Army Story: Pushing Through Personal Limits

Everyone has limits, but what they don’t know is that these limits are not ceilings; they’re only just as far as you’ve gone before or think you can go. You can always push beyond what you think is a limit, so don’t let what you think about yourself or your capability stop you from succeeding in your endeavors. You’ve heard me say that the body can’t go where the mind hasn’t been; the other side of that limit is where your mind hasn’t yet ventured.

A story springs to mind. When I was in Ranger school, I was going up a mountain, and my legs were already so smoked I could hardly walk on flat ground much less the mountain I was scaling. To make matters worse I was carrying a super heavy machine gun and all my gear. All of this stuff just weighed down on what was then a malnourished body.

I remember looking up and thinking, There is no way I can climb the next fifty feet! I was just so furious. I had my machine gun on me, and I was so angry that the only way I could cope with that anger was to take that machine gun and — when no one was looking — slam it into the nearest tree.

That made me feel a little bit better, and it gave me the boost I needed to walk another fifty feet. Then the anger would set in again, and I would look around — again making sure no one was nearby — and I’d slam that heavy gun into another tree.

My body was telling me that I couldn’t climb that mountain, that I was totally gassed and had nothing more to give. Sometimes that happens. We find ourselves in these situations where we just have to embrace the suck (Disclaimer: sometimes your body is trying to tell you to stop doing what your doing or you’ll end up paralyzed for the rest of your life, and you should probably listen to it in those circumstances).

But more often than not, your body is a liar. It’s going to warn you way before you even reach that perceived limit. When it tells you that you can’t go two more miles, odds are you got ten more miles left in you. You keep pushing on because your body lies to you and when it does so, the best thing for you to do is to lie right back.

If you’re on a long run or ruck and your body wants to quit, you tell your body, “Okay, great, I’ll quit when we get right up there,” and you point to where you’re headed. But when you get there, you lie to your body and say, “Well, now that I’m here, I’ll quit when we get over there,” and you point to another location. And you just keep going by doing this over and over again.

Sure, it sounds a little cheesy, but keep dangling the carrot in front of you because your personal limits are far far beyond what you or your body thinks they are. There is a difference between discomfort and pain. Most of us experience discomfort and not real pain, so we can push through to achieve our goals whether that be in fitness, shooting, war fighting, business, marriage, you name it.

Before you get mad at me for attempting to destroy government property at the tax payers expense, know this: the machine guns in Ranger School don’t work anyway. You’re carrying all this weight to get to an objective where you’re going to shoot a gun that doesn’t work because it’s been mistreated by thousands of other people. So don’t stick up for the gun. That gun sucked. It deserved to be bashed against a tree.

And I was there to help.

Another story springs to mind about pushing through mental limits. Regardless of your level of physical training and performance, it’s ultimately going to come down to mental toughness.

I had just conducted an airfield seizure, and the bird was late, so we were waiting outside in forty-degree weather for it show up, which doesn’t sound too bad except that I was laying in a puddle of freezing water. Man, it got pretty bad, but I had a pack of Skittles in my pocket and that was my morale food. So, when things got really bad, I would take out that packet and eat a Skittle or two.

But at this point, my hands were so cold they didn’t have any strength to them. So, when I tried to open the pack, I couldn’t actually do it. Those Skittles were tormenting me! And at that moment, I stopped praying for God to save me and started praying to God to prepare my place in heaven: Here I come God; I’m literally dying.

And before you say anything, I did in fact get hypothermia that night, so I wasn’t far off on my assessment.

When we all finally rallied together and I had plopped down with some of the other guys, I remember being so miserable that I turned to the guys and asked, “Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking right now?” They looked at me as said, “What’s that?”

“I would give anything for a snow cone right now.”

It was just one of those moments of absolute stupidity, but I had to laugh at my own pain in order to make it through. I hate being cold. On my deployments, I carried around a small yellow Post It note, and I would take it out of my wallet when I was cold and read it for a morale boost.

It said: Fire.

I would lay it in front of me, rub my hands together, hold them out over the small, yellow piece of paper, and relish the fictitious warmth it gave me. It was so ridiculous that it actually mentally helped.

I can hear you right now laughing at me and saying, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” I agree! You’re right, but it helped and worked. Sometimes you have to laugh at your own misery to make it through to the other side.

Remember Train Hard. Train Smart. And push through your personal limits.