Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life

by Thom Shea

  Within a month, I had secured four top-of-the-line mountain bikes and all the gear we needed. All my sponsors wanted in return was our committed effort to do the best we could to represent their products. Most people want connection to each other and want to feel needed. The excitement of everything coming together, and the exhilaration of being able to cold-call anyone pushed me to call two of the wealthiest men I knew. I was so confident I was not going to embarrass the team or the SEALs with our effort that during these two cold calls, I asked for a specific amount and explained where, how, and why I needed it. Both men said yes, and were happy to help. We were $20,000 on the way. The race fees were paid in full, and travel costs were easily met.

  Three days before the start, we found two attractive women as support crew—trust me, pretty women make a man perform better. With the two vehicles packed, we headed out. Four hours into the road trip, we were on the side of the road with three flat tires. Everyone was ticked off and blaming each other—my first real-world leadership experience outside the military. My solution was to say, “We are all in this together. Keep working the problem until it is solved. I think we are in good shape. We have money for tires and time before the start. Two of us can stay here and drink beer while the other four get the tires.” I am sure more words were exchanged, but I felt being in the moment and not making people mad was a better solution than pointing out who messed up and how this would affect the time line.

  Finally, we came to race day. Everyone handles stress uniquely, and SEALs are already unique. Two of us studied maps and checked gear, one spent the entire night trying to more than engage our race crew, and one went to a bar and drank. My second key leadership lesson came on day one, two hours before the race started. With his two hours of sleep and the smell of booze permeating the air, it occurred to me to laugh and say aloud to my drunken teammate, “How can I help you? Can I carry your pack?” He politely said, “No, I am good. There ain’t no way I am going to let you tell everyone you carried me through this race. No way.”

  With that, we headed to the start line and out on the first leg of the race—twelve miles straight uphill from 8,000 to 11,500 feet, and back down to 9,000 feet. A strange thing occurs to me at the start of any race or situation I have chosen. I feel truly alive. Nothing else matters but that moment. The air was crisp and I could smell the dirt and high mountain air. The ground was exceptionally noisy as the dirt and pebbles gritted under my feet. I recall an odd sound for the entire first hour, like a metronome of step/grind/step/grind. My body felt alive, my legs strong, though my breathing was rapid due to the thin air at that altitude.

  By the end of the first leg, all the booze had miraculously worked its way out of my buddy’s system, through one end or the other, and we jumped on our bikes for an eight-hour mountain bike ride to Provo and Utah Lake.

  During the first twenty hours, we reached thirteenth place out of fifty-eight teams. We made a strategic, dangerous navigational move to chop off ten miles of easy riding for one mile of cliffhanger riding. As we traversed this cliff on a twenty-inch ledge, one foot kicking off the wall for support, the other hanging precariously in space, my buddy turned to me and said, “Falling off the ledge would be easier, wouldn’t it?” I smiled and said, “Maybe for you, but I’d have to drag your ass the rest of the way. And if you died, how would I explain that to your wife and daughter?” Then I realized my state of exhaustion, “Brother, I think we need to stop soon. I can’t focus at all.”

  In adventure racing, when you think you need to stop, it is already too late, and you end up stopping right where you are: eating, drinking, and sleeping in that exact spot. We thought stopping on a ledge with bikes made no sense, but stop we did and slept for an hour. When we woke, daylight came, and things were far scarier than they had seemed at night. I had somehow wedged my bike into a crack in the wall, pulled out my sleeping bag, and crawled in. My legs were hanging off the cliff, and my feet were swollen terribly from hanging like that for an hour. I was too scared to move. Looking at the other three, I could tell they, too, were freaked. Finally, I managed to get my body out of the sleeping bag without falling, grabbed it and my bike, and shuffled the next 200 feet to more secure footing. Once we were all off the ledge, we laughed so hard we cried.

  The next ten miles were uneventful, and the thought of reprieve from the heat in a long paddle around Utah Lake silenced the demons of our Internal Dialogues for a while. Sometimes, small moments of good thoughts make all the difference. When the sun comes up, especially in an outdoor adventure race, spirits soar and attitudes shift automatically. Millions of years of genetic programming kicks in when you leave the confines and rules of today’s society behind. Sun means energy … and you can see better.

  As we traversed the maze of bike routes and trails mandated by the race committee, we wondered where we would rank when we pulled into the transition area (TA) and met our crew and other racers. We hadn’t seen another team in six hours. Since I was navigator, and we had made interesting navigation choices earlier, I wondered if we had made a bad choice. But I didn’t reveal my misgivings to the rest of the team. Nothing can crush physical effort faster than a lack of faith in the navigator. After an hour we turned a corner and rode into the transition area.

  Checking in, we noticed only two other teams had officially arrived, and none had decided to get on the water. We were third. Here is where it got interesting. We had a choice to make, and our choice could either crush us or put us in the lead: rest and eat slowly, or grab food and paddle gear and get to the water ahead of all the others. My body was screaming for rest and food. My eyes burned from riding all night without protective glasses. Since I was a mountain-biking virgin, I had never considered getting clear eye protection to keep the wind from blasting my eyes. So we all suffered.

  My body ached where the saddle had rubbed it raw. The thought of sitting in a kayak made the choice even more difficult. Moving toward our crew and gear, we saw the British team move toward the boats with their paddles in hand. The choice now made, all the exhilaration of the sun and the new day faded. SEALs cannot stand to be near the front and not be first.

  The girls on our crew had set breakfast out on the table and were hurt when we said we were grabbing our food and paddle gear and leaving. Looking back, I realize our choice, and how we interacted with the crew, completely shut them down for the next three days. I realized I needed to apologize and thank them for their effort. This is a key element in human performance I will never forget. I want you to learn this point, too: recognize the effect you have on others, and acknowledge others’ contributions, no matter how small. Human connection pays dividends in the business of performance and team dynamics.

  With paddle gear on and food bags in hand, we moved to the boats and made our way to the shore. The route seemed straightforward, and the mountains around the lake provided easy navigational landmarks. But water is never to be trifled with, a lesson we had all learned in SEAL training.

  The first of the four legs was a five-mile, straight-line paddle to the lake’s south side, where there was to be a punch-style marker on the bank. As we got into the rhythm of paddling and eating and drinking, we easily pushed through the first leg and found the marker. Each consecutive marker was the same, but as the heat grew, so did the wind and waves. We had a slight tailwind on the first two legs. However, the next three legs were harder. As the wind picked up to 20 mph, we noticed no other teams were on the lake. We were alone and exhausted on a huge lake in the middle of an adventure race with fifty-eight other teams who had paid to do this, and not one other team had ventured forth … surreal. But we pressed on and tried to keep each other in sight.

  The struggle was overwhelming. We weren’t making headway paddling into the wind. The other boat crew dropped a food bag in the water and we had to rescue it—a desperate mission costing us energy and an hour. After recovering the food and pulling into the bank to find the last marker, we were spent. I knew I didn’t have the str
ength to paddle into a crosswind for three more hours. We had a what-are-we-doing-here talk, then rested on the shore for an hour and prayed the wind would die down. It didn’t. And the temperature rose to 100 degrees, leaving us even more broken.

  Finally, we decided to just do it, and we’d sleep in the air-conditioned van for three hours when we got to the transition area. I knew we’d be blown down the leg by the crosswind, but we had seen a bike path next to the east side of the lake and had agreed that if we were blown south, we would get out and carry the kayak instead of paddling into the wind. Noble thoughts: don’t you just love them?

  The first mile took one hour. Near the middle of Utah Lake, four jet skis pulled up alongside and said they had been sent to escort us. All the other teams had been held back, so we had been the only team to complete the paddle. The other teams were on an eight-hour race delay. Nice, I recall thinking, we can rest for eight hours and start anew, and we would need to.

  The next two miles took three hours. As we pulled into the transition area, the race director met us with a congratulatory handshake and said the teams had been put on an eight-hour delay. For some reason this made sense, but as we dragged the boats up and limped to our support crew, I noticed ten teams were mounted on their bikes, listening to the race director count down … 5, 4, 3, 2. “What’s happening?” I asked my buddies. “You mean they all got to sleep eight hours, and we took eight hours to complete the paddle? Are you kidding me?”

  My protests to the race director must not have been clear. I thought I was speaking English, but after that paddle, maybe I wasn’t. He just couldn’t understand why I was saying we needed an eight-hour rest, too. I just recall telling him he was an idiot. My remark would come back to haunt us, but the damage was done. He was an idiot, and we were exhausted.

  We sat and ate the meal the girls had laid out—delicious, but I can’t even recall what it was. I sent the rest of the team to bed and got out the maps for the next leg. In trying to plot the points and keep my eyes open, I somehow calculated the next leg to be 125 miles of mountain biking. When I woke, I was still sitting in the front seat of the van, air-conditioning still on, with the maps all over me. My legs were asleep, and I had peed all over myself. That didn’t bother me as much as waking up the others and saying, “OK, time to roll. The next leg is 125 miles; pack at least thirty hours of food.”

  The girls had left in the other car to get us food. It wasn’t their fault. No one had told them the plan. I had been the leader. I had fallen asleep and smelled like an outhouse. A great role model.

  Just when we mounted and were headed out, the girls rolled in, so we turned around and ate what they had brought us. I asked them to wash our gear and told them we wouldn’t see them again for at least a day. They were wearing bikini tops, creating an interesting conversation for the next two hours.

  Endurance cross-country mountain biking is no joke, but doing it while exhausted, carrying thirty hours of food and water, and a sleeping bag, is a joke. It is actually funny because it hurts so badly. We had hard-tailed bikes, and every bump felt like it punched the saddle into my stomach. The first three hours took us from the valley floor up 4,500 feet, to some unnamed pass.

  We rode until we couldn’t any longer, then got off and pushed. We made a valiant effort, laughing at the pain, telling stories about the crew, and joking about life, with a pedal continually catching on the back of my calf and eventually tearing a hole in it. I finally picked up the bike and carried it for the last mile. As we approached the top, we passed the first of the teams who had slept for eight hours. When we passed them, they had questioning looks in their eyes.

  Once on top, we stopped where two other teams were resting and joined them in a celebration of Snickers bars and Gatorade. They told us we looked like hell. Finally, a woman on the French team said, “You guys will never complete this course. You are pushing too hard.”

  In the midst of a beautiful sunset and the flavor of chocolate and Gatorade, the sound of a predator—me—snapped and broke the silence, “Fuck you, Frenchie. Why don’t you shave your armpits?” The prey huddled into a herd of four, and the predators—us—moved off.

  The rest of the night was a blur of branches, cliffs, rocks, and glancing at my map. We babbled on about women, family, and anything else that came to mind as the night wore on. We crossed several streams and took time to replenish our water, rest, and eat. The sun rose on four guys who no longer cared. My knees were hurting from the lack of mountain bike training … and about fifty falls on the trails. I noticed one of my teammates had blood running down his inner thighs. When I asked him what had happened—I didn’t recall him falling or crying out in pain—he said, “My ass is bleeding from the seat.”

  Since I am a SEAL corpsman, I felt as if I should be able to help him. When we stopped, I said, “Let’s see the damage.” He dropped his shorts, bent over, and spread his cheeks. What I was seeing didn’t register. He had a blister the shape of his bike saddle, torn open and bleeding. He turned and said, “I think I am crowning. Could you please deliver my baby?”

  I didn’t laugh. I felt impending doom that we were out of the race. No human could endure his pain. Yet he simply said, “Just shoot lidocaine in it, and I will get it done.” So, with needle and syringe, Doc Shea delivered a mountain-bike baby, complete with a spank on the ass for good measure. Seeing him cringe settling onto the bike seat made me admire the commitment of SEALs, and his mastery of his own thoughts—his ordeal would have made lesser men quit. If his own Internal Dialogue was anything like what he projected on his “loudspeaker,” no mere mortal could have stayed the course.

  My focus was terrible, gone. Our brilliant strategy had, like so many other great plans, met reality. The overall plan had been divided in two. The first part: eat and drink methodically. Clearly, we all had learned through SEAL training that the body could go for a long, long time when well hydrated and fed. We had separated food into eight-hour bags filled with GU packs, jerky, Snickers, and such. Water was also an easy plan. We all carried three-liter camelbacks and two water bottles. The plan for eating and drinking was simple: consume 150 calories every thirty minutes, and drink five swallows of fluid every fifteen minutes. We would replenish our water when anyone noticed they were below half. Initially, replenishing water had been easy—streams and wells were shown on the map—yet we didn’t see water for three hours. I looked again at the map, in a state of, “I just want the pain to end,” but I could find no more water shown for the next fifty miles.

  Finally, at the bottom of a long uphill section, I stopped and brought this water problem to everyone’s attention. Each man had a chance to look at the map and get needed rest from the punishment of being in the saddle for seventy miles of brutal single-track. The decision was clear: divide all the water and food into quarters, slow down, and hope we could find water. Then the bomb hit. One of my guys noticed he had dropped one of his eight-hour food bags. He thought it had been at our last stop, twenty-five miles back, at the top of a 10,000-foot peak.

  “Thom, um, I only have six hours of food left. How many more hours to go?” he whispered.

  “You don’t have two bags? The rest of us do. We have at least twelve hours left, and the terrain from here to the transition is grim. Gonna get hotter and …” I can’t repeat what I said and thought.

  With that, we threw all the food into a pile and did the old one-for-me, one-for-you trick. After everything was shuffled we realized a sick truth. We had seven hours of food and five hours of water, but twelve-plus hours of mountain biking through the heat of the Utah high desert. We sat silently for several minutes. I lay back on the ground, looking up at the clouds, and let the facts sink in. It was no longer safe to continue, and no longer safe to go back. We were at an impasse.

  Oddly, we had not seen another team for six hours. We all knew exactly where we were on the map—it was clear as a bell—we were in hell. “We can’t just sit here. Give me the map, let’s see if there is a road
we can get to and flag down a car, and get the hell out of here,” my buddy suggested.

  Sitting in utter misery wondering how we had allowed this to happen, I said, “Let’s just get on the bikes and find water. The deer must drink somewhere, even without a map.”

  Instead of mounting up, we just pushed the bikes up the hill and rested when one of us needed it. We did this for the next twenty miles, off and on, going from shade to shade. Finally, we saw two teams sitting on the side of a fire road. We limped up to the group and asked if they were OK or needed anything, though we had nothing to give them, and no intention of giving up our precious water.

  An interesting thing happened. The two teams had quit and called the race director on the emergency satellite phones provided. We had not thought to ask or call for rescue. They said if we waited with them, the truck would be there within the next two hours.

  Simultaneously, we four looked at each other and smiled. I looked at the two other team captains and said, “I’ll pay you $200 for all your food and water. We ran out, and would appreciate help.” With that, we extended our stores another four hours. This seemed like a victory as we pulled away from the “foolish quitters.” I didn’t realize for another hour that we still didn’t have enough food and water to complete the leg.

  Consider the phenomenon of being closer to the finish line or the end. The finish calls to you. Maybe this is what people summiting Everest go through, and why so many die so close to the summit. All these thoughts went through my mind … we were going to die here. But I became angry—not at myself, not at my men—just angry. I told myself not completing that leg was NOT an option. We would simply find a way to make it through this hell.

  Cresting a hilltop, we found the last place with trees before the descent into a bowl and a lake, where the transition area was set. I suggested a pause until the temperature cooled down. It was 3:00 p.m., the hottest point of the day. So we pulled off the trail into a shaded section of pines, pulled out our bags, stripped off our shoes, and lay there drifting in and out of consciousness. Around 7:00 p.m. we all came back from la-la land into hell, and the temperature was markedly cooler. Clouds had moved in. We packed up without speaking, mounted up, and headed out. Two hours later we ran out of food and water, and the sun went down.