Boat Crew Two
What stuck out the most to me, whether Goggins was running marathons without training for them, breaking pull-up world records, or simply just being an overall bad ass was his mental toughness. In particular, his story about going through Hell Week with the infamous “Boat Crew 2”.
In this story Goggins recounts a particularly difficult day during hell week where Boat Crew 2 was starting to struggle. They were doing boat raises and for the first time that week they were feeling and looking shaky. Instructors prowled around looking for weakness and Goggins realized the instructors had what his crew needed… energy. Instead of continuing to let himself fade, he made a decision to steal their energy. The instructors wanted to see weakness… he decided himself and his crew would show them the exact opposite to get inside their heads.
Why this story stuck out so much to me is just how Goggins was able to completely flip the script. Energy was fading and they were going through the hardest physical week that likely any human goes through EVER. He didn’t just decide “I need more energy” he gave himself a goal. He needed to be going SO hard that his instructors were thinking about him when they tucked themselves into bed that night. He needed to push beyond ANYTHING that had ever been done before.
As an athlete, if you can find a way to apply this to your training, it is scary to think of what you can become. How much more you can get from every hour of training, and how much better you can get every single day. That ability to flip the switch and push to new limits is an incredibly important thing for an athlete.
Now, not everyone will be as extreme David Goggins, and that is okay. However, I still believe it is so important to be able to turn on that switch. You don’t need to be hard ALL the time, but when the going gets tough and you are in the face of some adversity… what is going through your head? Are you thinking of how easy it would be to quit? Or are you thinking about taking souls.
Whatever makes you push harder doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work. Like in his book, David Goggins recounts how he just looked at his instructor and decided “That mother f***er is going to be thinking about ME when he tucks himself into bed tonight. He knew that the instructors wanted to break him so that drove him to be unbreakable.
Even if you aren’t going through hell week, you are hopefully still working your ass off at whatever point of your competitive season you’re in. When the going gets tough and you can feel your body starting to fade on you, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to let it fade and decide “that’s enough for today” or are you going to find a way to push harder and make sure you get every improvement you can every time you step into the gym, every time you step into practice, and as a result… every time you step into a game.
It’s easy to quit when things get tough. It’s easy to justify extra rest days when you maybe don’t need them, or skipping that last set of sprints that just feels like “too much” today. The hardest thing is to squash those excuses, keep putting the work in and make sure you continue to separate yourself from the rest.