Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

This is a biography/memoir of a guy named David Goggins. He had a tough life, abused by his father then growing up as the only black kid in small town Indiana. He didn’t do well in school, was very overweight, had a dead-end job, and a marriage that was on the rocks.

Then he decided to become a Navy SEAL. That sounds kind of anti-climatic, but that’s the truth: he just one day decided to lose 106 pounds in three months and go to SEAL school (technically, “BUDS,” for “Basic Underwater Demolition School”).

He had to do Hell Week three times, because he kept getting medically disqualified – first for pneumonia, then for a broken kneecap. When that happens, they drop you and you can start over, but you have to do it all again.

He finally graduated, and then got into ultra endurance racing while he was serving as a SEAL. And let me be perfectly clear about something – David Goggins is an absolute freak.

His idea of racing is running for 24 hours – he covered 101 miles. Or doing an “Ultraman,” which is something like a double IRONMAN. Or doing the Badwater 135, which is some insane race for 135 miles through Death Valley (I think the guy from Fitness Confidential talked about this same race). Or doing some hike that took him 36 hours to cover five laps – the last of which he had to walk and which took him eight full hours.

His description of these things is kind of disgusting to read. He urinates bloody sludge. He defecates on himself. He vomits regularly. Toenails are temporary.

The level to which he pushes himself is insane. At one point, he has shin splints so severe that they’re essentially two broken legs. He goes to a marathon to watch his wife (second wife; he married and divorced the first one, twice), and then literally at the last second, decides to run it… on two broken legs.

He tries to break the 24-hour pull-up record. He fails twice (once on the Today show), but eventually does 4,030 dead-hang pull-ups in 24 hours. To prep for this, he was doing 1,500 pull-ups per day in the weeks leading up to it.

And somewhere along the way, the Navy figures out he actually has a hole in his heart. He has surgery on that twice, because the first one didn’t work.

…and don’t forget, he’s an active Navy SEAL who did tours in Iraq. (Thought, perhaps oddly, there’s very little talk about his actually military service. I assume at least some of it is classified.)

He eventually gets moved into recruiting and PR because he’s Black and they’re trying to recruit more Black operators that will blend in better in Africa. Additionally, he uses his ultra racing “career” as a promotional device – he’ll run an ultra every weekend after talking at a bunch of area high schools, to reinforce how much of a bad-ass he is to potential recruits.

To top it off, he has this weird fetish with other special forces training. He goes to Army Ranger school (…just because, I guess?), and fails to pass Delta Force selection twice. There are a couple other ones in there – Air Force ParaRescue and something called “DEVGRU” – just for good measure.

This is all super-interesting, but the book also tries to be self-help, which means there are a lot of platitudes in there about getting super-hard and enjoying pain. I just don’t know how relevant this is to the average ready. I’ll repeat: David Goggins is a freak.

Example: at one point his wife is begging him to go to the ER after a race, and he’s curled up on the floor saying that he just wants to “stay in this pain” a little longer – how relevant is that for the average person?

Is David Goggins a total animal? Yes, no doubt. Will this transfer to anyone else? Not likely. To do what he does would be a fast track to physical injury for most people. I’m glad that he can push himself so hard, but his mindset and physical resiliance are clearly very rare.

This means that the self-help sections are about an inch deep and will apply to virtually no one (they boil to, “don’t stop”). I think that maybe he just wrote a memoir, and the publisher said, “You know, if you can turn this into a self-help book, we’ll sell 4x as many….”

I’m glad I read it, if for nothing other than the sheer horror and amazement at what Goggins does to himself. And if the self-help stuff inspires you, awesome. But I just don’t think there are many people like David Goggins, so I’m not sure how applicable it is beyond simple morbid fascination.

Book Data

Author

David Goggins

Year

2018

Pages

364

Acquired

Not recorded

Open Library

OL18108064W

• I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on August 8, 2026.
• A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.