MS Fighter

Can’t Hurt Me. David Goggings. MS Can Hit Harder. But It Can’t Break You.

Multiple Sclerosis doesn’t knock politely before it walks in. It doesn’t call ahead. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It smashes through the door like a SWAT team at midnight, flips your life upside down, and dares you to do something about it. One day it’s ripping your balance away and you walk like you’re drunk on a tightrope. The next, it clamps your legs with spasticity so sharp it feels like steel cables snapping tight around your muscles. Then it comes for your head…dizziness spinning the room, brain fog crawling through your thoughts until you can’t focus on a single damn thing. Sometimes it burns your nerves like you’re wired straight into a live current. Other days it goes for the kind of humiliation no one likes to talk about…bladder issues, sexual dysfunction…symptoms that try to break your pride as much as your body.

And it doesn’t stop. Ever.

Most people break right there. They sit down, curse the universe, cry about how unfair it all is, and start waiting. Waiting for the storm to pass. Waiting for someone to save them. Waiting for mercy that isn’t coming. But MS doesn’t hand out mercy. Life doesn’t hand out mercy. And Goggins sure as hell doesn’t talk about mercy either. Goggins says suffering is the way through. He says when the pain hits, when the body screams, when life itself feels like it’s coming apart in your hands, you don’t back down. You lean in. You stop waiting for the pain to pass because it isn’t going to. You fight in the middle of it. You sharpen yourself on it. You use it until it breaks before you do. Most people want comfort. Comfort is warm. Comfort is easy. Comfort feels like safety…until it kills you slowly from the inside out. Comfort is why people quit. Comfort is why people waste their lives waiting for easy days instead of building the strength to survive the hard ones. Comfort makes you weak.

But pain? Pain is a weapon. Pain strips away the lies you tell yourself. Pain burns your excuses to the ground. Pain leaves you standing there naked with one choice: stay down or rise anyway. Goggins calls it callousing the mind. Taking the hits, the storms, the chaos, and letting it carve you into something harder than the pain itself. Because life will hit. MS will hit harder. But the man who keeps rising, who keeps stacking discipline on discipline, who keeps building callouses on his body and his mind…that man becomes something the storm can’t kill no matter how many times it comes swinging. MS can hit harder. But it can’t break you unless you hand it the pieces yourself.

Calloused Mind. Calloused Body.

Goggins talks about building callouses on the mind the way fighters build callouses on their knuckles and lifters build them on their palms. Thick, rough, unbreakable armor…not by avoiding pain, but by walking straight into it, over and over again, until it has nothing left to take from you. MS gives you a thousand chances to quit. Muscle weakness so heavy you feel like your legs are made of concrete. Fatigue that crushes you before the day even starts. Balance gone so fast you walk like the floor is a moving treadmill. Nerve pain burning through your arms like you’re wired into electricity. Depression riding shotgun through all of it, whispering in your ear that it’s easier to stay down. That’s where most people fold. That’s where they hand the storm the pieces of themselves without a fight.

But a calloused mind doesn’t quit just because it hurts. It doesn’t break just because the day goes ugly. Every squat when your legs feel like wet rope. Every push-up when your shoulders lock up like rusted hinges. Every bag round when dizziness spins the room and your lungs feel like they’re on fire. Every single day you train when MS throws the kitchen sink at you…all of it stacks armor on your mind one brutal layer at a time. Because callouses don’t come easy. They come from friction. From pressure. From the grind that cuts, burns, and scars until the skin hardens, until the pain stops getting in the way. Same with the mind. You get a calloused mind by training on the bad days, not the good ones. On the days when fatigue drops you to your knees before you even hit the gym. On the days when your body locks up halfway through a set. On the days when the weight buries you, when the storm is screaming, when everything in you says This is enough.

Goggins says that voice is lying. That voice wants comfort. That voice wants easy. That voice wants weakness. And you kill that voice with reps. With miles. With weight on your back when your legs shake. With rounds on the bag when your arms feel like they’re made of lead. With discipline so brutal that the storm learns you won’t break no matter how many times it comes for you. MS brings symptoms that change like the weather…balance one day, spasticity the next, nerve pain after that. But a calloused mind fights through all of it. It stacks discipline on top of pain until you’re not scared of the bad days anymore. Until the storm hits and you don’t even flinch. 

That’s the point. Pain isn’t the enemy. Quitting is. And the man with a calloused mind doesn’t quit. Not when the body screams. Not when the weight crushes him. Not when MS tries to break him in half. Because callouses don’t just protect you. They turn you into someone who stops asking for easier days and starts building harder armor instead.

The 40% Rule in the MS World.

Goggins says when you think you’re done, when your body’s screaming, when your mind swears there’s nothing left…you’re only at 40%. You’ve still got more in the tank. More strength. More fight. More grit.

MS doesn’t want you to believe that. It wants you to think the first wave of fatigue is the finish line. It wants you to treat dizziness like a command to sit down. It wants muscle weakness to feel like a wall you can’t climb, nerve pain to feel like the end of the road, emotional swings to make you think the whole fight isn’t worth it. Most people listen to that voice. They quit when it hurts. They stop when the symptoms hit. They tell themselves they’ve done enough…when in reality, they haven’t even gotten close to empty yet.

That’s where the 40% rule slams into MS like a sledgehammer. When the fatigue hits so hard it feels like someone pulled the batteries out of your body…you keep moving. Maybe it’s slower. Maybe the weight drops. Maybe the pace cuts in half. But you keep moving. Because 40% isn’t the wall. It’s the doorway. When balance bails on you mid-set, when spasticity locks up your legs, when dizziness spins the whole room while you’re under the barbell…most people rack the weight and walk away. The 40% rule says adjust, don’t quit. Drop the load. Change the exercise. Cut the set in half if you have to. But you finish what you started. Because discipline doesn’t live in comfort. It lives in the last ugly reps. The ones you grind out after everything in you already voted to quit.

Goggins built his life on this rule…running through injuries, training past exhaustion, pushing so far past his own limits they had to make new words for it. Now, MS isn’t Navy SEAL Hell Week. It’s worse in a thousand ways because it doesn’t end. It doesn’t give you a break between battles. It doesn’t care how many victories you had yesterday. It hits today anyway. But that’s why the 40% rule matters here even more. Because MS sets limits every damn day…fatigue, pain, balance, nerve fire, weakness, humiliation symptoms no one talks about. Limits stacking up like walls around you. And the 40% rule says you climb anyway. You fight anyway. You stop believing the first wave of pain is all you’ve got and start realizing the body always has more. The mind always has more. Goggins calls it The Governor…that mental switch flipping early, shutting you down before the tank’s even close to empty. MS tries to use that governor against you every day. The fight is learning to push past it.

The truth is that fatigue doesn’t mean finished. Pain doesn’t mean broken. Balance loss doesn’t mean useless. The 40% rule says there’s always fight left…but only if you stop listening to the excuses screaming in your head.

Taking Souls. Beating MS at Its Own Game.

Goggins talks about taking souls…the moment when you stop being the one under attack and start owning the fight. It’s about flipping the script on pain, on exhaustion, on the storm that thinks it’s got you cornered. It’s looking at the enemy, the weight, the day itself, and saying You thought this would break me? Watch me.

MS hates that mindset. It wants you waiting for better days. It wants you folding on the bad ones. It wants you to treat fatigue, dizziness, balance loss, muscle weakness, nerve pain…all of it…like a reason to surrender instead of a reason to fight harder.

Taking souls means you stop giving it what it wants. When fatigue hits so hard your legs feel like sandbags, you train anyway. Maybe the load drops. Maybe the pace slows. But you show up when MS bets the house on you staying home. When dizziness spins the room and balance disappears, you don’t cry about it. You move slower, steadier, tighter…but you move. You refuse to let the symptoms write the ending for you. When spasticity clamps your legs, when nerve pain crawls through your arms like they’re wired with electricity, when bladder issues try to humiliate you mid-day…you don’t let the storm take your pride with it. You stay in the fight. You refuse to hand MS that satisfaction.

Taking souls means training on the days everyone expects you to quit. It’s the run when your lungs feel like fire. The lift when your muscles lock up like concrete. The bag rounds when dizziness makes the floor tilt like a sinking ship. It’s showing up when no one’s watching. When the world would understand if you stayed down. When the storm bets everything on breaking you today. And you take its soul by standing back up anyway. Because there’s nothing more dangerous than the man who keeps moving after everyone…the storm, the pain, the symptoms, the world…expects him to quit. MS doesn’t have an answer for that. It can throw fatigue, nerve pain, spasticity, brain fog, depression, humiliation, all of it…and the man who keeps coming anyway steals its victory every single time. Goggins built his life on this principle. Hell Week didn’t beat him. Ultrarunning didn’t beat him. Life didn’t beat him. He flipped the script on pain and made it pay rent every time it showed up.

That’s what you do with MS. You make the storm regret ever picking you as a target. Because nothing shuts chaos up faster than refusing to break when it throws its hardest punch.

When the Storm Has Nothing Left.

MS doesn’t quit. It doesn’t slow down because you’re tired. It doesn’t back off when you’ve had enough. It doesn’t care if you’ve been fighting for years, if the fatigue has been chewing through your muscles for days, if the nerve pain feels like fire eating you alive from the inside out. It keeps coming. Most people meet that reality and fold. They wait for mercy like it’s on the way. They tell themselves the storm will stop if they just sit still long enough. They convince themselves that quitting will make the weight disappear, that staying down will bring peace.

But the storm doesn’t stop. It never stops. And neither can you.

Goggins teaches that the fight isn’t about waiting for easier days…it’s about becoming the kind of person who doesn’t need them. The kind who keeps moving through fatigue that makes your legs feel like wet concrete. The kind who trains when balance bails out mid-set, when spasticity locks up your knees, when dizziness spins the whole damn room. The kind who doesn’t let bladder issues, nerve pain, brain fog, or depression take his pride with them. Because the storm takes enough already. Don’t hand it the rest of you for free. Every rep when your arms shake. Every round when your legs burn. Every disciplined meal when the fatigue whispers for junk food and shortcuts. Every early morning when your head says stay in bed and your body feels like it’s made of lead…those moments are where you steal victory back from MS one piece at a time.

That’s what Goggins teaches. That the bad days don’t own you unless you let them. That pain isn’t the signal to quit…it’s the invitation to fight harder. That discipline and suffering aren’t punishment…they’re the only path to becoming unbreakable. Because there’s only one way to make the storm shut up…outlast it. Outwork it. Outfight it. Make it run out of ways to hit you. And when it finally sees that nothing…not fatigue, not pain, not balance loss, not nerve fire, not even the darkest nights…can keep you down, the storm quits before you do. You don’t wait for easy days. You make the hard ones regret coming for you.