Earned, Not Given- Chapter 1: What's a GoRuck
What's a GoRuck?
“What’s a GoRuck?”
It’s a question that I’ve been asked dozens of times. My usual response is that it’s an endurance event that involves rucking. The next question is, “what’s rucking?” Then I will explain that rucking is basically walking with weight in a backpack.
In this over simplistic way to describe a GoRuck event, it’s so much more than that. The definition of a GoRuck event is “a challenging activity that's based on Special Forces training exercises and involves carrying a weighted rucksack. GORUCK events are often team-building events and can vary in difficulty and duration.”
What does that mean? It means, a lot of rucking. What is rucking you might ask? The term rucking is rooted in the military and it basically means carrying a backpack/rucksack with weight in it over a set distance.
My first GoRuck event came the following year after I did a Spartan Race with my friend, Harrison. The Spartan Races opened my mind up to what kinds of races and fitness events existed. The Spartan Race was miserable. It took place in the last week of October. It was cold, rainy, and miserable. I think the temperature during the event was about 45F. When I ran the event, I didn’t feel cold because I was keeping my body warm from running, doing burpees and holding myself upright in the slippery mud. I felt like a warrior running the event. When I finished the event, the adrenaline wore off and I sat shivering around a fire in wet clothes.
The next day I woke up with road rash on my skin from low crawls under barbed wire. With raw skin and sore muscles, I didn’t feel bad. I felt alive.
It was a different type of feeling than the normal one I was used to after a long run. I felt like I had done something that I didn’t know I was capable of doing.
Several months later, Harrison sends me a text and tells me to do this event with him. It was called a “GoRuck Challenge.”
The thumbnail of the event had people who looked dirty and covered in mud. They all had headlamps on during the event from it taking place at night.
“This looks cool, it looks like a different take on doing something like a Spartan Race.” I thought to myself.
I signed up for the event blindly without taking a deeper look into what it was about. A few days later, I decided to take a closer look at the event and my jaw dropped when I saw the different events they held.
GoRuck Heavy:
24 hours
35-40 miles
30 lbs in your ruck without water. (6 bricks suggested)
50% completion rate.
GoRuck Challenge (Now called “Tough”):
12 hours
15-20 miles
30 lbs in your ruck without water. (6 bricks suggested)
90% completion rate.
GoRuck Light
6 hours
5-10 miles
20 lbs in your ruck without water (4 bricks suggested)
98% completion rate.
Wait, what? Six bricks in a backpack for 12 hours? 20 miles of rucking? What is rucking? What the hell did I get myself into?!
My jaw also dropped when I saw the price tag on the GoRuck rucksack. It was $300. I couldn’t fathom spending $300 on a rucksack. When I talked to Harrison about it, he told me that it was a necessity for this event. If I did buy this, I wouldn’t need to buy another backpack ever again. I splurged and ended up buying the 26L GoRuck GR1, a rucksack that has lasted me 10 years.
My First GoRuck Challenge
When I showed up to that first GoRuck Challenge, I kept my mind empty of expectations. All I was going to do was show up and go with the flow. What I came quickly to find out about what makes GoRuck events unique is the team aspect of it. No one at the event is competing against each other. This event is not a race. Instead, it’s something a bunch of strangers endure together.
Everyone at the event had to quickly learn how to work together. Quickly you learn the different strengths and weaknesses of everyone that is on your team.
GoRuck events are led by a Cadre. A Cadre in GoRuck events is a current or former Special Forces member who leads the events by giving challenges and lessons throughout the event. A Cadre’s job is to both challenge the group and put pressure on them and teach everyone some lessons in leadership through that pressure. These events are often as mental as they are physical. When you’re in an exhaustive physical state, you tend to make irrational choices and decisions. Our bodies and brains go into survival mode when we feel an outside stressor. The outside stressors cause us to react selfishly, even if it’s not in the best interest of the team to complete their goals.
I’ve come to learn the best way to get over this is to confront it. During a GoRuck event, you’re forced to confront all of these impulses and see the repercussions of it in real-time. This is part of the drive that keeps people coming back for more of these events.
Our Cadre’s would be Mickey and Brian. Mickey was about a 6’1” Navy Seal who had a bunch of tattoos. Navy Seals are known for their love to take you in the water. Both of them were intense guys but I felt Brian was a special type of crazy. I’m not sure if we were lucky or unfortunate to have him lead my group for the second half of the event.
We rucked a lot and rucked fast. He loved to do ruck runs throughout the city and make us randomly do PT everywhere. During one part of the event we carried our rucks over our heads and would do what he called, “up boat, down boat.”
Basically when he said “up boat” we would lift our rucks over our heads while we were walking and on “down boat” we would set it down.
Our group would get gaslit by him while we were rolling around in the coarse sand on the beach.
“You should be thanking me. Usually, you have to pay for things like this. This is exfoliation. You can thank me later for this.” Brian would say to us.
This event ended up being far more intense than I ever bargained for but I ended up making it through. I had never been on my feet for 12 hours at a time like this before or quite felt this beaten down before. During the event, Cadre Brian was the villain of his level of intensity but afterward, I had mad respect for him for pushing us to the limits.
After I finished the event, there was a level of pride that I had in myself. I felt like I had earned something special. I did something that less than 1% of the population would even think about doing.
During the event, I told myself that I would never do something like that again but after it was over, I wanted more. I became addicted.
See the next part of this story in the link below. You can also find the ebook of this story here.
