Pain does not stop the body.

I read this amazing article from T-nation, and an excerpt on Special Forces training truly took my breath away. I’ll paraphrase and edit some to shorten it for you ADD people.

During Special Operations selection training, you’re subjected to a brutal series of physical and mental tests. Depending on the program and the time of year, between 60 and 90 percent of candidates won’t finish. Fun stuff.

But it taught me something important: Pain does not stop the body. There’s nothing that hurts so badly that you can’t keep going just a little longer.

Extreme and continuous stress teaches you to break daily life down into short, measurable goals. You make it to breakfast, and then you focus on making it to lunch. Sometimes your mind refuses to project beyond the immediate future: running one more step, swimming one more stroke, grinding out just one more push-up.

Everybody hits bottom at some point. You get to a place where you’d do anything to make the pain stop. If your mind breaks first and you stop running, or wave for a support boat on a swim, or raise your hand during a beat-down to say that you’re done, you’re officially “weeded out.” You’ve quit. You’re part of the majority, but you still feel like a loser.

Fortunately, there’s a loophole: If your body breaks first, they won’t hold it against you. Every guy in my squad had the same perverse thought at some point: “If I can just push myself hard enough to black out, I’ll crash in the sand, take a nap, and wait for the medics to revive me. I’ll get a nice little break, and then rejoin the pack.”

So we ran harder. We pushed. But we hardly ever got those naps.

I remember being on a run, soaking wet and covered with sand. We’d just gotten back to our feet after calisthenics in the surf and a series of sprints up and down a sand dune. Then the instructors took off sprinting again.

I didn’t think I could make it any farther, but I knew I could never live with myself if I stopped running. So I put my head down and sprinted as hard as I could through the soft sand. Pain surged through my body, and the only conscious thought I can remember was that the air I was gasping into my lungs had turned to fire.

I focused my eyes on the heels of the instructor. The pain was getting worse, but I kept going. I could hear another member of my class behind me, struggling to keep up with the pack while puking between strides.

Guys who went through the training with me had similar experiences. They’d hit bottom one day, and think they could finally reach their breaking point if only they pushed a little bit harder. But it never worked. The agony would only increase. But so would their capacity to keep going. Pain, in other words, never actually broke our bodies.

Which isn’t to say we weren’t incapacitated from time to time by hypothermia, hypoxic blackout, hypoglycemic shock, or some other things you find in the dictionary a few pages past “hell.” But passing out was acceptable. Quitting wasn’t.

I’m a civilian now, running a facility and training people. Every now and then, I hear someone say, “I can’t.”

Frankly, that’s BS. Next time you’re tempted to say you “can’t,” remember that what you’re really saying is, “I don’t want to.”

Wasn’t that just freakin beautiful?

Living in the past.

Sometimes when I daydream, I think about what it would be like to live in the past. I’m not talking like early 1900’s or colonial times, I mean freakin’ MEDIEVAL days. My eyes just glisten when I think about how awesome it would be to have your status in life set by how amazing you are at fighting and killing people / animals. Man, that’s the LIFE.

In my daydreams, I’m always this awesome warlord who has unparalleled bravery and awesomeness, who goes out and conquers peoples by the hundreds and pillages their cities. I’d be cool though, cause I would be really nice and let my enemies live once they realize how kind and tight I am. Historians would write great things about how I once disguised myself as a peasant and hear people talking about me and how awesome I was. My weapon of choice? Freakin warhammer.

Also, I imagine there to be no rules. I see a girl I like? Freakin kill the boyfriend or otherwise pwn him. A child in danger? Smash the faces of the attackers and I’m a hero. I also think about trying to stuff my head full of all the technological information of today that I can, so that right before I am time-warped to the past, I can write them down and be the innovator of the UNIVERSE. Course, people would laugh at me, call me a hack and otherwise possibly take my life with fire, water, stones, or all 3. I’d write down all my inventions (stuff like sandwiches, iPods, blogging etc.) and store them somewhere, so that when I die, historians will dig me up and say “WAS THIS GUY FOR REAL?! ANCIENT FACEBOOK?! WAS THIS GUY REALLY FOR REAL?!!?” Shows like Alias and movies like National Treasure? Screw Rambaldi, find the freakin’ Wang artifacts! Shoot.

Anyway these are things I think about when I have nothing to do at work.

I like to…

Use a blowdryer to heat up my blankets and bed before I sleep on cold nights. It saves a lot of physical energy at the expense of electricity. Really great, try it sometime.

25 things, bet you didn’t know at least half of these.

1. I almost never say goodbye if I can help it. It’s either because I think it’s easier not to say bye and just peace out (cause I’m going to miss them a lot), or I just don’t want to see the person so I just peace out. Either way, things like “goodbye parties” or “last ——” whatevers are things I actively look to miss.
2. I wake up every morning with a song in my head. They are almost always random and have no secret meaning or theme to my day.
3. If I’m pissed off, I just stop talking. If I’m annoyed, I just stop talking. In fact about 75% of the time where I’m in a “quiet mood”, I’m not in a good mood. Haha this admittance might come back to bite me later.
4. I *almost* buy soooo many things. As in, they are in the cart, and I am about to put in my credit card information before I say “ok jk I don’t need this.” I attribute this to slickdeals.net and its deal-catching brethren. Case in point: I almost bought an 18-sack clothes organizer because it was on sale the other day…
5. Whenever someone walks by me at the mall, I like to sniff their wake to see what they smell like.
6. I’m afraid of taking things too seriously, because if I fail at it then I have no excuses.
7. I have no idea what kind of girl I am searching for. (Apart from the standard filters)
8. I have no discipline to read books, but I can sit for hours reading articles and science journals about fitness and health.
9. The first time I learned I had perfect pitch was when a piano tuner came to my house in my childhood, and randomly decided to test me after he was done.
10. In social situations, I feel like there’s always a battle in my mind between saying the funny outrageous things and reserving them in case I am judged. You can guess which side usually wins.
11. I like to sleep a LOT. My theory is that bigger people need more sleep than regular people. The longest duration I think I’ve slept was about 15 hours in college. Anytime I nap, I end up sleeping 2-4 hours and wake up confused because it’s dark when I think it should be morning.
12. I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, and although I feel like ADD is a bogus disease, anyone that went to Regnart with me can attest to the fact that I was not a normal child. My form of being friendly was showing people my pee-do, peeing on your shoes and screaming into your hair.
13. I am a firm firm firm believer in the fact that most processed and complex carbohydrates do nothing for the modern human physiology except mess with our insulin production, create tendencies for malnutrition, and stuff our bodies with unecessary calories. Feel free to ‘present data’ arguing your point, but I will probably not listen because I am stubborn and think I am right.
14. I’m a pretty big guy, and even though I like things like MMA, tackle football, and working out, I am 100% sure that I am a lover not a fighter.
15. Out of the many types of people I see at the gym, the kind I most respect is the overweight guy or girl that I see in there all the time, working their butts off to get into shape.
16. I find that a lot of girls have a horrible first impression of me when first introduced and hate me. This is disturbing.
17. I love good electronica, and anyone that says “omg its so repetitive though~~~!” has no idea what musical structure is or cannot appreciate the finer points of musical theory. I have this theory that trance is often structured like classical works with expositions, developments and concluding motifs. Trust me, it’s good.
18. In middle school, someone once told me that I was not good at anything. I have never forgotten those words and the way they made me feel, and I think it has shaped a lot of who I am today.
19. Although I like to think of myself as an influential person, I find that my laughs always tend to imitate those of whatever friends I am hanging out with at the time.
20. One of the major regrets in my life is choosing to swim in high school rather than play football.
21. I think a real man cries.
22. I believe that the primary reason Christianity gets a bad rap is rampant hypocrisy and superficiality.
23. A big theory that I have about musicians is that your gear should never be better than your talent. It’s really unfortunate and freakin’ sucky when there are people out their with Gibson LP’s who really shouldn’t be owning such nice hardware. Plus I’m jealous because I have crappy gear.
24. If we’re in a loud environment and you say something that I can’t hear or understand, usually I’ll just look at you and smile while analyzing your reaction. If you look satisfied, we move on. If you look like you want affirmation for your statement, I’ll just nod. If your face looks inquisitive, then I’ll go “yeah…. I think so…” If you look pissed off, then I’ll ask you to repeat what you said. Haha.
25. The greatest tragedy in life is when people don’t take the time to evaluate what they’ve been doing with their lives, nor take the time to truly consider the possibility and implications of life after death.