Why I Race With My Demons: Masochism, Military Envy, and the Stoic Path to Healing

When I met my wife, she saw through me faster than anyone ever had. She asked a question that cut straight to the core:

“What are you compensating for that makes you do masochistic things?”

It caught me off guard. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I had never really said it out loud. I had built my life around hard things—voluntarily throwing myself into physically brutal events, like the Death Race. Climbing mountains with sandbags. Crawling through mud under barbed wire. Hiking for hours without food or sleep. On the surface, it looked like I just liked to suffer.

But I wasn’t doing this for pain.

I was doing it for proof.

A Dream Deferred

My path to these events didn’t begin with a desire to punish myself. It began with ambition, with structure, with a dream to serve. During my junior year at UIC, I was accepted into the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School program. I was on the brink of booking my tickets to Quantico when it all unraveled.

The reason? Cheerleading.

I was a collegiate cheerleader—not for the games or the pom-poms—but for the competition. I was a gymnast first, but I didn’t mesh with the gymnastics coach at UIC, so I pivoted to cheer to stay active, to flip and fly and defy gravity at Nationals in Daytona Beach. I trained hard and competed harder. We placed 5th in the nation my freshman year and 4th my sophomore year. But when our basketball team went on a hot streak during my junior year, it meant more travel, more absences—and a finance professor who didn’t care why I was gone.

She was going to fail me for missing classes. The Marine Corps wasn’t going to wait. So instead of Quantico, I found myself in summer school, retaking finance and preserving my GPA, but watching a dream fade in the rearview.

I made the Dean’s List in my junior and senior years. On paper, I recovered. But inside? That failure—a failure that wasn’t really mine—ate away at me. I had something to prove. To myself. To the world. To whatever force had taken that opportunity from me. I needed to know I could endure the kind of crucible the Marine Corps would have put me through. That I had the grit, the discipline, the resilience—even if I never got the uniform to prove it.

Unspoken Trauma

But that wasn’t the only thing I was running from—or toward.

The world of cheerleading had also taken something else. I was raped by a choreographer.

I didn’t talk about it for 10 years. I didn’t even admit it to myself for a long time. Like so many others, I buried the trauma. Pushed it down. Pretended it didn’t affect me. But it did. In everything.

In how I carried myself. In how I trusted (or didn’t trust) others. In how I sought out places where I could feel powerful again. Where I could reclaim control of my body, my mind, and my will.

The Death Race didn’t just become an outlet—it became an exorcism. A battlefield. A sacred proving ground where I could burn away weakness, confront my demons, and come out stronger on the other side. At least, that’s what I hoped.

What I didn’t expect was that it would also become a path to healing. Not just physically. But mentally. Philosophically. Spiritually.

The Day Stoicism Found Me

After my first few Death Races, I started noticing something about the people around me. These weren’t just athletes. They weren’t adrenaline junkies or masochists looking to bleed for fun.

They were people like me—people who had been through something. People who had lost something. People running from ghosts or looking for proof that they could survive the storm.

It’s where I met Johnny Waite—a fellow racer, mentor, and one of the first people to introduce me to Stoic philosophy in action.

I remember a moment that flipped a switch for me. Johnny thought he had lost his laptop. He believed he left it in my car, and for a while, we weren’t sure if it had been stolen or simply misplaced.

But what struck me wasn’t the situation—it was his reaction. He just shrugged.

“It is what it is,” he said.

No panic. No frustration. Just… peace.

I was bewildered. Had I lost my laptop, I would’ve been spiraling—anxious, angry, catastrophizing. But Johnny just moved on. Later that day, he found it. No drama. No wasted energy.

That moment haunted me—in a good way.

How could someone be so calm in the face of loss? What kind of mindset is that?

The answer was Stoicism.

Johnny pointed me toward Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and the writings of Epictetus and Seneca. I dove in. And I started to realize: what I was chasing through physical suffering—the ability to endure, to remain unmoved, to face the chaos of life with resolve and clarity—had a name.

It wasn’t masochism. It was philosophy.

Suffering With Purpose

Stoicism teaches us that we can’t control what happens to us—only how we respond. That’s the core. It’s not about being emotionless. It’s about not being ruled by emotions. It’s about resilience, discipline, perspective.

The Death Race taught me those things through pain. Through mud. Through failure.

Stoicism taught me through words. Through practice. Through reflection.

Together, they changed everything.

I stopped seeing my masochistic tendencies as something broken, something to hide. I started seeing them as a vehicle. Not the destination. Just the road I needed to walk to get to where I was meant to be.

And I wasn’t alone.

We All Show Up With Something

At every endurance event—whether it’s the Death Race, SISU 24, or some other unrelenting crucible—I meet people fighting ghosts. Trauma survivors. Veterans. People grieving the loss of a parent or child. People in recovery. People who need to cry but don’t know how, so they sweat it out. Bleed it out. Break it out.

We may be racing on the outside, but inside, we’re rebuilding.

These events create space for that. They force you to be vulnerable, to strip away the noise and confront who you really are when everything is taken from you—sleep, comfort, warmth, direction, approval. And what you find in that place isn’t weakness. It’s truth.

It’s not a substitute for healing—but it can be a catalyst.

Therapy and the Hard Conversations

I need to say this plainly: the best help I ever got didn’t come from carrying logs or crawling through rivers.

It came from therapy. From saying the words I never thought I’d say. From facing the memories I had tried to outrun. From learning that I didn’t have to fight alone.

Events like the Death Race can be a powerful tool for transformation. But they’re not a cure. They’re not therapy. They’re a mirror. And sometimes what we see in that mirror is a reminder that we need help. That it’s okay to get help.

More than okay—it’s courageous.

There’s nothing weak about seeing a therapist. Nothing broken about needing support. If anything, it’s the most Stoic thing you can do: to face reality as it is, without illusion, and take responsibility for your healing.

From Masochism to Meaning

So when people ask me now, “Why do you do these things to yourself?”—I have a better answer.

I do it to remember who I am.

I do it to stay grounded, centered, tested.

I do it because suffering, when chosen with intention, can be sacred.

But most of all—I do it because I know what it’s like to suffer in silence. And I never want to go back to that place. I want to keep growing. Keep healing. Keep helping others do the same.

Masochism? Maybe. But I call it chosen suffering.

A form of resistance.

A form of prayer.

A form of becoming.

And with the right tools—philosophy, therapy, community—it can become the foundation for a better life.