Teamwork. The first team to bend their arms on the log had to go back to water torture.





Other than team work, my own motivation was a huge factor to get me through. I literally used every comment that was said to me or quote from books I had read, whatever to help motivate me and continue. (The Red Circle by Brandon Webb was very interesting and motivating). I had a few people tell me that “statistics show” I most likely would not finish and others just say I probably wouldn’t make it through the first half. I believe some said this to try and motivate me by trying to prove them wrong and some I think just didn’t want me to be disappointed if I did drop. Of course I did have a lot of encouraging words from others saying I would do great and I appreciate all the positive comments I got before and during (aka my team) the Heavy.





I was lucky to have a lot of other forms of motivation to help me through, and an important one to me was to have my expectation to finish, to suck it up and keep going. I knew it was going to be miserably cold there and a little bit hard to prepare for exactly how cold, so the “Don’t Fucking Quit” (DFQ) phrase went right along with this holding up my expectation of finishing. When we were doing bear crawls through that freezing cold, muddy water right after log PT and I could feel rocks digging into the palms of my hands, along with the cadre yelling at me to go faster, I just kept telling myself to suck it up and that they had been here before most likely going through a lot more than what we were doing. Also, the cadre told us to go faster because they really were serious about doing it again if you were too slow or came in last (It pays to be a winner.) To reiterate a strong point - expect yourself to finish and to push yourself farther and harder than any other challenge. If you expect those random moments of complete insanity, it will be much easier to take them on with your team and push through them.