David Goggins joins Joe Rogan mid-workout, revealing his brutal childhood—beaten by a pimp father at six, racial threats in Indiana, and failing the ASVAB despite tutoring—before transforming through Navy SEAL training, losing 106 lbs in three months. He shattered endurance records (4,030 pull-ups in seven hours) while battling undiagnosed heart defects and self-imposed suffering, arguing true limits are mental, not physical. His "40% rule" and monk-like discipline reject shortcuts, urging raw honesty over polished platitudes to unlock unstoppable growth. [Automatically generated summary]
They see me now as the guy that with his shirt off who can do 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours, who can run 205 miles in 39 hours, who can do all this crazy shit.
But what they don't understand is they don't understand the journey that it took me to get to this point.
And what got me to this point was I was just the opposite of what I am today.
I was that guy who ran away from absolutely everything that got in front of me.
But not many people knew that.
I had two people.
Like the real me was like this very scared, insecure, stuttering, got beat up by his dad, all this kind of stuff.
And I built this fake person that walked around like my shit didn't stink, you know?
So that's kind of how I did it.
And through the process of time, I realized that I was lying to myself and lying to people.
My dad beat the shit out of me when I was growing up.
I was the first black baby born in this hospital called Miller Fillmore in Buffalo, New York.
My dad owned skating rinks, he owned bars, he ran prostitutes from Canada to Buffalo, New York.
My dad was a big-time pimp, big-time anything bad about a person, big-time hustler.
He was American.
You know that movie with them, D'Angelo Washington?
He was that, but not that bad.
You know, he wasn't that big, but that's what it reminds me of.
He was that kind of guy.
And beat the shit out of me, beat the shit out of my mom.
There was an incident one time when my mom got knocked out on top of the stairs, and he drug her down the stairs by her hair.
And at six years old, I'll never forget this.
In my mind, I was always afraid.
My whole life I was afraid, but I had this fucking voice, this conscience, that would always be battling me, saying, hey, you gotta get up and do something.
I didn't want to do shit.
You know, I was just afraid, but that voice would force me to get up, and my dad, you know, I'd try to beat him up, whatever, at 6, and I'd get my ass kicked.
So this went on for several years, and I have a big-time learning disability.
My dad didn't believe in us going to school.
So my dad, it was about the business, the skating rink and the bar.
So the skating rink opened about 7 o'clock at night, and this is the time I was able to walk.
So about, you know, 4, 5, 6 years old, 8, 9. And I'd go to the skating rink at 7 o'clock at night, and I'd work the skating rink until 10 at night.
And then we would scrape the gum off the floors, and we'd clean the whole skating rink up.
And then my dad had an office.
And my brother and myself would sleep in the office, and my mom would go upstairs and work the bar until 3 o'clock in the morning.
And then they'd clean the bar up.
So, after all that shit was done with, going to school rarely happened.
So when I went to school, I was all kind of, you know, my learning disability.
I had social anxiety.
I was just a jacked-up kid from living in this tortured home.
From the outside looking in, we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and then we would travel to the ghetto of Buffalo, New York, where the skating rink was at.
So, you know, we worked around mostly blacks, and I lived around mostly whites.
But no one knew what was going on in that house on 201 Paradise Road.
It's crazy.
But my mom got courage to finally leave him when I was about 8 years old.
We moved to a small town in Brazil, Indiana.
And that's when the real war started for me.
And Brazil, Indiana is a small town.
Great people.
A lot of great people.
And I say that because a lot of people get offended.
And I'm going to get to the point where they get offended.
There was about maybe 10 black families at about 10,000 people in the town.
And in 1995, the KKK marched in the 4th of July parade.
So this was a, not everybody was racist.
There was a lot of good people, some of the best people I knew was there, but there was also a lot of racism there.
So me being one of the few black kids in that, you know, in that area, you know, it kind of haunts you.
I had stuff on my notebook, you know, nigga, we're going to kill you on my Spanish notebook.
They had that on my car, nigga, we're going to kill you.
This is early 90s.
And so, even though I showed it didn't hurt me, it was jacking me up.
So all the insecurities I had when I was a kid with my father, I moved into this area here, and it just got worse and worse and worse.
And shit haunted me.
And that voice that I talked about, it kept talking louder and louder and louder, but I was doing nothing about it.
And I decided to make moves.
And I cheated all through school, and it's kind of humbling to talk about my story sometimes, and it's also embarrassing, but it's real.
It's who the fuck I am.
It's what I am.
It's what created me.
And copy from the fourth grade to my junior year in high school on every assignment.
And I want to get in the military.
I want to join the Air Force, and the guy gave me an ASVAB test.
It's like a watered-down SAT. And I couldn't copy on it because the guy beside me had a test A, I had test B, the guy on my right had test C. So I looked to copy on this test and I couldn't copy on it so I got like a 20. And I wanted to be an Air Force pararescueman.
It's guys that jump out of airplanes and save down pilots.
It's a special operator in the Air Force.
And my score was so horribly low that we'd take it again.
And he said, hey, I got like an 18 the second time, even worse.
I need to get a 50 out of a 99. And so my mom and I, for a while, we lived in the government-subsidized apartments, $7 a month, and also food stamps.
And we slowly moved up to a $230 a month place.
But at the time, you know, we were pretty poor.
But my mom afforded enough money for me to go to see a tutor one hour a week, so for four hours a month.
I had six months to study for my last test.
I was going to take the asthma test three times.
And I studied my ass off and passed it.
And I got in the Air Force and realized there was more things in front of me.
I was afraid of the water.
Terrify the water.
And I learned how to swim, but what gets everybody in this training, in all special ops training, is the water confidence, where they try to pretty much drown your ass.
You know, all of our lives we've been breathing.
And they take that from you, and they want to see how comfortable you are in the water.
And there's only 1% African Americans in special operations.
And I didn't know anything about African, like a lot of them are negative buoyant, which I am, because of the bone density.
I struggled.
But six weeks into the program, there was about 25 guys left out of about 150. I was there, and I didn't go to sleep for six weeks of the program.
And I wanted to quit so badly, but I quit everything in my life.
I copied through school.
I wanted to prove people wrong.
And so here I am, in this Air Force program, starting to get a little more confidence, but this water was kicking my ass, and six weeks into the program, the doctor gave me a blood test.
It was, I have sickle cell.
Sickle cell trait, not the anemia, but it still killed people.
But, so they pulled me out of training for a week, and when you go from being very uncomfortable in that water situation, and then now you're comfortable, and I'm sitting back watching the guys drown, you know, I'm not part of the activities anymore for this week, I didn't want to get back in that damn water again.
So the fear overcame me and all my insecurities from my dad, from this small town, from everything started coming back.
And even though no one knew how fucked up I was, kind of create this other person who was tough, I live with this shit all the time.
So, me not wanting to go back in that water, the doctor called me back up.
I thought I was going to get like a medical kick out of the military.
So, no quitting for me.
They'll kick me out so I can have some pride.
The doctor said, no, man, we could put you back in the training.
And I was like, fuck.
But after a week, I'm like, you know what?
I missed one week.
There's only three weeks left.
There's a good chance, you know, I could tough this shit out and go on.
But I went back to the CO and the command officer of the program and the sergeant said, hey, you got to start from day one because you missed, you know, that week of training.
And I broke.
I broke.
I couldn't imagine going back through that again.
So I made up a lie.
And I said, man, the sickle cell thing is really scaring me.
It was the fucking water.
It wasn't sickle cell.
And I pretty much quit.
Even though they gave me a medical, I quit.
So from the age of 19 to the age of 22, I went and did a job called Tag P, where you control fast movers behind enemy lines.
Cool job, but there's no water.
I was afraid of the water, so I avoided it.
And I gained 125 pounds in that time frame.
I went from 175 to almost 300, to 297 was my heaviest.
And I started finding things that was comfortable.
And the more things I found comfortable, the more uncomfortable my mind was.
Because that voice I was telling you about, it always was there.
I was just trying to avoid that conscience.
I wanted to be left alone from that conscience, and it wouldn't leave me alone.
So I got out of the Air Force, and I started working for a job called Ecolab, where you spray for cockroaches at 24, and spraying at different Steak and Shakes, Red Lobster, whatever, from 11 o'clock at night to 7 o'clock in the morning.
And what changed, I came home and watched this Discovery Channel show, Class 224. I came home from Steak and Shake, I sprayed it down last, get a big ol' large 42-ounce shake, walk across the street and get a box of mini donuts from 7-Eleven, and I would drive home for 45 minutes, this big ol' fat guy who, yeah, I worked out, but I was fat.
I didn't run, didn't PT, I just hit the gym.
So I'm driving home, turn the TV on, and what comes on is Discovery Channel Show, and that's where everything changed for me.
I was taking a shower, I walked out, heard these guys, and I watched the show, and it made me reflect big time on the piece of shit that I am, and I'm exactly what people said I was going to be.
I saw these guys going in the water, so I was terrified of it.
I mean, I can't even express...
Have you ever had a big fear?
And I know a lot of fighters have fears and stuff like that, but they get over them.
But a lot of us have these fears that you just don't want to fucking face.
And I have a lot of them.
I had a lot of them.
And that's what created the person who's in front of you today.
And we'll get into that.
But just a scared bitch is what I was.
But I was watching these guys going through Hell Week, Class 224. And these guys ringing the bell, quitting, dropping their helmet down, rolling out.
A lot of guys just leaving.
And it made me reflect on my fears, my insecurities.
And I saw real men, what I thought were real men who were staying, who were overcoming adversity, who were overcoming all these different things that I had blamed so many fucking people in my life, my dad, my mom for not being there.
When I was 14 years old, my mom was going to get remarried to this great guy.
He got murdered.
And then I moved back to a small town in Brazil and everybody was to blame.
My learning disability, my skin color, you know, me being, everything.
And so I sat there for a while and I was like, man, I gotta fucking, I gotta, no one's gonna fucking come to help me.
No one's gonna fucking come to help me.
It's fucking me against me, period.
And so I had the man up, and I said, the first thing I started doing is facing every fucking fear I have.
No matter what the fuck it is, man.
And these things would keep me up.
And no one, people who are hearing this shit, they will never really understand and grasp when you face these things and so many things, how they keep you up and haunt you at night.
To either be that 300 pound guy who sprayed for cockroaches and made a thousand dollars a month, And at 24 years old knowing when I'm 50 fucking years old I can reflect on this and think about what guy I never became or I can totally just sack it up and fail and fail and fail until I succeed.
So I started calling recruiters up.
I said I'm gonna go be a fucking Navy SEAL. And every recruiter, so there's a weight and height limit to get in the military.
And I was six foot one and 297. And I had prior service, which was a big deal.
So I called all these recruiters up and all of them said, hey, how tall are you?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
They got into conversation to see if I was even qualified.
And by the time I got to my weight, phone would hang up pretty much like, hey, you know what?
Call somebody else, you know, try to get in the reserves.
So I tried to get in the reserves.
And I called this guy named Steven Salgio, a recruiter up.
And he said, hey, come on in.
He saw me, put me through the weight standard, all this other stuff, and to get into the class I had to get into, I had to lose 106 pounds in less than three months.
So, I was like, fuck that, I can't do that.
I grabbed my chocolate milkshake and went back to Ecolab.
I'm going back to work, man.
This is my life.
So, in this job, you're looking for cockroaches, looking for rodents and stuff like that, and this next morning, or this next night, I went to work, and I don't like cockroaches too much.
I hit the mother load of cockroaches, and this restaurant got full of cockroaches and rodents and everything else, and I sat there and said, this is my life.
I said, this is my life.
You are exactly who the fuck, this is it.
And I said, this ain't gonna be it for me.
So, in that restaurant, I quit my job, left my canister in that restaurant, my spray canister, got back in my Ecolab truck, and I went home.
And I started working out like somebody, I became the most obsessed person on the planet Earth.
And I was basically I had to invent a guy that didn't exist.
I had to invent a guy that can take any pain, any suffering, any kind of judgment, be called nigger, be called whatever the fuck in the world and be able to stand in the fucking room and say, go fuck yourself.
I had to build this callous mind and I built it through suffering.
I built it through downright fucking just crushing myself.
If it was raining outside at 3 o'clock in the fucking morning, if it was snowing, The first instinct is don't go out there and do shit.
My instinct was, we gotta fucking go out there.
Anything that was fucking horrible in my life that I would normally say no, that was inhumane to most people, I had to go do it.
And I started callusing my mind at this point in my life.
And I lost the weight.
I lost the weight and I went back to recruiter.
I got into that class.
And I went through three Navy SEAL Hell Weeks in one year.
Only got to ever be in three Hell Weeks in one year, to my knowledge.
The first one I didn't make it through.
The next two I did.
And I didn't stop anymore from there.
And I started realizing through this process, That the fucking mind is what you created.
And I started opening different doors that I didn't think were even there, that I didn't think even existed.
And the more doors opened up, the more I started realizing that my potential is damn near endless.
And it changed my whole mindset.
So I went from David Goggins and I created Goggins.
And that journey is a priceless journey that is hard for me to even explain to people because it sounds so quick and easy.
Like, I lost this weight and I went through three hell weeks, I went to Ranger School, went to Delta Force, Lexington, whatever it is.
It was brutal.
It's a brutal journey every fucking day and everybody goes, well, are you happy?
If anybody knows my life story, and I'll try to give you just a snippet of it, where I'm at today is in front of Joe Rogan telling you my life.
To get through where I became, to get through where I'm at now, there's nothing but pride I have for myself that I can't really show people.
Because I have this face.
I have this face that they see like, are you happy?
This is an exciting story for people because there's a lot of people out there that feel trapped and they feel stuck and they feel like they can't do anything and this is who they are.
You're a guy who felt that exact same way but figured out how to not be that person and be a person that you would admire.
How did you, what were the first steps?
Like, you had some slips before, right?
Because you quit because of the water thing, but then when you went back the second time and you decided you're going to lose all that weight and you quit that job, Was it just straight forward from there or were there some days where you just failed and then you picked it back up again?
So my first run when I decided to lose the weight I was like I said 297 I was about 32 percent body fat and I went my idea was to run four miles for my first run I didn't know how bad it's gonna fucking hurt me I used to run before I was fat and I was like fuck it I can do this I ran a quarter mile and walked home I walked home and sat on my couch and cried.
I went to my mom's house who was about maybe 20 minutes down the road and cried and get in her couch and said, man, I can't fucking do this shit.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
I just got somebody pregnant.
My life was just fucked.
I was making $1,000 a month.
My rent was $8,000 a month.
And my mom just kept fucking with me.
And kept fucking, you're not good enough, man.
This isn't for you, man.
These guys are the best motherfuckers on the planet Earth.
You're not that.
And, um...
What it was, and it's kind of funny, I was obsessed with Rocky.
Rocky 1, in particular.
And when I was a kid, I'd come home every day and I'd watch this fucking show Rocky.
And I would fast forward with the little VHS tapes to round 14. Round 14 fucked me up like nobody's business.
Why?
The song came on.
When I bought the pull-up record, I listened to the song for 17 hours.
It's 2 minutes and 13 seconds.
And I'm able to visualize and dream like nobody's business.
And I know that I can create a vision that many people can't.
And I work for it.
So the vision I had was when Apollo Creed beat the fucking shit out of Rocky.
Beat the shit out of him.
He kept fighting.
He was a dumb fighter.
Couldn't read.
Couldn't fuck.
That was me.
Couldn't read.
Couldn't write.
Just punchy.
Everything about him.
And Apollo beat the shit out of him.
He was in that corner, and everybody was saying, stay the fuck down.
And him getting up, him getting up, Apollo Creed raises his arms up in the fucking air, turned around, thought he won the fight.
He turns around and sees this guy getting up, and it was the face of Apollo Creed that changed my life.
The face of Apollo Creed.
It was like, just by that motherfucker getting up, not winning, just by him getting the fuck up, Apollo Creed was his champ, he was the best.
Rocky had taken his soul.
Had literally taken his soul.
His head goes down, he looks at him like, what the fuck are you?
I wanted to be that.
Not Rocky.
I wanted to be the guy that people looked at.
I don't care if you liked me or didn't like, I don't care.
But I said, this motherfucker is going to keep coming after whatever the fuck is in front of him.
I wanted that.
Worse than anything in the world.
So, that is, I kept picturing me falling down and getting up and every motherfucker that called me nigger, I was dumped, even myself.
Even myself, I wanted to feel something besides defeat.
I wanted to just go to distance.
And that going to distance pushed me to a point of where now I go way past the distance.
So basically what I did was I came home, and I had a talking milkshake.
I sat down, and I gave up.
I said this ain't gonna fucking happen.
I could lose 106 pounds and I can't even go a quarter of a fucking mile.
I started being able to take negative shit and be happy.
And this whole, I say what if a lot, it sounds corny and it sounds weak, but it's true.
One of the recruiters said, there's not many black Navy SEALs.
As a matter of fact, I was the 36th African American SEAL in history.
Over seven years.
Because of the fucking water, you know?
I mean, people get mad at me.
It's fucking true.
Just get over it.
And so, I was like, man, what story would it be if my fucking fat, dumb, lying to be friends with people, insecure ass, can overcome this shit?
And that what-if mentality, that dreamer mentality just would always fuel me.
It would just fuel me.
Man, what if I can be a SEAL, man?
What if I can go from running a quarter of a fucking mile?
Now I run 205 miles.
What if I can go?
Just what if I can go?
And how would that feel if I'm graduating?
Because I don't forget at the graduation thing I was talking about, 224, like the video I sat down and watched.
This command officer stood up and he said to the graduation guys who are graduating buds, like 18 of them, he said, we live in a society where mediocrity is often rewarded.
And he went on to say something about these men detest mediocrity.
And I wanted to be a man that detests mediocrity.
It got me in a lot of trouble in the SEAL teams and going forward in my life because I just, I started looking down on people for not going hard as fucking shit.
And I started to create different things but that's for a different day.
But I just believe that, you know, my whole mind changed.
So what I did, I sat down there and I put Rocky in.
I got my milkshake put Rocky.
I said, you know what?
I was big time in Rocky and Platoon.
Why Platoon?
I love to see people who were getting beat down.
And there's scenes.
There's scenes that just drove me.
And people in my Hell Weeks, you know, I was in three of them, they'd always hear me singing these songs.
These songs, humming these songs in torturous situations.
When everybody's quitting this fucking code, I would be somewhere gone.
Somewhere fucking gone, somewhere fucking dark as shit.
There's a scene in the platoon where Elias, when Barnes shoots Elias, and you know, they think Elias is dead, and the choppers are taking off, and Charlie Sheen's asking, you know, Tom Berenger, where's Elias?
Where's Elias, William Dafoe?
Oh, I found him back there dead somewhere.
And through the woods, the Viet Cong is chasing Elias through the woods and they're shooting him in his fucking back.
And all he wants to do is get to the fucking chopper.
He's getting shot in his back.
He's getting up.
He's getting shot in his back.
He's getting up.
And you see this guy just fighting.
I love the fucking guy who just fucking fights.
And so I put these things in as reminders that you're going to have to fucking suffer, man.
This fucking.25, man, this is...
Man, you're going to have to fucking suffer to go from this fat...
Insecure motherfucker to one of the best guys on the planet Earth.
This journey is going to take something that is going to be incomprehensible to most people.
And these different visualizations, how I visualize them in my self-talk, it became so nasty and dirty that I almost liked the fact that I went.25.
So it became from being defeated to like, man, all right, motherfucker, maybe, you know, maybe tomorrow we can go 0.75.
You know, it just became this different mindset.
I turned negatives into positives.
So I would take it like, who would even think about doing this?
So I would sit on my couch saying, who at 297 who can't fucking swim that great, who's scared of the fucking water, would have the fucking balls?
Who had the balls to fucking man up, quit a job, and go and just put everything on himself?
So it's how I start talking to myself and put myself in a whole different category and that would fuel me the next day and I just kept using that as fuel and fuel.
No one would do this shit.
No one would do this shit.
You're the baddest motherfucker around.
You're the baddest motherfucker I ever lived.
And I just kept fueling me with the right kind of message that I needed to hear that I was never telling myself.
That's one reason why I went through three hell weeks.
I don't talk about it a lot, but the stress of my life getting to 24 caused me to have some serious psoas issues.
I didn't know anything about this shit.
The psoas muscle is what we use.
It's your hip flexor muscle.
And basically, under stress, it starts to tighten up.
And I stuttered from the time I was in third grade to the time I was in seventh grade.
White blotches on my skin.
I was a nutcase.
And so the insides of me are also getting fucked up.
So in this process, my psoas muscle got real tight to my T12. I can show you the bump in the back of my head after this show is over, but I started growing this fucking large tumor-looking bump in the back of my head from my body compressing.
So I'm 6'1", but my muscles were like 5'9".
Because I just started, just the muscle tightness for my psoas, going to my T12, I was just getting tighter, my quads, everything getting tired from just stress, just stress in my life.
So the more I stressed my body with the workouts, my lower body became out of balance.
So I had a bunch of stress fractures, a bunch of injuries going through BUDS, and how I got through BUDS was they gave me my third time, was my last time going through Hell Week, I basically put a black sock on at 4 o'clock in the morning and I would get duct tape.
I had numerous stress fractures on both of my legs because my body was literally like coming in on itself.
And my legs were like, I was pronating it really bad and putting stress on my shins.
And so I would put duct tape.
I would duct tape my feet and I would show you the top of them where I have pressure ulcers that were the size of quarters.
From, you know, how the ankle joint, so the foot goes to the shin, and how you move this, where the tape was so tight, it just created a nice ulcer right there.
Basically, over the last five years, everything I've done in my life, I did it being very unhealthy.
I never talked about it.
I just kept going.
And it cost me pretty much, I was choking my insides out.
Adrenal issues, tons of adrenal issues, thyroid issues, anything with the endocrine system pretty much shut down on me.
My organs were pretty much shutting down.
And I went from a guy who could run 205 miles to a guy who couldn't get out of bed.
And the doctors were trying to search what was wrong.
That's why I figured out the psoas muscle.
No one figured it out.
And I hit it by accident.
So, I've missed two days of stretching out in five years.
And so what happened was all the shit I did to myself, the stress I was under, physical, mental, all kind of shit, it just choked me out from the inside.
And doctors put me on all kinds of medication.
And the medication started doing the exact opposite.
I was on DHEA. I was on some different things for my estrogen, different things for my...
I was on anything to do with your endocrine system.
Thyroid medicine.
Good God, I was on cortisol, all kind of shit to get my stuff in.
I had like this lump in my throat from like the heart was always...
I couldn't run down the street.
My body was just jacked up.
Couldn't sleep.
My whole body was just down, shutting down.
I could give you a lot more than that, but just to give you an example, I was fucking dying.
And so I couldn't do anything.
I went from a guy who was this guy to a guy who can't do shit.
And the doctor was like, I don't know what's wrong with you, man.
You know, your labs are this.
Is it PTSD? What's going on?
I knew it wasn't any of that shit.
So I sat in the bed one day and I realized, man, my life is over.
This is it.
But it gave me time to reflect on everything I had accomplished.
I've never taken time to reflect on the kid I was to the man I am now.
So honestly, the time I wasn't working out, it was the best time of my life because I got a chance to really reflect back and be proud of who I became.
I never took time to do that.
It was like one after another.
Get the fuck after it.
Get after it.
Get after it.
You ain't good enough, motherfucker.
Get after it.
Get after it.
And I got halted.
So anyway, this process went on for a while.
More medication.
This isn't working.
That's not working.
No doctor can figure it out.
I'm like, fuck it.
I saw this doc about eight years before this happened.
And he was like, hey, man, you're so fucking tight.
I've never seen anybody in my life as tight as you.
And I... If I were to tell somebody one thing right now, man, that's so-ass muscle and getting that hip flexor opened up, because we're all stressed the fuck out.
I called the race director up, Chris Costman of the Badwater.
And he said, are you an ultra runner?
And I was like, I don't know what that is.
He goes, have you run 100 miles in 24 hours or less?
I was like, no.
But I said, I'm a Navy SEAL. I was in three hell weeks.
I was a Ranger.
I gave him some resume.
He didn't give a shit.
He said, I don't care.
You got to qualify for my race.
And the deadline was up in two months for this Badwater race.
And basically, he said, there's two more races you can do to qualify.
And I might consider you in my race.
We select top 90 athletes in the world.
And you're not even an ultra runner.
But I like your calls.
I like what you're doing.
He said, I'll call him up on a Wednesday.
And he goes, there's a race on Saturday in San Diego, San Diego one day, where you run around a one mile track for 24 hours, so many miles you can get.
If you get 124 hours, I will consider you in my race.
I did the math, 14 some minute mile, fuck it, I can do that.
Dumb shit thinking, I'll tell you that right now.
It was rough.
The worst pain I've been in my entire life was this race.
So, I have my wife at the time, she's now my ex-wife.
We go to Walmart, get a blue lawn chair, rich crackers and mild plex.
That's what I'm gonna have for a 100 mile run.
So, show up at the start line of this race, It was the AUA National Championships.
It's like the best ultra runners compete against each other to see how many miles you can get in 24 hours.
And I'm this big bodybuilder looking guy with a shirt off.
I probably ran no shit, no shit, no more than 50 miles the whole year.
That wasn't my thing.
I wanted to be like Jack.
I didn't want to be cardio guy.
I wanted to be ripped, big Navy SEAL guy.
And the day before this race, it's funny, this guy named Joe Burns, who put me through my hell weeks, a SEAL guy, he's one of the hardest guys out there, He was in the gym the Friday before I did this race.
And he was doing a full body squats, dead lifts, power cleans.
I said, fuck it, man.
You know, he's the guy that approved me to do this race.
You know, he gave me the approval to go do this race and signed off on it.
So I'm in the gym.
I went in there and did a full body, hardcore squats, deadlifts, and everything with this guy.
Because I knew he was going to come watch me in this race.
So I've always been about, alright man, you're going to see me come in here and jack this weight, and tomorrow you're going to watch me do a 100 mile run.
What are you going to think about that?
So, basically, I paid for it.
So he came out there with my favorite thing, chocolate mini donuts, because he knew my story of my past life, and brought six mini donuts out there, and I had my hat pulled down, and at mile 70, man, it was torturous.
And with blood down my leg and 30 miles to go, I... Started reaching the cookie jars man.
I started pulling off all kind of stuff I reached in my mind and a lot of us when we have bad times in life even the hardest person where we forget how badass we are during that hard time I Have a thing where I take a couple seconds to reflect on hang on man You've been to been through this you've been through that you overcame this overcame that I don't ever close my mind to the fact that this can't be done and And I knew I had to get up.
I needed nutrition.
I needed hydration.
I needed to stop being dizzy.
So that's the first thing I did.
I didn't panic on it.
I had 30 more miles to go to get 100. I had to start about the process.
Slowly but surely I was able to stand up, and I was literally hobbling around this track, just walking.
No running at all.
I couldn't run.
My feet were in the worst pain.
This is the worst pain I've been in my entire life.
Nothing in any training is even comparable to this last 30 miles.
And what happened was, my ex-wife looked at me and she's like, man, we agreed I'm not gonna make the time.
I was going way too slow.
And at that time, at mile 81, Something clicked that I'll never probably be able to do again with my mind, body, spirit, soul, everything just connected.
And my mind knew I wasn't fucking around anymore.
It knew I wasn't going to quit.
It knew that guy was dead and buried and gone.
And I was going to die out here on this fucking Walmart for whatever reason why I was going to get through this motherfucker.
I didn't give a damn.
There was no fucking crowds.
There was no trophy at the end.
I wasn't even in a race in my mind.
It was nothing.
It wasn't about nothing.
There was no nothing.
It was a bunch of people who didn't know who the fuck I was.
It was me against me.
And I used all these different dark places to start bringing out light and just fucking going deeper and deeper.
Ended up running the next 20 miles.
I ran 101 miles.
And I ran the next 20 miles.
Ran.
At about a 10-30 pace.
And I did 101 miles in 18 hours and 56 minutes.
Sat back down that blue porta potty.
Now, my chair that I got from Walmart.
And that's when the body realized I was done.
And this great feeling came over me, but also the worst pain in my life.
That's when I took a humongous shit on myself.
Literally like a fucking log up my fucking back.
Pissed so much blood down.
And my wife was, she was a nurse.
And she was freaked out.
I couldn't get up.
I couldn't stand up.
She backed this Camry on the knoll of the grassy area I was at.
And we were both lifters at the time, so she was decently strong.
I put my arms around her neck.
She got me to the backseat of the car, let the windows down.
It kind of smelled like horrible shit.
And I had this poncho on it because it was November in San Diego, so I'm sitting there Jack Camry in the back of this car.
And she was terrified.
I need to get to the doctor.
I need to get to the doctor.
So I said, just take me home.
So we lived on the second story, or the second deck of this apartment complex in San Diego.
I got to the first deck, so I get out of the car and I could stand up, but with my arms around her neck.
So I was just leaning down because I was going to pass out.
I got to the first deck, went down.
Just couldn't stand up anymore.
Got around her neck.
Worked my way up the railing.
Got around her neck again.
Walked to the kitchen area, which was right in the front door.
I was laying on the puncture liner.
Crap was everywhere.
I managed.
She helped me manage to get into the tub.
And it was like dirt was coming out of my penis.
This looked horrible.
Just the grossest thing in the world.
It's the worst pain I can ever, ever, ever be in in my life.
And the craziest thing, I'll tell you a story because of this right now.
I'm not sadistic.
I'm not crazy.
People may think that.
They may want to put a title on me after hearing me because it makes them feel better.
Because they think, wow, this guy must be some special or just fucked up crazy dude.
No.
I'm a guy that came from nothing.
Anybody's capable of doing shit like this.
Anybody.
And I sat in that tub.
She put the water on me.
She called my mom up.
And my mom was dating a doctor at the time.
The doctor said, you need to get him to a hospital now.
She came back in.
All I wanted to do was call Chris Costman on the phone, the race director of Badwater, and said, I fucking did it.
So she said, I'm taking you to the doctor.
I said, no, let me sit here and enjoy this pain.
She said, what are you talking about?
I said, you know, I go, I need to go to the doctor.
I realized that.
But I never thought...
It was humanly possible to do what I did.
I went 70 miles, and at 70 miles, I was dead.
I was at 100% what I thought was 100%.
I went 31 more miles after being in the worst physical shape I've ever been in in my life.
And all the...
All that pain and suffering and thing was going through my fucking body as I sat in that tub and the waters hit me.
It was the most amazing feeling of accomplishment and I want to be numb.
I want people to give me drugs and to numb this fucking pain.
I wanted to...
I did this.
As crazy as it sounds, it was the most amazing moment of my entire life.
To overcome such...
To come from this kid...
Who was mentally tortured himself and was tortured.
It's all to this kid, to this guy now, who was able to overcome such amazing odds and obstacles.
And I called Chris Cosmo, the race director of Badwater, and he said, the idea of a 24-hour race is to run 24 hours.
You only ran 19. And he put doubt in my mind that he wouldn't let me into Badwater.
So a month later or so, about a month and a half later, I went to this race called the Hurt 100. It's a 100-mile race in Hawaii, 26,000 feet of colony.
The funniest thing about this, I don't tell this story very often.
I had signed up for, I'm getting to that answer, it's right now.
I went on deployment and me and my wife my mom signed up for the first Las Vegas marathon down the strip of Las Vegas and That incident happened so I ran a hundred miles before I ran a marathon Two weeks later roughly December 5th was this marathon that we all signed up for I couldn't walk I could not walk I was fucked up so Ten days or two weeks after this hundred mile in one race I did This
marathon December 5th in Las Vegas.
I said, you know, it's the first one I can't run Maybe I can walk with my mom So I tried to go out to this little knoll around our grassy area in San Diego I tried to run legs were broken.
I said fuck I can't even I'm jacked can't do shit So I said, you know, maybe I'll watch you guys do the marathon and I'll cheer you guys on whatever I said, I'll try to walk with my mom December 5th happened.
That gun went off.
2005, 14 days after, I broke myself off, and I qualified for the Boston Marathon.
I heard some black dude from fucking Brazil in the end talking about, this happened, this happened, three hell weeks, ran to school, ran 100 miles, broke my feet, broke my body.
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I'm like, this mother, he's the biggest fucking liar on the planet.
So basically, because of my pronation that I never figured out, because of my psoas muscles, I always had issues with stretch fractures, shin splints.
So I put a lot of pressure on the inside of my ankles.
And so there's this tendon that goes up the back side of your, I don't know if it's your fibula, on the back side of that little bone, on the back side of your foot.
It goes right up the side of that, right alongside that bone.
And that thing was just so flared up on both sides that even this flexing my foot was just killing me.
So I realized when you cast that thing up, casting my feet always helped me out because it locked my foot into a position that wouldn't make me pronate as much.
So between the casting of that, and if you watched the Badwater video of 2006, You'll see me crossing the finish line with this compression tape literally like flying on my ankles because I went to the race with compression tape on my ankles.
And so basically, I have that on my, you know, on my ankles.
I had inserts in my, you know, in my shoes and also this wedge.
On the back heel of my left foot.
So then it would keep me from pronating that heel so much.
So I had all that on just to go around.
And I ran my ass off and went to Badwater 2006 with compression tape on my feet and walked a lot.
So as you see the story may be kind of unbelievable, but there's some proof right there So that's how I was so painful Yeah, I was pretty fucked up as you see right now.
I'm trying to get oh man.
Yeah, I'm pretty destroyed right there What is the most amount of miles you've ever run at one time?
Yeah 205 and 39 hours Wow non-stop Yeah, I've had quite a few people on, I've met quite a few people now over the last year or so that have run Ultras.
Courtney DeWalter, you know who she is?
She won the Moab 240. She beat all the men by 22 miles, something like that.
No, so the race in Hawaii, yeah, I actually called the race director up and there wasn't like a big time, like I didn't have a 100 mile race I believe I had.
And he pretty much just drowned in his own fluid, pretty much.
We were in the pool doing some evolution.
He sunk to the bottom.
His temperature was hot.
He missed a lot of Hell Week for getting pulled out for different stuff.
He wouldn't go quit.
And he ended up dying in Hell Week.
But, yeah, so anyway...
After Hell Week ended, I wanted to go back to the gym.
You know, so second phase happened, dive phase.
Like, I could get back in the gym and start jacking my weight.
I love jacking weight.
And I realized I couldn't squat.
So I went from squatting a lot to where I couldn't even squat the bar because my lower back was all fucked up.
And I was like, I don't know what's going on.
It was because this muscle, so in Hell Week, your hip flexors are so, and I went through so many of them so fast.
And so the hardest part of BUDS, I went through three times.
Not the Hell Week part, that's one of the hardest parts, but it was the initial part of the, what everybody sees on TV. The log PT, the surf torture, the daggone boats over your head, all that shit.
I went through that person three times in one year.
And over a period of time, my hip flexors got so tight that it just jacked me up.
It jacked me up from my hip flexors, always being so cold and so stressed out.
And everything led up to it, but this really was the part that I noticed I could squat before Hell Week or before my first time going to BUDS. After BUDS, I couldn't squat anymore.
For anybody who does anything hard, like, you know, if you do anything like weightlifting type shit or martial arts type shit where it's just everything's explosion, it's lifting, it's heavy, it's push, push, push.
One of my friends was telling me about it where they're trying to find the benefits of 90-minute hot yoga classes because they think it might mirror the observed benefits of sauna, which they already know for a fact has big benefits because of your body producing heat shock proteins to deal with the heat.
If you see like two doorways, right, and one of them is like fucking C.T. Ali Fletcher's fucking super pump Iron Attic's gym, which is hard work, and then right next to it is the yoga studio.
You're like, well...
Once you get done with all that hard work, you'll go over to that yoga studio.
No, there's two different kinds of hard work going on.
So what do you do now in terms of like you got over this five years ago, you're in this bad situation where your body's not working right, now everything's working great again.
And they put this catheter through my femoral artery that went through my heart.
They went and they took this Helix patch, they placed it in there, and then they found out six months later that the hole wasn't covered up enough yet.
The healer's patch was very damn big.
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So they go back in there in 2010. How does the patch adhere to your heart?
Yeah, so I was off active duty for three years, so I was in a recruiting area for three years trying to get back on active duty, and that was my life for three years, man.
Like, walking up the stairs is making me jacked up.
So, the doctor, Doc Shrek, he's like, you know, gave me EKG. He goes, go to the doctor, get an echocardiogram.
So, I'm in there, getting an echocardiogram, just chilling out in there, and the guy's talking to me.
He has this little wand in my heart.
We're bullshitting about stuff, and he, when people get quiet, Fucking not good, man.
So he's in there, just has his wand on my heart, chilling out.
Yeah, man, what are you doing here?
What's going on?
And he says, I'll be right back.
He goes and gets a doctor.
Doctor comes in, puts a thing on my heart.
The doctor gets another doctor.
Now, I'm just freaking the fuck out.
I'm like, okay, because when it comes to your heart, you know, it's a big deal.
So they come back in, they say, hey, we can stop the echocardiogram.
We need to talk to you out in the hallway.
You have a hole in your heart.
And the guy didn't know that I was, he knew I was a Navy guy, but I don't think he knew I was a SEAL, because not many black guys are SEALs.
And we had a conversation about, you know, we got to fix this real quick.
I said, yeah, I mean, then I came up that I was a SEAL. He said, man, you could have died jumping, you could have died diving, you could have died and all this stuff.
Because basically, the hole in your heart, if it gets plugged with something, like anything, like, you know, let's say you get a bubble from diving or something like that, you're going to die.
So what's funny about that is you see that that doesn't create after one pull-up.
So if you can imagine the pain, because you have one contact point.
That's it.
Like running, you can overcome it because you have these big giant legs and it's different.
When you have these little fragile punk-ass hands touching the bar, you know, imagine 4,030 pull-ups, how many times you're coming on that bar, coming off.
I don't like, and people don't believe it, but I was a big guy twice in my life.
So hence the reason why I just don't like running, man.
It hurts.
It's brutal.
It sucks going out and I'm gonna be gone for two hours or I'm gonna be gone 39 hours running on a one-mile track I'm not crazy, man.
That shit sucks.
I mean, you know, people put me in this category of, you must be some crazy guy who loves it.
No, man.
No, that's why I do it, though.
That's the only way to callous your fucking brain, man.
That's the only way to get harder in life.
People take these classes on mental toughness.
Like, even Seals, you have a class about visualization, self-talk, eat an elephant one bite at a time, breathing control.
Yeah, roger that.
You got to put yourself in a hellacious situation.
It's a lifestyle.
How are you going to react?
How are you going to react?
Like, all that training goes out the fucking door when you're in the fucking cold water and you're fucking miserable and it's the first hour of 130 hours of Hell Week and that first wave goes over your head and you're the coldest you've been in your life and your mind goes from hour 1 to hour 1 fucking 30. All that fucking self-talking shit, dude.
You ain't thinking about getting the fuck out of here.
But if you live this shit...
On a daily basis, you know how to calm your mind down.
The self-talk will help.
All that stuff will help.
But usually we react.
We have pain.
We have suffering.
We react.
And we react about, get the fuck out of here.
We gotta go.
It's those people who are able to control that fucking feeling of fucking flight and say, no, motherfucker.
There's a way through this.
It's not going to be here forever.
I'm not cold right now.
I went through three of them.
I'm not cold now.
I'm in a nice warm studio with you.
You got to think about that shit.
It's just going to end.
It's going to end, but we don't know that.
We don't think that.
At that time, it's just going to last forever.
And then you get to sit back on Friday with everybody walking across the, you know, back on the grinder, all the 16, 17, 18 guys that graduated Hell Week, and you get a chance to watch these guys victorious.
And then you get the chance to think about that.
You take that hot, warm shower, First thing that comes to your fucking mind is why the fuck did I quit?
So what keeps me going?
I've quit several things.
I know what's on the back end of fucking quitting.
It's a lifetime of thinking about why the fuck did I do that?
It was something about if you're born a certain way, you can't become this way.
It was totally saying that who I am now, like I had to be born with some, not genetic power or some gift from God, but I had to have some kind of special gift.
Had to have some kind of special gift.
And I forget what set me off.
But it was like, we had to be...
To be somewhere, you had to be born with it.
What was the concept?
And I know what I was born with.
And I know the battle that I had in my mind.
So when he said it, I just sat there looking at my face and somebody in the crowd asked me a question.
And I totally contradicted everything he said.
And I was like, nah man, I mean I fucking know for a fact that you can be this fucked up dude Like, really fucked up dude.
Yeah, the problem with a guy like that with his theory is that his theories are based on results.
And those results are based on human beings.
And most human beings, there's certain people that are born with certain gifts, like a guy like LeBron James, obvious physical talent.
You know, Jon Jones in MMA, obvious physical talent.
But there's...
When you look at someone who's super successful, you always assume that it has to be because of some sort of physical gifts because people look at themselves and I'm sure this doctor, this old dude, probably had like a little gut and probably had- That's exactly how he looked.
Little tiny arms and weak shoulders and probably thought, well, there's certain people that are just mesomorphic and probably broke it down all these scientific terms.
It's a difficult motherfucker where you're going to fail, and you're going to be in your head.
You're going to be saying, I'm not good enough.
And it's how you get through that.
It's how you get through that on a daily basis when that thing is saying, man, I'm 43. I've done so much.
You start to become civilized.
The refrigerator gets full.
You start making money and you start...
I'm not getting cold anymore.
I'm retired.
At 40, people shouldn't be playing basketball or football or being...
You start to believe this shit.
And it becomes in your fucking mind, like, there's people who are retiring, you know, at 40-something years old, or 30-something years old.
At 43, I'm still putting 100 mile weeks, still doing thousands of pull-ups, thousands of push-ups, because I'm not allowing myself to become civilized.
The worst thing that can happen to a man is to become civilized.
You lose that fucking fight, you lose that, why the fuck am I doing this shit?
Did you find resistance from that amongst other guys that didn't like that you were making them uncomfortable?
Because that is something that people, there's a natural instinct that people have when someone's working harder than them to somehow or another diminish that person.
And that's one of the things that I've gotten from paying attention to you, is that what you're preaching, what you're talking about, is finding yourself through struggle.
Don't you think that your happiness is probably elevated by The amount of pain that you've gone through 100% so the amount of suffering that you understand the amount of pain that you've gone through Makes you appreciate the happiness and the beautiful moments with much more intensity.
That's what weak people miss about my story Weak people hear this soft kid.
Oh my god.
He must be miserable.
Oh my god.
What the hell is wrong with him?
You're missing the fucking story You're not listening to the story man Look what I overcame.
If that doesn't put some badge of honor tattooed in your fucking brain for the rest of your life that you can die today talking to Joe Rogan, you're missing the story, man.
Am I happy?
What the fuck do you think?
Don't misunderstand the passion in which I speak for not being intensely happy.
Happiest person in the world.
But I'm not done.
So I'm not going to speak to you like, oh man, everything is great.
I never had, and the crazy thing about what, you know, you say that, I didn't have a motherfucker come wake me up at 3 o'clock in the fucking morning and say, hey, you gotta get your shit in.
I had no trainer.
I didn't have a nutritionist.
It was the self-discipline that I had to survive.
Not survive.
I was weak.
To thrive.
No one said, hey man, you're 297 pounds, man.
I want to help you out.
Hey man, you're not smart.
I'm gonna help you out.
I had to work at all this shit.
I had to overcome, and it self-disciplines everything.
If you don't have it, I don't look at you right, because I know you're capable of more.
It's not discipline so much for me.
It's all on you.
It's all on you.
The self part is what's big.
We need someone to hold people accountable.
Fuck that shit, man.
Fuck that shit.
We count on people too much to get us through shit.
And we look to our right, we look to our left, we're looking for help.
And if you can build that self, you can build that total accountability in one's self.
And it's not about being selfish.
I'm trying to create a better me so hopefully people who are hearing this or taking it the right way can say, I can run a mile.
Ain't about running 205 fucking miles, doing four, being a city.
Well, listen, I guarantee you've already done that.
What you experienced from watching that television show and what got you out the door, what got you to sort of take the first steps to change your life, what you experienced by watching Rocky, those moments of inspiration, those are critical for people.
They need to know that someone's done something, that someone's done something that's greater than what they could imagine themselves doing, and they want to take a Step towards trying to be better that that that inspiration is gigantic and sometimes it comes across as corny You know people read it too much of it online it becomes It drowns out you lose that the meaning gets lost I mean there's and there's a lot of posers There's a lot of people are out there that are they're pretending that they're trying to offer up inspiration or a true
honest account of their experiences but really what they're trying to do is say something that's gonna get likes and Right.
You know, they're trying to say things that they think people are going to go, yeah, double high five.
This commitment that you have to authenticity is one of the reasons why people are connected to what your message is.
That's one of the reasons why what you're saying, you don't want to grow it too fast.
You don't want it to be bullshit.
You're terrified of that thing, just like we were talking about with weak people.
You're terrified of seeing that weakness in yourself.
We all see that.
We've all seen motivational things that are bullshit.
We've all talked to people that are talking, and you realize there's nothing really...
That they're not really connected to their words.
Their words are just a bunch of words they've pieced together because they sound like something that someone who's enlightened on the subject would say.
And it's not so much a struggle, because I'm not really about...
I'm not driven by the business.
I'm not driven by trying to be...
I make a very small salary from being retired from the military.
That's all I need.
So I'm not fast to...
I'm a minimalist motherfucker.
Give me a backpack a fucking ground to sleep on and a pull-up bar and a fucking some running shoes and a subway sandwich or some shit and I'm fucking straight.
So it's um I believe in patience.
I'm a patient dude.
I can watch the piece of grass grow for 20 years because I know that this is how you get somewhere in life by being that monk-like mentality And being able to watch something grow very calmly, patiently.
And I really developed that through my heart surgeries and I developed that through that first 100-mile run.
I thought I had given 100%.
When I was on that chair at mile 70, I was fucked up.
I thought I'd give it 100%.
And to go that last, I go, man, I wasn't even near 100%.
So I came up with this thing called the 40% rule.
It's basically where you...
It's like a car.
You put a governor on a car.
And they say the car can go 130. That governor stops the car at 91. And you're driving thinking, man, I want to fucking floor it, but I can't go any faster.
We do that to our brain.
We put a governor in our brain.
The second we feel pain, discomfort, suffering, all those words that we hate to say because we have this happy, peaceful world we live in now, we stop.
We slow down.
And if you can get through these different barriers and gain 5%, 2%, 3%, that 40% becomes 60. That 60% becomes 70, 80, and 90. And then you'll hopefully one day near 100. I don't know many people who probably add 100. I mean, we think we're there, but there's so much more.