CHAPTER 1CHOOSE YOUR SUFFERING
RESILIENCE:
The capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress
“SUCCESS IS A FUNCTION OF PERSISTENCE AND DOGGEDNESS AND THE WILLINGNESS TO WORK HARD FOR TWENTY-TWO MINUTES TO MAKE SENSE OF SOMETHING THAT MOST PEOPLE WOULD GIVE UP ON AFTER THIRTY SECONDS.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author,
Nobody wants to get into a race to the death with David Goggins. I learned that the first time he came out to my town in 2018 to do what would become the first-ever Lift Run Shoot experience I shared with an outlier. We had a big Saturday planned that consisted of a 50K that would be followed by shooting bows, lifting weights, and then watching Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Since he came in the day before, we decided to take a run up Mount Pisgah. That’s when I saw the two sides of the man. There is the stoic David who you might share a cup of coffee with, then there’s Goggins who you throw raw meat at.
I normally take guests to Mount Pisgah, where we can share a run together. I can usually tell pretty quickly how good a runner somebody is in the first few hundred yards. As we took off up the backside of the hill, I thought to myself, Damn he’s got a long stride! At the time, he was living in Nashville, so I assumed that since there were no hills there, this was going to be the equalizer. But the farther up the mountain we got, his stride never changed. Normally when you’re running uphill, you shorten your stride—because if you don’t, you’re going to gas out—but Goggins’s stride never seemed to change.
This is gonna be rough.
He never faded in our run to the top of the mountain. After we finished, he remained calm and serious. I had grown used to Goggins, the badass who spoke to followers on social media, but David was cool to hang out with. I appreciated being able to train with somebody who was going to push me. And this was just our warm-up for the Frozen Trail Run 50K the next morning.
David Goggins has provided an incredible amount of inspiration, not just for me, but my family in general. For example, my son, Truett, who has been the Guinness Book of World Records holder of pull-ups in a day, got the idea to chase that title solely because David previously held it.
Photo by Ryan Loco
The following day was cold and rainy. Miles into the race, everybody was soaking wet. By mile 22, something started happening with Goggins’s feet. He had to untie his shoes and take them off, something that’s never a good sign 22 miles into a 32-mile 50K ultramarathon. Your feet get torn up in long races: toes can be bleeding, toenails are torn off. This is what happens. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I decided to keep chugging along. I assumed that David would get it figured out and would catch up with me. But I couldn’t help having doubts.
Maybe I won’t see him again?
But … no. Sure as shit, he caught back up with me and my brother, Taylor Spike, who was also running the race. By the time he reached us, he was running in a different groove. Just as we were going up this last grade to do one more summit in the race, my calf began to lock up so I couldn’t run it. As I started to power hike up the hill, that’s when Goggins took off. When I reached the top of the mountain, 30 miles into the race with only a couple left to go, I asked a cameraman who was up there how Goggins looked.
“Well, he had his shirt off”—remember, it was cold and rainy—and he was saying, “They don’t fucking know me! They don’t know me, son!’”
“Who was he saying that to?” I asked the cameraman.
“Nobody. There was nobody up there.”
Goggins got better the farther he ran. He crushed the second half of that race. I saw David turn into Goggins firsthand, and it was real. When shit got hard, he got into this different zone. He became better and tougher. All I could think was, This guy is different. And I loved it.
The same thing happened when we were lifting weights later that day. We had been doing as many reps as we could on the incline bench, true burnout sets, however many it took to get 100 reps, and this was after doing 600 total reps already during this weightlifting session. My younger son, Truett, who was 21 at the time, was working out with us as well. My trainer, Eric McCormack, was running us through the workout, so, on the last set, McCormack was standing behind Goggins, urging him on. I had been able to get in only 15 or maybe just 13 for my last set, but David switched to Goggins mode and pushed it. It was insane to watch. McCormack was calling off the numbers—“Nineteen! Twenty! Twenty-one!”—all while Goggins began to shout, “They don’t know me, son!” and “Who’s gonna carry the boats and the logs?” Most people get fatigued, but once again he showed us how he was actually getting stronger.
Say whatever you want about David, but when he morphs into Goggins, look out. He’s a whole different person; someone who’s unstoppable. Someone who is truly undeniable.
We all look for inspiration, for people to follow and emulate. Goggins is one of those people who I love the most. Good, hardworking people who embrace suffering. I fall in love with their spirit. Goggins is one of those guys that I know is never going to waver. You always know what you’re going to get with him. He understands what it takes to be undeniable.
“It’s a lot more than mind over matter,” Goggins wrote in his book Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. “It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.”
* * *
I am always looking to learn more about my breaking point and ability. I am drawn to challenges where success often hinges on one’s ability to deal with pain, to endure suffering. Bowhunting the country I love, the rugged mountains, is tough. Do it long enough and there will be many days that you’ll question why you subject yourself to such misery.
Sometimes I wonder if I am drawn to endeavors like bowhunting or extreme endurance running because I like the challenge or because I am good at suffering. I think it is because of the latter. I’ve been doing it a long time.
My mom and dad divorced when I was four going on five. He was a star athlete; she was a cheerleader. Theirs is not the first such union to fail. Young adults having kids is never easy. I’ve never blamed them or used the fact that I came from a “broken home” as a crutch. Just the opposite, in fact. Their divorce did hurt me and my younger brother, Pete, though. I think this was when I first learned to excel at suffering. I remember wanting nothing more than my mom and dad to be back together. Not having my dad around made my heart ache. He was like a god to me. And while I didn’t see him nearly as much as I wanted to after the split, his legend motivated me.
Kids many times put their parents on pedestals, but parents are not perfect. They screw up, and their kids are exposed to their flaws. That never really happened with my dad. He set the standard, was infallible and omnipresent. No one could ever compete. My mom remarried, and, of course, I hated my stepdad because he wasn’t Bob Hanes. There was drama in the house, and eventually I went to live with my dad. Suffering followed me.
Living with Dad was tough because I dearly missed my brother Pete, who opted to stay with Mom. Pete didn’t have the same connection with Dad because he was so young when our parents divorced. With Dad busy starting a new business and me missing Pete, I moved back with my mom. One good thing came out of it. My stepdad, trying to extend an olive branch of sorts, took me and Pete rifle hunting. I was 15, and Pete was 12. Right out of the gate, I was a good, successful hunter and an accurate shot. I went out by myself a lot, as while my stepdad got me started in the field, I still wasn’t that excited to hang out with him; accepting my stepdad felt like it meant I was disrespecting my real dad.
I kept filling tags until I was 19, when my buddy Roy Roth got me started in bowhunting. The timing was perfect. I needed the challenge of bowhunting. Rifle hunting wasn’t offering it.
At first, I was in over my head. My very first morning out with my bow, I had a big 6x7 bull elk come stomping into range, bugling the entire way. I was knelt down, shaking. My arms felt tingly, like they were asleep, and I wondered how I would ever get my bow pulled back. Even if I did, I had doubts that my tiny arrow could down the amazing beast that stood before me. I got my bow back and completely missed that big bull elk on the first shot, then somehow got another shot before he spooked and blew that shot too.
Learning from that mistake and many thereafter, I eventually found success that very first year after 18 straight days of elk hunting when I arrowed a spike bull elk. The next year, in my second season bowhunting in the woods near my hometown, I arrowed a 5-point bull elk, a black bear, and a Pope & Young blacktail buck.
It wasn’t long before I knew it was time to take this passion of bowhunting to the next level. I had my sights set on Oregon’s largest roadless wilderness area, the Eagle Cap. Roy and I headed toward the middle to the most remote area I could find on my topo map. We were 400 miles away from home; away from the only area we had ever hunted. Just as I had hoped, the Eagle Cap Wilderness was tougher than anything I had experienced. Not only was the hunting hard, but the country was overwhelming, and the conditions were extreme. It was a true test. I missed the comforts of home. I missed my loved ones. Being away hurt, and I was suffering. But that feeling was familiar.
The ache and the pain. The misery. I embraced it.
I thought of my family and my dad a lot in the mountains. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. I think they are right. The irony was that I loved the hunt, and my father never hunted. He never bought one hunting license in his entire life, and, in fact, he didn’t get why anyone would hunt. Regardless of this, he was always proud of my accomplishments. But those accomplishments came from those early days of suffering in the wilderness.
Shared suffering builds bonds. I first discovered this with Roy Roth. Before he ever invited me to start bowhunting, I already knew something about suffering, but my misery came from hating my life and never feeling happy. The only suffering my body felt came from being lonely or the morning after a long night of drinking. I never realized that one day I would welcome suffering and, actually, that I would thrive on suffering. The wilderness offered a different sort of misery. This was the kind that helped you grow and made you stronger.
Roy understood this well. It came from venturing into the rugged and treacherous wilderness. Of course, not everybody would view this kind of suffering as a positive thing. Most people wouldn’t want anything to do with it. So, when Roy moved to Alaska in the early 1990s, just as I was all in on backcountry bowhunting, I had to learn to suffer by myself.
The pain felt wonderful.
The first “intellectual” I ever interviewed was Chris Williamson. I was stressed out because that’s not my forte, but it turned out to be one of my most popular podcasts, and his “unchosen suffering” take from the discussion went viral.
* * *
You find out what type of person somebody is when they put a fucking rock on their back. That’s why I love the Lift Run Shoot experience.
My fourth guest to visit was Chris Williamson. Even though I had been following him for a while and loving the content he was putting on his Modern Wisdom podcast, I was able to get to know him more and to dive deeper into this theme of suffering while showing him my daily routine. In some ways, Williamson’s childhood resembled my own. He was an only child living in a northeast town of England called Stockton-on-Tees. As someone really unpopular and bullied at school, he grew up convinced that he was flawed and chronically meant to be alone. I understood this feeling. But this drove him to become the man he has become today.
“Most of the high performers that I know about are coming from a place of insufficiency,” Chris told me. “They’re trying to prove something to that parent, that teacher, that bully, that group of friends or whoever from their childhood that they actually are worthy of love or praise or acceptance or admiration.”
When he first got to a university, Williamson wanted to have an excuse to party for free, so he became a club promoter and became very good at it. He and his business partner built a successful business. In his late 20s, he became widely known to the British public when he ended up on a reality dating show called Love Island. To Chris, this big reality TV dating show was the pinnacle of the party-boy world championships. But suddenly he found that he didn’t like his life.
“I thought, Is this really all that I’ve got to offer the world? You know: me in tiny swim shorts prancing about on TV. Not that that’s not nothing, but it just felt like there was something else missing. And even though I loved the work that I’d done, it felt like being a crab that kind of was outgrowing his shell somehow.”
Williamson found meaning and purpose after two of his friends invited him on their podcast, and he discovered that he really enjoyed it. He thought, If I do this on my own, I can do this as much as I want. So, in 2018 he started his own podcast. Five years later when we spoke, Modern Wisdom had 600 episodes.
When Williamson came to visit, he admitted that he hadn’t run in a long time but rather only did little jogging warm-ups in between lifting. For a while, he did CrossFit. After picking him up at the airport, I took him to shoot some arrows at The Bow Rack, the archery pro shop in Springfield, Oregon, that opened in 1971. After that I drove by the house I grew up in and the first place I used to hunt. I wanted to give him the perspective I had when I was in my early 20s.
“I thought if I could have a little mobile home like that,” I said, motioning to a trailer we were driving by at the time, “and a decent truck that I could count on getting me to work—if that was my setup right there, I thought I’d be set. My own little place and a truck. That was going to be my life. That was the goal.”
“What’s the goal now?” Chris asked me.
“I don’t know. I feel like I’m playing with house money. Since a trailer and truck was my goal, and I have more than that, I can’t lose. I already won, no matter what happens. I should never have made it out of this small town and don’t really know how I did.”
I elaborated on my attitude of feeling like I didn’t deserve everything I had, like the house I owned or the life I was leading. I told Chris I felt like somebody was going to figure that out, and everything was going to go away in a snap.
“There are people out here who work their ass off who will never have what I have, so why should I have it?” I explained.
Chris told me this was a feeling that he really struggled with himself, a feeling that he was only now starting to get past.
“I think it’s a by-product of coming up in a super-working-class background, where you associate the amount of money that you deserve—or the recognition or whatever—not only with the amount of work that you put in but the amount of suffering associated with that work. And this sort of Puritan work ethic—it’s what my country is very good at. So, you can imagine these priests in the Middle Ages, and the sun’s beating down on their back, and their hoeing the ground in the garden. But they’re not doing it necessarily for what the work achieves. It’s the work itself. It’s in service of God. Right? That’s that Puritan work ethic. It’s almost like self-flagellation. They’re making themselves hurt because the sacrifice is their tribute.”
After shooting arrows, we took a warm-up run up Mount Pisgah before grabbing the 72-pound rock in my truck. The clouds had settled over the 1,060-foot-tall mountain, so we jogged in a thick fog for about 7 miles before heading back to the truck to pick up the rock. We took turns hauling it up the mountain. Chris learned something that everybody who comes learns eventually:
There is no good way to carry a giant rock up a mountain.
As we were nearing the top of Pisgah, I took over carrying the rock and went ahead while Chris continued walking and caught his breath. The guys were there filming him, so they captured his thoughts.
“I respect Cam,” he said. “I admire him a lot. I’ve got to learn a lot from him today. There’s not much else I could do right now that would fulfill me more than this. I mean, it could be a bit warmer, I guess. But again, we’re gonna have some elk chili later on, and it’s going to taste a lot better because we’ve done this. And also, man, I work hard, right? I put myself through difficult things, especially cognitively. But I can’t push myself this hard without a reason to do it. Performance without a purpose is one hell of a skill to have. No one there cheering you on. No race to prepare for. No finish line. No glory. No nothing. Yet he still performs. He still pushes hard. And I suck at that. I find it very, very hard to put myself into the place that Cam’s put me in today without a Cam there.”
After taking turns with the rock until reaching the cloudy summit, all that was left was to lift, then we would have earned our suffering for the day. It turned out that this would be one of the themes of our discussion the following day when we spoke about taking that rock up the mountain.
“Why I like doing it is because when someone suffers, there’s never a more honest time,” I said. “When you’re suffering, you can’t fake it. That’s one reason why the Mob has used torture: they’re going to find out the truth about a person. The military makes their men suffer because they want to find out who’s weak and who’s the best. Because you cannot lie when you’re suffering.”
I asked Chris whether he thought suffering was the ultimate truth teller, the ultimate truth serum? He said it definitely opens people up, and he proceeded to the concept of chosen and unchosen suffering from David Goggins’s latest book, Never Finished. Unchosen suffering is going to happen in life: like your parents passing away, and relationships breaking down, and your body failing you. Things are going to happen that you have no control over, Chris said, and the only way that you can prepare yourself for unchosen suffering is with chosen suffering.
“You can elect to put yourself into a position to become a stronger alloy of whatever the metal is that you’re made of,” Chris stated. “And by purposefully choosing difficult things, you will arm yourself against that situation … Every single person that I know that is incredibly successful in a balanced way and has a good perspective on it elects to do very hard things regularly. It humbles them. It reminds them that they’re just mortal. And it also means that if the entire mainstream media apparatus tries to come down on top of you—let’s say just as a hypothetical—you can deal with it because you know that you’ve dealt with a thousand disgusting kettlebell workouts followed by a cold tub.”
Launching arrows with Chris Williamson
The other concept Williamson spoke about was also from Goggins’s latest book: performance without a purpose.
“I found that very interesting because a lot of the time people need an excuse to perform. They need a race to be working toward a goal, a holiday, a photo shoot, a wedding. And that is what drives them forward. And, you know, that’s not nothing. That’s an incredibly powerful, potent motivator. But if you can manage to perform without that, that’s real power. Because it means that not only are you going to choose your suffering, but you’re going to continue to hit close to your maximum performance with no finish line, no crowd celebrating your completion, no glory. No nothing. And that’s why you carrying this fucking pointless rock uphill with marker pen on it that reads ‘Poser,’ with no one there. That’s why that’s impressive.”
As we talked about Goggins, I said I believed he was the master of self-motivation. Williamson shared how the two of us were similar in regard to motivating ourselves.
“The desire to prove other people wrong is a fucking potent fuel, but it is toxic,” he said. “I do think that as much as proving other people wrong is great and useful and can get you a good amount of the way there, I do wonder how much peace you find with that. And I asked Goggins that as well. ‘Have you found peace?’ And he said, ‘When you go to war with yourself, you find an awful lot of peace.’ So maybe the only way out is through stuff like this.”
Williamson expressed how he wished that the Gogginses of the world—those people who were daily doing these sorts of things of going to war with themselves—could go to bed with a little peace, knowing they had made a sacrifice trying to inspire others. But then he wondered if having a little bit more inner peace would mean those people would be less motivated and disciplined.
Hearing that word peace made me think of something else a lot of people say, how the key is balance.
Copyright © 2025 by Cameron Hanes
