Joshua Stath

Pain Is Weakness

Pain is weakness leaving the body. I’ll never forget when I was first introduced to the words, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” I was seventeen years old, not even out of my little high school in my little one-four stop town. I was a scrawny kid back then, six feet two inches and one hundred and sixty-five pounds or so. To say that I was small would be an understatement. In high school we had to take physical education, and while I was a great runner for both sprints and long distance, I couldn’t get a bar up or a dumbbell curled to save my life. I was determined though, and it was when I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps out of Casper, Wyoming that I knew things were going to change. My recruiter told me that I was what they termed a double rat, or double rations. Basically, when they were going to send me to boot camp, I would be eating double the amount of food that other recruits would be. This was to help my body pack on the muscle that I would need while providing me with enough energy to make that transition from civilian to basically trained Marine. And that is exactly what they did.