Earned, Not Given- Chapter 7: The Light
When you can taste the finish, there's no way you'll stop.
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After the Tough, we followed the same plan that we did finishing the Heavy. We made it back to the hotel. Jason and Harrison took a nap and I couldn’t sleep as usual.
I opted to go out and get a real breakfast and sat down at a diner nearby. I ordered the biggest skillet I could get my hands on. The breakfast place was only a 5 minute walk away but I ended up taking an Uber.
Why would I waste extra energy? I had plenty of energy to give later on.
It was about 10:00am and I had seen the sun go down and come up twice since I last had slept. It’s strange when you don’t sleep. The body feels off. A mini alarm goes off telling you that something is not right.
It’s not natural to see multiple day cycles in a row without sleeping but I had to do it. I would rather push through than nap. I was certain if I fell asleep I wouldn’t be able to wake up. I couldn’t risk it.
Cadre Doug told me, “I’ll see you in a few hours.” And he was right.
There was no way we weren’t going to show up to the Light after doing the Heavy and the Tough. Something would have to be wrong with us for us to quit at this point.
Our Light class had a lot of people in it. I would say it was about 50 or 60 people.
The perk of doing a Light event is it’s supposed to be an entry level event for people starting to get into rucking. There’s not a lot of PT and you mostly ruck. The weight requirement is 10 pounds lighter for a Light event than it is for the Heavy and Tough. That extra weight makes a huge difference for your morale.
Chad and Doug had the group gather up and we mostly rucked up and down the Lakefront path in the city. There wasn’t a whole lot more to do than that if we are getting a lot of rucking in a six hour span.
After we rucked back to the start point, I thought that we had did it. We were finished and the event was going to be over. I was going to get the coveted orange HTL patch.
We all circled up at a playground that was near the start point. Chad had an announcement to make to everyone.
“We have six people in this group that did both the Heavy and the Tough. Will you step forward. Before earning your patch, you have to do one more thing, you have to do 110 eight count body builders.”
An eight count body builder is similar to a burpee. You do a full push up, move your legs in and out then jump up from a squat position.
Everyone gathered around us. We were allowed to do the eight counts in sets so we opted to do sets of 6 sets of 15. On the last set, we would do 20 finish.
Chad afterwards told us we did every rep and every set with perfect form. One last challenge, one more thing. When you’re relentless, you will not let anything get in your way.
After we finished the high counts, Chad had us do the tunnel of love. The tunnel of love is where you basically go into an arched pushup position and low crawl under each other.
Chad came to the end, showing the orange patch, “do you want this? Go ahead and take it.”
All of us didn’t think he meant that literally and we kept going. He had intended for us to actually take it but we just kept going for more. All of us wanted to have it given to us and earned instead of taking it.
Then he stopped us and gave us all the patch.
I teared up and gave Harrison and Jason a hug. We did it. We completed something we worked so hard to get to.
It was one of the most proud moments of my life. I gave my 100% and I know that I gave my 100%. No one can take that away from me.
There’s a greater sense of satisfaction when you give something your all and finish it.
See the next part of this story in the link below. You can also find the ebook of this story here.
