WHOOP Podcast - Green Beret Kevin Flike shares his inspirational comeback story after being wounded by war.

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Kevin Flike thought he was about to die. After being shot in the stomach while serving as a Green Beret in Afghanistan, Kevin underwent a long and difficult path to recovery, battling pain, addiction, and loss as part of his remarkable comeback story. He joins Will Ahmed to discuss that journey and his newfound mission to help others by sharing his experiences. Kevin covers why he joined the army (2:11), what made him want to be a Green Beret (5:20), working hand-in-hand with the Afghan people (8:39), the stressful nature of his deployments (10:52), the 11-hour fight with the Taliban that changed his life (16:36), how his life was spared by a matter of inches (19:25), being saved by an Afghan commando and his fellow soldiers (21:25), what was going through his mind before his life-saving surgery (26:24), why he saved the bullet that nearly killed him (26:36), coming to peace with death (27:25), the importance of living without regret (30:09), the severity of his wounds and the invasive and experimental surgery that was needed after being shot (36:30), struggling with the loss of teammates (37:13), becoming addicted to painkillers (42:38), how his wife helped him through the darkest period of his life (45:31), finding WHOOP and training for the Boston Marathon (50:39), and his new mission to help others (55:45).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

I had a conversation with myself at 26 that most people don't have until they're 80 or 90. I started to ask myself questions about my life. Like, what kind of man are you? Like, did you live your life the way that you wanted to live your life? I ultimately came to the conclusion that I hadn't because you always think you have the next time. And today is it for you. You woke up for the last time today. And in that moment, I've never felt so terrible in my life.

Hello, folks. Welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop. At Whoop, we are on a mission to unlock human performance. So we build technology that helps you understand your body. That includes hardware, includes software, includes analytics. And this podcast for me has been an opportunity to sit down with people who use Whoop, people who are high performing individuals who live a performance lifestyle. and really just figure out from them what makes them tick. Our guest this week is the retired Green Beret Kevin Flike, who is certainly a high-performance individual and a true inspiration. He was badly wounded while serving in Afghanistan. He endured this unbelievable path to recovery. He had unbelievable pain. He got shot in the stomach.

It led to experimental surgeries and addiction to painkillers. He lost his friends who were killed in. action and really we discuss all the ways that Kevin's managed to overcome the hardship in his life and create healthy mindsets going forward. Kevin is now actually training for his first Boston Marathon, which is unbelievable considering at one point he could barely walk. And he's someone I just find truly inspiring. I think no matter what your background is, you'll find Kevin's story fascinating. So without further ado, here is Kevin. Kevin, thanks for coming on the Wood Podcast.

Hey, Will, thanks so much for having me here. So you've had an amazing career and specifically a few fascinating life moments, which we're going to talk about. I thought it would be helpful just to start with, why did you join the Army? That's a great question. I'm from a small town in upstate New York called Stillwater, which is an incredible place to grow up. And I had a lot of people that were just very involved in my life.

my family was very fortunate and this wantingness to kind of serve other people was always instilled in myself and my brother's and I was very fortunate to attend an all-boys Catholic military school for six years. It's a little bit different than most people's high school experience but you know it really taught me kind of like love God, love country and put others above yourself and I think that exposure to the military really kind of led me down this path of you know I want to serve and I want to serve people, and I think this is the avenue to do it. So my freshman year there, we were watching a Navy SEAL Hell Week video in the military science class. Half the class is wondering why anybody would want to do that, and the other half isn't paying attention because they're 14, and I'm like, that looks awesome.

That's what I want to do in my life. So I became fascinated with special operations, like the camaraderie, the brotherhood, how difficult it was to get in the dangerousness of the missions. then 9-11 happens in my senior high school. So it goes from this fascination to like this is an obligation. So went to college fully with the intention of joining the military afterwards and started looking at all the special operations branches that were out there from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and the Green Berets just stood out to me because their mission statement,

they oppress O'Lebert, to free the oppressed. I was like, that's it. That's what I want to do. I want to learn languages. I want to live with foreign cultures, train their militaries, their militias, be this warrior diplomat. And from that point on, like, that's exactly what I wanted to do. Frame the difference between the Green Beret and other pockets of the military. Yeah, I mean, when you look at the, like the special operations community, for instance,

people will always say to me, well, it's like a Green Beret better than a Navy SEAL. And, you know, all that joking, you're like, yeah, of course they are. It's a green beret, right? But I think, you know, every unit within the special operations serves a unique purpose. And the men and women that make up those units do incredibly well at what they're doing. Like the seals are great at what they do. The Rangers are great at what they do. The Green Berets are great at what they do.

And I don't think that there's really an ability to compare and say which one's better than the other. They just kind of have these different mission sets. But I think of that underlying theme is some pretty incredible human beings that make up these organizations. What was the training process like for becoming a green beret? Yeah. So for me, I took a kind of a unique path. After college, instead of going to officer candidate school, I decided to enlist in the Army, which most people will go to college, then they'll become an officer. But they had this new program where you could essentially sign up to go to special forces training or selection. And if you're lucky enough to get selected,

then you got to go on to training. And so for me, Like, I knew that's exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the Green Beret. I wanted a shot at this. When people are like, hey, like 10 or 15% of people make it through it, I'm like, I'll do it. I'll be part of that. Sure. So the training started for me, like four months of basic training, infantry training,

airborne school, then went to Special Forces selection for about a month and was fortunate enough to get selected to continue training. And you kind of, you're so happy. You're like, this was brutal month. I can't believe this. And you're like, the hard days are behind me. And then it's like, no, I've actually just invited increasing levels of misery. And so kind of for the next year and a half went through the training process at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, which was, you're doing a lot of like, you know, a tactics portion of it.

You're going to do a survival school portion of it. You dedicate anywhere between three months to a year depending on your specialty of learning your specialty. And I was an engineer on my team. So a lot of explosives, a lot of construction. And then the languages are a huge component of the Green Berets, right? Because you have to build this rapport. Yeah, it's so interesting. Yeah, you have to.

It's like, you know, I say the Peace Corps with guns, right? Yeah. It's not just about the tactics and the missions. It's, you know, building wells and building rapport with the local community and stuff. So language is a huge component of it. And I spent six months in language school, learning Mandarin Chinese. I had minored in in college, got really good at it, and then never used it again. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah, it probably should have, it would have made more sense to study Arabic, right? Yeah, so, I mean, you think of like... At the time. Yeah, Arabic in Iraq at the time, and then Farsi and Dari in Pashtun in Afghanistan. Yeah. So when I started deploying to Afghanistan, I was like, okay, your Mandarin's not going to do you very well here. English actually isn't going to work that well.

So I use that as an opportunity to kind of build some rapport with the Afghans that I worked with to say, like, hey, like, I want to learn Dari, please teach me. And so I would just spend hours with them, like, phonetically writing things out and got pretty good at it. I'd say at like a maybe a first grade level. When you say, I want to learn your language. Yeah. Right?

And this is, let's frame the time period. When is this? This is, I did my deployments to Afghanistan. in 2010 and 2011. In this time frame, 2010, 2011, obviously there had been a U.S. presence in Afghanistan before. What was the feeling from the Afghan people when you were speaking to them? Yeah, so, I mean, initially made the ask of the Afghan commandos that I was working with. I was fortunate to work with the same group of guys in 2010 and 2011.

So you built some rapport up and you get to go back to that. which was great and the reaction from them was really positive because it showed them that like I cared about them on a deeper level like it wasn't just this professional relationship like I cared about who they were I cared about their culture cared about their religion so important right it's building the trust like yeah you can't I mean you see it right here in a company right like you can't get anything done until you have the trust of the people you're working with and there's just different ways to earn it And I think in that situation, that's what I knew I needed to do, right, to show them that

I cared about them and their country on a different level. So that was just kind of a small component of, like, building this rapport up with them. Like, they would teach me about their religion. They would teach me about, like, traditional Afghan dancing and all of these things. So that when I inevitably went out and made mistakes, they were like, ah, don't worry, it's Kevin, or Kvon. he's just trying but I think then the ability even too right be in a village talking with people and you know like said my vocabulary wasn't high but like to be able to ask how are you doing

how is your family pretty impactful and what was a day like in 2010 for you in Afghanistan yeah so my deployments are a little bit different they're in the same location in kundus in the northern part of the country but in 2010 a lot of the focus the war was really on the southern part in Helman province in Kandahar. And so I used to like jokingly say that the supply line stopped before it got to us and we're kind of like forgotten, up-pocketed in the north. And so we actually had to spend a lot of time building our base as an engineer that kind of fell on my shoulders. Really beg borrow steel, right, to get the supplies that we needed. And you know, building our base, building a base for the Afghan

commandos. We went a really extended period without water, you know, electricity, kind of getting things up and generators going. So a lot of the focus for me on that deployment, like in addition to the missions and training, was to build this base, right, to figure out ways to do it. We had a 20-person local Afghan work crew that we employed to come in every day. So if we ran out on a mission, like I was out under the sun, working with them, thinking about what they're going to do today, the supplies that they need, which was awesome. It taught me a lot about project management, how to think outside of the box, because at the end of the day, the mission needed to get completed. And we had about seven months off in between the deployments, went back again in 2011,

and things had really heated up in the north at that point. And people had a pretty good idea that there were some bad actors up there and needed to get taken care of. So we, you know, luckily it had built that base up quite a bit. The next team relieved us. They had built the base up also quite a bit. So on this second deployment, all as I really had to focus on was missions and getting out the door and working with the commandos,

which was a huge relief to me because on that previous deployment, I probably slept maybe four hours a night. Wow. You know, for seven months. And if I had a whoopsrap, I think my recovery. You were redlining.

Yeah. For seven months. Yeah, right. So it was a very kind of like same, same location, same guys you worked with, but a night and day difference in terms of kind of what the day-to-day looked like there. I mean, I've been living in a whoop world for so long.

It's actually really hard for me to imagine what four hours of sleep for seven months straight feels like. Now, today in your life, how many hours of sleep are you getting? I try to go for six to eight a night. Okay, so you're getting anywhere from 50 to 100% more sleep than you were getting when you were in Afghanistan. Yeah. When you were in Afghanistan, could you feel the effect that that had on your body? Or is it some combination of adrenaline and mission that ultimately makes you almost sort of oblivious to the status of your body? I think, you know, for me, like I was 25 at the time, right?

Sure. A decade ago, like hard charger. Like, this is what I wanted to be doing with my life. And, you know, you can get by. Right. And it, human beings have this ability to get by, and they don't even know it. Totally. That's absolutely true. But I felt the effects of it big time after, you know, like three, four, five months of it. Like, I was like, I'm going to have a nervous breakdown or something here.

What were signs that you were feeling the effects of it? Just like I didn't feel as sharp as I normally did. I didn't, like, forgetting things, very nervous, high levels of anxiety. I mean, probably coupled, you know. Coupled by being there for that long. Right. And also actually under really meaningful as an amount of stress or even at times danger, right? Yeah.

You know, so all those factors there were, I think, kind of not this great recipe. And, like, I noticed in my body, too, I didn't feel like I was, like, recovering fast enough from workouts that normally wouldn't have or even, like, body composition. And now that I, now that I know the things that I know and I look back at that time frame, it's like, oh, wow, your cortisol levels were so high. that's why like you couldn't stop eating sugar totally yeah things like this and then really felt the effects when I got home when it was like time to decompress that's got a crash right just an absolute crash and what does crash look like a lot of sleeping right yeah how long would you sleep for when I got back I mean still sleep wasn't great during the week you know maybe like six hours but like Friday Saturday night you're like 10 12

our sleep sleep that's pre-kids so right just my wife and I at the time now this is uh all before september 2011 when you get shot in the stomach right so let's talk about that because this is an amazing story as far as i've researched it yeah so we we got home from that first deployment on a friday uh we went back to work on a monday and uh when you say got home you went back to the base oh yeah Sorry, like flew back from, made the journey back from Afghanistan, back to Fort Lewis. Right, because you were up in the north and you were coming back. Yeah. Okay.

So it's like stops in Germany, stops in all over, you know, the world to finally get back. And, you know, we had the weekend off. We go back to work on Monday to kind of start refitting our gear. And it's like, all right, well, you guys are going back to Afghanistan seven months. And we need you to go to Thailand for a month and a half for a training mission. And we need you to do these two other separate training iterations. So you'll be home for three to four months in two years. So as a married man, you can imagine how difficult that is there.

That's challenging. So, yeah, we went back in March of 2011, went back to the same base to work with the same Afghan commandos that we had been working with. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the mission set kind of changed a lot more. The focus, we had a lot more assets, like helicopters. We were able to do a lot more helicopter assaults. We were able to cover a lot more ground. around, but you know, with anything in life, right, the more you get, the more it's expected of you. And so within the first three months of that deployment, we ran more missions than the

previous team ran in seven months. Wow. Just because of the demands that were out there on us. So kind of like, you know, we're looking at the first deployment of like just this level of exhaustion from everything going on, not sleeping, building bases, trying to run missions. And then you're looking at this level of exhaustion of 2011 from running missions constantly and going any any any given week you know you might be up for 24 to 72 hours at a time yeah you know doing doing your missions and maybe you're catching an hour or two catnap here or there but you know that toll takes it pretty quickly on you yeah i can only imagine i mean based on all the research we've done here that would be unbelievably tolling yeah it's almost like i'm happy i didn't know at the

talking about how bad it was for me. So, okay, so you get into an 11-hour fight with the Taliban. Yeah, so this is seven months into that deployment, right? So think if we've been working with these guys for 14 months, and we got ordered to do a valley clearing operation in the northwestern part of the country. And within like an hour of landing, just as the sun's coming up, the fight kicks off and, you know, starts and, you know, in sand. insanity ensues, right? You know, you're trying to figure out what's happening, who needs help,

what's going on. And, you know, ultimately, we thought initially, right, we'll kind of drop some bombs on this location, and that'll be it for the day. And after the bombs dropped, that was really kind of the start to the day. And it really emboldened the enemy. And so for the next 10 hours, we just found ourselves going back and forth in this valley. And then in that kind of like the 10th hour of it. I was going around the corner of a building because I wanted to reorganize my squad of Afghan commandos, it was about 10 people, and figure out how we were going to attack downhill into this dry riverbed. I crept up alongside the building to try to just continue to see more of the land came into my purview, like how I'm going to do this. And I got to the front.

I stepped out for a second to gain that one last vantage point, and then it just kind of felt like I got hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer, like somebody snuck up and suspended in midair. You know, land, you know, crash right on the ground. My helmet comes off. My earphones come off. And like the pain that I felt that day was like nothing I had ever experienced in my life. Wow. And are you wearing a bulletproof vest?

Yeah. So wearing your body armor with the plates in the front and the back, the bullet was about an inch or two below the body armor. oh so like an inch or two up right hits the plates it's all good maybe some bruised rips because that's how strong that is right right yeah stopping power and the but i also think about it this way right so when i got shot i got hit in the femoral nerve so it paralyzed my left leg oh my god sent an absolute intense shooting pain down my leg uh the bullet went through my hip so it fractured my hip and then it hit my colon so you know my colon was starting to leak at that point

Oh, my gosh. So I always like to remind myself, yeah, an inch up and it hits your body armor, but an inch over, you hit your femoral artery and you bleed out on the spot. Yeah, right. Life is this game of inches. Well, that's more than a game of inches at that point. So, okay, so you're hit, you're on your back. What's the first thing it goes through your mind? It's a true testament, I think, to the thousand of hours, thousands of hours of training that people provided me from the day I joined the Army.

it's we practice things that at the time seems so monotonous like they're like all right why do I have to do this again and do this again but you you practice these things these standard operating procedures because like when the going gets tough like you're going to revert back to what you know yeah that's totally the whole point of training in a lot different contexts right right like training is what happens what you do when everything breaks down yeah and in this moment right like when my life is in the balance i reverted back to what i do and because i had great mentors and people pushing me along the way making me do things when i didn't want to do it like a great coach or a great mentor well yeah in this moment i just reverted back to what i knew right i got on the radio i called my teammates i let them know that i was wounded uh that i've been shot gave him my location and then immediately just next thing is all right you got to treat yourself and i had this pain in my leg because of the nerve had been hit i didn't know it at the time and so whenever you think you've been in your leg, you're like, hey, you're from where artery's been hit, like, so I grabbed my

tourniquet and I'm like, you got like two to three minutes to live, man, so let's go. And I start patting, you know, up and down my leg, trying to see. Try to figure out where you were hit. Right. So you know where to put the turn to hit. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Did that several times and like, I'm like, there's nothing here. And then I finally made a pass up to here in my stomach. I just see a little bit of blood on the outside of my t-shirt. And I'm like, there's nothing you can do here. So I'm just laying out in the open pain. I just pulsating through my body and minutes felt like years. I got back on the radio again. I called the team and I'm like, you guys got to get to me. Like, this is bad. I said a couple choice words

over the radio and the fight had really picked up. So the volumes of fire were really big, like pinning them down. And then I got off the radio that second time I look up. There's this guy that I've been working with for almost two years at this point, runs out to the open, takes me by my body armor and drags me behind the building while bullets are flying around this is a green beret or this is an afghan oh wow yeah so all that training all the preparation that you did with the afghan people saved your life yeah it's like who that was totally worth it right good for you man that's amazing i mean it was really to me it validating too right like of course of the incredibly validated you know the free the oppressed mission right the green beret mission like you know that was all worth it right in that moment

when that i needed somebody the most like that guy was there for me and so he pulled you out, and is it obvious to that you're bleeding profusely at this point? Are you mostly just completely absorbed by the pain? All the bleeding was internal, with the exception of a little bit on the stomach, right? So really, like, you know, not much any, you know, nobody has to stop any bleeding, but you don't know, there's no exit wound either. So nobody knows what's going on inside of my stomach or my body, right? And could you even have a feeling for it? Like, could you tell look there's something happening inside of me that doesn't feel right or or is it just so overwhelming like I'm trying to to put myself in your shoes in that moment yeah I mean for me

you know the point until I got somebody helping me was like you just got to stay conscious you got to stay conscious totally got to stay conscious um calm your breathing down like this is fine like you can handle it and then my you know when my teammates get to me right they start working on me and I'm, I actually have all this on video. Like, oh my gosh. A guy randomly at his helmet camera running. Oh, my gosh. I didn't realize it until a couple weeks later.

And, you know, you hear me on the ground screaming for morphine and like saying like, hey, like, you know, they're asking me like, can you feel your leg? And I'm like, no, it's, I'm in a ton of pain right now. And my hip, I can't straighten my leg out. And there's pain, you know, from the hip fracture and everything, just kind of pulsating through the body. and they were they were luckily very focused on saving my life so I had to remind them to give me some pain meds yeah you know luckily those those kicked in pretty quickly but you know I could hear guys were coming up to my medic and saying hey I'm gonna make it or not and it's like I don't know it looks pretty bad and I'm like I'm on the ground I can hear all this yeah oh my gosh so when you

say to yourself okay I got to breathe slower yeah what are you literally doing in that moment is it is it deep inhale's deep exhales like how are you thinking about that i mean that was really my first like initial reaction after you get over the shock of being shot right and i was like all right you's got to take some deep breaths calm down call the team like execute execute execute execute execute because like all the training that we'd received i knew like if you get nervous about this and you start to elevate your heart rate and like it's you can literally kill yourself in that moment right and so i was like let's take it down take it down and not here um you know tried my best obviously to do that and were there any mind tricks that you were playing with yourself like were you trying to visualize

being in a safe place or being on a beach or were you just focused on literally the next thing you have to do yeah it was literally like first thing calm down second thing let's just focus on the steps that we need to take here yep you know and then once that guy got to me and I knew people had me right i had great faith in my teammates and the commandos that we were working with uh i was like all right these guys got this and you know and then what's the feeling when you get a big hit of morphine after being in that kind of excruciating pain is it surreal almost because you know that there's things that are totally screwed up in your body they they so they we'd carry these things called fentanyl lollipops okay um you know i think everybody hears about fentanyl now with with the opioid

epidemic but uh totally incredible battlefield uh medicine right if you're in a situation like this and so they duct taped a the fentanyl lollipop to my finger and you know i was just and you're oh it's literally a lollipop yeah oh and you're you're sitting on there like that just got sucking on it and they keep yelling at me kevin don't bite that don't bite it Kevin i'm like okay okay because if you bite it it'll be too big of a hit it won't work right it's designed to oh slow release Yeah, slow release. And then after a couple minutes of that, I was like, yeah, maybe this isn't too bad. Maybe I'm as injured as I think here.

Yeah, maybe I can get it back out there. Maybe I'll just fly to the surgery tent on my own here. You know, from there, right, it took about 45 minutes from the time I was hurt until the time I got loaded onto the helicopter, had about a 15-minute helicopter ride to the surgery tent. I get there, they start cutting my uniform off. I hear people in the background prepping for surgery. You're like, hey, we've got to get this guy open. Surgeon's asking me questions.

And it's like, hey, do you have any questions for me? And so, I'm like, well, am I going to lit? And he's like, I don't know, looks pretty bad. Hang in there. Do you have any last requests? And so I asked to save the bullet, which I actually have at home. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

It's a great reminder if you're having a bad day, take a look at that. And you're like, yeah. Yeah, that can put everything in perspective. Day wasn't as bad. And then I was pretty certain I was going to, die. So I said, I'm going to need a Catholic priest to give me my last rights, and I'll never forget, like, that mask just coming down to my face and asking God for forgiveness for my sins and saying goodbye to this world. So you literally had gotten to a place where you had come to peace

with dying? Yeah, I thought, I'd had so many close calls before that I'm like, this one's it, man. Like, you got a gunshot wound to the stomach, not very good. this is this is it for you and i i'd had some really close calls before and on the previous deployment i had a really a lot of close calls and one real bad day all wrapped into one um where you know i got trapped on a mountain it's 120 degrees we're running out of water we're fighting all day every time i moved it was like a movie like a machine gun just like trail my every movement and for extended period of time a couple hours like I just kind of had to like lay down behind some cover and had a lot of time to think about this this is in 2010 like two weeks before

we're supposed to go home and I was like wow you're going to die today the heat's going to get you or the bullets you like you can't keep can't keep being so lucky right yeah and I had a conversation with myself at 26 that most people don't have until they're 80 or 90 and I started to ask myself questions about my life like what kind of man are you like did you live your life the way that you wanted to live your life like with a zest and the zeal right did you love your family did you love god like did you take them take advantage of your opportunities and i ultimately came to the conclusion that i hadn't because you always think you have the next time yeah i was like all right and today is it for you right you woke up for the last time today and in that moment it was

I've never felt so terrible in my life, so frustrated, so angry with myself, where I felt like I'd wasted, so taking people opportunities for granted. And I just made a promise to myself in that moment, like, you know, God, if you get me off of this hill today, this will never happen again. And luckily, you know, by his grace, I got off of that thing and got on the helicopter. I mean, it was just such an intense day that we were getting attacked, like going on the helicopters. two weeks later, we're home. And so I'd said to myself, I'm like, I don't ever want to feel like that ever again. And tried to make a really concerted effort to not take things for granted, not take relationships for granted. People. Yeah, gratitude. Exactly. Right. And carry that over to the next

deployment as much as I could, right? And granted, right, like coming back from a very violent deployment, getting ready to go on another violent deployment. My headspace was not incredible, but I was trying as hard as I could. And so when I was in this moment, fast forward to 2011. I'm shot in the stomach. I'm on the ground.

I'm like, this is it. I'm like, you know, I'm at peace of myself, right? I've tried to make the most out of everything, and I'm good. And the big lesson I get away from that is like, you know, when it's your time, You want to be able to feel like that. You want to feel that peace, right?

Because take it from me, right? If you're that 26-year-old Kevin trapped on the mountaintop questioning his life, and you don't like the answers you get back, that'll be the absolute worst moment of your life. Yeah, I mean, it's such an incredible, powerful story that you just told. And this whole feeling of you haven't lived life the way that you wanted to or in the most fulfilled way. maybe you lacked gratitude maybe you lacked appreciation for you know friends family faith

whatever it may be and then you make a resolution to change that when you have this uh experience where you almost die and then all of a sudden you find yourself literally dying and and because of the changes that you've made in your life coming to peace with that i mean that feels like a real breakthrough yeah i mean you know i say sometimes you got to learn lessons the hard way and It was a hard way to learn those lessons, but I consider myself blessed at this point to have had that experience. Gratitude, I mean, for me, what I've come to realize is that is an everyday thing for me. Right? Like, I start out every day.

I write in my journal what I'm thankful for because. It's amazing how many people I've interviewed who have told me they do that, whether on the podcast or off. Like, it's an amazing common thread amongst successful people that I've met. You always have to have that to fall back on. It's like if everything is going wrong in your day, you've got to be able to think back to something you're really thankful for. The other thing that that practice does, and I've been doing it myself, is it makes you get really focused on anything that you can appreciate, right? A great cup of coffee in the morning, a smile from, you know, a friend of yours, whatever. And I think really focusing on those tiny things in life, too, brings through more meaning and brings through more gratitude overall in the right.

rest of your life. Your gratitude doesn't just have to be that big one moment, right? Like some days it's like, yeah, I'm really thankful for the cold brew coffee machine in my office, right? Like you said, it's just learning to appreciate the smaller things in life. And for me, it's like not taking them for granted. Like, I feel like I had before. I have this quote on my phone that I read a lot, which is music is the time in between beats. Miles Davis said that, but it's so true, right? It's like all these little moments in between these big bigger moments that that define you yeah so when you realize you're going to live or or you know that sort the the 24 48 hours after this incredible incident do you feel like an overwhelming

sense of happiness and like because you would recognize that you were comfortable dying and then you didn't die that feels like the ultimate yeah right like wow now I got to go back out and do this all again? Yeah. So it was four days later, I asked, my first recollection is asking someone if I was in heaven or hell. And they're like, neither. You're in Germany right now. So, oh, wow. Very shocking, right, you know. Because they put you under. Yeah. So I was intubated, was under, you know, went from this, basically they have these field hospitals all throughout, right? Because they want to get you in that golden hour, that first hour of getting hurt, your chances of survival significantly higher. So have these places to stabilize you. And then, you know, from there, flew to a bigger base in

Afghanistan and then flew to another bigger base. And then from that base flew to Germany. And then that's where I came back to consciousness there. And, you know, the feeling was overwhelming, right? It's like confusing because I'm in this, I think I'm going to die, firefight. And then people, I'm like, I got tubes hanging out of my body. My stomach is cut open. And people are explaining to me what's going on. And I'm like, wow, you know, it's a lot to process. And people are continuously having to explain it all to me. And so it was emotional, incredibly emotional in which crying quite a bit.

And it was like almost the gravity for me of the two past deployments really just sunk in, right? Like, you know, the stress of the, you know, the post-traumatic stress of everything and everything that had happened. And it was all came to a head and the injuries. So having that feeling, but then also being like, wow you're alive like this is unreal like you you know you are still here like it's it's brighter outside like it's you know voices sound sweeter like this is amazing but it was also hard for me too because I felt this way about how happy I was that I'd never had to go back to Afghanistan again I mean I could tell right the injuries but like my team was still there and I felt bad that now

I'm in the safety of the states and my team is still back there for another four months Wow, yeah. And was there a moment of concern where you're thinking yourself, like, oh, am I going to be able to walk the same way I used to walk? Am I going to be able to breathe the same way used to breathe? Like sort of these basic human questions. Yeah. I mean, so that kind of started to come to me when I was about a week in Germany, a couple of weeks in Texas at Brook Army Medical Center. And like, when I was there, it really started to come into my framework of how lucky I was to be alive, to be in the condition that I was in. I saw a lot of amputees, you know, burn victims from the war. And like, dude, you can't

feel sorry for yourself, right? Like, you got to get after this. And at the time, I'm 27, right, I was a very physically fit, even for Green Beret standards. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to, this is no problem. I was telling people I was going to run a marathon in a year, right? like, honey, you're going to be lucky to walk in here. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, this isn't going to be a problem, right? I get back to Fort Lewis. I went to, I was able

to do all my physical therapy, the special forces unit, which was great. I mean, a guy who had been like the Boise State football strength and conditioning coach was spending two to three hours a day with me, helping me. And then you have top physical therapists. And I'm like, you're going to will yourself to get better. Like, this is just inevitable.

And after a while, my stomach healed, my hip healed. But my leg had atrophy to the point that was the size of, like, my left arm because of all the nerve damage. Oh, my gosh. And we went to the University of Washington Neurology clinic, and they could barely read the MRI because there was so much damage. And they jokingly were like, try the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. So, of course, we did. Yeah.

And, you know, they had been working on an experimental surgery there that they thought that I could benefit from. And, you know, made it really clear, though, like, this is experimental. We don't know if it's going to work. for a nerve to regrow can take years. We're going to have to, you know, very invasive surgery. You have to go back on pain meds, which are brutal for me to get off the first time. And at the time, too, that I got this news, like my teammate, Sergeant First Class, Ben Wise, was killed in action just two weeks before the team was supposed to come home.

Oh, wow. It was like, you can imagine receiving both pieces of news, like, hey, you're going to have to get a huge surgery again and when your best friends just got killed. And by the way, in my mind, I'm like, and you weren't there to help him. Yeah. And that's what happened. So that, all that news at once was pretty crushing.

But I had to pull myself together, like, for my wife, for my family, and knew, I had to walk away from the situation knowing I tried everything, to get back to where I was or where I wanted to be. Like, if you just kind of quit now, it's not really a way to honor any of your friends that have gotten killed. So, you know, we did the surgery. surgeon made a huge incision on the left side of my stomach here he cut uh you can kind of see it here like he cut this nerve out oh wow it runs all the way up so so for folks uh listening to this i'm looking at a scar that runs from all the way from your ankle all the way up your leg to your groin yeah so all all said and done i've got about 40 inches of scars from surgeries and unbelievable kind of like a Frankenstein type of guy here we're replacing parts with other parts

Oh, you look beautiful from the neck up, which is what I'm looking at. So, okay, so the experimental surgery, I mean, this is an area that I'm personally fascinated in, I'm fascinated by. What exactly are they doing? So they took the sensory nerve from this leg, and I don't have any feeling really in this leg, which I say is made for some awkward conversations after I realize I've been rubbing somebody's leg for an hour. Yeah, right. train or something and I quickly run through the story with them to tell them everything and they're like uh okay weirdo get away from me so they took the sensory nerve out and then they they cut the damage part of the nerve out and grafted it in think of like a railroad track

or basically we have some railroad ties that are broke the train can't go down the tracks we're going to put some new railroad ties in and so they put the they grafted that in in hopes that then it could kind of grow down, I think it was like an inch a month or something. Fascinating. And, you know, for a long time, nothing happened, just like the doctor had said. And are you doing exercises or anything to try to- Oh, yeah. Like, I'm going four to six hours a day.

I bet. I'm like, at the time, my command was great. They were like, look, your only job is to get better and prepare for the future, whatever you want to do. Sure. So I lived at our physical therapy place. There wasn't like a time in the day that you could show up and that I wouldn't be there because I just had to walk away from this thing knowing I did everything that I could.

So it was awesome experience because they had just started kind of taking more of an athletic approach to training guys in special operations where it's like, hey, we have these guys, we spend millions of dollars on them, like let's increase longevity, let's increase athleticism, let's take this athletic approach instead of this push-ups, sit-ups long run, grind you into the ground thing. So that we had access to the best, right? The Seahawks came to see our facility, and they're like, this is better than what we have. And so I'm like, well, awesome. And, you know, worked with these trainers to do this.

And I think it was, it was really cool because this was really the beginning of the program. And I was one of the, you know, we had a lot of other guys come back, amputees and things like this. But unique injury sets. to really challenge these guys who would use to ACL tears and strained ankles and stuff, they're like, this is a whole new ball game for me. And so we just kind of had to get creative, right? There wasn't a manual, and this was an experimental surgery. So we'd do a lot of things like, you know, if you can't do a pull-up,

you put a resistance band on there and loop your knee in and you pull up, right? So they're like, well, you can't lift your leg up. So let's use a resistance band and let's just get that motion down. Let's get that brain connectivity going again with that nerve and get that process going. So just to frame where you were at sort of the low point for your leg, could you walk on it? I could walk, but I had to basically relearn how to walk. Okay. Because I had no quad function at all.

And it sounds like you couldn't even build quad muscle. No. So it was all completely learning how to recruit my glute, my hamstring, a different way to push off. And for a long time, like I had to think about every step. that I took. Because if I would not do that, like all of a sudden my legs are flying above my head and I'm in the grocery store and take out a whole cereal aisle or something like. And, you know, that happened a lot. It was pretty embarrassing. But I think that that act of literally having to pick myself up off the ground paid a lot of dividends in terms of humility and the future for me.

Now, during this period, it's also a time where you were struggling with alcohol, and painkillers as well yeah i mean whatever you're comfortable sharing about that what was it like and what was the process to overcome that open book will you know i'll answer the question right uh yeah you know i think an experience is worth nothing unless you share it and this is my purpose on earth so when i left the mayo clinic i was prescribed 12 pills a dilaudid 12 percissettes and two volume right so 26 pills a day at the time wait a day yeah oh my gosh um but keep you Keep in mind, I mean, ridiculously invasive surgery. That's true.

Stomach cut open. I mean, I, I, this is kind of what this medicine's actually for, to be clear. Yeah. And so people hear that, like, oh, my God. I'm like, no, no, it was, it was needed. Like, I was in worse pain after that surgery than when I got shot. Oh, wow. Just due to the angles that they had to cut at.

And so, but that's, that's kind of where I started out at. And the first time I, I, after getting shot, was able to kind of get off my meds in like two months, had my wife's help. But I think the second time around, that's when the gravity really hit me of, like, this is, you are not going to come back as quickly from this as you're thinking. Yeah. There's a very high likelihood that, like, you're not going to be the same person that you used to be, the things that you prided yourself on, your physical fitness, being a green beret. A lot of doubt sets in. Exactly, right. The uncertainty for the future, right?

Everything that it had transpired in the past couple deployments, thinking about that. You know, my company had three guys get killed on the deployment. Fourth guy kills himself when we get home. Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. Why are you alive, right? Yeah. Why didn't you die?

Like, what is your purpose here? Why is this all happening to you? Why didn't you just die? Like, because you're in some pain and you're suffering right now. And so I think kind of all of that together and also with the fact that I was quite a bit of pain, you know, really developed this reliance to deal with the gravity of the situation on the pain meds. And, you know, I worked my way down.

It wasn't like I stayed at 26. I could get myself down to two or three a day, but I couldn't, like, that was like the last crutch that I had with it, and I couldn't quite beat that. And my wife sat me down one day, and she's a tough New Englander, right? She grew up on the Cape, and just to give you a frame of reference with my wife, when I first got out of the hospital, she's giving me a sponge bath, and I was like, hey, do you just want get a divorce or what she's like no asshole i'm giving you a sponge bath right now all right so she is like the glue that held this thing together yeah that's amazing

and you know when you're going through hard times right like you need to surround yourself with people who aren't afraid to tell you what you need to be doing yeah and she wasn't and she sat me down she's like is this it man like is this what you're going to do with the rest of your life and i i you know i came back with everything i'm pain better and wounded purple hard all this other stuff that she didn't care about right yeah and uh she's like i thought you had goals man like i thought you had things you wanted to achieve in your life like and then this really stung where it's like you think this is a way to honor like ben and your fallen comrades and i was mad i mean we've been together since we're 18 married at 23 wow good for you um there's the angriest i've never

been with her but it was angry because she was right um and kind of drew a line in the sand and stopped taking pain meds one day and started studying for grad school the next day. Good for you. And what's your advice to someone who's listening to this, who's struggling with alcohol or struggling with pain meds? Like, what are the mindsets that helped you overcome that? It got to have, like, your last line of defense, right? Like, there's got to be someone or something that you just, no matter what happens,

you can't let that person down. And so for me, when I thought about that, like, when it, because I, I mean, I got off the meds, I was like, I thought about them every day for over a year. I mean, it was just... That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's crazy how that works. And, you know, probably at times, replaced a little bit of that with alcohol, but was it able, you know, to get that under control?

I actually don't drink. I've drank in two years. Good for you, man. More health reasons. And it's probably on my recovery is pretty good, usually. Yeah, we've got to get to the Woop aspect of this, too. I'm fascinated by using WOOV. I think the big thing that I say is, like, find these things that are,

like very tangible for you that you can't let these people down or these things down or these institutions down like so for me a lot of people believed in me and a lot of people are telling me how much I inspired them and so I'm like you you can't let these people down totally you can't let your wife down who believes in you right so it sounds like finding responsibility for other people was a big theme for you on your path yeah I mean it really kind of breaks down to three things It's like I say ask for help, receive help, and give help, right? Yeah, I like that. You know, I asked for help, right?

After an extended period of time, I went and saw our psychologist at the first Special Forces group and started working with him on holistic ways that I could deal with all this, right, so that I wasn't going down this destructive path. There's a lot of work I needed to do. It wasn't just physical, it's a lot of mental and emotional work that receive help, right? Like, my wife was there to help me, like she wasn't against me, and you have to receive it when people who love you come to you, right? And then give help, right? Like I, at the time, I'm like, how could I help somebody? Like, I'm struggling, doing all this. But a guy reached out

to me whose recovery was, I mean, actually as bad as mine was going, it was still going good. And, you know, he reached out to me to kind of for some help, some friendship, right? And after meeting with him a couple times, I'm like, oh, wow, like this is really beneficial for both of us. And I think when you're going through these hard times, addiction, life, anything, right like ask for help receive help give help it's amazing advice and an amazing like just an amazing journey you've been on man i mean i feel so grateful to live in a country that has people like you protecting it so thank you for everything you've done i appreciate it man it's just doing my part you know thankful for what the country's done for me now how did you find out about whoop yeah so i found out

about whoop um i'd heard about it like you know see it on instagram and all these things and for me, you know, since getting wounded, right, you know, I went to grad school. And when I kind of like, when I got out of the military, started grad school, went to, did a dual master's at Harvard at MIT. Good for you. Hey, people make mistakes on me. I send the check in before they know it hit them. And, you know, that kind of my physical fitness and things really started to take a backseat, right? Because you're just getting crushed. I was doing four years at grad school, working three years. We had her first kid. the first semester of business school. We had our second kid the last year of grad school. I was still in a lot of physical, mental, emotional pain that I was dealing with. You know, then I graduate and I start working. I was working at Goldman Sachs downtown in Boston here. And, you know, it's an incredible job, incredible firm, but it's a lot of hours, right? And it's a lot of pressure there. The starting career, getting out of the military, you know, the physical fitness aspect really went back to the wayside. And it was the Christmas of 2016

team that I had this massive wake-up call. That's Christmas morning. Kids are there opening their presence and I have to lay on the ground and watch them do this because my back hurts so bad. And then the rest of the day, I'm just kind of like had to apply myself with muscle relaxers and I can't do anything because my back hurts so bad. And I realized at that point that it's like, you have to put your physical fitness back at the top. It's got to be your number one priority. And it's not because you're selfish. It's because you love these people. if you don't do this, then you're going to be nothing to nobody. So really started along that journey there of like, all right, we have to get back to

regular routines of working out, trying to figure out all this stuff, like not accepting anything except for a less like what you want to hear, really started focusing on diet. I was really fortunate around that time to get connected to Alex Guerrero, Tom Brady's trainer, working with his staff there to reduce my pain levels and start to increase basically my physical activity. Yeah, fascinating. So went on this massive journey, right? And one of the components of it that I felt was really missing was, you know, I'm like,

I just want to understand more about like what's going on my body. Yeah, totally. I felt like, you know, at this point, like I realized like how much food impacted my, my body, right? I realized all these things. So I'm like, I need to learn more, right? And started researching things. I had seen whoop on social media, talked to some people that used it. it. And I was like, I think this is, this is exactly what I'm looking for here, right? Like, I want to know,

I want to be able to know how much I'm sleeping. I want to be able to know, like, if it's a good day to work out. And because I'm all about optimizing my performance. Yeah. Like, I stopped drinking because even two drinks that make me feel bad. Yeah. Like, I, you know, I eat clean 100% of the time, practically. And I will make any adjustment to reach this performance, right? So if I have this ability like with whoop to say okay you're performing like you're red right now and then i try to backtrack and say why are you red yeah what'd you do with the behaviors the yeah diet whatever because i'll change it like yeah that's fine right like i don't care um and so that was that was what really led me to it and i think the first thing that i noticed right away was like oh wow like

you better start sleeping more or or like figuring this out a little bit that was the first thing that jumped right off the screen to me. And you're now on your way to training for the Boston Marathon? Yes. Yeah, I mean. First of all, congratulations, right? From where the story started. You can congratulate me when I crossed that finish line.

Well, congratulations to be able to run two miles, hell. Yeah. From what we were talking about earlier. Right. And that's, you know, the perspective, right? You have to kind of keep throughout it. I made that promise to myself in Germany and the intensive care unit. I was going to run a marathon.

And I was going to run again, and I wanted to run a marathon. So it's 3,130 days later. I'm actually going to be able to go out and do it. So I'm excited. I love that you know the exact number of days. Oh, yeah. That's like I said, this is a real long-term goal here, folks. Yeah, well, people underestimate what they can do in 10 years.

Yeah. That's like, yeah, it's a decade. It's almost. And so much has happened in between a lot of personal growth there. And how have you used whoop to help train for it? so for me um it's really like you know if i'm in the red i'm like all right maybe you can push your long run to this day or that day it's tough to dictate my schedule because i have a six year old a three year old you know working and stuff uh to you know i i have these like certain

times and day set out to work out so i'm like all right you got to optimize right you got to try to make sure you're not in the red it's going to happen right yeah totally but uh you know using that to backtrack and then say, okay, like, you're on the red here today. What did you do? What did your workout look like? What did your food look like for that day? What was your K-LOR can take? How was your sleep there? And then to be able to try to remedy those situations. That's been a big thing that I've been able to use in terms of the training piece. And then for me, like really focusing on that sleep aspect, right, to have the numbers, numbers don't lie. So the numbers in my face that tells me I slept for four hours and 22 minutes last night okay well that's not going to cut it so yeah that's not

enough yeah what are we going to do to cut that out and even just seeing small changes you know i can measure everything now right so i stopped watching tv during the week at night boom i go to sleep earlier i have better sleep right and i can measure and i quantify all that there you know i love i love the sort of two themes that you've touched on one is around uh this concept of of being in a period of your life where you recognize that you just had to get by, right? When you were in Afghanistan, right, and when you were doing all these tours, it's like, what was minimum viable, right? And now you're at a phase in your life where you're training for a marathon and you're

supporting a family and you're working professionally and you recognize the goal is actually what is optimal. Like, what can I do to be optimal? And in creating whoop, that was one of the big themes that I thought a lot about is how do you how do you optimize actually within both of those states like even within the state of get by what are the minimum viable things you can do to make get by the best version of get by and even within the lens of optimal what are all the different things that you can look at so I love the way that you've described these different periods of your life and I also highly appreciate the fact that you're using

whoop today to to get ready for this marathon yeah I love it it's been a huge part of the trading process. And I think the thing that I highlight to a lot of other people, too, is, you know, I'm trying to optimize my performance. It's not just for athletics, right? Like, you know, I'm not playing college football anymore. Like, it doesn't matter if I run this marathon in four hours or five hours. It's, I'm trying to optimize, like, my performance for life. Totally. Right. I have this mission, right? To go out there, to take the lessons that I've learned from these incredibly dark periods of time and give them to people. I can't have bad days, right? Because, like, what if I meet somebody and have to have this opportunity to talk to them and lift their spirits or, you know,

and I have two small children, six and a three-year-old, and they need me every single day. And my wife, who is remarkable, she's getting her Ph.D. right now, right? Like, it's like, I don't, you know, I want to, I want to optimize for life so that I can be my best version of myself just to give to everybody. No, I love it so much. So what are, what are a few of your tips for other WOOP members out there on things that you do to be more optimal? Yeah, so I think a big thing for me at nighttime, right? I don't have, there's no electronics in the bedroom, right? I'm a big routine fan, right? This standard operating procedure that saved my life. Yeah, right. I realize really quick. I feel like you're going to stick to that for a long time.

Yeah, that can be helpful, right? You can apply that to other aspects. So, you know, I have a routine I follow in the morning. I have a routine I follow in the evening. The routine in the morning is to get me ready for the day, right? The gratitude piece, right? Meditation. So gratitude journal. Yeah, gratitude journal then you meditate you said yep how long do you meditate for i try to do 20 minutes twice a day oh wow good for you i do i do 22 minutes every morning and i would say like maybe 20 percent of the time i do it in the afternoon i have a boat ride home every day oh that's perfect that's it it's cool because it centers me it's refreshing and then i get to see the kids and hopefully leave everything from work behind and be and is it uh transcendental meditation or what type of

meditation. So I started out doing the mindfulness and that's when I when I first met the psychologist at the first special forces group, we started working on mindfulness meditation. And that's where I was like really understood the correlation of my stress levels to my pain levels. So it started to dive deep into that. And recently actually started doing the transcendental meditation piece. I've been doing it for about a month right now. Oh cool. It's cool. I can check on my Woop app like when I'm meditating and it's like how much lower my levels drop. Isn't it amazing? It's incredible. It just shows how good it It's got to be for you. Yeah.

I mean, you can also see it in your whoop data. Like, I realize on days, this doesn't happen very often, but on days where I don't meditate, like I can see my heart rate's more elevated. I can see the effect of a workout's more strenuous. And your sleep's probably not as good. Sleep's not as good. Yeah. It's just like, I think it's a superpower.

Yeah. For me, it's been instrumental. And, you know, so getting those things in, I do some Bible study, some prayer. Usually there's some workout component in the morning. there and then, you know, kind of go through the day, hopefully get that meditation piece on the boat ride home. And then at night, really, you know, I just have, I have so much I want to achieve my life and you can't buy more time. You can't make more of it. Well, you can. That's what I came to realize is you can make more of your time, but you have to manage it. Totally. And so I

kind of saw at night, I'm like, you're wasting a lot of time doing things that have no return, right like tv or instagram or something like that so i'm like well let's try to cut some of those things out you don't need to completely out of your life but let's minimize those go to bed earlier wake up earlier that's where you can gain gain some time back and so we just try to develop kind of a nighttime routine that's going to help me get in the mindset to go to sleep like not have my phone up there not watch tv one of the last things i do before i get in the bed is i write out my day for the next day oh wow that's a great practice and it To me, it's like...

And it sounds like handwriting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Which nobody can read about me. Because you don't want the electronics, right? Yeah. But that, to me, it's like, all right, it's time to, it's all here for you. And it's going to be there tomorrow morning when you wake up.

And how detailed is that last practice? Is it, uh, and would you frame it more as aspirational or more as like a bullet list? There's a bullet list. Like, hey, these are the things you need to get done tomorrow. Okay. And so then it's like out of my brain on the paper, I'm not waking. up like at 2.30 in the morning. Will you do anything around affirmations? Uh, you know, I really haven't. Um, we have, I kind of grew up with an affirmation every day before I went to school.

My mom would kiss me on the cheek and my brothers and say like, you're a flike. You're an achiever. Right. So it wasn't like, hey, you deserve things or like your owed things. But like, you get out there and like do stuff. Yeah. And so trying to do that with my children. Like if you walked up to my six and three year old right now i say what do flikes do they would say they uh you know they don't give up and they help people right so like i think that's kind of like the family affirmation that we have and really want to install that never quit attitude and service right always put people above yourself in your life that's my wife is getting her phd and nursing with a focus on woman's homelessness and health care issues wow that's going to be her life's work that's amazing look man

you are a true inspiration i mean i mean i've taken a lot of from this conversation just personally. I'm sure our listeners are going to love everything they've learned from you. And again, just like, thank you for your service. Thank you for what you've done for this country. It's just incredible to know that there's people like you out there. Oh, appreciate it. Thank you for the work that you're doing here.

I mean, the impact that the work that everybody in this company here has done has been great. I mean, it's helped me out significantly. And it's only going to get better for myself and everybody else that uses the app. Well, look, it inspires us every day to hear that, especially coming from you, that is a true compliment. So I'll make sure the rest of the team knows that. And thank you again for coming on the WOOP podcast. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you.

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links to relevant topics from this conversation and others. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Whoop podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can find me online at Will Ahmed. I try to respond to everyone who reaches out. And you can also follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you may have. Thank you again to all our listeners, to all our Whoop members. We love you.