Why I Want To Do One Of The Worlds Toughest Endurance Events
My why runs deep and I'm not even sure if I truly know it.
This has been brewing in my mind since Memorial Day weekend where I shadowed a GoRuck Heavy event for about 6 hours.
The event gave me some nostalgia. It reminded me of all the trials and tribulations that I had doing these events five years ago. I had completed all of GoRucks events and got the honorable HCL patch that I wear on my GR1 rucksack to this day.
It still didn’t feel like enough. I had one more event to complete which was different from all the others, GoRuck Selection.
GoRuck Selection is described as this on GoRucks website:
Selection is a 48+ hour individual event and dubbed the toughest endurance event in the world. Our Cadre will enforce a standard adopted from our roots in Special Forces Assessment and Selection. Those participants who do not meet the standard at any point will be performance dropped at our discretion.
I was on a trip to Arizona this weekend and had a chance to watch something. I didn’t feel like watching a trendy documentary or anything like that. I wanted to watch a documentary about something that I could relate to. I watched The Standard which is a documentary in 2020 that GoRuck released about the event of Selection.
One of the questions that stuck in my head was about 24+ hours into the event, the Cadre’s were asking the lone man left, “why are you doing this?”
He gave some standard answer like, “to push myself and see what I’m made of.”
That’s an answer that I would give but it’s a surface level answer. It has no substance. There’s not much more for me to prove.
Am I the toughest person alive? Definitely not.
Am I tougher than vast majority of people walking around today? That’s for sure but that also depends on your definition of toughness.
To me, doing an event like this isn’t to prove myself.
What is my why? Why do I want to do this?
Is My Why About Proving Toughness?
I used to say this to people that I do ultra endurance events and GoRuck events because I want to see what I’m made of. That answer felt phony to me. It was an answer for people who do not understand what it’s like to do something they thought was impossible for themselves.
I’m not a mutant. I’m not a genetic freak who can run endless miles without tiring. I’m a normal guy and have always been. My entire life has been being a normal guy who levels himself up to see what his potential is.
Work ethic will not get you whatever you want but it will show you what you can get.
If you never work hard, you will never know where your potential could be.
If I didn’t wake up at 5:00am to lift weights in the morning from 8th grade to my senior year of high school, there’s a chance I would not have started or been captain of the football team. Even if I did, I would have done my team a disservice for not giving my best.
I wake up every morning today, not regretting a thing that I did for that team.
Is It The Ego?
It’s not for the ego or bragging rights. I’m the type who downplays a lot of races that I’ve completed instead of brag about them. (Maybe I should brag about them more, that’s how you get more social clicks.)
If I took the ego out of the equation and did these events in a vacuum where no one would know about them except for me, I would still do it.
It’s Not The Event It’s The Journey
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. - Some stupid cliche.
Cliche’s can have some truth to them. The journey is often as important as the destination, if not more.
My first 50 mile ultra marathon, I ran it with minimal training. I signed up for the race 6 months in advance and I fell into a run of not training. I don’t think I ran more than 10 miles a week the entire time leading up to the event.
I finished the 50 mile ultra after moving at a crawling pace the last 15 miles but I finished. I was proud of finishing but I was not proud of the way I trained for the event.
I could have done better. A lot better.
Training for intense endurance events does more to you than get you in shape. It progressively sharpens you. It makes you more disciplined in other aspects of your life.
I know on days and weeks that I’m keeping up with my training, everything else in life seems to be under control. Maintaining the primary pillars in your life is important and letting one of them falter can cause the other ones to falter.
Why Am I Training For GoRuck Selection
Since I was a kid, I took things on that were tough because I thought it would make me stronger. I occasionally slept on a cot in my unfinished basement, I would sleep on the floor, I woke up early and did all sort of things like that.
Doing something hard isn’t about being hard. It’s about what you become in the process. It teaches me to become a person that can empathize with others more, it gives me confidence that I can handle whatever life throws at me and it opens my mind to what the possibilities are for myself.
A lot of us have no idea what our possibilities are because we are living at a fraction of our potential.
I will be told that I need to relax and enjoy things more often. I do have moments where I sit back and enjoy them. However, I cannot fully enjoy them until I know that I did my best.
If you’ve been consistent about something in your life before, you’ll know what I’m writing about. Think about a time you went on vacation but you’ve been working towards something that is important to you. Can you really be on vacation if you have that thought lingering in your mind that you left something on the table for months leading up to it? Did you earn your vacation?
It’s a similar principle. Sometimes you need to feel like you’ve earned something to achieve fulfillment in all other moments of your life.
I know training and giving this event a try will be something that will stick with me forever. That is why I am going to document all my trials and tribulations along the way. Cutting videos has become a small hobby of mine and I think it would be fun to see the journey along the way. Maybe it can be something for my future children to see or impact one person to make a better change in their life.
On my 18th birthday, my father passed away after an 11 month battle with cancer. He never showed signs of letting up on his fight with it. Even if it did mentally, he never showed it externally.
Seeing what he went through for 11 months certainly changed me. The least I can do is voluntarily take on some adversity and suffer for a couple days.
Maybe that is my why?
Even if it’s not, I know one thing. If I try my best, one day, I’ll look back and not regret anything about the person I became.