Blake Hall
Remember ‘The Pacifier,’ a movie starring Vin Diesel as an ex-Navy SEAL who uses his special forces training to babysit a gaggle of children? This story is a lot like that, except that instead of babysitting minors, one unidentified SEAL spent 31 days following around and yelling at a spaghetti-haired rapper.
Said rapper is Jesse Itzler, the guy who penned and rapped ‘I Love This Game’ for the NBA and the New York Knicks theme ‘Go NY Go.’ Itzler is a wealthy entrepreneur married to the founder of Spanx, so he had plenty of money available when he came up with the hare-brained idea to hire a Navy SEAL as his personal trainer and constant companion.
When Itzler met the anonymous SEAL (His name was not released, and we think the guy in the pictures is an actor) at a marathon in 2010, he immediately knew that the veteran was exactly what he was looking for in a fitness trainer.
“When I sat with him and “pitched him” on the idea of training me, there was a twist to it. I didn’t just hire him, I asked him to move in with me and my family for 31 days,’ Itzler writes on his website. “Yes, I wanted to physically improve, but I also wanted the mental side of it as well. I was curious if I could inherit just a bit of that “warrior” mentality so few of us really have. I wanted it at work, at home, in the gym.”
For an entire month, the highest-paid Navy SEAL in the country whispered sweet insults in Itzler’s ear to wake him up, dragged the rapper outside to train in the early morn and yelled at him until he thought Itzler was sufficiently traumatized. The rapper gave the SEAL the power to initiate a workout or drill at any hour of the day and through any weather.
According to Itzler, this meant running in through bilzzard conditions while wearing a 50 lb vest, sleeping in a wooden chair and doing up to 1,000 pushups a day. The SEAL trained himself by spending time in an oxygen deprivation tank. Before ending his training stint with Itzler, the SEAL gifted the family with an inflatable water raft that could hold up to 450 lbs so they could escape New York in an emergency.
“The real takeaway is that to get better in life, you have to be uncomfortable,” Itzler said. “You have to get out of your comfort zone.”
Itzler’s book documenting his experience will be out Nov. 3.