I have had the opportunity throughout my life to test my desire and motivation to serve and perform at a very high level of fitness. Since my participation in the Fight Science television show, where they tested my ability to handle cold water and perform on a Spec Ops level, I am often asked about improving mental toughness. I cannot point out one particular event in my life that helped me build mental toughness; I can only think of many—a lifetime of events and habits.
I was never one of those kids who naturally excelled at athletics in school, but I tried to work harder than anyone else in high school did, and played five sports during my four years. I worked out before school, did my sports, ran home after practice, and then studied hard. When I got into the Naval Academy, there were many people like me, many of whom had worked even harder than I had. I soon learned that I could make even more use of my time; and, as a result, I attained an even higher level of fitness than I previously thought possible. I again thought I had reached my peak in my SEAL training preparation; then I went to BUD/S.
I was well prepared. All of my USNA classmates (there were 20 of us) who went to BUD/S graduated and became SEALs. That is a 100 percent graduation rate, in a school that boasts about its 75–80 percent attrition rate. We were a tight bunch who competed with each other, which just made us all work harder. I remember people quitting everyday and my classmates and I would say to each other, “It hasn’t even gotten hard yet—why are people quitting?” If your physical conditioning is at the highest level, you do not have to tap into your mental toughness until later, in a challenging event. However, in order to build that type of physical conditioning, you have to tap into your mental toughness every day of your preparation training. It might be a day when you do not feel like training, but you do it anyway. It might be getting over a new hurdle like running, or swimming faster, or doing a thousand push-ups in a workout. Regardless of the obstacle, training hard to get over it for months, or even years, will build up mental toughness.
At BUD/S, we truly trained to compete, not just to survive each day. Our preparation enabled us to compete and succeed without having to tap into our mental toughness—yet. But by the time Hell Week arrived, mental toughness training was a big help. You cannot train for Hell Week; it is a true gut check. We all asked active duty SEALs, “How do we better prepare ourselves for Hell Week?”
Amongst ourselves, we had kicked around the idea of getting colder during our workouts, or staying up later and sleeping less, even getting under the log more in our workouts for log PT. We did this for a while and then our SEAL chief stationed at the Academy, Rich Black, said, “Hell Week is like a kick in the nuts—you can’t really train for that wisely.” We laughed and agreed, but we made our workouts harder all the same, and prepared well that last year.
As you might imagine, we all had the same doubts in our heads: were we tough enough? However, we were so well prepared that we were able to turn that doubt into, “No way am I quitting; I just pray I do not get hurt.”
Little victories like winning the obstacle course, doing the most pull-ups on the PST, or having the fastest swim in the class were daily challenges that really turned BUD/S into a competition and made it fun, rather than feeling like a torture session where we were just trying to survive each day. This is where I came up with the saying, “Train to Compete—Not Just Survive.” It really helped make BUD/S a series of races as opposed to pain and torture.
When BUD/S Class 180 started First Phase, we had 120 students. By the time Hell Week started, we were down to less than 90 students in our class. People left everyday for a variety of reasons. Too cold, too much stress, too many push-ups, too much running, too many water skills; by the end, BUD/S will give you too much and too many of everything.
The night before Hell Week, we were all jacked up. We could not sleep, but we forced ourselves to rest and just waited for the late October Hell Week of 1991 to begin. BUD/S class 180 was about to break out for Hell Week. Hundreds of blank rounds fired from M-60 guns and large amounts of smoke and concussion grenades made us all aware of when Hell Week started.
We spent the first thirty minutes staying as close to our swim buddies as we could and did hundreds of reps of push-ups, flutter-kicks, running to the surf zone, and getting wet and sandy while the sounds of bullets, bombs, and instructors with bullhorns directed our every move. We stayed wet the entire week and lost 40 members of the class.
We eventually low crawled from the Grinder to the ocean (about 200 meters, mostly on pavement) and stayed in the surf zone locked arm-in-arm, singing songs in the dark for a few hours. We were cold, but not freezing, but already had members from the class quitting while we were in the surf. We got out of the water an hour or so before midnight. We knew we would eat roughly every six hours and our mental goal was to make it to the next meal. During the next two hours, we grabbed the logs and started log PT. We knew that after Hell Week was finished, we would be done with Log PT at BUD/S, so we were actually excited to start and finish our last log PT at BUD/S.
We stopped around midnight thinking it would be our last log PT and that we could finally eat something, but evidently the first meal would not be until 0600 so we ran around for a few hours with the IBS boats on our heads before coming back to the logs. Wait—log PT again? We did log PT until 0600 breakfast. This was about four hours of running, lifting, working together as a team, and laying on our backs half-naked on the steel pier on the Bays of Coronado. One thing Hell Week will force you to do: you will work together as a boat crew team or you will suffer for it. We actually got to eat breakfast and then continued doing another six hours of log PT until lunch. We later figured out that our last log PT session was about 12 hours total. You still get the full benefit from log PT during Hell Week these days, from what I hear from recent BUD/S graduates.
One-Man Log PT
This is a way to do one-man log PT. If you don’t have a log, then resort to the weight room option using the dumbbells or barbell Push Press (this page) and Thrusters (this page). Getting the shoulders and core accustomed to the weight of a log is a smart preparation tool if you are not a seasoned lifter. Rest the log on the shoulders and get used to that discomfort as you will be moving the log with your boat crew in this position.
We made it through the night, got some chow, and were ready to go to the next meal. We spent the first day doing four-mile timed runs as a boat crew (which is only as fast as your slowest man is) and more surf torture and low crawls. The whistle drills became instinct after hundreds of times. One whistle: drop and prepare for incoming; two whistles: low crawl toward the instructor. This was a constant double whistle (tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet) and you kept low crawling until you could touch the instructor blowing the whistle. Three whistle blasts meant you could stand up and recover, but it always took at least 100 yards of low crawling. In fact, for a few months after Hell Week, when my alarm on my watch would wake me up with the same (beep-beep, beep-beep) I woke up low crawling in my bed. The days got warm without being hot, but the nights got cold as we sang goodbye to the sunshine and hello to the darkness. “Goodbye sunshine, hello darkness,” we sang every night until the instructors got tired of our voices. Then we spent the next few hours in the surf zone either singing or doing boat races.
Why does it always rain during Hell Week? For as many times as I have watched or been in Coronado when a Hell Week was taking place, it has always rained. It rained on us as well and made the nights a little colder, but the water temperature was actually warmer than the air temperature so there was no sudden shock of being cold. But you were cold in the long term, and you never stopped shaking. You need all the calories you can get to stay warm when you are that cold and active, so it is highly recommended to eat everything on your plate (and your buddy’s plate if he leaves anything for you). Stay full, stay warm. Remember that.
There is nothing worse than this during Hell Week. Many people agree that the constant pounding of the boat on your head is the hardest thing to endure. You will do this for miles and pray you will be in the water soon so you can paddle as opposed to running. There is no good spot to get under the boat. The middle of the boat puts constant pressure on your head and the front and the back get to bouncing on your head as you run with your 6–7 man boat crews under the 200–300 pound boat.
How can you prepare? Neck exercises are smart to add into your training, as well as good core workouts for both abs and lower back. I wish I would have had the TRX back then in my preparation phase, as my back at 43 is stronger now than it was at 23 due to the constant core work the TRX does for me. But some hang cleans and power cleans are good too, if you do not have that background under your belt.
After your third day of staying awake with no sleep, you start seeing weird things—hallucinations resulting from sleep deprivation. What is really happening is your brain wants to go to sleep and go into a dreamland, so you actually start seeing your dreams superimposed on reality. You can be talking to your buddy and he falls asleep standing up. It is funny when he wakes up talking gibberish. It is also really weird to see cartoons running the obstacle course, or a little muscle man in place of a fire hydrant. One of our boat crewmembers kept seeing a wall and tried to push off the wall during our “around the world paddle.” The paddle is a boat race that starts in the Bay on the Amphibious Base and you have to paddle out of the Bay into the Pacific Ocean and then south to BUD/S. This takes many hours, but if you win, you actually get some sleep time. Our boat crew won and actually waited for two hours for the last boat crew to arrive. We watched them get hammered for losing. We slept on the sand, under an overturned IBS huddled together for two hours; despite appearances, this was probably the most comfortable sleep I have ever had. This was when I realized I had regressed back to a primal ancestor. I was an animal, a caveman. We all have this skill. It just takes extreme events for us to engage the primal instincts of truly living within a fight/flight response, but we all can do this.
After you bust your butt for three days, you pretty much go into zombie mode and just get things done. There is a point when there is nothing the instructors can do to hurt you. What are they going to do to you? Make you do more push-ups, get you wet and sandy and cold, make you run more?
However, there are moments toward the last half of Hell Week when you have to engage the thinking part of your brain again and actually plan mini-missions of stealth and concealment, where you have to hide from the instructors. Winners get to hang out by a huge bonfire and you can even stay with your boat crew as long as someone in the group tells jokes that make the instructors laugh. You also start running like an old man with serious chaffing after 4–5 days of being wet, cold, and sandy.
There are other events during Hell Week that are more fun than challenge, but I guess that depends on your mindset as you are going into and through it. BUD/S Hell Week teaches you that the human body is ten times stronger than the mind will let it be. You really have to turn off the rational thinking part of your brain that tells you that you need to go to sleep, rest, and recover after a long days work. You actually have to regress back to a caveman state, where there are no “creature comforts.” You learn to enjoy food as a wonderful gift, moments of sleep feels like hours and jumping into a swimming pool feels like a bath. Regardless, finishing Hell Week still stands as the defining moment for a member of a SEAL team. You have earned the right to start training to become a SEAL after this gut-check, and you show the SEALs that you want to be there and you will not quit when needed by your team.
Preparing for any Special Operations training program can be challenging and can often lead you to question whether you are tough enough to endure. Who knows if, at the moment when you become physically exhausted, you will be able to suck it up and not quit?
The answer is to learn how to play with pain and discomfort. The skill you must practice and learn how to do is to disassociate. Since being introduced to this concept, I have interviewed several SEALs, physiologists, and psychologists, and have thought about my own experiences. All parties, Spec Ops students and scientists alike confirmed it—the ability to disassociate is a highly useful skill with applications in athletics and daily life, as well as SEAL training. In laymen’s terms, to disassociate means to disengage from your body and focus on something else besides the pain, boredom, or discomfort of life.
The ability to disassociate should not be confused with the disassociation disorder often caused by traumatic events, but rather recognized as a method to endure long, painful, uncomfortable, and tiring events like Hell Week or cold-water exposure. Everyone I spoke with had a unique story regarding how he or she was able to disassociate. Here are several examples:
Pain: A dental visit using no painkiller when getting a cavity filled. Many have endured this with a focus on a “happy place” or gazing at a tiny spot on the ceiling. I tried this once, and only once; I made it but realized my disassociation skills were not as strong as I thought.
Competitive/Long Distance Running: Many marathon runners spend the first few miles getting their pace down and then spend the next 20 or so miles focusing on something else, like building a house brick by brick, to help with the monotony of running 26.2 miles. Then they come back and finish strong with that final kick that requires more focus to accomplish.
Swimming: Many swimmers call what they do when swimming for hours at a time going into a “swim coma.” Looking at the black line for 6000+ meters requires the mind to wander, but also to be physically in the event itself. Many collegiate swimmers talk about writing term papers while swimming.
High Rep PT: When you do workouts preparing for BUD/S, the total reps in a pyramid workout or super set can take you into the several hundreds of push-ups, sit-ups, dips, and even pull-ups. Many former SEALs talk about zoning out within 5–6 sets when doing these monotonous, high repetition calisthenics workouts.
Cold Water: Thinking warm thoughts and repeatedly flexing your muscles at regular intervals will help you fight the cold from getting into your brain and telling you to quit. I always thought while sitting in the freezing water about the end of the day in the warm shower, putting on dry clothes, and crawling into bed under some big blankets.
Team Player: Many people keep going just so that they do not let down their team. I remember taping up sprained ankles and still playing in football games because I did not want to let down my team or miss a chance to compete. A few of the SEALs I talked to actually broke bones during Hell Week and did not quit with a broken foot, or even a broken leg. They said they did not want to let down their boat crew and their swim buddy. To them, quitting was not an option and they found the focus to ignore the pain by helping out others in the team.
How do you get this ability to disassociate? Practice! Physiologically speaking, your body can produce hormones that can speed you up (adrenaline/cortisol) as well as opiate-like hormones to relieve pain (endorphins) simply by thinking. If you do not believe me, think about someone busting through your front door with a gun and taking your family hostage, or think about sex; see if you have a physiological response. I truly think that this is why many of my workouts help people successfully prepare for Spec Ops training programs; the number of high-volume workouts allow for this disassociation process to occur, whether because of monotony or by enduring pain.
The key to this skill working during your Special Ops career is being able to still think tactically and logically while disassociating from the pain and discomfort of whatever training gives you. Being able to disassociate may get you through BUD/S and other challenging Spec Ops courses, but being a good Special Operator requires you to avoid getting into a zombie mode when tactical decisions are required. This, too, takes practice: performing long, tiring events with a full mission profile in your training with your teams. The workouts in the program will help you practice the dissociation skill while still thinking creatively to get through the workouts. Breathing deep helps you naturally engage the thinking part of your brain when needed for tactical thinking drills, even when physically exhausted.
Like I always say: no 30–45 minute gym workout will truly prepare you for a day in Special Ops Training. You have to put in the time.
Trying to differentiate these two is challenging at times. I have found that mental toughness can border on, or cross over to, stupidity very easily. Personally, I tend to measure mental toughness on two different standards. For training programs, the line is pain versus injury. For getting out of life or death situations, there is no stupid way—only the way that yields success. In a life or death situation, you may be severely injured and still keep moving in order to live. This requires the mental toughness ingrained in us all as a basic survival skill.
For instance, when playing sports or going through training programs for military, police, and fire fighting, you will find yourself in pain from the daily grind very often. Some of these pains will border on injury. There is a fine line between sucking up pain and pushing into a more debilitating injury. Yes, you can be stupid and press on, and ruin your chances of graduation or permanently disable yourself in the process. By pushing through pain into injury, you cross the line over into stupidity. Sometimes it is just luck that gets you out of injury. It is wise to understand the difference between pain and injury while pre-training, as well as during your choice of training. When you suck up pain, it requires mental toughness. When you push through pain and into injury just to avoid stopping or quitting, that is when the border of mentally tough and stupid becomes fuzzy. You are now gambling against your luck to avoid further injuring yourself.
Being mentally tough helps you to keep competing when your mind wants you to quit. One thing I learned during Hell Week at BUD/S was that we have a section in our brain that tells us to stop in order to prevent us from hurting ourselves. There are times when you have to shut off that part of your brain. Once again, your body is ten times stronger than the untrained mind will let it be. This type of training helps you tap into this mindset, but often your life experiences as well can build a mental toughness and resilience that no one can beat.
Being mentally tough can take us into another level of competition or into a survival mode with success. You will find when things get bad and you are worried more about living than anything else, your body will do all the work for you without thought of wanting to quit or dying. As humans, we are built to survive. One thing the military, police, fire fighters, and other types of similar training will give you is an ability to think in high stress situations, when most people shut down. Even then, it is the repetition in our training that enables our bodies to perform in order to survive or help others to survive. The training does not make you mentally tough; it simply brings it out.
So, what is the difference between being mentally tough and being stupid? Simply put, mentally tough people are not stupid; they are those people you look to be around when there is danger or an impossible task in front of you. It all depends on your point of view and attitude. We all do stupid things from time to time, because we are human. But take a look at the jobs that the proven mentally tough perform: running into a burning building to save others, running across a street when bullets are flying, or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane into enemy territory. Some may think all of these things are stupid, but it is the “stupid” people who keep us safe from terrorists, criminals, burning houses, and other natural and man-made disasters.