Introduction

This was going to be a simple document that I was going to write and share with my Go Ruck Team. As the length of the document started to grow, I realized it would be easier to break it up into sections and post it as a blog.

WARNING: If you end up with access to this, but haven't actually done a GRC, I will be sharing "secrets" of the Challenge.

This is an After Action Report meant to help us remember our experience, and it's my version of the events. It may or not be completely accurate, but it should be entertaining. If you didn't complete the March 21st GRC with us, you probably shouldn't be reading this. If you were there, ENJOY!

Note: I added the emails for the folks that I knew were there. If I'm missing someone, let me know so I can add them. As best as I can, I'm keeping this blog private to our team.

It all begins

It was a dark and chilly night. The thermometer read 41 degrees and our breath hung in the air as we paced around the steps in front of 26 Wall Street. George Washington gazed upon the idiots spread about before him, wondering how the fuck his hard fought war for freedom resulted in a pack of lunatics paying to be beaten by a guy who demanded to be called “Cadre”.

The nervous energy was nearly palpable. And the size ups began. Don’t kid yourself, everyone was trying to figure out who was going to be the “fitness stud” and who would be the whiney punk; who would sail through and who would be calling a cab in the first hour. It stayed friendly, but the competitive spirit was everywhere.

When finally the Cadre introduced themselves, it was immediately clear that there would be a difference in approach. Within seconds, I, for one, knew I wanted nothing to do with what was behind the door on the right. He clearly felt the continued need to show how large his appendage might be (and probably wasn’t). Way to “angular” for my taste, and after he disclosed that he was a Force Recon Marine, I knew that Strattner, soon to be named Carabiner Chris, and I would have to spend way too much time trying to make sure that Guy didn’t strangle him.

The dude on the left seemed much more relaxed and more my speed. Fortunately, when the moment came to choose sides, most of our crew flocked to him and the die was cast. By the way, I’m protecting the names of the accused just in case this ever finds it’s way into the public eye. He lined us up in two lines and away we went. 

Team Weight and my President's Award Performance

Let’s talk team weight for a second. Every team is required to bring a team weight weighing roughly 25 pounds. At first blush, our big red hook of a team weight seemed great. It spoke to the origins of our team, it had a leather strap, it looked pretty bad ass. To be fair, I don’t think that anything weighing 25 pounds would be fun to carry around the city, but I’ll gladly finish my time on this planet without having to hear that huge hunk of metal scraping across the pavement again. 

Twenty three brave (or completely stupid) souls set out into the night towards the Vietnam War Memorial Park. Most of us had no clue where we were actually going and frankly, I was so amped up at that moment, I would have followed the person on front of me directly into the East River if they ran that way with purpose. Instead, we found the park and immediately assumed the push up position: feet up on a low wall, packs riding up the backs of our heads, gloved hands spread on frigid cold concrete and butterflies the size of Malaysian Flight 370 swirling in our bellies. 

“When I say ‘down”, you lower yourself to the ground. When I say ‘up’ you push up and count.”

“DOWN”

“UP”

“DOWN”

“UP”

“DOWN”

“UP”

“GET OFF YOUR KNEES! DOWN!”

“UP”

Let’s stop the action for a moment and discuss conditioning. I personally prepared myself for this very moment by religiously doing 200 or more pushups a day for weeks. I would assume that my teammates had similarly prepared. This particular night, I got to push up number 3 or so and I suddenly, and unexplainably, reverted to an earlier version of myself...say a third grade version, where three pushups was about the maximum I could muster and I expected a damn President’s Award when I was done! I have no idea what happened, maybe the ruck smacked me in the back of the head and I developed regressive personality disorder, but we did like 10 push ups and I was ready to die already. I think our Cadre even mentioned that we had just started and that he was hearing a LOT of moaning and groaning already...no shit buddy! He switched us to flutter kicks and I was thanking God, and I’m not even a religious guy!! I’m sure I was doing the most awful looking flutter kicks ever seen on the planet, but I was just so happy to not be doing push ups. He yelled some more, we moaned some more, He yelled louder, we moaned louder. I distinctly remember looking up at one point and seeing what was either a puddle of sweat or a sudden onset of urinary incontinence across from me...given the circumstances, either would have been perfectly plausible and 100% acceptable. 15 minutes into the GoRuck Challenge and someone pissed themselves...that sounds about right.

Bear Crawling to Brooklyn

I really don’t know if we achieved whatever goal he had set for that particular part of the Challenge or if he just got tired of hearing us trying to die on him. I think he was talking to us the whole time we were pushing up and fluttering, but I don’t remember a thing he said. He was there, in the middle of the two lines of soup sandwiches (that would be us...think about it...), marching back and forth with Old Glory over his shoulder, and all I heard was the unmistakable vernacular of every adult on the Peanuts cartoons. Until he said, “ON YOUR FEET!” I heard that shit! I didn’t know if it meant we were done with PT-from-hell or not, but I knew that I could accomplish that goal: get up off the ground!

We stayed in our lines as he told us to find the Brooklyn Bridge. Fortunately, a couple of the people in the group actually knew where things were in the City, so we started off towards Brooklyn. (We may have made a few wrong turns in the early stages, we may have also gone in the completely wrong direction for a short distance, but considering our Georgia-Native Cadre knew even less about NYC than most of us, we were all good.)

Finding the Bridge proved to be the simple part of that leg of our journey. It was immediately after we began to cross the span that life took an unfortunate turn. Let’s talk Bear Crawls. 

Do you know what a bear crawl is? You may think you do, but you really don’t. You have no friggin clue what a Bear Crawl REALLY is until you’ve bear crawled half way to Brooklyn! Ok, we can say that maybe we only bear crawled for a third of the span, but does anyone really care? It went forever, and remember that team weight? That huge red hook? The sound of that weight scraping every inch of the bridge is forever etched in my memory. 

Briefly, after an unknown distance of bear crawls, we got to do some duck walks. I don’t think I ever did the duck walk correctly. In fact, he stood next to me for most of the time we were supposed to be duck walking and simply shook his head. All I know is that I had the damn big red hook, I was trying to squat as low as I could go, but the hook was dragging, and I couldn’t get my legs out wide enough and I just failed to impress him, so, we got to do more bear crawls! Hooo-fucking-ray! More bear crawls, more hook dragging, until I heard what might have been the most glorious thing said until that moment, “Lunge walk the rest of the way.”

Yeah, I know, who the hell would be happy to lunge walk halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge? Well, I’ll say emphatically that I was happy! Lunge walking was a pleasant change from bear crawling and those stupid duck walks that I guess I was not designed to do. I once tried snow boarding. I really wanted to get it. I was a good skier at the time, and I wanted to snow board, but I just couldn’t make it work...duck walking was the same thing. He could show me a thousand times, but I just couldn’t make this body do that exercise. 

Let's a have a Pissing-Crab Walking-Flutter Kicking-Elephant Marching Good time!

And then we were in Brooklyn. We marched around a little bit, apparently looking for the next torture chamber. I remember passing the other group doing something awful in a park, there were screams for help from the darkness, but we didn't help them. We just marched on and shortly thereafter we started buddy carries. 

As a fireman, this is not something completely foreign to me. A buddy carry is a fireman’s carry, arm between the legs, grasping a wrist, weight on your shoulder and go, go, go. We paired off, hoisted our partners and started towards our destination. In the fire service, the fireman’s carry is a perfect means of moving a buddy...a short distance, maybe from one room to another or simply from inside a building to the outside. Fireman’s carrying someone (who, by the way also has a friggin ruck on!) over what seemed like hundreds of yards, is not fun, it’s not easy and it hurts! It hurts not only the carrier, but the carried has a shoulder driving into their belly and/or nether-regions. No one can breath, we’re all bumping into each other - I’m driving my partner’s head into the ass of another carried victim, it’s like the keystone cops, Go Ruck style!

We went down some sort of ramp towards the water, I know that for sure. There was a pause near some benches where we rustled up a local "urban outdoorsman", who, high on life (and whatever else he had gotten his hands on), was thoroughly confused when his cubby hole was invaded by 23 nut jobs in the middle of the night. 

We resumed the push up position, my ruck cracked me in the back of the head and I was, once again, transported back to my youth. I maxed out at push up number three, squealed like a little kid, moaned, groaned and gutted out the remaining reps. We lined back up and trudged down to a “park” of some sort. Here we got the first bathroom break, but there was, of course, no actual bathroom. 

We split into boys and girls. The females got a private corner of the park and the men, being an intelligent bunch, hid behind a small building...on an incline...and proceeded to start pissing up hill from where most of us dropped our bags. Anyone see a problem here? Yeah, fucking stroke of brilliance there. I mean, it’s not like having the ruck coated in gray City grime wasn’t good enough, no way man, I need a healthy coating of urine to really get that dirt marinating! 

Once we rallied back up and I believe we did some flutter kicks. I’m really not sure if the flutter kicks came before or after the crab walk traverse of the park, but, does it matter? We fluttered and crab walked, it sucked. The crab walk was particularly fun with the big red hook. Somehow Andy and I ended up hauling the damn hook the entire return trip. I think it was just because we were both so damn slow that, by the time we were on the way back, there was no one left behind us to hand it off to! Unfortunately for us, this was not the last time this would happen to us! (That’s foreshadowing folks!)

After the crab walking/flutter kicking excitement ended, we became elephants. The elephant walk is another thing I remember doing as a kid. It was a great gym class exercise for little kids, although for the kids, it was probably more like square dancing. Remember square dancing? Every kid’s gym class nightmare! I have to touch...a GIRL? No fucking way teach! Well, the elephant walk is about the same thing, only, at this point in the night, I wouldn’t have cared if I had my hand between the legs of an actual elephant! I know that Anthony was in front of me, I really don’t remember who was behind me, but it didn’t matter. Everyone was immune from the up close and personal touchy-feely shit going down. 

With hands firmly placed between the legs of the person in front of you, we rocked, rolled, screamed, counted and shuffled down hills and stairs to the site of our next mission: Buddy Bear Crawls.

Buddy Bear Crawls (or as Mrs. Goldstein refers to them: that stupid dragging thing we did)

The semi-frozen grassy knoll spread out before us. We were in a two lines facing up the hill. The front line got on their backs and the back line assumed the beloved bear crawl position straddling over their buddy. The object of this exercise is for the bottom person to grab ahold of their bear crawling partner and be hauled across the field. For this grand event, I was paired with Laurie. There was no pre-plan, we had no idea what was happening until we were already in the middle of it. I have no clue what the best way to accomplish this mission would be, but we “decided” (or maybe we defaulted), to me being on my back and Laurie scrambling atop. She would creep forward, set herself, and I would grab her shoulder straps to haul my ass forward. It seemed, at least at first, that we were moving pretty well. My first indication that we were near the back of the pack was hearing my wife and one of my best friends yelling at each other about 20 yards ahead of us and to my left. I don’t remember what they were saying, but I knew that they had met approximately 9 hrs previously and were now, most likely, in a position similar to Laurie and me: her straddling him, him straddling her...there would be grabbing and clutching, screaming and grunting...yeah, pretty much everything you want to hear out of your spouse and buddy. Clearly my concentration was shattered, only to be refocused by Laurie who uttered something along the line of: “We Suck!”

We tried reversing our positions, her on the ground and me on top. This was worse. We went back to her on top and me on the bottom and I did a little inch worm thing while she just crawled over top of me, better, but still, we sucked. Let me stop for a second and dispel the notion that is undoubtably creeping into the dirty minds out there. This scenario couldn’t have been less provocative. There is nothing sexy about crawling through the holy grail of goose shit covered frozen fields in Brooklyn, at midnight, surrounded by near strangers, while a young man yells at you to keep moving. Fun times...no, not really. 

Finally, it became apparent to everyone that we sucked so badly, that we needed help to finish. Help came running up to us, three of us snatched Laurie up off the ground and carried her to the finish line. All in all, it was some great quality time with Laurie.

Once we were all at the finish line, we were granted a snack break. While it might have seemed like a reward for hard work, it was nothing like that. Our Cadre just needed a few minutes to figure out how to smash us next. He set off to recon the area, which included water, large rocks, and, unbeknownst to us, a huge log semi-submerged in some mud. And this is the first time we were saved by the police.

We were just starting to pack up and line up when a little car with a light bar came shooting down the path towards up with clear purpose. There were no guns drawn when they exited the vehicle, but it was apparent that there was some ‘splaining to do. What we did not know (and neither did the Cadre) was that the parks in the United States of New York City closed at 1am. It was now about 1245 am and we were to begin making our exit immediately. Oh darn! We lined up and started out of the park at a double time pace. It was only after we put some distance between us and the cops that Cadre Adam revealed that he had scoped out the log and some water with our names all over them.

The Assault on Central Park

We trekked in the general direction of the Manhattan Bridge when we were stopped on the side of the road and given our first “mission”. We had a Team Leader (TL) and Assistant Team Leader (ATL) identified, and were told that something important had to be accomplished in Central Park. I know that there was something very specific, maybe it was a VBIED (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device) up that way that we had to find, or destroy or recon, or something along that line, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. All I knew was that we were way far south in the City and Central park was pretty far north. The only rule were given was that we had to cross on the Manhattan Bridge. Off we went.

We asked for directions a few times, but it was VERY fortunate that we had a few peeps that actually knew their way around the City. In particular, Dan, Andre and Carabiner Chris were awesome when it came to navigating. We crossed the Bridge, walking by the way, and landed in China Town. We were on the east side of the Island at about 16th street, Central Park was up at 59th Street, you do the math, we just started walking.

We walked and walked and my bladder filled and filled. At some point we were instructed to carry our rucks in our hands - no shoulders. I didn’t care too much because I had to pee so bad by then that nothing else really mattered. As we trudged on, I could here other muttered comments about full bladders, so at least I wasn’t alone, but it still sucked. 

We merged onto 3rd Ave and continued going north. And now is when the NYC nightlife really started to interact with out merry band of morons. The bars were in full swing, the night was warm enough that folks were out and about and there we were hauling our sorry asses towards Central Park. Every few blocks we would pass some clubs, the gawking would start, some would ask us what was going on, some just saluted the flag...did I mention the flag? Yes, we have a flag. An American Flag leads the way ALWAYS. Fairly quickly we all settled on a simple explanation for our condition: it’s a 12-hour endurance challenge. That pretty much sums it all up, not all the details, but enough to satisfy the intoxicated minions of the east side of Manhattan at 2am. And we kept moving. I could hear Dory from “Finding Nemo”: “Keep on swimming, keep on swimming, keep on swimming.” 

The tentative plan was to get our butts to Grand Central Station and use the facilities. Which would have been glorious, had Grand Central not been locked up tighter than Fort Knox! Oh my God, I almost wet myself right there on the side walk. Seriously, I just didn’t care anymore! I was already covered in goose poop, how much worse would it have been? 

It was all made so much worse by the fact that carrying my ruck in my hands (not on my shoulders as it’s generally designed to be carried) had gotten pretty hard. So i had reverted to a semi-front shouldered carry. Basically, I had the ruck on the front of me with the straps over my upper arms. It wasn’t technically on my shoulders and he hadn’t yelled at me to move it so I considered it a win. The huge downside was that the bottom of the pack bounced off my belly with every step. It was a double edged sword: make my hand hurt but save my bladder, or wet my pants a little bit with each step but save my hands. It was a lose-lose. I split time and was just generally miserable everywhere.