happens in the shadows, and well out of sight. I fit in well over there, and it
was great to be back operating again. I lived on Ford Island, with a view of
Pearl Harbor right out my living room window. Kate and I had split up, so
now I was really living that Spartan life, and still waking up at 5 a.m. to run
into work. I had two routes, an eight-miler and a ten-miler, but no matter
which I took my body didn’t react too well. After only a few miles, I’d feel
intense neck pain and dizzy spells. There were several times during my runs
that I would have to sit down due to vertigo.
For years I’d harbored a suspicion that we all had a limit on the miles we
could run before a full-body breakdown, and I wondered if I was closing in
on mine. My body had never felt so tight. I had a knot on the base of my
skull that I first noticed after graduating BUD/S. A decade later it had
doubled in size. I had knots above my hip flexors too. I went to the doctor
to
get everything checked out, but they weren’t even tumors, much less
malignant. When the doctors cleared me of mortal danger, I realized I’d
have to live with them and try to forget about long-distance running for a
while.
When an activity or exercise that you’ve always relied on gets taken away
from you, like running was for me, it’s easy to get stuck in a mental rut and
stop
doing any exercise at all, but I didn’t have a quitter’s mentality. I
gravitated toward the pull-up bar and replicated the workouts I used to do
with Sledge. It was an exercise that allowed me to push myself and didn’t
make me dizzy because I could take a break between sets. After a while I
Googled around to see if there was a pull-up record within reach. That’s
when I read about Stephen Hyland’s many pull-up records, including the
twenty-four-hour record of 4,020.
At the time I was known as an ultra runner, and I didn’t want to be known
for just one thing. Who does? Nobody thought of me as an all-around
athlete, and this record could change that dynamic. How many people are
capable of running 100, 150, even 200 miles
and also knocking out over
4,000 pull-ups in a day? I called the Special Operations Warrior Foundation
and asked if I could help raise a bit more money. They were thrilled, and
next thing I knew, a contact of mine used her networking skills to book me
on the damn
Today Show.
To prepare for the attempt I did 400 pull-ups a day during the week, which
took me about seventy minutes. On Saturday I did 1,500 pull-ups, in sets of
five to ten reps over three hours, and on Sunday I dialed it back to 750. All
that work strengthened my lats, triceps, biceps, and back,
prepared my
shoulder and elbow joints to take extreme punishment, helped me develop a
powerful gorilla-type grip, and built up my lactic acid tolerance so my
muscles could still function long after they were overworked. As game day
approached, I shortened recovery and started doing five pull-ups every
thirty seconds for two hours. Afterward
my arms fell to my side, limp as
overstretched rubber bands.
On the eve of my record attempt, my mom and uncle flew into New York
City to help crew me, and we were all systems go until the SEALs nearly
killed my
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