IT'S NOT THAT THE SEALS (Sea, Air, Land) have a problem attracting ready, willing recruits; the Navy sends them more than enough men interested in joining a force revered for having handled some of the most delicate and dangerous operations in every conflict since Vietnam. It's the able part that's tricky. The initial, seven-month training gantlet, known as BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training), is a notoriously brutal selector, intentionally designed to disabuse the vast majority of its initiates of their SEAL daydreams. BUD/S can handle a maximum of roughly 1,000 men annually, spread out over five classes, but it graduated just 192 in 2005 and only 171 last year. "Navy recruiting complained that 'We send you good guys and you break them,' " Smith says. "And our answer was, 'Well, you're sending us the wrong guys.' "

Smith is convinced that the right guys are endurance fiends like triathletes—wiry all-arounders who tend to be focused, good both on land and in the water, and largely indifferent to physical discomfort. Contrary as it may be to our cinematically sculpted notions of them as neckless linebacker types, typical SEALs are around five foot ten and 175 pounds. "Bigger guys are mostly weeded out," an instructor told me at the BUD/S compound on Coronado Island last spring. "Too much body to haul around."

The graduation rate at BUD/S has historically stood at around 26 percent, which, though low, was enough for the SEALs to maintain their 2,300-man force. But then they became, in a way, victims of their own success.

The SEALs were among the very first soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001, sniffing out Al Qaeda operatives and weapons caches. They were dispatched to secure offshore oil platforms during the initial invasion of Iraq and, thanks to their adaptability and proficiency at rapid mobilization, have become indispensable in the urban shooting galleries of Baghdad and Fallujah. Yet despite thousands of frontline missions, they have suffered only 19 combat fatalities over the past six years. Wanting more of that sort of efficacy and efficiency, the Defense Department recently called on them to add 500 men to their ranks by 2011.

Making BUD/S easier so that more men could pass (the SEALs don't take women) simply wasn't an option. "Compromising quality risks mission failure, or American lives, or both," Captain Herbert, the commanding officer of the training center, explained. "That would be just immoral." The obvious solution was finding better recruits. When Smith started looking behind the numbers at BUD/S and discovered that triathletes were graduating at a rate of better than 40 percent, he had an idea of where to find them. "If you look at who our guys are and the things they do on the weekends—triathlons, climbing, open-ocean swims—they get out there," he explained. Smith, who runs a SEAL mountain-bike team and once competed in events like the Eco-Challenge and the X Games as a Salomon-sponsored athlete, decided to take advantage of that fact by simply advertising it.

Over the past year and a half, he or members of his staff of 28, supplemented by SEALs with backgrounds in the relevant sports, have started showing up at endurance events, sometimes competing, sometimes just manning information tables. "It's about the right information conveyed by the right messenger, in this case an athlete talking to another athlete, who also happens to be a SEAL," Smith says.

At the Winter X Games in Aspen this year, they brought a pull-up bar to see how many people they could find who could do ten pull-ups. They ended up with 215, including a female big-wall climber who racked up 32. (Take that, boys' club.) They've spoken at REI stores and to running clubs, and, in late June, they put on a pilot event in Boston called the Trident Challenge, a competition based on the SEAL Physical Screening Test—"Triathlon light, with a strength component," Smith calls it. They've also been promoting the Superfrog, a SEAL-run triathlon held in and around their training compound on Coronado. The September 2006 race, which Mitch Hall won, drew more than 300 entrants, 165 of whom were civilians.

Smith has also made a priority of pulling the curtain back slightly on what has traditionally been a fairly opaque organization, on the theory that the more informed recruits are going in, the less likely they will be to quit. He has set up a call line to field questions from interested candidates and, with help from the Navy, established a nationwide network of mentors—most of them former SEALs—to prepare recruits for BUD/S. And where once the SEALs cultivated secrecy and relied partly on the attendant mystique to attract candidates, Smith has even begun courting the media. "Twenty years ago, when Mitch and I joined, there were none of these resources," he says. "It was some fat guy from the fleet with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. That was recruiting."