-confidence, which made me a better SEAL instructor.
But how do you push yourself when pain is all you feel with every step? When agony is the feedback loop that permeates each cell in your body, begging you to stop? That’s tricky because the threshold for suffering is different for everybody. What’s universal is the impulse to succumb. To feel like you’ve given everything you can, and that you are justified in leaving a job undone.
Some criticize my level of passion, but I’m not down with the prevailing mentalities that tend to dominate American society these days; the ones that tell us to go with the flow or invite us to learn how to get more with less effort. Fuck that shortcut bullshit. The reason I embrace my own obsessions and demand and desire more of myself is because I’ve learned that it’s only when I push beyond pain and suffering, past my perceived limitations, that I’m capable of accomplishing more, physically and mentally—in endurance races but also in life as a whole.
Because in life almost nothing will turn out exactly as we hope. There are always challenges, and whether we are at work or school, or feeling tested within our most intimate or important relationships, we will all be tempted to walk away from commitments, give up on our goals and dreams, and sell our own happiness short at some point.
impulse is driven by your mind’s desire for comfort, and it’s not telling you the truth.
Over a period of time, your tolerance for mental and physical suffering will have expanded because your software will have learned that you can take a hell of a lot more than one punch, and if you stay with any task that is trying to beat you down, you will reap rewards.
in every failure there is something to be gained, even if it’s only practice for the next test you’ll have to take.
We don’t all have the same floor or ceiling, but we each have a lot more in us than we know, and when it comes to endurance sports like ultra running, everyone can achieve feats they once thought impossible.
In order to do that we must change our minds, be willing to scrap our identity, and make the extra effort to always find more in order to become more.
Research is one part of preparation; visualization is another.
Who hasn’t dreamed up a possibility for themselves only to have friends, colleagues, or family shit all over it?
We have access to so many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us.
despite what my body was saying, I was immune to suffering.
Don’t ignore them. Be prepared for them, because in any endurance event, in any high-stress environment, your weaknesses will surface like bad karma, build in volume, and overwhelm you. Unless you get ahead of them first.
I told myself I was immune to suffering, but that didn’t mean I was immune to pain. I hurt like everybody else, but I was committed to working my way around and through it so it would not derail me.
In the military we always say we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training,
In 1999, when I weighed 297 pounds, my first run was a quarter mile. Fast forward to 2007, I ran 205 miles in thirty-nine hours, nonstop. I didn’t get there overnight, and I don’t expect you to either.
Whether you are running on a treadmill or doing a set of push-ups, get to the point where you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop.
Then push just 5 to 10 percent further. If the most push-ups you have ever done is one hundred in a workout, do 105 or 110. If you normally run thirty miles each week, run 10 percent more next week.
confidence you gain by continuing to push yourself physically will carry over to other aspects in your life.
They weren’t trying to push themselves every day of their lives, and I wanted to be around people who thought and trained uncommon 24/7, not just when duty called.
Talent wasn’t required for this sport. It was all about heart and hard work,
