In July 2007 a Navy SEAL ran through Death Valley in a hundred and twenty degrees of heat and finished third in the Badwater 135, the hardest foot race in the world. Two years before that he had not been a runner at all. What put him on that road was a helicopter.
David Goggins was born in Buffalo in 1975 and raised in Brazil, Indiana, and by his own account got out of a childhood he has described in detail and at cost. He joined the Air Force in 1994 and served five years as a Tactical Air Control Party airman — the man who goes forward with ground troops and calls in the aircraft. He had started down the pararescue pipeline first and left it: a sickle-cell trait diagnosis, and a straightforward fear of the water. He remembers that as quitting. When he got out in 1999 he was spraying for cockroaches on the night shift and weighed close to three hundred pounds.
The turn is the part of the story everybody knows, and it is the part that comes from him rather than from a record: a television documentary about BUD/S, a phone call to a recruiter who told him the weight was impossible, and three months in which he says he lost around a hundred pounds to get under the limit. What is documented is what followed. He went through BUD/S with class 235 in 2001, finishing Hell Week on the third attempt after pneumonia and broken kneecaps had stopped the first two. He served with SEAL Team 5 and SDV Team 1, deployed to Iraq, and went to the Army's Ranger School, where he graduated as Enlisted Honor Man. He retired in 2015 as a chief petty officer.
On 28 June 2005 a Chinook with the call sign Turbine 33 flew into the Kunar mountains to reinforce a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team that had been compromised — the operation this catalogue already tells through Michael P. Murphy, who was on the ground, and Marcus Luttrell, who was the only man of the four to come down alive. A rocket-propelled grenade brought the helicopter down and killed all sixteen aboard, eight of them SEALs. Goggins knew men on that aircraft. It remains the worst single loss in the history of Naval Special Warfare.
What he did about it was decide to raise money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which puts the children of fallen special operations soldiers through college. Told that the way to get attention was to run something absurd, he entered a twenty-four-hour race in San Diego with no training behind him and covered a hundred miles in a day — and, again by his own telling, finished it with stress fractures in both feet and his kidneys failing. He kept going. Badwater 135 in 2006 and 2007, fifth and then third. Ironman at Kona. The Moab 240 in second place. A Guinness record of 4,030 pull-ups in seventeen hours, set on the third try after two public failures. Over the years the running raised more than two million dollars, and none of it was his.
Since then he has become something the rest of this list is not: famous outside the military, through two books and a great deal of shouting. It is worth saying plainly that most of the detail of his early life and his worst races comes from his own account, that some of it has been picked over, and that he is not here for a battle. He is here because of what he did with a loss that belonged to the men already on these pages.
In March 2026 the Air Force confirmed what an Instagram photograph had already given away: at fifty-one, with an age waiver — the cut-off is forty-two — David Goggins had quietly reenlisted and was in training with the Special Warfare Training Wing. He had gone back to pararescue. It is the one thing he ever walked away from, and he has spent twenty-seven years refusing to leave it there.
Photographs: U.S. Navy, public domain. · Wikipedia