MITCH HALL probably shouldn't have been posing for pictures. It was the afternoon before last October's Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, and he was hoping to finish in the top 100.

Most of his fellow competitors spent hours fine-tuning their bikes and bodies and resting up for the next day's 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run. But this time Hall, who had placed 207th out of the more than 1,700 competitors in 2005, had returned to Kona on the military's dime. The Navy even ponied up for his $7,000 Cervélo P3 triathlon bike. A 16-year veteran of the SEALs—he received a Bronze Star for classified actions as one of the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001—Hall had become the face of the elite force's surprising effort to increase its ranks by dipping into the world of endurance and adventure sports.

And so, instead of sipping liquids in the shade, Hall, 35, an intense, sinewy man who bears a passing resemblance to Lance Armstrong, was standing in the 80-degree heat by the pool at the Kona Seaside Hotel, half smiling, his bike in front of him and emblazoned with Navy and SEAL decals, with a 19-year-old SEAL recruit next to him, posing for photos destined for posters, pamphlets, or the SEAL Web site—or at least for convincing the Navy that the bike had been a sound investment. "We've worked my triathlon interest into the recruiting effort," Hall said after the shoot. "And I think it's a win-win."

Kona was a test rollout of sorts for what's being called SEAL Athlete, a program that aims to wrap a recruiting message around the fact that, in their free time, SEALs tend to gravitate toward long-distance races and action sports.

"We're looking for target-rich environments," Captain Roger Herbert, the commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, told me at their facility on Coronado Island, near San Diego. "In Southern California, surf competitions make great venues, water-polo matches make great venues. We even went to a lifeguard competition."

SEAL Athlete is one of the primary innovations of the new Naval Special Warfare Recruiting Directorate, formed in December 2005 and tasked with collaborating with the Navy's traditional recruiting arm to find more and better SEAL candidates. The Directorate is like a boutique ad agency, reaching out to a niche that standard Navy recruiting efforts often overlook. (The Navy tends to set up booths at places like NASCAR races and boat shows.) And though they didn't really expect to find any recruits at Kona—while the average age at the Ironman World Championship is 38, the cutoff for SEAL recruits is 28—the SEALs saw their presence there as an important first step toward making a good impression on a new audience.

Hall's hopes of impressing with his time were dashed when he came down with flu-like symptoms the night after the photo session. Feverish and depleted, he limped across the finish line after 13 and a half hours, in 1,407th place. It was a disappointing result from a personal perspective, but it was still on message: SEALs are just like you—assuming you enjoy swimming, cycling, and running 13 hours a day.

"Getting the word out in this community, with Mitch and other athletes, is important," explains Captain Duncan Smith, 48, an adventure racer who joined the SEALs in 1985, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has headed the Recruiting Directorate since its inception. "It might be a small pond, but it's a pond where we want to make sure we're fishing."