Earned, Not Given- Chapter 2: Finding The Next Challenge
Never get complacent.
Previous chapter:
When GoRuck started, a special group of people decided that they were going to do all three events back-to-back-to-back. This would be doing the GoRuck Heavy (24 hrs), the GoRuck Tough (12 hrs) and the GoRuck Light (6 hrs). Each of these events would be performed on the same event weekend. Between each event is about a 3 hour break to recuperate and get everything together.
Eventually, GoRuck started to make special patches for people who would complete all three events in one go. It became the coveted HCL patch. The “C” stood for “challenge” as it what the Tough was originally called. Throughout this book, the event will be referred to as the HTL instead of the HCL for consistency purposes.
Harrison moved to Portland, Oregon. He asked me if I wanted to attempt to do an HTL with him for the 9/11 event that was going on. I have an uncle that lives in Portland so I thought of it as a great opportunity to see family and have another attempt to challenge in my endurance.
Neither of us had done a GoRuck Heavy before. We were diving straight into the deep end trying to do the HTL on our first Heavy attempt. We had no idea what we were in for.
Portland Heavy
We had Cadre Mickey again for the Heavy and Cadre Doug. There were two Cadre Doug’s in GoRuck so Doug was called “Asian Doug.” Doug was a pretty laid back guy but I came to learn if you made him mad, he would basically punish you by saying things like, “sorry, you failed, you have to do this now. I don’t want to do this to you but you failed the challenge.”
The event started off with Mickey leading us. Right away he wanted us to do the Army PT test. One big distinction we found out right away about doing a Heavy was that we had to do the Army PT test. The Army PT test was this:
55 pushups in 2 minutes
65 situps in 2 minutes
12 mile ruck march in 3.5 hours
5 mile run under 40 minutes
The worst part of this was doing the 5 mile run. We started the event on this bike path along the Columbia River. Mickey said that he placed some rocks last night where the turn around point for the run but someone must have kicked the rocks over. After a majority of us ran about 3 miles down, we realized we had run too far and ran back. Luckily, Mickey had mercy on us and understood that the rocks were kicked over.
Then we began the ruck march. I had never done a straight up ruck for this far before at this pace but I was going to give it my best. After about 6 miles into the ruck march, I started to feel my feet becoming hot on the bottoms. It was a strange sensation that I had never felt before. I had to keep going to keep up with the team so I walked through it.
One lesson that I found out was that in a Heavy, you have to carry a lot more weight as a team than you would during a Tough. A Heavy is what it’s called and it’s heavy. If your team fails a time hack to get to a point, Cadre will add what they call coupons to the team which is usually a sandbag or some other weight that we find lying around on the side of the road.
After rucking around Portland for the better part of 12 hours, we arrived at this park with a giant stair case. Since this event is in honor of 9/11, we were to climb the equivalent of a 110 flights of stairs for the World Trade Center.
Before this event, we were asked to bring a homework assignment. Since this event was in honor of 9/11, we had to look someone up that passed away during 9/11 and tell their heroic story. I chose Welles Crowther.
Welles Crowther was known as “the man in the bandana.” He worked as a volunteer as a fire fighter when he was younger and was working in the World Trade Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks. When the first plane struck the South Tower, people were huddled and frightened. Welles appeared out of nowhere and calmly evacuated as many people as he could out of the building. It’s estimated that he saved 18 lives during the attack.
We all sat around and shared some of our stories of the people that passed during 9/11 to remember them. This was an incredibly powerful moment and it knocks you back into reality of horrors and heroism that occurs in the world.
We often get caught up in our own world and forget that at any moment our world could change in an instant. Would I be the hero like Welles Crowther in a situation like that? I would like to think so but the truth is, most of us do not know until a situation like that happens.
Part of the reason I enjoy doing events like these is because it gives me an opportunity to see who I truly am in a controlled environment. When you’re pushed to your physical limits, how you respond to it shows you a lot about who you truly are during times of stress.
After we did the stair climb we were coming to the second half of the event. The bottoms of my feet started to feel like they were on fire. I began to prefer doing a light jog to waling because jogging speed to alleviate the pain. Along with the pain was this sloshing feeling. I knew I had blisters on the bottoms of my feet that were horrific but I don’t think I quite knew how horrific they would be. The mistake that I made during this event was thinking that because I bought a nice pair of socks that I would miraculously be blister free. Before this event, I never had an issue with blisters so I didn’t think twice about it. I also have never been on my feet for this long before so my lesson was learned here.
After hobbling for last few hours of the event, I eventually finished it. Cadre Mickey gave us a speech and reminded us that these patched are “never given but earned.”
Harrison and I drove back to one of the Heavy participants houses where we all dropped out things off in preparation for the HTL. I told Harrison that I couldn’t do the Tough event. My feet were messed up and I couldn’t imagine going out there again for another 12 hours.
When I gave the inclination of not doing the event, Harrison also decided not to do it. I felt bad because of it. I felt that if I was able to gut it out, that he would have gone back out there with me.
We were in this event together. Which was what makes doing events like these so powerful. The strength of leaning on each other makes you want to push yourself further. I didn’t want to let Harrison down and I knew he didn’t want to let me down. If one of us was going to quit, it was going to be a real quit. It wasn’t going to be because we wanted to.
My Uncle John picked me up from the house as I hobbled to the car. I was proud and heart broken at the same time. I wanted to do all three of the events but I didn’t see a path to doing it. Toe nails black and skin peeling off. I tried to clean my feet off and tape them up but the damage was done.
I had never had blisters on the bottoms of my feet like that before. I always assumed that blisters formed between your toes and on the sides of your shoes. I never expected the bottoms of my feet to be the spot that would be torn up.
I laid on the couch and I thought to myself, I don’t think I’m ever doing an event like that again. This was brutal and far worse than I ever imagined. Maybe I’m not cut out to do long events like this. I got my patch for doing the GoRuck Heavy and that’s something to be proud of but maybe doing the HTL is too much for me.
Was it too much for me to do? I’m not a natural endurance athlete. Growing up, I played football. The idea of running more than a few miles at once seemed like an alien idea to me for most of my life. This event was going to be a cumulation of rucking 65 miles with about 35-40 lbs on my back. That also isn’t factoring carrying the team weights as they rotate around.
How the hell was I going to train for something like this?
See the next part of this story in the link below. You can also find the ebook of this story here.
