GoRuck?

[perdurabo]

Originally Posted by Hammock

I am posting this email I received two days ago to illustrate how GORUCK dealt with a problem:

"Hi everyone -

[Redacted] here. As we say here at the Teamhouse, bad news doesn't get better with time, so I'll cut to the chase: we are canceling GORUCK Trek events going forward from this October 1st.

GORUCK had "help wanted" ads posted for former case officers (at least up until a couple weeks ago). Perhaps GORUCK didn't get enough responses to be able to handle the Trek schedule. I hope that changes, I'd love to hit a Trek one day and play "airsoft spy" for a night.

[sterinn]

I signed up for GRC Houston Feb 2, 1:00am

Man I'm excited!

[SDK]

Anyone in SD area? I'd love to do one of the ones coming up, and would like someone to train with.

[Friars18X]

Doing the GoRuck in Washington, D.C. 20121201. Figure it will be a good test a couple months out from shipping.

[MountainMan35]

Originally Posted by Friars18X

Doing the GoRuck in Washington, D.C. 20121201. Figure it will be a good test a couple months out from shipping.

As am I.

[Horrible]

Originally Posted by SDK

Anyone in SD area? I'd love to do one of the ones coming up, and would like someone to train with.

I am in SD and am doing the one on New Years eve!

[SDK]

Originally Posted by Horrible

I am in SD and am doing the one on New Years eve!

I'm thinking of doing the one next year. How long have you been training for it, and what have you been doing?

[Horrible]

Originally Posted by SDK

I'm thinking of doing the one next year. How long have you been training for it, and what have you been doing?

Well, I haven't been training for it specifically, but I have been training since about July for an SFRE happening in December. It just so happens that the two events appear to be fairly similar, so I get can train for both

I've been rucking twice a week out on Iron mountain and doing interval runs 2-3 times a week. And then just calesthenics about 3 days out of the way, just working to increase numbers.

[adal]

Did it yesterday. Good cadre. Well formed. Very much reminded me of selection without the being weeded out. Everybody that went was in shape for it, but even then it hit some hard. I didn't quite come straight off the couch, but I could've trained a little more.

Sore today in the expected places. No blisters, no cuts, no bruises.

It rained the ENTIRE time of our event which was 14+ hours (and 33 degrees out). There wasn't a dry spot on anyone including cadre who at the end said that it was officially his coldest Goruck ever.

If you do it, don't take it lightly.

[Mobelizer]

I got my GRC coming up Feb 23 0100 in Atlantic City, same day they got a GoRuck Heavy(24 + hrs) at Ft. Bragg.

GORUCK recently restructured their website. giving a better overview of the events you can attend.

over the last month I have been doing (weighted) rucks 5-8 miles combined with PT. Completed a ruck yesterday .8 miles 2 hours.


I hope that within 6 months I can get physically/mentally prepared for "Selection". GRC on Feb 23 should be a decent indicator/benchmark

[Mack27]

I'll be doing the GoRuck Challenge in DC on July 4th. I'm really excited, it'll be my first one. I've been doing Crossfit for quite a while now, and been rucking with about 30 pounds over various terrain and distance for the last two months. I think I'm ready physically, it'll be the mental thing that is the toughest to prepare for, but I think I'm ready for that as well. GRC in DC on July 4th? Should be a good time. I'll let you all know how it goes when I get back, and hopefully have some good pictures.

Mack

[albeham]

Might need to take my fat ass of this desk and get it on.

Baltimore event coming up, might go watch, hell might just go and do it.


any more AARs ?

AL

[Horrible]

Here's mine from Dec 31, 2012 (Class 367)

Alright, I got to Balboa parkaround 0030 and saw only a few people standing around. The mood was light and we introduced ourselves and talked about the upcoming challenge and such. A small cluster of the guys had apparently just done one in Newport, RI about 3 weeks prior. "Holy shit, these guys are nuts" is what I'm thinking. There's one guy here with a cool beard, and I tell him he has a cool beard. He laughs. One guy there named Matt Francev has done this dumb stuff 8 times prior, including the very first slection class (You can read about it here http://www.gorucknews.com/selection....stine-florida/). Cadre shows up. His name is Mike and people are talking to him like it aint no thing. I thought this was kinda odd, but then again I assumed there was gonna be a whole lot of screaming and hollering once the cadre got there but that turned out to not be the case. Mike didn't have to yell to get us to do stuff.

More people filter in as 0100 comes and goes. We take roll. About 5 people missing. Jokes are made about having Hitler AIDS and TBS (terminal bitch syndrome) and we laugh. Cadre Mike tells us, very politely, to grab our rucks and form two lines facing each other, then put our rucks on the ground and open them. People have trouble forming two parralel lines and it makes me wince. But we get our stuff covered and aligned and open up for inspection. Interesting to see some of the stuff that people have packed. I brought two extra pairs of socks, old issued Nomex gloves, hydration bladder and some granola bars. People had all sorts of extra warming layers and snivel gear. In hindsight, I should've gotten some kind of glove that wouldn't retain water, a bunch of salt tabs (I paid for this later) and maybe an extra t-shirt, but overall I think I packed really well. Everyone's bricks checked out, fortunately. We were given very specific instructions beforehand to make sure that our bricks were well-taped, and had our names and phone numbers on them. Everyone followed this. Mike began introducing himself: Former force reconnaissance, former combat controller, dive qualed, HALO qualed, he's done quite a bit of stuff. He talks a little more, but then sees two folks with packs on walking over to the group. "Rucks above your heads" he says. The two stragglers hustle over to our roll call person and check in, which prompts Mike to let us lower our packs. He talks a little bit more about combat and where he's been. He mentions something like 2 trips to Iraq and 1 to southeast asia or something like that. Two more folks round the corner and we put rucks over our head again. They casually stroll towards us like its nothing. "HURRY THE FUCK UP!!" someone shouts. Thats gets them moving. They check in, packs go down. We form up in columns of two and move out towards the main fountai, about 400m away.

The groans are audible as we approach the fountain, but we don't get to jump in quite yet. Mike calls the team leader up and gives him our instructions: Split up along the brick pathways to the fountains, bear crawl through the little reflecting pools, up the stairs (which have water running down them) and keep going until you reach the end. We do this. Up at the top of the stairs we do a modified high crawl, still in water. The stones hurt my knees. We keep it together and make sure to wait for the folks in the back. They are ever so slow. I can tell my gloves are soaking up water like a sponge and so are my boots. This will become a theme for the day. We reach the end of the pools and form back up. Mike sends us to the fountain and informs us that we are now going to commence with the welcoming party. I'm not sure why, but I let out a tiny little "Rah" and someone behind me giggles. We 360 around the fountain (which is turned off and would probably look gross if it wasn't 0100 and dark) and are told to watch for the pipes. Gingerly we step in. The water is a shock to the system. The air temperature was probably about 45 that night, though the water was likely warmer than that. Instantly people start shaking. I feel fine, strangely enough. Our first exercise is jumping jacks. We manage to do this pretty well, though some folks suffer from Iraqi Army syndrome and cant seem to do jumping jacks correctly. Whatever. Next is cherry pickers. They're easy and we breeze through them. 4-count pushups. Fuck. With packs on. Double fuck. They're actually easier than I thought since we're in deep enough water that we kinda float. There was one guy who was about 6'3 with long, gangly arms that probably didn't enjoy this, but fuck him for being tall. Packs on your front, flutter kicks. Uh oh. I sit down in the water with my head up. My straps are too tight, the ruck in right on my neck. Can't really breathe but I get through the flutter kicks. 8-count bodybuilders afterwards. People need to be shown how to do this 3 times. I call out "It's like a slow burpee. Don't jump at the end". Collective light bulbs go off. We do 25 of them in the time it takes your grandparents to have sex. I'm tired but feeling warm. The chick two people down from me is breaking down and is very, very cold. More jumping jacks. Cherry pickers. Motivated Marine Corps pushups. One guy says "Hooah" and I laugh. He's my battle buddy, a prior Army Engineer officer. Pretty cool guy. Pushups are done, and fountain fun is done. We are soaking wet everywhere, but I'm glad I brought my jacket. It would stay on me the entire time and keep me warm enough without overheating. Also had zippered pockets so I could stow my gloves in them later on when I hated those stupid fucking things.

We move out of the fountain and form up again. Marching south along some sidewalk we get to a ravine and Mike calls the team leader over. We have a downed aircraft in our AO and for some unexplainable reason we have to carry it out instead of hitting it with JDAMs or whatever. At the bottom of this ravine is an enormous dead tree just sitting there. The ground on the sides of the ravine is nice and soft but I almost twist an ankle getting to the bottom. That would've been fun explaining to my friends. "Oh, the ankle? I rolled it trying to get down a ravine to carry a half-ton log out of it with a bunch of strangers. I also had a pack on. Why? BECAUSE I'M RETARDED".

The log is heavy. Really fucking heavy. We had probably 15-18 guys on it and it was a bitch and a half to move. I saw pictures of other GRC's with like 6 guys on a nice straight log and I curse whatever gods put that fucking tree there. Its also got some nice angles to it so we can't just assign short people to the front and tall people in the back. This becomes problematic later on. Getting the log out of the ravine proves tricky because the ground is like mush and that stupid fucking log weighs like 20 tons. Have I mentioned how much I hate that log? I really hate it. While getting it up the hill, we had to bring it down to hip level and set it down a few times in order to rest up a little bit. On the third time doing this, folks pretty much just dropped it and it fell on my arm. Ouch. They certainly got it off quickly enough. The arm was okay, just a little bruising for my troubles. Finally we got that heavy bitch out onto the sidewalk. After slapping backs and shaking hands for a sec, Mike gave our team leader new instructions: We had to move the downed aircraft to the USS Midway for extract. FUCK. Midway is literally 3 miles away through downtown San Diego! I didn't know that at the time (Calculated it later using Google Earth), but I knew that the Midway was faaaaaar away. Ugh. So we picked up the log and off we went on our merry way. The rules are: We will follow all traffic laws. Which means we wait at stop lights, stay on the sidewalk at all times, and move for pedestrians. When crossing crosswalks, the log goes overheadfuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. That's all I could think. Gonna be a long day, for sure. Oh, and we have 1.5 hours to get there. We move on with our log airplane at a fairly good pace. People rotate out as needed. Because the log is so oddly shaped, folks rotating into the wrong spot have to stoop down when moving or suffer a hugely disproportionate weight on them. The groans and shrieks follow our log as we suffer through the night. Shoulders burned. Backs ached. OH! I forgot to mention one thing: We had a mandatory team weight, and another thing we brought along called a "coupon". Rules for the team weight are that it needs to be at least 25lbs and has to be carried the entire way. It also can never touch the ground unless Mike says so. We decided, in light of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, that we would each bring 26$ in quarters and fill a brick bag with it. I don't know exactly how much it weighed but it didn't seem to be much. Anyhow, the other part: The coupon. The cadre supplied this one, which happened to be a Pelican case filled with ice and about 30 beers. It probably weighed about 50lbs. It also happened to be very awkward to carry by yourself, so at one point one of the guys doing the challenege became McGuyver and rigged up some straps with carabiners on the one handle to allow two people to carry it, which is officially a Good Idea(TM). Unfortunately they spaced the straps a little too unevenly, so the case had a tendency to rotate and smash people's knees as they walked along. It wasn't too bad but it was super annoying.

[Horrible]

Somewhere after we hit downtown, both quads cramped up, hard. Like, couldn't-flex-my-leg-at-all hard. The pain was pretty bad and I had to get out from the log for a little bit. Some nice guy gave me a few salt tabs and that helped. I'm pretty sure it was Cool Beard Dude from before. After about 5 minutes of hobbling my legs finally decided to work again. We kept the log going down every street with passers-by gawking at our sorry group. Being that it was still around 0200 there were not many people out on the street, although we did wake up a few homeless people (Sorry guys). One guy even offered us some weed. We passed by a Lululemon store and all the Crossfit people made jokes.

Mike informs us that we are taking a detour. We head up a few streets (making sure to painfully elevate our log as we cross each intersection) and stop at a mall parking garage. WHEW! Finally get time to take that load off. We don't get to unceremoniously dump the log just yet, instead we get to kick-roll it over to the building wall. Then we get a bathroom break. We've already had a few cops and other security folks ask Mike what we were doing, so for us to pee, we had to go about 2 blocks away to find a nice covert location (Which turned out to be some bushes). We finished up our business and headed back to the rest of the team, where we munched on some food and drank more water. The chance to rest was nice but did not last very long. We had a new mission: Establish a communications linkup with the extract platform on top of the mountain. In this case, the mountain was the top of the parking garage, which was about 8 stories up (I think). So in true mountain-climber fashion, we had to bear crawl up the stairs. In the end it wasn't so bad, but my waterlogged gloves made a "squish squish squish" sound every time I put my hand down. We form up again at the top of the parking garage and wait for instructions. It is still dark out but downtown San Diego looks beautiful at night with no traffic. The buildings look very sparkly from all the lights. Anyway, we get formed up in a circle and do some squad pushups. If you're not familiar, squad pushups require the person in front of you to put their feet on your shoulders while you do the same to the person behind you. It makes the exercise stupid hard and is a stupid exercise for stupid people. We still had our packs on (as we always did) so it was nearly impossible to get the 10 we were required to do to before moving on. Im sure that Mike didn't approve of our form, but he let us go after enough attempts. We had to peel out of there and down the stairs to make it back to our log. My partner's legs and mine were pretty smoked by this point so going down stairs fast became quite a chore. However, we managed to make it and keep up with the group. Once we got back down off the garage, we were informed that a few of our team were wounded and had to be moved back down, so 4 brave guys got to run back up there and fireman carry the "wounded" team mates back down the stairs. After that, all was well and we got our log back and moved on. I was dreading moving again, as I was under the assumption that we were still a ways away from the USS Midway.

Turns out that we were only 3 blocks away! As soon as we turned the corner we could all see the harbor, which raised our spirits tremendously. We moved out at a faster pace to our rally point, where we were informed by Mike that we had made the time hack and were going to get a small reward. We all cheered and became super excited! And of course, the best part was unceremoniously dumping that fucking log into the ocean. BYE BYE FUCKO!! After that, Mike gave us a little pep speech and told us that we would be getting a 15 minute break to refill water, eat, or do whatever we needed to do. That felt really, really good. I took this opportunity to take off my waterlogged boots (I really should've worn running shoes, as these boots had water in them the entire time) and change my socks. I also filled up my hydration bladder at the local fountain. One girl had brought pizza slices in her pack, which was about as strange a thing as you could see at this time of night, and I'm very surprised her pizza didn't get squished into a mushy mess. I didn't have any but apparently it was very enjoyable. Some people are still shivering from the cold, but I feel pretty warm all over at this point, with the exception being my feet and hands. The break was sorely needed by all of us, except for Matt Francev whom I mentioned earlier, who talked about the second challenge he was going to do that day. Yes, Matt was going to do back-to-back challenges. Fucker is nuts. After a little more talking and resting, Mike gives us our next objective: Spanish Landing, about 4.5 miles away. We put our rucks back and form up in columns of two, ready to move on to the next objective.



The first thing I see as we move out is the skyline to the east. Skyscrapers obscure most of it but you can just make out some faint blue peeking out. I think, “Damn, how long have we been at this?”, and just around the moment I see a clock mounted on one of the piers to my left: 6:15. Turns out that we've been at this for about 5 hours now. It certainly felt like less, but time flies, I guess. We continue to move out and the mood is light. We pass the Star of India. We pass the airport. We do incline pushups on a low wall. “Find a pole” is Mike's way of telling us to elevate our feet and knock out pushups. I guess our pace was a little too leisurely so we ended up hearing this quite a bit on our push to the next objective. Oops, somebody left a glove behind. Mike informs us that this is not acceptable, so we lunge for 100m. I just happen to be carrying the coupon at the time so I am stuck lunging with close to 90lbs of extra gear. Ouch. Lunges are finished. We are informed that further movement under ruck is going to be done as an indian run. Double ouch. Folks in the back take off and move to the front, taking the heavy coupon and slightly-less-heavy coin bag from the people they just replaced. We keep moving. And moving. And moving. We move past the coast guard station. It feels nice just to sprint across intersections rather than having to hoist up that log. We keep moving. Spanish Landing comes into view. Just a little beach in the distance. Our columns of two need to make way on the narrow sidewalk for pedestrians and cyclicsts, both of whom seem out in force today.


Okay this is getting too long to write. Here's some high points:
-Made it to spanish landing. Got wet and sandy. Did got dragged across the beach.
-Went from there to Ocean Beach, 4.5 miles away. Made it under 1.5 hours.
-Got went and sandy there. Ocean waves nearly pulled a few of us out as we did flutter kicks
-Rucked a little way to a ball park. Cracked open the coupon and drank beers. Felt great! Plus we got to wash off (mostly) and change socks. Got a sweet 15 minute break
-Next objective was something like 7 miles away, back at Balboa park. One of the people following us accidentally hit a biker with her elbows, so we made jokes about lethal elbows for the duration of the ruck. Mike tells us to flare our elbows as we indian run, so we do
-Trek under a bridge and find a homeless camp
-Create a field-expedient litter and carry every member of the team. I think we covered a little over a mile in litter carriage
-Break crawl up a church's field
-Finish back at Balboa park
Total: 21 miles, 14.5 hours

[albeham]

ok and.....