痛みは体から抜ける弱さ itami wa karada kara nukeru yowasa Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body

痛みは体から抜ける弱さ turns pain into good news: what hurts in training is weakness on its way out. 抜ける carries the image. It is what goes out of something it was inside, the air from a tire, the tiredness from a body. So the Japanese says what the English says, and reads as Japanese rather than as a translation. The is goes unsaid, the way Japanese writes a motto.

The English was a favorite saying of drill instructors before the Corps made it a recruiting slogan, and the Navy's midshipmen had it by 1988 and the Army's Rangers use it too; the meaning has never moved: the pain of training is the weakness going out of you, so welcome it.

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