Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

by David Goggins

I looked at the people who were making me feel uncomfortable and realized how uncomfortable they were in their own skin. To make fun of or try to intimidate someone they didn’t even know based on race alone was a clear indication that something was very wrong with them, not me. But when you have no confidence it becomes easy to value other people’s opinions, and I was valuing everyone’s opinion without considering the minds that generated them. That sounds silly, but it’s an easy trap to fall into, especially when you are insecure on top of being the only. As soon as I made that connection, being upset with them was not worth my time.

I should have known that a breakdown was coming. By the time I started running at 10 a.m. on November 12, 2005, 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. While I was stationed in Iraq, on my second deployment with SEAL Team Five earlier that year, I’d gotten back into serious power lifting, and my only dose of cardio was twenty minutes on the elliptical once a week. The point is, my cardiovascular fitness was an absolute joke, and still I thought it was a brilliant idea to try and run a hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Okay, it was always a fucked-up idea, but I considered it doable because a hundred miles in twenty-four hours demands a pace of just under fifteen minutes a mile. If it came to it, I figured I could walk that fast. Only, I didn’t walk. When that horn sounded at the start of the race, I took off hot and zoomed to the front of the pack. Exactly the right move if your race-day goal is to blow the fuck up. Also, I didn’t exactly come in well-rested. The night before the race, I passed by the SEAL Team Five gym on my way off base after work, and peeked in like I always did, just to see who was getting after it. SBG was inside warming up, and called out. “Goggins,” he said, “let’s jack some fucking steel!” I laughed. He stared me down. “You know, Goggins,” he said, stepping closer, “when the Vikings were getting ready to raid a fucking

came together to put the fuck out. Most of our work focused on the legs, including long sets of squats and dead lifts at 315 pounds. In between we bench pressed 225. This was a real deal power-lifting session, and afterwards we sat on the bench next to one another and watched our quads and hamstrings quiver. It was fucking funny…until it wasn’t.

“So it’s your first trail race?” he asked. I nodded. “You really picked the wrong…” “I know,” I said. “It’s just such a technical…” “Right. I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve heard that a lot today.” “That’s okay,” he said, “we’re all of bunch of idiots out here, man.” He handed me a water bottle. He was carrying three of them. “Take this. I heard about your CamelBak.”

I raised some money, and I learned all I could from that pull-up bar. After logging more than 67,000 pull-ups in nine months, it was time to put them in my Cookie Jar and move on. Because life is one long motherfucking imaginary game that has no scoreboard, no referee, and isn’t over until we’re dead and buried.

hour. Nevertheless, I was leading the race and breaking trail in an average of six to twelve inches of snow. In some places the drifts were piled much higher. My feet were cold and wet from the starting gun, and within two hours they felt frozen through, especially my toes. My top half wasn’t faring much better. When you sweat in below-freezing temperature, salt on your body chafes the skin. My underarms and chest were cracking raspberry red. I was covered in rashes, my toes hurt with every step, but none of that registered too high on my pain scale, because I was running free.

Weather, more than any other variable, can break a motherfucker down quick. But I didn’t listen to any of that. I created a new dialogue and told myself to finish the race strong and worry about amputated toes at the hospital after I was crowned champion.

In my mind, I didn’t have the time to waste. I never hit snooze on my life clock because there was always something else to do. If I worked a twenty-hour day, I’d work out for an hour and sleep for three, but I made sure to get that motherfucker in. My