About five years ago I completed a GORUCK Light. It went about 4 and a half hours. It was unquestionably the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done. I have done a three day 57 mile backpacking trip up and over Mt. Whitney which was a more impressive feat, but that was when I was 26. I did this other thing 31 years later. I thought I was in shape. I thought it would be a 10 mile walk with a 20 pound backpack. I showed up in the wrong shoes, wrong pants, wrong backpack, in the wrong shape with the right attitude. I finished. It took a week to get all of the sand out of my hair. I still have the scars on my hips.
I have been thinking about what it takes to get us to face the hardest realities. Falling ill with Covid this September has helped me get into that mode. In 2018 I was dealing with my son’s mental illness slowly dropping him out of society as he lost the mountain of charm that made him the All-American Boy Scout that he once was. I was preparing for all kinds of loss and I eventually got through it. He has hit bottom about three or four times since then. I have become more anti-fragile since then. But there have been no close calls with the kind of desperate helplessness I felt in the year my son went zombie. I can’t say that intellectually I have become complacent, but even though I wake up every morning at 5:30 AM out of my old circuit-training habit, I can’t get in the mood to do that thing. I’m trying to change that.
It’s difficult for me to estimate how off track my life has become in my adjustments to the shenanigans of American life. So I try to compensate by immersing myself in the literature of tragedy, hardship and war. These days I enjoy watching the punishments of football plays broken up and the unforgiving nature of the game. I try not to be a sucker for the tacticool worship of first responders, special operators and NOC agents. But today I watched yet another GORUCK video, and I remembered my cadres yelling at me on my little expedition.
It’s marketing, but it’s also real. Unlike marathons and other games, these exercises are designed to bring you to the breaking point. You don’t quit until you quit and then you know you are a quitter. It’s the harshest reality of them all, to be physically broken, to be mentally broken. To suffer the humiliation of undeniable failure. There’s a special kind of courage necessary to walk into the maw of that inevitable pain. And yet it’s really a game. A war game, one that takes you beyond your limit, but only beyond your voluntary limit. I haven’t watched any reality shows recently. Do any of them do that?
I keep wondering how ass backwards we have to push our society until those who love liberty and have this kind of disciplined experience lose their patience with our perpetual whinging and victimology. I wonder when they become like the parents of us GenXers and tell us they’re going to give us something to cry about. I wonder if I’m going to go do all those pushups or if I’m just kidding myself and am never going to let anyone push me around again. Right now I’m ready to subject myself to it.
You see I’m down to the weight I would be comfortable with for the rest of my life. I figured out the diet thing. It’s basically brain dead simple. Eat less. Move more. So I can do six pull-ups in a row, twice as many as a year ago. I could probably manage 12 in three gos, but I haven’t challenged myself that much. Still, I’m getting better.
We’re coming up on the end of football season, and I still haven’t made room for the situp bench I got for Christmas in my garage. The tree is down, but the ornament boxes are still in the way. In time however, it will be time to test my Stoicism’s rationality in pushing myself to irrational limits. I’m not afraid to die, but more importantly, I’m not afraid to live and living takes pushing myself hard. That’s what’s next. I hear Zuck is building a billionaire bunker somewhere and the Thiel has been barred from building his in New Zealand. Building redoubts marks the beginning of a feudal age. Maybe Trump crosses the Rubicon this year. Maybe this time next year we’ll all be sorry we didn’t do our pushups. Just saying.