GORUCK Challenge
-
This thread is a resource for anyone interested in joining the Iron Heart GORUCK Team for a challenge in March/April of 2014. The exact date and location are TBD, but we are looking for 12-15 participants. The challenge is not limited to US members, and we hope to gain some international teammates who are willing to make the trip. Again, the exact date and location have yet to be determined. An eventual location may be chosen for the convenience of our international teammates (i.e. East Coast v. West Coast). Please feel free to add any information, or videos, you find of rucking and/or the GORUCK Challenge.
[
-
The GORUCK Challenge is a team event, never a race. Think of it as a slice of Special Operations training where – from start to finish – a Special Operations Cadre challenges, teaches, and inspires your small team to do more than you ever thought possible. Leadership is taught and teamwork is demanded on missions spanning the best of your city. The hardest part? Signing up.
Teamwork, leadership, camaraderie, smiles, and a gut-check worthy of Special Operations training. But the beauty of the Challenge is that it’s not about you, it’s about the people by your side, the individuals that become your team. Ruckers have called it an introduction to themselves and a West Point graduate told me it was the best leadership training he ever had. The funny thing is that the Challenge was an accident. Back in 2010, I saw it as an event to product-prove our gear. But as strangers became teams and friends left asking for more, sooner, so they could bring their other friends next time, the Challenge grew. And because of the Challenge, bonds formed and a family grew in a way that I have never seen outside of the military.
Every Challenge begins awkwardly. A bunch of individuals standing around, wondering what’s first. And what’s after that. There are no frills and no start line.
But eventually your Cadre shows up and life changes. Beaux is one of the great characters in this world, and a Force Recon Marine. In your class, he’ll tell you how he earned his degree in pain, suffering, and discontent in the Al Anbar province in Iraq. And then he’ll laugh and smile and talk about hunting zombies and making you a better person in the process. And you’ll laugh awkwardly and know he’s telling the truth. I’m asked how we pick our Cadre, and the bottom line is that it’s smiles and pedigree. The smiles mean you’re a character, that you can entertain 30 strangers who respect you while you build them into a team. The pedigree is a background in Special Operations, a mindset of mission success via unconventional solutions.
Logistics before go time, hurry-up-and-wait style.
There’s always a beginning and it’s called the the welcome party — also a staple in nearly every military school I ever attended. The point is to break down the individuals. Everything we do has a purpose, everything we do builds a team. And being a team is a mindset, and the mind responds to a good welcome party.
Bricks. Yeah, you’ll have them. If you forget to wrap them, which ‘Raw Dog’ did, you’ll probably hate your life for a while, but you’ll fight through it. The important part of this story is that Raw Dog is a ROTC student, hopefully destined to do great things as an officer in the US military. And I’ll guarantee you that for the rest of his military career, he’ll show up ready. Which he did not on this day. But he did finish, and he did thank us afterwards for the lessons. It’s still funny to me how that works.
Eventually the movements, and the missions start. Above is a throwback to Class 001 in San Francisco. Before Beaux was Cadre. Notice the gear being dragged through the sand. All our gear still makes its way through the Challenge prior to being launched. But more importantly, notice the smiles. Smiles get you everywhere in life, and the Challenge is no different. Good Livin’ is what you call it when life is actually tough but you love it, your attitude is great, and you smile. And since life can be a tough place from time to time, smiles always matter and attitude is everything.
It’s hard to completely separate the gear from the Challenge. All gear has weak points, but it’s our job to field test everything and make sure that what we’re doing is working. And that it continues to work. So suspending a log with your packs – when I’m cadre I won’t let you do it for very long because it’s easier than carrying the log, but it does help us prove the gear.
As the Challenge progresses, smiles still abound, but the goal is always to stay together. More together, more all the time. Any separation (‘breaks in contact’ in military jargon) indicate that the team is not functioning properly. The system for weight transfer matters, for rotating the heavier items like the party ruck. That’s the leader’s job, and the leader is appointed by the Cadre. It’s a learning process, and the classes have to be reminded that all the rules matter all the time. The most important one being: work together. Some people have less weight, some have more, some are doing better, some worse. But life’s not fair and neither is the Challenge. The people doing better should take more weight more of the time, and they should ask for no special reward in return.
When it doesn’t happen, when a team starts to separate, the Cadre takes it back to the basics of team building, a taste of a welcome party long past. Something like the inchworm. There are all sorts of interesting twists on it, the centipede, bounding, and a limit of advance. But the point is that as the Challenge progresses, individuals grow increasingly tired. It gets harder to think of the team, easier to think of yourself. You have to fight through that, especially because the missions of the Challenge continue, and missions happen together. It’s no different in the military. The toughest times and the most adversity bring out the best in people, and I’ll believe that to my dying breath. Hence so many stories of heroes making the ultimate sacrifice for a buddy — because ultimately it’s about your buddies. And the Challenge is, too.
Linked arms = together = good. It took this class about 10 hours to understand that. The other good thing is that the Challenge brings people of all walks of life together. Military and civilian, runners and lifters, men and women. No matter your size, smiles and a sense of cool will always get other people to follow you.
A lot of people watch the Challenge. Most wonder what’s going on. Some explanations happily require more time than others, though.
The Challenge is mission based. This happened after about a year, an idea brought to it by Dan, a Green Beret who was fresh off a deployment leading Afghanistan’s most elite soldiers on mission after mission, night after night. When he came back, he modeled his Challenge after that. Cadre picks leaders and assistant leaders, explains the mission, sets a time hack, identifies threats, and then the team steps off with the leader in charge.
The classroom of the Challenge is based on our military training and experiences. Above, Beaux is explaining what it means to bound, to work together with your team to overtake the enemy’s fighting position in a way that minimizes risk to your own team.
And then the teams execute. I can still hear Beaux in the picture below, at the top of the picture, making very loud machine gun sounds and pointing with his hand his direction of fire. Eventually, all the teams overtook his position. In his scenario, his fighters were now better prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse.
And the ‘downed pilot’, which pretty much means that your team is moving great distances to save a pilot who has been shot down.
The funny thing about the log, I mean the downed pilot, is that it’s an evolution of acceptance. The first hour, the team struggles and believes it’s too heavy. They moan and groan, looking for sympathy they’ll never find. The second hour, they try to work out systems to rotate people in and out but by and large they fail. Too much effort is spent to make it easy and not enough effort is spent to just suck it up. And the third hour is one of acceptance. Interestingly enough, the third hour is always their best and fastest hour with the log. No matter how heavy it is, no mater how difficult the first two hours were. The bottom line is that people, when they work together, are capable of infinitely more than they thought possible. And that’s a powerful thing to know, and even more powerful to experience.
There aren’t exactly water stations, but water is a priority so there are stops.
I usually cry when we stop at 1 World Trade Center. And it’s always on the route in New York City. The Challenge takes you to all the best places in every city. And I promise you it’s a new way to see it, and if the moment is right, you might cry, too.
But on it goes to greet the morning joggers. Joggers on the left have been up for an hour. Ruckers on the right have been at it all night. Good Livin’ and more smiles.
Fatigue produces instincts to act like individuals. So we go back to the beginning, a reminder that the team is always the priority.
And as it progresses, the goal is for the class to run missions successfully on its own. For the team to solve its own problems. The sooner this happens, and continues to happen, the better it is for everyone.
As if yesterday I can remember Drill Sergeant Hester telling my basic training class that if you’re ever wounded on the battlefield, you won’t care who carries you off. You won’t care if they’re black, white, purple, neon-striped, polka-dotted, whatever. I learned a lot from that man, and he prepped me well for Special Forces training, and for life. And some of those lessons come via the buddy carry.
All classes carry a flag with pride. Members of the military wear one on their uniforms, and this is a small way to honor their service, to honor the roots of the Challenge.
The progression of the Challenge is a thing of beauty for me, to watch the way that the team comes together.
But is it the real finish or is there another mission? In this case, the Challenge was complete. And Beaux talked to his class in Cincy about what they had done, and about why he’s proud to be an American. Because being an American is a state of mind. A state of mind that the Challenge proves exists and will always exist. A love of one another, a love of country. A state of mind where people are meant to work together, to do good, and to succeed together. And to overcome, always to overcome. And Beaux’s take is that people are born American all over the world, every day, it’s just a question of whether they get to come home. That’s the part where I turned away teary-eyed and wanted to live in that moment forever.
The small symbol of your Challenge is the GORUCK Tough patch, which goes well with the accomplishment in your heart. If you’ve already earned it, you know what you did to get it. And it means something when you get it. You join the GORUCK Tough family, and your Cadre shakes your hand in congratulations.
Some are humbled (Mouth Mead above), most are exhausted, but all are in awe of the people they did it with. In a huge way, the Challenge has reaffirmed my love in humanity. People are good, and capable of so much, and the Challenge lets them show it to themselves, and to each other. And in that process they fall in love with a family that is the GORUCK Tough family. It’s an extraordinary group of people who come from far and wide, from all different backgrounds, and who come together in 8-10 (more like 11-13) hours, all at once. In one city, with one cadre, to become one team.
And then the after party begins. The jokes fly about who did what — and how horrible, they mean beautiful, it was. Above is after my class in Jacksonville, everyone just hanging out to soak up the moment, to take it in. After the Challenge, everyone goes their separate ways but the time shared is never forgotten. I always find myself wishing that this moment, this shared elation of accomplishment, could last forever. The Challenge is the Challenge, the standard is the standard. But my goal is for all who come to experience this moment. It’s a noble feeling, and back in the early days, these were the moments when I started to appreciate that the Challenge was a special event, with special people. Or rather, with normal people doing extraordinary things for each other.
GORUCK TOUGH PATCH EXPLAINED
The GORUCK Tough patch is not for sale. It takes inspiration from the First Special Service Force’s spearhead, and the only way to earn it is to pass the GORUCK Challenge.
The Force was a joint Canadian-American commando unit formed in 1942. “The name ‘First Special Service Force’ was selected to cover an assault force whose handful of men would carry considerable automatic-fire power. It sounded innocent enough…” However, the Force earned the nickname Devil’s Brigade for its devastation of Axis powers in WWII. Though its history is a short one, modern day Canadian and American special operations trace their heritage to this unit.
History matters, as does heritage. In Special Forces, today’s training is based on yesterday’s combat. Today’s SF instructors have been there, and done that: Iraq, Afghanistan, and every other hotspot in the world. I owe my life to those guys (Hornosky, Kean…), and the guys I served with (Josh, Brian, Bobby…), and the soldiers of old who trained the guys who trained me. This is an open thanks to all of them for the lessons they taught me on how to survive, but also how to be a better person. Given that the Challenge is so directly based on the missions and training of Special Operations Forces and the wartime experiences of ourCadre, the Tough patch honors and harkens back to our collective roots in the First Special Service Force. It’s ultimately about the guy to the right and left of you.
The Force’s shoulder patch took inspiration from the Native American spearhead, and our Tough patch is meant to reference, and honor, a warrior spirit still thriving to this day. A spirit found in the military, but also the civilian world. We moved the spearhead horizontal, indicating action and forward movement toward the enemy, drawing a parallel to the GORUCK Reverse Flag. And when I hand them out to someone who passes one of my Challenge classes, I’m always proud to tell them that they’ve accomplished something every bit as hard as any training I ever had for that period of time. For me, the GORUCK Tough community (GRT) is a family, the Tough patch its badge.
It occurs to me that some people may be interested to know why someone would want to push themselves to these limits. I’m sure everyone has different reasons, so please feel free to share.
If you are interested in joining the Iron Heart Team, simply leave a comment below. A description of why you’re interested in the challenge is not required, but may help inspire someone to join who otherwise would not.
Additionally, any updates on your training and progress are appreciated. NOW GET TRAINING!!!
-
Both Pam and I are interested, we were planning on a Goruck Challenge for the HWDC anyway in San Francisco next April/ May. Could we combine?
-
Here is the team so far:
Zhivago
Adam313
Seanocono
Mega
Mini
JSJ
D666 -
Gav I want to keep the 2 events seperate. I think what you are doing with HWDC is awesome but, my concern would be the focus. I want our IH team focused and only concentrating on the challenge. I want you guys to party it up and enjoy yourselves. Don't wanna mix business and pleasure.
-
-
I'm in! This will be the hardest and yet most rewarding thing I have possibly ever done. I want to show my son, though he won't be old enough to remember, that anything can be accomplished with hard work. Training/getting myself into shape will be very difficult with a newborn but I am going to give it my best shot!
IH all the way!
BTW, we gonna do this in our jeans?? haha
-
Here is the team so far:
D666
Zhivago
Adam313
Seanocono
JSJ
DougNG
Bagley
Monday
Giles
EmceeQ
Finn?
BlackFrost? -
Pam and I won't be able to do it guys. Financially and physically we could not manage 2 trips to the US and 2 Goruck challenges, and as I have to be at the HWDC event, sorry but we can't do it.
-
Jeff, for those of us that down own a Goruck piece, do we need to order one and if so, what size?
1 a goruck brand bag is not a requirement
2 the gr1 is the ideal bag for the challenge
3 if you buy an event pass they give you a discount on gear -
Jeff, for those of us that down own a Goruck piece, do we need to order one and if so, what size?
1 a goruck brand bag is not a requirement
2 the gr1 is the ideal bag for the challenge
3 if you buy an event pass they give you a discount on gearJaco is correct
-
MikeC were are you!!!!
-
sounds like fun & a year to get ready for it gives almost anyone more than enough time. i have been meaning to sign up for one for the last couple of years, so i'm glad you are putting this together D-triple.
I'm all in.
oh & as motivation i'm pushing 40 fast & figure I want to do one of these as soon as possible before my mind is willing & my body isn't. i also love to set goals with tangiable rewards, just how I'm wired.
2014 can't get here soon enough
