How to make yourself hard to kill, according to a special operator

Time and again in my line of work, people ask me, "What did you do to prepare?" I usually respond with some sort of reference to steel genitalia, eating large amounts of bacon, and shooting nails from my eyes. That usually wows people.

After the hilarity that is EVERY encounter with me, I give them an answer that always seems to underwhelm. "I try to be as strong as I can. All the time. I just want to be the strongest guy out there. That's my number one goal. Then it's cardio and mobility."

Seriously, that's it.

If you want, I can get into long physiological discussions about how stronger people are less taxed by the same effort expressed on an event by a weaker person. There are so many examples out there, I won't even bother to ham-handedly try to quote them or paraphrase a saying they came up with.

Do you wanna geek out and banter about the Krebs Cycle? Wanna quote grip strength tests designed by dudes that don't lift trying to extrapolate the best anaerobic exercise for slow twitch muscle fiber performance? Well, tough crap, I am not that good. The point is this — I can stomp on the ground and scream until I am blue in the face, but it doesn't matter. I can only tell you what I have seen, and what I think works.

The fact of the matter is this: the stronger man nearly always wins. This isn't story time, and Goliath wins in real life kids. The freakishly strong 30-year-old whips the young buck more frequently than he doesn't. The underdog is a great story — but there is a reason why he is the underdog. It's cause no one thinks he can win, and he most likely won't. Think Vision Quest: could Louden Swain really beat Shute? Uh, hell no. That dude carried logs up and down steps like, all day, like a damn boss. Plus, Shute looked like he was about 195 pounds as a high school wrestler, and Matthew Modine's character dropped to 168 pounds to fight him… sorry, I digress.