"Do you suppose they will choose to make war against lean, solid dogs rather than against fat and tender sheep?"
Today’s game was to test out rain gear on a 3-mile ruck romp with Lean Solid Girl and our team weight, the Canadian Brick Bag (CBB), a sturdy canvas antique loaded with 35# of bricks. The rule was that the bag had to be carried in one hand at all times, by either one of... Continue Reading →
Photo by Lean Solid Girl Find part 1 of my misadventure here. When you're rucking with a group and you lag behind like a boat anchor, worse than the physical burning of sucking wind in white-hot lungs is the embarrassment of being the weak sister. No one says anything, of course, and probably few people are even thinking anything,... Continue Reading →
Xenophon of Athens was a philosopher but no soft-handed coffeehouse bloviator. A student of Socrates, in 401 BC Xenophon enlisted in a mercenary army setting out to topple the sovereign of the Persian Empire. After their commander was killed, the fighting philosopher held the routed army together and led them into the Caucusus Mountains on... Continue Reading →
I don't even buy them anymore, I swear. They're breeding and multiplying. After experimenting a lot, I have arrived at some hard-won conclusions about boots for rucking. Great for flat roads and short to medium distances, but nothing hairier than that. As reported earlier, I rejected GORUCK’s own house brand of boots, the MACV-1. Though... Continue Reading →
I met The Jolly Irishman minutes into my first GORUCK event, at kissing distance. We were all told to pair up: one person would bear walk across the beach and tow the other, who lay supine and clutched him around the neck. I ended up as a “top” with Irish as my “bottom.” Not having... Continue Reading →
To prepare for the Seattle Star Course, I've been playing with topo maps, Google Maps, and Road Warrior, feeding them different scenarios, and here's what I've concluded:1) Plan with Road Warrior, but don't walk with it. As far as I can tell, Road Warrior is really designed for delivery drivers. It's great for driving on errands... Continue Reading →
Find parts 1 and 2 here and here. I only thought about quitting once, when I fell down a storm sewer. I’d climbed a truly evil hill of densely packed million-dollar crackerbox houses, past homeowners leaving to go to the beach. One of them actually wore a t-shirt saying something like “Rucking is fun!” I... Continue Reading →
"At GORUCK events, people's foot care is surprisingly poor," said the former ultra runner somewhere around Mile 20. I smarted at the comment, but I couldn't deny it: the inside of my own boot was slowly grating my little toe like parmesan. ... This was the first time I'd encountered a serious distance runner, though, and it became clear that that community was privy to an advanced science of foot health as foreign to the rest of us as architecture was to Visigoths and Huns.
To prep for the (in)famous Star Course, I tried a 42-mile ruck march. I'd read one man's AAR suggesting that in training you aim for 40 miles (64km) in something close to 10 hours, and on paper that sounded almost reasonable. It's only 15 minutes per mile, right? Heck, I've motored along at that speed... Continue Reading →