Life was always giving you a test. Trying to give you a way out. Trying to give you the excuse not to show up. This is my excuse today. But guess what? You gotta have the mentality to show up every fucking day of your life. No matter what life throws at you. It's our responsibility to show up to the calcium of life. Prepare for fucking battle.
I don't care what you're going through, what life's doing at you. It's your responsibility to find your new 100%. I'm a big believer in doing something that sucks every single day of your life. Every day you're trying to find more of what you're capable of. And that's the big question. What are you capable of? Stop doing the things that you do every day.
Do the shit that no one else wants to do. Do the shit that no one else is even thinking about doing. You don't find inspiration by not living in the grip of life. You need to live in the grip of life to find inspiration. Put challenges in front of yourself. When you put a challenge in front of yourself and you attack it, that's when you find inspiration.
I wish the water was cold. I wish the motherfucking instructors keep on running. I wish the fucking rain. When the idiot is unknown and the distance is unknown. That's you know who the fuck you are. If it was rain outside three o'clock in the fucking morning, if it was snowing, the first thing I think is don't go out there and do shit. My instinct was we got to fucking go out there.
Anything that was fucking horrible in my life that I would normally say no, I had to go do it. My new norm is you get up every fucking morning at four o'clock and you suffer. This is your new norm. That became my new fucking life. Most people want to get out of it. I said, no motherfucker, this is your new life. This is who you are. Your new norm is you wake up and you suffer. That's what I realized and that's my mentality. This should ain't hard anymore.
You're fucking new normers, you wake up, you're getting the fucking cold water, you're gonna be here till the shit's fucking done. And now they say you're out, you get out. So my new norm, so I do that now today. My new norm now is, if I'm doing the tours in my run, your new norm now, man, you're fucking a doing tour of fucking moms. I'm in Las Vegas right now, it's hot as shit. There's not about any of that. But what it is about is a lot of us give total control to life.
We don't have any control of it. We just give out control of life. I do this shit every morning to prepare my mind for a life in a throw at me. I'm not training for a race. I'm training for life. I'm training for the time when I get that two o'clock in the morning call that my mom is dead or something happened. Tragic in life. I don't fall apart.
I help you body. Use your healthy mind. That's what it's about. I'm training my mind and my body, my spirit. So it's all one. So I can handle with life is not the way. Because the life I've lived, it throws a whole bunch at you. It's the reality if it's about 90 degrees and 100% humidity. But who gives a shit? That being said, September 3rd, I have to have my book turned in.
And when I realized I'm reading this book a lot, but I realized I wasn't born this motherfucker. I made him. At the bottom of insecurities, fear, self-doubt, lies was me buried in the fucking field position.
My dad beat the shit I was growing up. I had a fourth grade reading level in high school. I stuttered. I lied to people to be their fucking friends. I got called nigga every day of my life growing up. I had stuff on my notebook. You know, nigga, we're going to kill you. And the shit haunted me. I came home one night from work, spraying for cockroaches. I turned on the Discovery Channel. I saw some guys going through Navy SEAL training.
and they're going to be held weak and they're getting their ass just beat. You know, in and out of the water, guys ringing the bell, there's suffering. And I was weighing like 297 pounds. And I had to make a change in my life.
You know, I was at all time low and I wasn't going anywhere. And I was exactly what everybody said I was going to be, which was nothing. So I had to make a change. What comes on, just give me a chance I saw it. That's where everything changed for me. I was taking a shower, I walked out, heard these guys, and 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 big time on the piece of shit that I am and I'm exactly what people said I was going to be. But a lot of us have these fears that you just don't want to fucking fix.
And I have a lot of, I had a lot of them. And I saw real men when I thought were real men who were staying, who were overcoming adversity, who were overcoming all these different things that I had been playing so many fucking people in my life, my dad, my mom from not being there, my learned 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've got it. No one's gonna fucking come to help me.
No one's going to fucking come help. It's fucking me against me, period. And so I had to man up. And I said, of course the guy I started doing is facing every fucking fear I have. Remember what the fuck it is, man? And I had two options to either be that 300 pound guy who sprayed for cockroaches and made $1,000 a month, 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 going to be a fucking Navy SEAL.
I wasn't born this motherfucker. I made him. At the bottom of his securities, fear, self-doubt, lies was me buried in the fucking fetal position. How about I got out of that was recognizing, be honest with it, be truthful with it, and then fixing it. We like to live on social media with lies about ourselves, how great we are, get to the source and fix the problem.
I started Calus in my mind at this point in my life. 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. They didn't think even existed. And the more doors opened up, the more I started realizing that my potential is damn near endless.
I self-talked, it became so nasty and dirty that I almost liked the fact that I went 0.25. So it became from being defeated to like, man, all right, motherfucker, maybe you know, maybe more than 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 in my couch saying, who had 297 who can't fucking swim that great? Who scared the fuck of water? We'd have to fucking balls. Play the balls to fucking man up, quit a job, and go and put everything on himself.
So it's how I started talking to myself and putting 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 best motherfucker around. You're the best motherfucker ever lived. And I had to, I just kept fueling me with the right kind of message that I needed to hear that I was never telling myself. And through time, it became reality. The more things you can do,
Get outside that zone. That zone is that zone makes you feel good. The stronger your mind's gonna get. Let's start getting used to doing shit like this. It's not funny. My mind's used to it. You gotta straighten your mind. Take control of that. So then when you get out in the real world and they fuck you up, you got protection.
So I'm about 15 miles from home. And I often talk about taking souls. This morning, this person, I usually train alone. This person was around with me. And I said, fine, we're about 15. This morning comes, there's storms coming in this way. And the person calls and said, hey, why don't we do it tomorrow?
Taking souls is when I told the motherfucker, I'm gonna run 15 today and I run through again tomorrow. That's what taking souls is about. Don't worry about the elements and what's going on. You gotta get out there and get it. He wasn't the only one that fell apart taking the day off. Because the storm is coming in right now and there's not a soul out here but me.
So I started using all these different tools and tactics to get instructors heads and taking souls. That's where it happened, man. We were Wednesday freezing fucking cold. Everybody's jackhammer and everybody's, everybody wants to, you know, everybody's just wanting to get through it now. Let's just get through this man. I can't wait till Friday so we congratulate how we can get going. I said, let's go ahead and have some fun.
I said, we're gonna start, we're gonna start fucking with this guy. So, the evolution here was we just got through with Met Check, you know, we're stripped down to nothing, and they're checking us out, making sure we're good, checking for pneumonia, checking for fucked up knees, my knees are all jacked up, they're giving me shots and shit. And I was like the boat crew leader of Boat Crew 2. The boats, like, on our heads. Saw it was, we're supposed to lift the boats up above our head. That's all you gotta do. But when you're this weak, you know, this fragile, you're this tired, the boat's heavy.
So there's a thing you can do when you do boat presses. You get the boat tossed up, tossed up and catch it. That shows like you're jacked up. So everybody's holding the boat and they're shaking. The boat started to come down their head and all the boat crews are all lining up and they're fucked up. Now I'm looking at that and I turn around my boat guys. Hey guys.
It's time to fucking take some souls. They're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I said, we're getting fucking with the truckers out here. I don't have fucking jackets. If you can come off and have a smile and shit. I want the fucking faces to go straight up fucking now. So we're going to do this. We're going to start boat pressing. Just take my lead trust and you can energy from it.
Mitch are throwing this boat up in the fucking air, catch the toilet, and catch it. Mitch are yelling. I can't hear a fucking boat crew, dude. We're yelling our fucking ass off, and we doing it. Nah, there you go. Hey, no. Can't machine here. There you go. Nobody works like that in this house. 30, come on. 40, come on. 50, shut that boat down. 60, come on.
Get it, Salatine! They don't know me, son! Get it! They don't know me, son! Get it! They don't know me, son! Yeah! One, two, three! They don't know me, son! We won! Yeah, get it, yeah! Shh! Shh! Shh! Come on, we want to see it! Good, we good! We're going to carry the boat in the boat! That's you, buddy! Come on, three, three!
Come on! Twenty more! One more, David! One more! The boats! You're gonna do it! You're gonna do it! You're gonna do it! You did it! Yeah! They make a stop, like what the fuck, like the stop. I'll look at these instructors.
And their faces literally look like someone just took their soul out. Like, what the fuck just happened, man? I know me all, man. I couldn't have done that. How are they doing it? So the rest of the time, going through Hell Week, it was like we just, we owned it. Both crew two, we won every single race. We were just dominating. And the whole bunch of fucking guys that don't fucking like me. I don't give a fuck. I'm a warrior.
The warrior is a motherfucker who says, hey, I'm here again today. I'm here again tomorrow. I'm gonna be here the next day. I'm 50 years old and I'm still fucking natured. It's important to put no fucking limit on what's possible. I want to be the guy that people look at. I don't care if you like me or didn't like, I don't care. But I said this motherfucker's gonna keep coming after whatever the fuck is in front of him. I wanted that.
I kept picturing me falling down and getting up. And every motherfucker that called me a nigger, I was dumb. 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. But when you put that practice and every day you lace them up, not me, run, it's just a metaphor for life.
and you lace the motherfuckers up every day. Pretty soon you win. If you have the curvers and the heart and the dedication and the mindset about everybody go fuck themselves. I know what I know. I've listened to myself enough to know. I know what I know. And that's what people are doing up for. They don't listen to their journey. They listen to everybody else, shit. I'm not the best at anything. I'm not gifted. I'm just driven.
I'm a guy that came from nothing anybody's capable of doing shit like this. Anybody. All these guys died. They all had kids. I want to raise money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. So I googled the top 10 hardest races in the world. And what comes up is a bad water 135. It's a 135 mile race through Death Valley in the summertime.
I had put running shoes on over a year. I was a big time power lifter. I lifted weights heavy. That's what I did. So I called Chris costing up on a Wednesday. He says, look, man, the only way you can qualify for my race is to run 100 miles at one time in 24 hours or less.
I'm going to cut to the chase. I signed up for this race. It's called the San Diego one day, where you run a one mile track for 24 hours to see miles you can get. My goal was 100 miles. I knew nothing about ultra running. The first I never run was 20 miles at one time. I didn't run hardly at all at this time. I was a seal, but I was like a bodybuilder. And I did an elliptical trainer 20 minutes on Sunday.
All I did. And the day before this race is funny, this guy named Joe Burns, who put me through my hill weeks, a sealed guy, 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, it's a fucking medal. I went in there and did a full body, hardcore squat, dead lifts, and everything with this guy. Because I knew he was going to come watch me in this race.
So I've always been about, all right, man, you're going to see me come in here and check this way. And tomorrow you're going to watch me do 100 mile run. I got to mile 70.
but I was done. My feet were broken. I was stretched, fractured, shinsplants. Muscles were tearing. I'm messed up bad. So I literally start to turn white. I'm at mile seven. If they got 30 fucking miles to go, I'm jacked up. I got to go to bathroom. The bathroom's like 20 feet from me, supportive party. I can't get out of the fucking chair. So I'm peeing blood down my leg, pooping up my fucking back. And I got 30 miles to go.
And I can't stand up because my blood pressure is all messed up. I've been in three hell weeks, range of school, overcome so many obstacles in my life. This last 30 miles of this race is when I realized a human being is not so human anymore. We have the ability to go in such a space if you're willing to suffer.
And I mean suffer your brain and your body once connected together can do anything. And this 30 miles was the life changing moment. I was out of it. I wasn't the worst pain in my entire life. I was to me on the brink of death. And I was able to chunk this 30 day miles
into small pieces. I was so driven, and I'm not gonna say motivated, because motivation's crap. Motivation comes and goes. When you're driven, whatever's in front of you will get destroyed. I don't ever close my mind to the fact that this can be done. This became a personal thing. This became me against this race, me against the kids that called me nigga, me against me. I broke this thing down into small pieces. I said, okay, I gotta get nutrition. I gotta be able to stand up.
Let me see if I can fix myself. So I said, if I can just walk one more mile after being in the worst shape of my entire life, this would change everything for me mentally going forward. From this kid who came from dirt, nothing, who couldn't read until he was in a junior high school and is now here, I went, I walked a mile. I said, hmm, maybe I can walk one more mile. Maybe I can walk another mile. At mile 81, my ex-wife put them in, he says, you're not gonna make the time.
When your mind knows it's not going to quit, and this is what I found out. It's my 40% rule. When your mind knows it's not going to quit, your body will adapt to whatever is in front of it. And I was literally hobbling around this track. Just walking. My feet were in the worst pain. This is the worst pain I've been in my entire life. I was literally walking around with my wife at the time, and she goes, you're not going to make the time. She goes, you're walking like 37 minute miles.
I got to mile 81, and the second she said that I'm not going to make the time, I ran the last 19 miles nonstop. 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 that's 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 in God. And I was going to die out here on this fucking lumb up 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.
I ended up going to 20 more miles. I did 101 miles in 19 hours in six minutes. And that one day changed, that one 19 hours. It wasn't still a train, it wasn't Ranger School, it wasn't Delta Force, it wasn't in that crap I went through. It was this 19 hours in six minutes that forever changed my life to know that we as human beings are capable of anything. And we don't need any special kind of parents or tools to get there.
So I end you with this. Don't stop from your tired. Stop from your done. Thank you very much. I'm a guy that came from nothing anybody's capable of doing shit like this, anybody.
And this great feeling came over me, but also the worst pain in my life. I couldn't get up. I couldn't stand up. 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 Costner on the phone. They raised your bad waters. I fucking did it. So she said, I'm taking 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 realize 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 pain and suffering and things going through my fucking body, and I sat in that tub and the water hit me, and it was the most amazing feeling of accomplishment, and I went to be numb. I did this. As crazy as it sounds, it was the most amazing moment of my entire life. To come from this kid,
who was mentally torsed himself and was tortured to this guy now, who was able to overcome such an amazing odds and obstacles. And I called Chris Cosmo up the race director of Badwater, and he said, the idea of a 24-hour race is to run 24 hours. He only ran 19. And he put doubt in my mind that he would let me in the Badwater.
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...
It's 10 days or two weeks after this 100 mile in one race I did. This marathon, December 5th, in Las Vegas, I said, you know what, it's the first one, I can't run. Maybe I can walk with my mom. That gun went off 2005, 14 days after I broke myself off, and I caught off after the Boston Marathon around 308. The gun went off, and that thing came back. Like, all right, man.
What if, what if you can qualify for Boston, man? You're trying to hunt, so it helped me out. I actually ran 101 miles. What the fuck is 26 miles to me now? So the mindset going into was like, I ran 75 more miles in this.
So a month later or so, about a month and a half later, I went to this race called the Hurt 100. 26,000 feet of climbing over 100 miles. Probably went to top five hardest 100 mile races in the world. Went out there and got through the race. Did it in 33 hours. Was the ninth place finisher. Not many people finished that year. And I qualified for bad water and got in. And I went on to lose weight and train hard. And I got fifth my first year and went back my second year and got third.
When it comes down to how long can you stay in that pool? When it comes down to how far can you run? When it comes down to how much can you push yourself past the part where you want to quit? How far can you keep going? There's a purity in that that dissolves social order, all that bullshit, all the what people think about you goes out the window. It's what, who are you right now? Who are you right now?
When you put yourself in hell, that's the only time you can figure out how to fuck to get through that motherfucker. You can't read somebody else's book about some theory on how to do shit, some guy who set up in a nice worn office and wrote some book with a nice cup of coffee in the fucking hand. I want to see that guy who immersed himself in fucking hell. And he thought about quitting and leaving and his wife and his kids. And why am I here? Is it worth it? All this crazy shit?
It's still said and found out a way to get through it. The permanent result comes from you fucking, I say it all the time, you have to suffer. You have to go into the dark chambers that we often shut off and you gotta open them up. You gotta open up and fight that fucking demon, get in there, talk to that motherfucker and say, what's up? But going through this path of life, this journey over here that you make yourself that's incredibly difficult.
When it comes to the other end of that motherfucker is some glorious shit, then you can't even explain to people. And we're framed.
It's easier to accept the fact that I'm just not good enough. I wasn't made to do that. But I'll tell you right now, man, we can do a lot of shit when it comes to this pure armed guts and willpower and getting through shit. We have a lot more with a lot more than what we think we have. Does not some easy lit up street life path with nice smooth roads, right? It's a difficult motherfucker where you're gonna fail and you're gonna be in your head. You're gonna 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 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 become civilized.
You want to be uncommon and most uncommon people. You start putting yourself in situations that suck. You'll find yourself. Yeah. You'll find it real quick. I didn't have a motherfucker come wake me up at 30 o'clock in the fucking morning and say, hey, you gotta get your shit in. I had no trainer. I have a nutritionist. It was the self-discipline that I had to survive. It's not survived, it's about a week to thrive.
I had to work at all this shit. I had to overcome and self-disciplines everything. If you don't have it, I don't look at you right. 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. It's what's big. If you're going to suffer and suffer and go back in the grind, that internal dialogue you have with yourself when you're in misery, that's who you really are.
That's where the growth happens. When you're able to stay in that moment and talk to yourself, talk to yourself back into the suck of wherever you're going through, and you start stripping those layers away, but as you're stripping those layers away, you're building calluses over top of shit in your mind. That's where the growth starts to happen, is when you have to force yourself to stay in it.
Let's just fucking fuck all this, let's just give all this pain and suffering and misery of real life. Let's, let's cover it over. Nice big blanket. And let's find peace. No. Sorry. It's not possible. Gotta go into that fucking hell hole of life that you have that fucked you up and fix it. When I was younger, I had this image in my mind of what does a man look like to me?
And I got all these people who were badasses, characters. And in my mind, I became that. And that's what kept me going a lot. That is the biggest thing I can ever do in my life, is I became that guy. That I once looked at all these guys, now look at myself like, God, who the fuck can do that? I can't. To achieve the standards that you've achieved, to achieve the become the person that you are today,
and to have the influence that you have. It's like you had to go through that in order to empower all these other people. It's not like you're the superhuman person that is like a character in a book. You're a real human being who has real insecurities and real failures in your past and real demons. And you've figured out a way to harness that energy and just keep going and going. And not quick.
That's it. I did 67,000 pull-ups in nine months in training for a record for 4,000. And the failures, so I did the first time in September, failed miserably on this day, so I did 2,588 or something like that. Failed miserably for millions of people. Two months later, November tried again, failed again. Two months later, in January 19th, I finally fucking got it.
Even the hardest men in times of suffering, what we do is we forget how hard we really are. Because that's what suffering is. Suffering is a test. It's all it is. Suffering is a true test of life. I said to myself, who on this fucking earth will still be going right now? You are. You are. You gotta be the hardest motherfucker on the planet. Is it true? I don't give a fuck.
I believe it. I believe it today. Tighten up, people. It's okay. Trust me. It's okay. You might be calling me again one day. It's okay. How are you going to flip it upside down and say, Roger that? Now I'm going to harness this shit. And you'll read about me years from now.
Taking your skin, become more of a human being. Don't be afraid of the reflection in the mirror. Because that's all you can be afraid of. Once you overcome the reflection in the mirror, you've done it. We are all great.
It just, you gotta find the courage. You gotta find the courage to put your bow's headphones on and silence the noise out of this world and to find it. And to find it because it's out there, but it's gonna take hard work, courage, self-discipline. It's gonna take all the non-cognitive skills.
to be great. You know, smart is good, all this stuff is good. That's all cognitive. It's a non-cognitive skills that sets you apart from everybody else. I'm on a journey of life and we all have a different journey. I want to be forever proud of who I was as a man and change who I used to be, the liar, the insecure guy, the guy who can, whatever. I want to be proud. If I diet now, if I diet 8, if I diet 90, 100, I want to look at myself and say, proud of myself.
