I couldn’t completely escape notice. Despite all my exercise, despite all the PT and everything else, I had a lot of trouble with pull-ups.

I’m sure you know the routine—you put your arms up on the bar and pull yourself up. Then you lower yourself. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

In BUD/S, we had to hang from the bar and wait there until the instructor told us to start. Well, the first time the class set up, he happened to be standing right close to me.

“Go!” he said.

“Ugghhhh,” I moaned, pulling myself northward.

Big mistake. Right away I got tagged as being weak.

I couldn’t do all that many pull-ups to begin with, maybe a half-dozen (which was actually the requirement). But now, with all the attention, I couldn’t just slip by. I had to do perfect pull-ups. And many of them. The instructors singled me out, and started making me do more, and giving me a lot of extra exercise.

It had an effect. Pull-ups became one of my better exercises. I could top thirty without trouble. I didn’t end up the best in the class, but I wasn’t an embarrassment, either.

And swimming? All the work I’d done before getting to BUD/S paid off. Swimming actually became my best exercise. I was one of, if not the fastest, swimmers in the class

Again, minimum distances don’t really tell the story. To qualify, you have to swim a thousand yards in the ocean. By the time you’re done with BUD/S, a thousand yards is nothing. You swim all the time. Two-mile swims were routine. And then there was the time where we were taken out in boats and dropped off seven nautical miles from the beach.

“There’s one way home, boys,” said the instructors. “Start swimming.”