Cant hurt me master your mind and

I
still had trouble accepting 
me
.
Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of twenty
things in their life that could have gone differently. Where maybe they
didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance. If
you’re one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds,
and strengthen your character, its up to you to go back through your past
and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your
negative influences, and accepting them as weak spots in your own

---

character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you
finally stop running from your past. Then those incidents can be used more
efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger.
Right there on mom’s couch, as the moon burned its arc in the night sky, I
faced down my demons. I faced myself. I couldn’t run from my dad
anymore. I had to accept that he was part of me and that his lying, cheating
character influenced me more than I cared to admit. Before that night, I
used to tell people that my father had died rather than tell the truth about
where I came from. Even in the SEALs I trotted out that lie. I knew why.
When you get beat up, you don’t want to acknowledge getting your ass
kicked. It doesn’t make you feel very manly, so the easiest thing to do is
forget about it and move on. Pretend it never happened.
Not anymore.
Going forward it became very important for me to rehash my life, because
when you examine your experiences with a fine-toothed comb and see
where your issues come from, you can find strength in enduring pain and
abuse. By accepting Trunnis Goggins as part of me, I was free to use where
I came from as fuel. I realized that each episode of child abuse that could
have killed me made me tough as hell and as sharp as a Samurai’s blade.
True, I had been dealt a fucked-up hand, but that night I started thinking of
it as running a 100-mile race with a fifty-pound ruck on my back. Could I
still compete in that race even if everyone else was running free and easy,
weighing 130 pounds? How fast would I be able to run once I’d shed that
dead weight? I wasn’t even thinking about ultras yet. To me the race was
life itself, and the more I took inventory, the more I realized how prepared I
was for the fucked-up events yet to come. Life had put me in the fire, taken
me out, and hammered me repeatedly, and diving back into the BUD/S
cauldron, feeling a third Hell Week in a calendar year, would decorate me
with a PhD in pain. I was about to become the sharpest sword ever made!
* * *

---

I showed up to Class 235 on a mission and kept to myself throughout much
of First Phase. There were 156 men in that class on day one. I still led from
the front, but I wasn’t about shepherding anyone through Hell Week this
time. My knee was still sore and I needed to put every ounce of energy into
getting my ass through BUD/S. I had everything riding on the next six
months, and I had no illusions about how difficult it would be to make it
through.
Case in point: Shawn Dobbs.
Dobbs grew up poor in Jacksonville, Florida. He battled some of the same
demons I did, and he came into class with a chip on his shoulder. Right
away, I could see he was an elite, natural athlete. He was at or near the front
on all the runs, he blitzed the O-Course in 8:30 after just a few reps, and he
knew
he was a bad motherfucker. Then again, like the Taoists say, those that
know don’t speak, and those who speak, well, they don’t know jack shit.
On the night before Hell Week began he talked a lot of noise about the guys
in Class 235. There were already fifty-five helmets on the Grinder, and he
was sure he’d be one of a handful of graduates at the end. He mentioned the
guys he