#292 ‒ Rucking: benefits, gear, FAQs, and the journey from Special Forces to founding GORUCK | Jason McCarthy

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads to do this. Our work is made entirely possible by our members and in return we offer exclusive member only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe My guest this week is Jason McCarthy. Jason served in the US Special Forces from 2003 to 2008, serving in Iraq in 2007 where he was awarded a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation Medal, as well as serving in Europe and West Africa in 2008. Jason currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Green Beret Foundation. He is also the founder of GoRuck, which makes rucking equipment and if you've been listening to this podcast at all lately or follow me on social media over the past couple of years, you probably are aware of how much I enjoy rucking and how much I speak about it. I wanted to have Jason on this podcast to talk a little bit about his story. And Jason is not unique or alone in someone who has trained extensively using rucking. Of course anybody in the Special Forces has done that, and I think that's part of the point. It's really how did Jason think about bringing this as something to the masses? We'll talk a lot about Jason's background and his decision to join the military after 9 11. We talk about the training in the Special Forces and how rucking has been used for many years in the military, and how frankly, brutal some of the rucking training sessions are and how when Jason left the military and kind of felt a little directionless, this idea of creating a company that does what Goruck now does became part of his salvation. So from there we answer some of the more frequently asked questions about rucking. And this includes whether or not you need a special rucksack or whether you can just use a backpack, the difference between a rucksack and a weight vest, how to think about how much weight to use, whether you should use a chest strap or a hip belt, differences in types of footwear and what the pros and cons are around those things, common injuries and how to avoid them, and the frequency that you should be doing it when you're starting out, and how to train for longer rucking events. So, in many ways, this is both a story of Jason and rucking, but it's also a very practical how to guide. And I've wanted to do this for a long time now because I get so many questions about rucking. And first of all, I don't consider myself an expert at all. And secondly, I thought it would be really great to have it all in one place. And my clear hope at the end of this is that everybody decides to do some form of rucking at least once in a while. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jason McCarthy. Jason, thanks so much for making time. I know you're here in Austin for some awesome stuff that maybe we'll get to, but always great to be with you in person again.

Thanks for having me out to your podcast studio.

So, people who listen to this podcast, especially for the past year or two years now, have heard me talk about rucking a lot, and I point back a lot to you and to Michael Easter. Of course, you and Michael are friends. In fact, I met you through Michael. So clearly we're going to talk a lot about rucking today. But I think for people to kind of understand what it is and all of the how tos. I mean, I've got a list of all these questions that I know you're so facile in. I think maybe to put in context, kind of your broader mission, it makes sense a little bit to kind of understand your journey. So maybe we can start with some of that.

Let's start. Where should we go?

All right, so you grew up in Florida. You have a military background. Let's talk about how you found your way there. And what were you doing in high school and college that ultimately led to that?

Yeah. So I was born in Ohio. My mom was really young when she had me. We moved down to Gainesville, Florida. I was the unofficial mascot for the women's tennis team, Go Gators. And, you know, I grew up like that, bounced around with my mom. And at that time, the military was not really a thing. My grandfather had fought in Korea. He was an artillery officer. Never talked about it. My uncle was a helicopter pilot. Talked about it a little bit, but I didn't see him that much. And so this was not something that was top of mind for me at all. I mean, the 80s was, you know, Wall street and Gordon Gekko and all of that kind of stuff.

And how old was your mom when she had you?

My mom was 18 and 5 days old when she had me.

Wow.

So very young. That's a hell of a way to grow up. I became very close with my mother and just kind of went around with her everywhere.

Was your dad in the picture?

My dad was, and still very much is. Yeah. So he's still in Ohio. Those are still kind of my roots. Both sets of grandparents were in Ohio. They lived a mile away. I mean, my parents were in high school together. And so Ohio was always this kind of grounding thing. But it was because of my grandparents, mostly. I mean, my dad, yes. My mom would go back, we'd visit Ohio, but it was because of my grandparents. And they had an extraordinary amount of influence on my life.

So in college, what did you want to do?

Yeah, so, I mean, just to give you the years, I mean, I was in Jacksonville, Florida. I went to the Bowles School. It's an athletic school. It's very competitive. It was really, really hard. It was the hardest thing I've ever done was high school. You don't know who you are yet. The school was really hard. The English department just kicked my butt. It's coming at. You have eight classes, and I'd rather go back to the Special Forces Qualification course than go back and do a year of English at Bowles. But I played tennis. I played a little basketball. And so I was always into sports growing up and being really active, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I wasn't good enough to go to a big school and play tennis. I played D3 tennis at Emory in Atlanta, and that was great. That was a great way for me to kind of focus.

What did you study?

I studied economics and art history. My grandmothers were both docents at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio. And that was just kind of an important part of how I grew up in a lot of art museums in America and in the world. And so went to college. And then I graduated in May of 2001. I did well in college. I finally figured out the school stuff. And it turns out that if you don't live an hour from school and you're able to kind of focus a little bit more, and there weren't these kind of distractions as much in life, oddly. I was just too focused in college, frankly. And so I played tennis. I did well there I did well in school, and that's what college was for me. And I remember applying to these places that people told me I should apply to. Pick your bank, apply to them, pick your consulting firm, apply to them. I didn't know what any of that was, which I don't think most people do at 22. What do you do at Goldman Sachs if you're 22? What do you do at McKinsey if you're 22? Well, importantly, you pay your dues. And so you have to figure out how to get into these larger organizations. And I didn't know how to do that yet. And so I went and traveled around Central America and backpacked a little bit and then came back and was like, man, I got to get a job. I got to do something. So I started working at this marketing firm, and I was working at a call center on 911 in Daytona beach, literally across the street from the racetrack. And that was just the day that anybody that was alive remembers exactly where they were on 9 11. And for me, it was just this enormous kind of sense of sadness and anger that led to rage. And, you know, at 22 years old, military age, male, with no dependence, no attachments, I mean, I felt compelled to serve our country. And that was a really important thing for me. Now saying that you want to serve our country, and watching NVGs, the night vision goggles and everything's in green on CNN and it's Operation Anaconda and it's, yeah, I want to go do that. I want to be that. That's a lot different than the process of actually signing up to go fight in a time of war. I looked at other kinds of places. The CIA, the FBI, the whole Alphabet soup universe went and started looking all this. And you know what? Rightfully so, those places take a long time to get in. The application process is long. And even on the military, I mean, I'd just gone to college, so I had this big, enormous brain, and I'm so valuable and smart and, yeah, that's not how it works. But everybody wanted to serve our country at that time. It wasn't something you just walked up and said, oh, I'm going to be an officer and pick your branch. There was a line a mile long of people, young people that wanted to serve our country because of what happened at 9 11. So without even a huge call to service, there was this call to service. And I remember reading BY now it's 2003 and I've started working at a bank in D.C. and I'm still kind of applying to places. It keeps not clicking.

What's happening in that year and a half between 911 and early 2003.

So I felt really down in Daytona beach and Jacksonville beach, where I was. I just felt really far away from what was going on. And so I had some friends that were in New York. I went and visited them in New York. And it just felt very communal in a very positive way. I mean, it was nice to be around parents and loved ones in Florida, but ground zero was in New York and the Pentagon was in D.C. and it just felt like that's where the decisions were being made. It felt like that was just such an important place at that time. And I wanted to see it. I went to New York in October of 2001. I mean, you can smell it still. Anywhere you were, you could smell it. And I can smell it sitting here in your office right now. I know what that smells like. And God bless the people that worked through that. I mean, they just, day after day, they just pulled bodies out of the rubble. I still get goosebumps when I think about the amount of sacrifice and the service that went into that day and then to the handoff to the military. And the military is kind of a family business. You're best served if you're familiar with what that looks like.

Now, at the time, late 01 and most of 02, presumably anybody could walk into a recruiting office and join the Marines or join the army or things like that. So not necessarily Special Forces. Was that something you were thinking of? Or were you still at that point thinking, no, I want to be in the CIA?

Johnny Michael Spann died. He was the first casualty of the war, and he was in the ground branch or the paramilitary side of the CIA. Now, he had come over from the Marines, and he was chosen for that mission. This was the John Walker Lynd prison uprising where Mike Spann died. And he had a special language skills. Why he was given that mission. They needed to kind of loosen the reins on some of the press around 911 at that time, for various reasons, like, people wanted to know what was going on. And his story was, in fact, a very inspirational one for me personally. And it's like, that's what I want to do. I want to be on the tip of the spear serving our country like that. And so that led me down the path of the CIA. It's a long process. I mean, I went through almost all of it. And I mean, I was 22 years old. I'm a very active person. And I wanted to join the paramilitary side of the CIA. The CIA does not take people and turn them into soldiers. It takes very, very well trained, highly experienced soldiers, and it plugs them into kind of a different mission set. And I didn't know any of that. So there was this guy that was interviewing me, and finally you get to one on ones and there's more of those, and there's lots of those. You know, one of the office parks in Northern Virginia, and he looked at me and he was like, look, we don't train. I kept asking about this. How do I get this? He's like, we don't train people off the street to go do this. You need to go join the Special Forces or you need to do something like that inside of the military first and then come and work with us. And I'm like, okay. Finally, a year later, here we go. We have our answer. And so I really doubled down on the officer route again because I felt like that's what I should be doing.

And just for folks listening, officer route because you have a college degree, rather the enlisted route for people say just doing this right out of high school.

Correct. There's far fewer numbers of officers. Those numbers are determined by Congress. Enlisted ranks, they can grow very quickly. And when you're fighting a war, you need to grow enlisted ranks very quickly. And so we were so fast forward, and now there's the buildup to Iraq. I know what it felt like to live in America at that time. It started to become very divisive and all that, which put some strain on my process, my thought process. I joined up to go to Afghanistan and fight Al Qaeda. But ultimately you don't get to choose. When you're serving, you don't get to choose. And I just remember reading there was the Generation Kill series that came out in Rolling Stone, and it was written about the recon Marines that took Baghdad and that whole thing. And it was later made into TV series, movie and stuff. And that was March of 03. I'm like, man, these wars are passing me by. Before, little did I know that they would go on so, so long. But it just felt like I needed to do something. And so I bypassed the officer route. I started talking to the army, and they had this program where you can enlist, and they would guarantee you slots into the schools that comprise the Special Forces pipeline. The only caveat is you got to keep making it. There's a lot of different schools in that pipeline. And so it starts out with basic training and airborne school, and then a Prep course and then selection and then another prep course and then phase two and phase three and phase phase four and survival school and language school and all sorts of stuff. And so you just have to keep making it through. And then they give you that little green Beret and you feel like you're king of the world.

And so they basically said, you will be able to rise to the level of your capacity.

Yes, and you have to get lucky. I mean, if you get injured, you get recycled, I mean, anything's possible. But yes, part of the calculus is you look at, say, the army and there's a lot of infantry options. So say you go through basic training to join the infantry. Okay, well, you're infantry qualified. You can serve in the 101st. You go to airborne school. Okay, well, now you can serve in an airborne unit, 82nd airborne or whatever the case may be, you can still fight. And that's what I wanted to do, was I wanted to fight. It's odd because I was not a kid that grew up. I didn't start fights. I wasn't just fist fighting every day on the playground or anything. I just felt, I mean, in every fiber of my being, I just wanted to fight for our country.

Where do you think that came from? If you think about other kids you went to college with who were in the exact same situation, they graduated right before 9, 11. Did you talk about this with any of those guys? And who were your friends in college? And did you get the sense that any of them felt so compelled? And if not, why do you think this was sort of unique to you?

I have thought about it, and I don't really understand. Out of our high school class, there were two of us that joined the military. My wife would join the CIA later and serve on the front lines in Africa as well. But we were the three. It's a class of 150, 160. We all graduated in 97. We all graduated from college in 01. In college, there was an ROTC program at Emory, which frankly, I thought was a little bit odd. Now, full story here is my grandfather. Both of them kind of revered the military at the same time. And in our country, they had both kind of worked really hard and been successful and loved our country. And yet my grandfather, this is something that I don't think he got right was he had this idea after Black Hawk down in Mogadishu with Bill Clinton, he was like, nobody should ever serve in this man's military. And I think that that's a very knee jerk And a very human reaction to say when you don't like someone politically, but you always need people to serve this country or else everything that we hold dear crumbles.

In other words, the need for service should be completely nonpartisan.

Amen. It's not just the military man I felt compelled to fight. I'm a military age male that's been active my whole life, who's predisposed to want to do hard things and challenges. And that's not more important or better than someone that wants to become a teacher. We need both and we need to celebrate both and honor both for what they do for us and our kids and our society and our way of life. So I think it took all of the data points in my life that brought me to that point. I really wanted to do something special with my life. It's a scary time. How do you do that? Did you do that by joining company abcd? The short answer is no. That's a stepping stone to something else. You have to push on life and it's going to push back. And you have to learn what matters to you and what doesn't. What are you going to do and what do you refuse to do and for what reason? And you have to learn these things the hard way and everybody's a little bit different. Just my life had brought me to that point and it just happened to be four months before 911 and then 911 and then it took me over two years to finally join. This was not an immediate thing. A lot of cowardice baked into that whole process. It was hard. It was really hard. And then keeping it secret from my family, my mom crying on the kitchen counter when I finally told her, like, yep, signed up join the army today. Oh, that's awesome. Said no mom ever.

Yeah, right.

I mean, Iraq's the front page news every night. They're showing portraits of soldiers, sailors, marines who are dying in Iraq. Yep, I'm gonna go fight. That's hard.

Did your conviction waver by the fall of 2003? Less about public sentiment, which I think even by the fall of 2003, public sentiment had not fully shifted on Iraq. But just in terms of your own thinking about, hey, al Qaeda based out of Afghanistan, probably half in Pakistan at this point. That's where the fight is. Not sure I understand this Iraq thing. I mean, what was your thinking about that?

Personally, I never really understood the buildup to Iraq. I mean, WMDs, I never really got it, but I still knew. And this is something that I now have this litmus Test about regret. I think that regret is about the worst thing that you can carry around with you everywhere you go in life. And I think that most of us know when we're going to regret something. We just don't listen to that voice that's inside of our head. And so I knew for a fact, politics be damned, I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't join up and serve our country at that time.

That outshone all of the other stuff.

And it was hard. It's like you are joining up to go fight. You're not becoming an officer. You're going through this enlisted route to become a Special Forces soldier, intentionally going to fight on the tip of the spear. And we're about to start, or we have started a second war on a new front. What wavered was, oh, man, did I make the wrong decision. I can probably get out of this and I can probably go try the CIA again. I can probably go cash in some favor from somebody somewhere and get an offer officer billet and be safer. Being safer doesn't always spare you from regret. And in fact, it's usually just a way to delay what you know you need to do, which is the right thing for you and your path. That was a really, really hard decision. And a lot of ways, it was an extremely selfish decision. But for me, for the rest of my life, I mean, I had to be willing to roll the dice a little bit at that time, tell folks.

Where Green Berets fit in the hierarchy of the military. I think people are sort of familiar with Special Forces, and people have maybe heard of Navy seals and Army Rangers and Delta Special Forces, but I think for most of us, those things are kind of vague.

The main difference between Green Berets and the seals, the Delta SEAL Team Six, the Rangers, is those are in essence, strike forces in the Marines. I mean, the Marines take the beaches, they secure the land, and then a bigger force comes in. It is speed and violence of action. They're doing it with other Marines. The classic mission for the Green Berets that people will remember is right after 9, 11, few ODAs, a few operational detachment Alphas, a teams of Green Berets went in to Afghanistan, into the boneyard of the Soviet empire, and instead of fighting as the Soviets did, which is more assaulters, more helicopters, more whatever, instead of just throwing more of our own people at it, we linked up. Green Berets linked up with the Northern alliance and fought by, with and through them in order to defeat the Taliban. And that happened in under three months. And so that is the sweet spot for what we in Army Special Forces. Green Berets are synonymous.

How long had they been around? Had they been around since Nam?

Had they been around since June of 1952?

Okay, so Korea, basically, yeah.

And Vietnam was. A lot of the similar work was done with local indigenous tribes, the Montagnards in Vietnam. And Green bray is in 100 countries right now, and they're working with local forces. If you go to Africa, Green bes are diplomats. Diplomats working out of the embassy is fine, but who's really controlling that country is the military. So you need military people to go and be kind of diplomatic with those people. And we do. We train up partner forces, and then we get them to achieve our desired end state, our mission set. And so in the case of Afghanistan, after 9, 11, it was overthrow the Taliban and do it with the minimal footprint possible. So you can send very few Green Berets in. And God bless the Air Force while we're at it, because having air cover and that's a total game changer.

So where did you learn the skills that are clearly diplomatic? To be thrown into Afghanistan and realize that you have to now work with the Northern alliance is very different from saying, hey, this is our show. Our show meaning, like, we're here to do this now. It's. We're working as partners to do this together. Was that explicitly taught? Was that part of the training? Or are they selecting for that as they're weeding people out?

So these were some of my cadre, the guys that were on those teams, you know, triple nickel, ODA 555, 595. Those were guys that had just come back and were our cadre. And so it is part of the selection process. And I think that when you get into whether it's the military or business or anything, so much is determined by who you serve with and what are you looking for out of the people. And so you need this strong culture. And yes, it's very much a part of Special Forces pipeline. Like, do you play well with others? And then there is a language component. You have to be able to speak foreign language.

How long did it take you to learn a foreign language?

So I already spoke German. I passed out of that part of the language component. But that's because I'd also lived in Germany for over a year at that point and studied abroad and done all that, which is part of what you need to be successful. I mean, the culminating exercise of the Special Forces qualification course is called Robin Sage. It's a mock war spread out all over North Carolina. We jumped out of an airplane with 125 pounds on a rucksack between our legs. Jumping out. And then you land hurts. And then we rucked for 18 plus.

Hours with £125 on your back.

Yes. To link up with what is a guerrilla chief. It's basically a warlord. And you're testing your ability to think in a gray area because the military is very doctrinally based. It's black, it's white. If this happens, you do this. If that happens, you do that. And this is a world where the warlords have malleable morals. And so you roll up and this is your point of contact and there's an execution that happens within four minutes of you being there. This is in the training environment, but this is real. I mean, this is exactly how it happens. And so you're just kind of, well, how can you not lose your cool? You lose your cool, you burn rapport. You're done. You have sacrificed the mission because of your dogmatic principles that you brought with you from America. And if you don't like that, don't leave our shores and don't take this job because you have to learn how to conduct yourself like that. Because you still need to work with them. If you don't work with the Northern alliance, you're going to lose against the Taliban.

Let's talk a little bit about the physical training. I'll preface this by saying that I'm sure most people are familiar with what Hell Week is like for the seals and what's their underwater demolition buds that they go through for months leading up to it. It's very interesting. By the way, I'll caveat this by saying I have three good friends who are former SEALs. They're very much like you. Which is to say they're not what people would expect stereotypically. Right. These aren't super aggressive individuals. I'll share with you a question I have asked them. I'm sure you, you might echo the same thing, which is what predicts a person's success going through that grueling physical series of tests. And then the second question I asked them, because these guys are all now in their 40s, 50s, even knowing what you know today, having the mental toughness you have today, could you physically go back and do it again? So I'll share with you their answers as we get into yours, but let's go through what was physically involved in the most demanding part of that training.

You see this stuff on the Discovery Channel, which I had seen as well, and you think that that's what it is. You think that the yelling and the screaming, which plays really well on tv, and it lets people think that that's what it is. That part is laughable. It's very short. I mean, I'm talking. That was hours out of years of training, was yelling. The hardest thing that you're competing against is your own mind. And so rucking is the foundation of Special Forces training. Just to answer the foundational piece of this. And so what I have done, what we have done at goruck, is very much tapped into this. We've not invented this. We've not created it. And what I learned I owe to the people that taught me. And it's a tribal culture, and I'm grateful that I was able to share some time with them in that regiment. And so I had no idea what rucking was when I joined the Army. I started out doing stuff in the gym on normal stuff that you would do with the mirrors everywhere and people and just like, normal stuff. And then I ran a lot. Okay, we'll cardio and I'll get strong. It's better than nothing. You need to have miles on your legs and you need to be strong. But that is not what this is about. Special Forces selection, ultimately, to be a great teammate, you first have to be a great individual. So they test you really, really hard to make sure that you are the type of individual that has the ability to do really, really hard things and to not quit because the draw to do that is hard. But, you know, so you start out and it's 45 pounds dry, meaning water doesn't count. Any consumables don't count. They weigh you when you get there. Don't be late. Light or last are the rules. And there's a series of checkpoints that you get throughout the pine forests outside Fort Bragg at a place called Camp McCall. And you're just doing land navigation. Route after route after route after route. You're plotting it with map and compass. You have nothing.

And you're doing this alone or in teams.

Always alone to start out, always alone. So you have to be a great individual first. You start to learn stuff like, okay, well, if I plot this route, I got to go through this creek. That won't be too hard. There's a draw. Anytime you get water, you get vegetation. When you got vegetation, it's going to slow you down. There's thorn bushes and all this stuff. And you would get There and it's just so thick and you lose which direction you're going. You're getting all turned around and you're trying to save two miles of walking around this draw, this heavy vegetation next to water, because your feet hurt, because you've got blisters, because you've put so many miles on them already on uneven ground, and your feet get wet, which makes them harder.

What would be a typical distance for that type of a navigation early on?

I mean, you're doing overnight five points, say, and it's going to take you, I'll just say six hours, maybe more. Maybe eight hours. Seems like forever. The thing is, SFAs, or Special Forces selection, it's three weeks. You're just doing this over and over and over and over. It doesn't stop.

And did they explain to you why? Did they say there's a physiologic reason why rucking is the foundation of what we do? Did they say it's simply the most efficient way to mimic what you will have to do in the field?

There was zero of that. It was more. You're here to be tested. It's silent. There used to be a whiteboard. There's kind of barracks and stuff, and everybody's in there. And there was a whiteboard. The cadre would write the next hit time on the whiteboard. That's the only way that instructions were communicated. And the main point is if you're looking for someone to give you more information or to help you solve your problems, if you're looking for that, you're in the wrong place. This is not like the army, where someone's going to walk around and make sure that you have everything. They're going to weigh your ruck at the end of your iteration. And if you're 44.9 pounds, you're done. Adios, see you later.

So you're responsible for putting the ballast in the pack?

Oh, yeah. What we would do is, you know, there's rocks everywhere, which man walking around on pebbles after being out and about and your feet are sore. And I don't just mean the muscles are sore. Like the skin is sore and you got shower shoes, so flip floppy hops on and it's just, man, I can feel it right now as I'm describing this. Your feet are just shifting around and hurts. You would take that gravel and you would put it in a little bag and then you would use, like fish scales and they have them out. You can go weigh your ruck. And if you're dumb, you're going to put £55 in. And if you're smart, you're probably going to put 47 in just because scales are different. And if two pounds is going to be what undoes you, you got bigger problems. So you want to make sure that you don't be late, light or last. And so you always have to have it. It's breeding this culture of autonomy. And the selection process is weeding out people. Basically, people self select.

So how many people started that three week selection process?

Oh, shoot hundreds at that time.

And what's the attrition?

I don't know. 20% make it? Maybe.

And of the 80% who don't make it across that three weeks, how many raise the flag and how many show up light? They're trying, but they just fail.

I mean, most people self select, they give you a flare and you'd be out in the middle of your navigation. Say it's at night, night when it's cold or it's raining. I mean, the conditions of course matter. And when you see people popping up their flares, what that means is, I quit. Because the cadre then comes and gets them and puts them in the back of the pickup truck and takes them to the quitter's fire, which they conveniently locate right next to the people still going through the course are going so they have the warm fire and don't fall prey for that.

And these folks that end up quitting, what do they end up doing?

They go serve somewhere else. I mean, so honorably, you know, they go to Alaska or the 82nd Airborne. At that time, they were going straight to war. And, you know, I got a lot of respect for that. These are the people that are showing up, toeing the line. You can't know if you have what it takes to go through this until you go through it. You talked about predictors of success. Yes, you need to be physically fit. Say you need to be able to carry weight, do all that, whether, you know you can or not. I didn't know if I could or not, but I kind of figured it out. But really what it boils down to is there is no predictor. You can't look at a lineup and say, oh, you were the high school quarterback and you look like a statue of what physicality should be. I can tell you that from my personal experience, those are usually the first ones gone.

Well, I was just about to say so. In posing this question to many of these Navy seals who are friends of mine, that's exactly what they said is if you were the all American captain of the water polo team that looks like an Adonis. You're probably the first one that's going to quit. Which always found it interesting. In fact, one of my friends mentioned that one of the toughest guys in their buds was the most physically underwhelming person he had ever seen. He described him as a 5 foot 8, kind of slight build. English wasn't his first language. He was Mexican. Like he just didn't look like an imposing figure in any way, shape or form. But he's like, guy was mentally so tough. Sounds like that's what you're saying.

It's not just not quitting, it's performing. I mean you have to perform. This isn't like, oh, if you don't quit, you're good. You have to make your hit times and then you have peer reviews, this sort of testing against. Do you play well with others? I mean, you're stack ranked because they put you in groups at certain points. Right. If you're consistently last, the cadre just start pressuring like you don't belong here. And then that just starts to eat inside your brain until they're giving you the words that you're going to tell yourself. And then once you tell yourself for the last time, then you're gone. All you have to do is say, I'm quit, I'm done. I don't even like to even use those words. I guess that's the beauty of it though is that it's the unknown and you have to push someone. It won't work in two days, it won't work in five days. You have to push this over days and weeks and months because you're just wearing down someone's will because it gets hard.

Now it's interesting. How old are you today? You're probably in your 44. Okay. And you were about 24 when you did this.

Yep.

Could you do it again?

I love to sit and say yes. I think there is a percentage. The risk is much higher just because injuries are so much more prevalent and you don't recover as quickly.

That's amazing. That's exactly what every one of these guys to a man said the same thing. Because I said, look, you've made the case to me that this is mind over body all day long. Your mind is clearly at least as strong as it was when you were in your twenties. Could you do it again? And they all said no for exactly that reason. They said, the fundamental difference is we wouldn't have the recovery capacity today that we had in our early 20s.

Now I got another buddy who was an enlisted Green Beret for a long time and then just went back and joined the officer corps. Now, to do that for the infantry, he had to go back to Ranger school. Now he did. He's a couple years younger than I am. Ranger School, 62 days. And can you do that? Yes, you can do that. I mean, the volume of ocean work at buds is really, really, really significant. They're feeding you a lot at buds. They don't feed us in the Q course.

How much weight did you lose?

Certain phases, I was down to 180. Laughed and called me Skeletor by the end of a bunch of them tall and skinny, and I had to work really hard. I thought that you were supposed to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rambo or these guys who had played Green Berets. And what I found is that you can never be too strong, but you can definitely be too big. The more weight that you have on your body that's non functional, the more you have to carry around with every step that makes you slower. And so you don't want to do that. And so how do you become this kind of lean, super medium sized, perfect specimen of efficiency, if you will. And naturally it does that for you because you're just rucking so, so much.

How are you being fed throughout these training activities?

MREs, boxes of MREs. There's a little bit of time at the chow hall at Camp McCall, but not really. You just don't have the time for it.

And what's in the MREs?

A couple thousand calories of stuff that'll last 10 years.

How gross.

They've gotten pretty good, actually. And hunger is the best sauce. So when you're hungry, it tastes amazing. Some of my best meals were MREs. One of the phases. We went dumpster diving and we found a whole bunch of stuff and we ate it and it was incredible. It's one of the best meals I've ever had.

Yeah, that's interesting. So the 45 dry is kind of your foray into rucking. As the training progressed, talk more about some of the rucking challenges.

Yeah. So 45 dry was uneven and tank trails. So tank trails are basically sandy trails that tanks would go on on bases. You can make better time on those because they're not sloped and stuff quite as much. And we would have straight up ruck run competitions. I mean, and you have to meet certain time standards on that. And that is just you. And you have a. We call it a rubber Duck version of a rifle that you have to carry with you, which is just asymmetrical carry of several pounds for 10 miles or 12 miles.

Carry that in your hands, not strapped on the pack.

Yeah, yeah. And so those were foot races. The 45 dry was also across the pine forest and a lot of miles. Then you get into team tactics. And the team tactics means that you're carrying heavier machinery, heavier machine guns and stuff. So there's tripods, there's more ammo at this point, it's blanks in training, of course, but there's larger machine guns. There's a saw, there's stuff like that, which someone has to carry. You're dispersing the load a little bit across the team, but everyone's rucks get a lot heavier. So call it £85. You're patrolling much more slowly. You're learning what a wedge is. You're learning how to do ambushes and raids. And you're getting to an attack point and you're setting your rucks down and you're going. And you're going lighter to attack a target. And then you're back to your rucks and then you're egressing with your rucks.

And tell me about what the sacks looked like, because presumably when you're carrying all of these trimmings, you've gotta be strapping them on. So what does the base pack look like?

I mean, the big green Army Alice pack.

How many liters is it inside? Roughly all of them.

It's enormous. It's a really, really, really big pack. 80, 90 liters. I mean, it's really big. It doesn't go above your head. So it's not like the big hunting packs or whatever that you would see that goes above. It's kind of on your shoulders. And then you also had this. It's called load bearing equipment, this kind of vest of sorts. And it would have a belt on it where you would store other stuff, magazines and stuff like that, which prevented you from using the hip belt on the Alice pack. You just kind of get used to.

So you've got that big pack on your back with or without a chest strap?

Without.

And then no hip belt.

There's kind of a hip belt, but it's not really a load transfer. That's also true in the real world. I say the real world of combat. I mean, you have stuff on your front that you need. Putting all these straps and stuff, this sternum strap and hip belts and all this stuff. I mean, that's fine if you're gonna insert over a mountain to get to your target and then drop your ruck. Like maybe you need to do that. But carrying stuff on any type of an urban assault or anything like that, I mean, you have like, I had my pistol, my chest rig was right here on my chest. Magazines for my M4 were right here. Like, I'm not gonna unclip my hip belt so I can then get at my ammo. That's not in line with the priorities of work. You want to get that ammo as fast as you possibly can.

So all of that load is on your shoulders.

Yes, until you get into what I talked about with the £125 insertion and stuff. And at that point, it's. You're doing everything that you can to carry that load. Like you're trying to just change it up so that the blood can flow to different places. Because if you jack it down on your hips great, it'll give your shoulders a little bit of relief. And you jack it down on your shoulders, it'll give your hips a little relief. The blood, you can kind of feel it coming back to life. It's just such a great feeling as that happens. So you're just kind of adjusting it constantly.

So the 125 pound exercise, tell us what that was again. You were parachuting with that pack.

So you jump in with that, which is. It's a team effort to waddle to the airplane and get on the airplane and collapse back and sit down. And then you hook up and then you're jumping into an airstrip.

From what elevation?

Not too high. I mean, 800ft, 1,000ft.

Your parachute's coming open immediately.

Yes. It's not a halo jump, so it's a static line jump, which basically means that you're. Your backpack at that time is your parachute, and you hook up into the side of the plane. It's like what you saw in Band of Brothers, one of the greatest series ever created. You see them hook up and then as they're going out, the parachute deploys immediately and your rucksack is off your belt and it's dangling in between your legs.

What's holding it, though? You're holding it with your hands to your belt.

No, it's attached to your belt.

It's attached to your belt.

It's fully attached. And then you lower it down so there's a lowering line right before you land. You lower it down because if you don't, the risk of injury, like breaking your legs or whatever, the way that you would Fall would be harder. A parachute landing fall, you land with two feet, and then you kind of roll your legs over to disperse the force against your body. Still hurts, but you fall faster with all that weight, and you just land, hit like a sack of potatoes. I just remember landing. I'm doing it right now, too. I kind of wiggle my toes and my knees and like, all right, nothing's broken. Good. Get up. And then you got to get that thing on. And you're, like, getting on all fours, like, you get it on and roll over like a dog and grabbing the back of your hamstring to pull one of your legs forward and then pressing up, and it's a whole thing. Now, once you have your team, one person does not have a ruck on. And then you help somebody else get up. Once you get it up, it's easier. It's still really hard, but it's easier. It's a team effort to. To get down and then get back up. And it's just excruciating. If that's going to be the hardest thing in your life, you're also in the wrong business because that's basically just physically demanding. And some of the other problems.

And what was the physical part of that? How long did you guys have to go?

I mean, that was 18 hours.

Oh, that's right. You said 18 hours. My God. I mean.

And it's just horrific. It is so slow. It's in a combat situation. Ish. They have timelines that they're trying to hit, and basically it just. It really, really sucks.

And what kind of terrain?

I mean, it's pine forest, North Carolina pine forest. So there's some hills. And it's not hardballs. It's not concrete.

How often do you take the pack off to rest?

You just want to get there. All of a sudden, they simulate that, oh, there's potential enemy over there. Hide. The last thing you want to do is stop, is you just want to keep going and get there. And that starts to eat away at you. It's all you can think about. It's like being cold is the only thing that I would equate it to. It just starts to consume your thought. No matter what's going on, if you're that col, it just eats away at you. And that pack at that weight just eats away at you. You can't think tactically. You can't head on a swivel paying attention to enemies. It doesn't happen. And so as commanders are susceptible, as we all are, to kind of risk aversion like, hey, you need to have everything in order to be prepared for this mission. I mean, there's this other maxim which is speed is security. And if there's greater assumption of some risk, if you have fewer things, but you have greater speed. And so that's kind of a worthwhile thing for people to consider. Like, how do you achieve mission success? Do you actually need £125? But that's beside the point in training. You need at this phase of your training, you are in really good rocking shape. You are in really good shape of everything. And this is the beginning of a mock war. And they need to make sure that you are exhausted and not thinking lucidly. And they need to make sure that you can operate under conditions of extreme stress. And they do that. And it's very effective. And the thing is, is that when you go through that, when you are done, you know that you did something, you can't cheat yourself. You know what you had to do to do it. And it is an amazing feeling of gratitude for the human body and the human mind that you get. That is the gift that you get with these people that you share this sacred experience with. And so you don't want to to shortchange yourself of that in any way. You want the full red pill experience, take the red pill, do the thing and watch what happens to your mind when you're done.

At this point, you've really got all the people who are going to select out, have done so correct. So it's just such a physically demanding task that I have to imagine that there are people whose will is there, but physically they can't keep up. Do you guys stay together no matter what?

So almost nobody washes out by that phase. I mean, there's the practicality of the army has every incentive to weed people out as quickly as possible. They don't want to keep people in a training pipeline for years only to find out at the very end costs millions of dollars to do this in addition to just wasting time. So the body has grown accustomed to this. I mean, you start 45 dry. You're going at various speeds to include shuffling and fast to over uneven terrain. You're getting up into £85. You're starting to know that this is really vital to your ability to operate and do this job. So you start to take it upon yourself to do this, which I did a lot of. I started rucking a lot because that was the thing that I needed to do to achieve mission success, which was to pass this damn Course meaning on.

Your own time you were rucking.

Oh yeah.

How much time did you have for yourself?

So I mean, you would go through a phase and then sometimes it would be a month until the next phase started. Sometimes it wasn't. There were so many people going through at that time slots and phases and all this. They just needed a lot of people to do this job. So you have to maintain your degree of physicality and that's part of it.

So what workouts would you do on your own when you were at home for a month to stay in shape?

So on base I would go and park at one of the gyms. There's tank trails everywhere. It's kind of a thing. And so I would go on long rocks of varying degree of weight. You're also doing things like how do you harden your feet and keep them hard? Like CliffsNotes version is start out with thin, thin socks. If you develop any hot spots, wring those socks out or trade your socks and keep going. Don't let it develop until it gets blisters. But the hotspots will eventually turn into calluses if you treat them correctly. And when you go out into the field with calluses, you start getting blisters. Blisters have no bearing on your physical performance other than that they go straight to your brain, right? Like this is so much pain and you just start to think about it and it consumes you. So you have to start to think about, well, how do I prepare my feet for this, how do I do this? And so I just put a lot of miles in and then I would do these mad dashes into the gym. I've never actually loved going inside of the gym. So I would put headphones in. I mean, this is back in the Ephedra Ladden universe of when pregame was really pregame workout. And I'd go in there just like a madman. I didn't know what I was doing. CrossFit started midway through the Q course and that was an interesting thing. It was sandbags and pull up bars and stuff like that. That was part of the training though. One of the guys came out there, he had these two instructions was razor and blade, awesome call signs. And he was like, man, there's this new thing called CrossFit and it is awesome, high intensity training. And this is what you need to be the heroes that your country demands of you at this point. It is so good, it is so fast. We're going to one CrossFit workout and then we're going to go on a 10 mile run or a 10 mile ruck. And then we're going to come back and we're going to do another CrossFit workout. That's how good it is. And it's like, awesome. I'm in. And it was so simple. You got everybody in this dirt field just rolling around in it and it's like, don't cheat yourself, man. Look around and see if anybody's cheating. They're cheating. You do not want to serve with them. I mean, that is motivation right there. And so there was just this culture of iron sharpening iron all the time. And you're around it all the time and you start to just live like that. It's animalistic in a good way. And so, yeah, on my own time, sure, I swam a lot. I mean, I dedicated myself to becoming the best that I could be. I can control those variables. I can't control unconventional warfare. I can't control the problems that they're going to give me. I can't control my perfect reaction to this or that. It's unknowable. I don't know what these things are going to be. But I know the best thing I can do is to set myself up for the optimum physical response that I have to anything. And I found that at times where I found some of the doctrinal things that they were teaching us to be a huge challenge to me. I mean, linear ambush versus an L shaped ambush. Like, why are we doing this? I remember asking that question. It was like, why don't you low crawl for the next hours until you come up with a good answer for that question. It's like, okay, got it. No more questions. College boy. Some of these were really hard, but I found that I could make it up to the team by just being in great shape, carrying more weight longer and doing with a smile on my face. And so that was the variable that I controlled. So I took up a lot of swimming personally. There was this hippie Streetville, North Carolina called Hay Street. There was this yoga studio down there. And I told nobody I was doing yoga every day when I wasn't out in the field. And I was doing it because I wanted to not get injured because the volume of work and reps, you can feel it, you're getting sore. It's a thing. It's just a lot of weight and miles and reps and how can I set myself up for success? And so I started doing getting my ass kicked by these older ladies at this yoga studio. And I was in there and they probably knew I was in the army, but I was trying to camouflage that. I didn't want to talk about it by any stretch. And I was doing that just to give myself a little bit of an edge. At least for me, I thought it was an edge. And I think half the battle going into anything is to go in confident. If you've cut corners, you know it. The cadre's going to find out, but you know it. And that burrows inside your brain. And then when something doesn't go your way, you start to play the what if game. That what if game is so dangerous. If you've done what you can do and you show up ready, the outcome is going to be what it's going to be. And so I was committed to that process. And I really am grateful that I had that opportunity to kind of see what I was made of according to a standard that I had nothing to do with establishing.

So when did you finally serve? When did you go into the field?

So I joined up in October of 2003, and I earned my Green Beret in May of 2006.

Just two and a half years.

Yeah.

I mean, that's unbelievable how long that takes, right?

Yeah, it is. I know how much I owe. I'm not talking about taxpayer dollars, although I'm grateful for those. I'm talking about the amount of knowledge that I got from the people who had gone and done amazing things with a human spirit that is burning so brightly. And for them to share some of that with me throughout my training and just to breathe some of that same air. I mean, I just feel like I owe. I owe at least what they gave me and more. And so that was sacred time for me. And then it got even more sacred when I got to my team and we deployed in 2007 and we were in Iraq. That was a really nasty time in Iraq. I mean, the surge was going on. A lot of guys and girls were dying. I was not immune to questioning my own decisions and mortality and why did I do this? And all of that did make it through, obviously, and then came back and we served in Stuttgart and out of Germany, and then we also went down to Mauritania, the Islamic Republic of, and did work by, with and through some of the partner forces down there for a period of time, which was great. And then I got out in late 2008.

What determines when you're going to get out?

So my contract, my initial contract was five years. And what I expected was I remember primarily these men that served in, say, World War II and storming the beaches of Normandy. I mean, most of them served for a couple years and they were gone for a couple years and then they came back and they resumed a, a life and they started, and they started businesses or they worked for a company and they did these things. And I never had the opportunity to really talk to somebody about what it was like or I wasn't able to even ask the right questions even if I could have. But I thought that that's kind of what it was. I thought it was going to be a, hey, check the box and go do this thing and serve your country and come back. Now I'll be ready for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and pick your bank or your consulting firm and now I'll be ready for my regularly scheduled life. But this service to our country, it changed my heart in the process. And so that was the hard part about when it was time to transition out. I mean, I had a five year contract.

And what were the options if you chose to renew that? Could you have stayed right there in the field?

Oh, yeah. You finally start to get good at what you're doing. You're not just trained, you've actually done, you've actually applied your training. And it's one thing to train for war and it's another thing to fight in a war. And I don't mean just physically. The physical reactions are pretty straightforward. I just mean the actual emotional contemplation of your own mortality. And how do you function against that? What are the quiet moments like at war when someone on another team dies or when your flag's at half mass because an IED struck someone in the next town over or whatever it might be. And how do you process that? And if you don't process that, you don't know what it's like. And so that's why going through that, I know what that's like and it's not great. I also learned how to draw strength from my team and trust in my training and fight through it.

What do you think it says about that? Processing that, if anything, speaks to the relative differences that people experience when they leave the military. In other words, when you think about whether it be PTSD or lesser versions of that, do you think that that has anything to do with how one processes grief in the field?

I think first off, Tribe by Sebastian Younger is a fantastic book on this. It's one of my favorites and he is just a national treasure to me. The way that he has brought so much of my thinking forward on this as well. It's not necessarily the problem of the soldiers. It's the problem of society and. And just being so disconnected. And when you go from this culture that you're living and breathing in with these guys that you love, I mean love, you're just so much a part of something that matters. You matter to them, and they matter to you at a very deep level. Your families matter to each other, and you're motivated by the mission and service. You wake up, you know that you're doing good, and it feels really, really good. And when that infrastructure goes away and there are other components to that infrastructure, I mean, the army and the military, I mean, everything's taken care of. There's housing allowances or there's housing that you stay in. There's chow halls. It just kind of works. And you're in that. And you're allowed to focus on being a part of the team. And so my transition was extremely hard. You just lose a sense of identity, but practically you lose kind of a structure. You lose a purpose, you lose friends.

Yeah, I was going to say, how many of your. Call it brothers, really, because that's probably what it is. How many of your brothers did you go from speaking with and seeing every day to not having contact with outside of the occasional phone call?

That's right, all of them. Basically.

No one else you were close to was leaving at the same time in reasonable geographic proximity?

No, absolutely not.

That's probably normal.

That's normal. That is the norm. Because you go back to where are.

You from then, and now you've been five years completely removed from any of the normal structure of society. Your friends, who you were probably close to before you went in, have moved on, they've gotten married, they've had kids, they've been promoted, they've been at that.

Bank for five years. And I've been doing something different. And I felt like I was quitting.

When you left military.

Yeah. I mean, because they went right back to Iraq and whatever was going on, Iraq didn't matter. Going on in Iraq, that's not what mattered. What mattered was this team that we had and our ability to serve together. And we were safer and we were more effective and we were better able to carry out our mission together. This is natural. I mean, people come and people go, no matter what. But to do it of my own volition felt like I was quitting on my team. And that was a lot to process. Because then the practical side of, well, you're giving up a job, you're giving up an income, you're giving up purpose, identity, and just the structure of, okay, you wake up, you do PT physical training in the morning, you go for a run or a ruck or you lift weights or you do whatever. I mean, there's a lot of camaraderie that comes out of that. You feel a lot better. And so I started to reject all of the things that I thought I didn't love about the Army. The structure of I'm never doing PT again, never going to wake up early again. Everything's going to be just efficient, so optimized and I'm in control of my destiny all the time now. And for that quote freedom, I gave up a ton. I mean, the freedom to go it alone is what's the point. Make sure that that's what you actually want. And it took me a while to kind of rebuild a group, a team of friends or people that I wanted to do stuff with. It took me a while to be vulnerable enough to let anybody in. So I wasn't just robotic about the whole thing. I really didn't want to talk about the army at all. You talk about in your book like you would run away from diet questions, I would run away from army questions. Grew my hair out, basically had a series of, if not half truths, just full on lies about not. And no, I didn't serve there. No, I wasn't in the military. Let's talk about something else. It was just because I didn't want to talk about it.

Why do you think that was?

Because I felt like I'd quit. This deep sense of shame. Why would you get out when you're winning the Super Bowl?

So did you think about going back?

Yeah, I very much thought about going back. And the personal side was very complicated. My wife, who I married a year and a half into my time in the army, we had grown up together, went to high school together, finally knocked that cowardice as well. Things come in twos. So I joined the army and I told the girl finally that I loved her. The courtship was handwritten letters from basic training. We eventually got married and I told her about what I was doing before I joined up. And she eventually applied to the CIA and applied as a language instructor. And they're like, no, no, no. So they made her a case officer. She went to the farm, she graduated the farm and became a case officer. I think five days before I became a Green Beret, Got put on a smoking hot plane to Darfur to help work on that issue, like right after she graduated and then was posted in war torn West Africa Abidjan, Cote d', Ivoire, for three years after that. So I was at Fort Carson, and then I was in Iraq, and she was in West Africa, and then I was in Mauritania. She actually visited me in Mauritania while I was there.

Were you married at this point?

Yes.

So was part of the reason that you left to also be with your wife?

Yes. And I was going to go join Ground Branch. I was going to go back and finally join where Mike Spann had served in the paramilitary side of the CIA. And now I knew the people, and.

You brought the skill.

And I had, quote, checked the box. I mean, I cried when I was driving out of Fort Carson. You take a razor blade to your base pass, it's on your car, lets you slide through a certain entry point so that you don't have to stop and do the same security as if you're a civilian, and you turn that in. And then I've cried all the way through Kansas, going back home to Florida to get on a plane to fly to Africa. And I was like, what is going on? You know, I just did not foresee that happening. And it was this loss of something, like, it was a grieving process. And it's just at that point, Em and I had been married for almost five years and never lived together. I mean, that doesn't work. The thinking, like, she can't join Special Forces, but I can join the Agency. I mean, having at least one boss of a company is easier to coordinate. And that was naive as well. It's really, really hard to make that stuff work. Those tandem couples, it's nice in theory, but really, someone has to be willing to kind of take a backseat or else both suffer or both are compromised in their careers.

So what happened when you got to Africa?

It was about what you would expect. It was not perfect. There was this skip to the end and sat phone calls on top of a bunker with mortars coming in to my wife in Africa on meetings of whatever she's doing down there, and working 100 hours a week by Wednesday, and we had just grown apart. I brought all of my baggage with me, which was, I've given up everything to be there. She was used to working and working and working. I mean, case officers are measured in scalps, meaning how many people do you get? Do you recruit? That are assets. And the harder you work, just like anything else, the harder you work, the more you'll achieve. The more you fish, the more fish you catch. And so it's hard to incorporate me into that. I Didn't have a job. I couldn't really work there. The embassy had. The opening that they had was for a janitor. And I've spent plenty of time cleaning the head. You know, I'm not above it. At that point in my life, I did not have the self confidence enough to say, okay, I'm going to go from a Green Beret to being a janitor at the US Embassy in Abidjan. I just, I couldn't stomach that at that time. I was there two months and then I flew back and sleeping on a buddy's couch in New York and trying long distance stuff and we met in Morocco. The things that you do to salvage something that's in the crash and burn phase of its time. I mean, there is a happy ending to this. We did get divorced. Yes. She came back to the States. We did get divorced. Years later, we got remarried. We have a great family and we're very happily married. And I can't imagine life without her. That's the greatest failure of my life.

What's the failure?

Divorce from the girl that I loved my entire life. Not making that work.

Do you think it could have worked in that first version?

Hypotheticals are a very difficult thing to sort of answer. I mean, there are scenarios where it could have worked. I mean, it was hanging on by a thread and then it wasn't, and then it's hanging on by a thread and then it wasn't. I mean, the fact that it does work now to me is proof that, yes, it could have worked.

Maybe it's possible that it works so well now because you both lost it.

It's very true. That could also be true. I will say this, that I was used to doing pretty well at things. I don't want to sit and rationalize something and say like, oh, it's all good that this failure happened. Right. I just want to say that the silver lining to it was it made me a lot more compassionate, it made me a lot more understanding that you don't know what people are going through. So be kind. It's a good thing to be kind to people. You just don't know. Because at that time, I mean, I have my whole new set of, oh, how are things going? Like. Oh, yeah, they're going great. Thanks. Let's move on, talk about something else. So then I just stopped seeing people and became a hermit. It was me and my dog and a country song and a bottle of whiskey. And that was not a healthy phase in my life at all. Because then I'm out of the Army. I don't have a job. I don't have prospects for a job. Don't have a marriage anymore.

How are you supporting yourself?

I had a little bit of money saved up, and I just didn't have a lot of expenses.

And presumably, I'm sure you had a GI bill, you could have gone back to grad school. I mean, did any of these other ideas entice you?

That's what I did. I went back to business school in D.C. it's another case of I'm grateful to the American taxpayer for that opportunity. Because as you kick this off, it's how do you process grief and how do you do. What is that? Like PTSD or PTSD lite or however we want to say it. But the time that that bought me to kind of help figure my stuff out. I had a lot to offer. I just couldn't do it at that time. I have a lot to offer now, and I'm really happy to offer that to our country, the world, the next generation, whomever. And I'm very motivated to do that. And that's in no small part because the American taxpayer was willing to finance my school for a couple years and help me transition a little bit and gain a little bit more confidence and. And all of that stuff. And so I would just say going through it starts to stack. Murphy is around, and he's just striking left and right. And what I learned in sear school, which is survival school, is everybody has a breaking point, no matter how tough you are. Name and serial number is not reality. You will crack. Everybody cracks. It will happen. And so that is a maxim for life. And to think that you won't is just hubristic.

And when did you realize you were heading in that direction?

It was just really, really bad. I just lost the desire to do anything. There wasn't some moment I wasn't suicidal in that sense. I was just not well. I have a lot of energy in life. I'm active. I like to do stuff. And it took my dog, which Emily gave to me. We were still friends throughout this, oddly. And the greatest gift I ever got until we had kids was we had one dog that had been with her in Africa. And she looked at me and she was like, you need him even more than I do. You can have him. I mean, you could maybe even argue that we wouldn't have gotten back together without that happening. Because then my life was this. Just not good. Living in a basement and I got a dog, and I don't have any mission or purpose. I have nothing to with do. I have a friend and I asked a friend for help, which was very humiliating. I'm the guy that doesn't ask for help ever. That becomes your shtick. And that's what the army, especially Special forces, especially these special operations units. That's what it is. Yes, there's a team component and tactically, if you need help, but you don't need help solving your problems, emotional problems, you don't bring those to the team. That's not a thing. And so when you have to do that, when you get out, it's a very foreign territory and it's a very shameful thing. And I think that that is a problem that we need to kind of take head on and say there's a lot of strength in asking for help and you're going to need it. So you need to be part of something bigger than yourself. You need to take care of yourself. You need to do the things that were healthy in the army that brought you this value. You need to do those things still physical training and take your pick. There's a lot of great things that are a part of that. It's a very social organization. You get to know the people that are around you. You develop deep and lasting friendships through doing hard things. That develops a lot of camaraderie. And you need to go do those things and be active. And it's just very easy to fall into this state of all that's gone. I'll never be as cool as I was. And I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I don't have any exactly transferable skills. This is just not what I signed up for anymore. And you can go down that spiral and everybody's got a breaking point.

And at no point during this where you are right now, the friend's couch, et cetera, the divorce. What year is this? How far after 2008?

It's fast. That's 2009. My flash to bang on this was pretty fast. I mean, I ended up starting school late 2009. It's like a full year of not good. But a year at that time felt like a long time. School felt like an easy thing. I know this is progress to somebody. I didn't really. I'm like, okay, I'll go back to school, I guess.

And during that period of time, are you picking up a rucksack again?

So the funny thing is, the only thing that kind of got me off the couch was Java, my dog. So I believe in community. The social health part of our lives is vital to everything that matters the most. And to me, you plus a dog is the most foundational. Like it's the bare minimum for a community. U plus one and that one can be a dog. And for me it was. It's like he had to go out, he needed exercise, he needed someone to take care of him. So serving someone else, or in this case a dog was a huge unlock for me to kind of face the world again. It's still very humbling to think about. I'd just been this special Forces soldier that felt like I could do anything with my team till I couldn't do anything. And it took a dog to kind of get me out of that state. And then Goruck was in the background of all this. Emily had actually had the idea for it in West Africa. It was like, hey, you should do the Goruck thing. Because I had built her a go bag full of supplies and stuff for her to put in her car and want to put at her house. And it was just in case.

A go bag is a bag that when everything goes wrong, it's the one thing you grab.

It's what we would put in the trunk of the Humvee. Because if our vehicle's disabled and we have to fight, we need more bombs and ammo and water and radios and batteries and all that stuff. It's just more supplies. And that's a good thing when you're fighting.

Do you have a go bag at home right now?

Yeah.

What's in it?

It's mostly medical stuff. I'm going to have some weapons as well. I mean, what scares me or what I'm cautious about are these times of whether there's hurricanes or power outages or these kinds of things where it becomes lawless and Everybody jumps on i10 or i95 and then people are running out of gas and it's like, how long does that last? Who knows? Those are the kinds of things that concern me.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't remember what happened during Hurricane Katrina, which people probably remember. There was a real delay on the part of the federal government in getting aid in there. And I don't remember the exact number of days, but it was surprisingly short as to how long it went from no power, no food, no water, to complete lawlessness and violence. I mean, very short. We're talking four or five days. And you could make the argument that that's the most compelling reason for self armament. It's not the home invasion in bed and someone breaks into the house. It's the total societal breakdown that comes with a natural disaster or something like that.

Yes. I mean, you're more likely to hurt someone that you love. Most people are more likely to hurt someone they love in this there's a robber in my house situation. Just give them everything. These are only things, this doesn't matter. Like the idea that you're going to shoot someone cold in your hallway. I mean, you have to be extremely well trained and you have to be able to target, discriminate and make sure it's not a bad guy. I mean, is this your first time in that kind of situation? If so, you're stressed, like, go shoot with a heart rate of 160 sometimes see how you're doing. And it's hard, you know, in the middle of the night you've just been woken up. Those are not my deep, dark fears. The worst case scenario are the natural disasters and stuff like that. So, yes, we have a go bag and we have a med pack in the back of our truck as well. And our office is a safe house. We have a lot of stuff there too, and a big safe and all that kind of stuff.

So you're making her a go bag.

We were trying to figure out what I was going to do when I was there in Africa. And she's like, oh, you should do the goruck thing.

But where did that name come from? Goruck.

I kind of started calling it a goruck to her. A Go bag. A Goruck. That was just what we called it. I mean, we had a sop, a standard operating procedures for what would go in our go bags. I probably still have it somewhere, but I haven't looked at it since I was in Iraq. But I tailored it to what we had there. And I just used a surplus bag, an extra bag that I had brought with me. It's like, now you have this just in case. And it's better to have just in case and know where it is. And so what she meant by that was, take the Special Forces way of life. And then I built one for her boss there and another person at the embassy. I was like, okay, well, I can fill a year doing this. That's fine. Upgrade people's home security and teach them a little bit about what to do just in case. And the language was a barrier because it's French. The import, export business of using diplomatic pouches to send stuff to populate people's go. I mean, just building a business from scratch in West Africa as a diplomatic Spouse, your marriage better be on perfect ground and you better be in there for the long haul. This smash and grab year that I was going to have doing that would not have worked, but the idea sort of endured. And so I moved back and I was just still searching for something to do. I needed a hobby and this became a hobby. And so I was like, oh, these bags are too military. I don't want anything to do with the military. So I need to make them less military, but still awesome like the ones I had in the military. I put an ad in Craigslist, New York City for a backpack designer. Got a bunch of people that rode in and found this couple that was in Bozeman, Montana, and that started a year and a half ish process of working with them on a couple prototypes.

What were the specs that you gave them?

So I started out with an old assault pack that I had. An assault pack is a way stripped down version that you would take on an assault. And when you think about assaulting in places around the world, doorways are narrow. You're in a stack to go into a room, meaning there's four of you and you're as close as you can possibly get. You can't have these huge rocks because you're going in and clearing the room. And so milliseconds are life. So you have to have really small silhouettes of stuff and more what you would associate with an urban style backpack. Not a big giant hiking pack or a big giant Alice military pack or whatever. And so started with one of these salt packs and just said, hey, we'll strip away all this stuff that makes it look too military and let's do that.

And also, I'm guessing you immediately realized at that point that the weight had to come in the form of iron plates. Our mutual friend Jocko, when he rucks, he's using a more traditional pack where it's got a pole on it that you're basically dropping heavy plates onto. When you were in the military and you were doing your own training, how were you loading up a pack? Putting weights in the back.

Rocks.

Rocks?

Yeah, I mean, rocks and stuff. And you would wrap them in something so that it would kind of protect the, the interior lining. Full story. I did not start goruck with this idea that rucking was going to be the thing. I did not think about it like that at all. This whole series is something that Emily and I have tapped into. It's not something that we've invented or really created.

But what were you thinking? Who were you Thinking the customer was. When you got ahold of these people.

In Montana, the summer of 2010, I drove around, realize I'm in business school at the time. And so there's this idea about total addressable market size and well, you can go to retail and you get press and you can do all this stuff. And direct to consumer was still not quite what it is now. I mean Amazon was not Amazon yet. I thought that it was going to end up being. And I was surrounded by some artisans and stuff in New York and I wanted this to be beautiful and simple as well. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. As da Vinci I really love that quote. When it comes to the design of things, it's also less to go wrong, it's less to break. And so the summer of 2010, in between years at business school, I drove around to 48 states in my Ford Expedition with my dog and I approached small men's stores and other kind of retail places about having them carry this. 48 states. I drove to all 48 in how.

Many weeks this summer? It's like 12 weeks, two plus months.

Probably 10 to 12. Yeah.

That's incredible.

Yeah, well, it was very painful is what it was because you have these hopes and these grandiose dreams. It's like I don't know how to do Facebook ads, I don't know how to do Google Ads, I don't know anything about that. But I can get in a car and drive around and go meet people face to face and tell them this story. And we're going to get people to buy this stuff. And I bought this sport rack to go on top of the truck. I needed extra space with so many rucks that we were going to sell it. I didn't sell any rucks. None. Every state I was finding a new store. So toward the end of my first year in business school, started making a list of all the higher end men's stores around the country. And I did that only because of a price point thing. It was GR1 primarily. We're making GR1 exclusively in America and it cost me more than I wanted to charge everybody else. When I saw the price, I was like, oh my gosh, what is this? This is insane. But I just never thought that Founded by Green Beret and Made in China just never had that good ring to me. So I wanted to double down.

What was the price premium to make it in America versus China?

4X. Oh my God, 4x. I didn't cost it, but that's what it would be now and we've never made in China. But I thought, okay, well, this is an advantage that I do have. And one thing that Special Forces teaches you is don't fight fair. I mean, definitely don't do that. Never launch a ground war in Asia. Princess bride, never fight fair. I mean, bring the Air Force with you to a gunfight, always. Why would you not use. What is your unique strength that you have? Bring that to the fight. And I thought that it was me driving around and going and meeting people at these shops and convincing them of the story and the quality and all this stuff. And it just was an unmitigated disaster. It just didn't work because of the.

Price, because people didn't understand who would in their right mind want to buy a backpack to put weight in it to walk around?

There was no rucking at the time. This was just an everyday carry, cool bag with a lifetime guarantee.

I don't have a GR1, so the GR1 was not one that was fit to have the slots of the weights in it.

So we'll fix that with gr1 with you. Gr1 has a back panel with a zipper on the back of it. I'll show you in my car when we leave. Mine's in there that's 10 years old, and there's a zipper that's next to the back. It's a completely separate compartment. And we had an assault pack that was kind of like that in war that was designed to put a hydration bladder there. The problem with the hydration bladder there is that it's this big, giant lump in the middle of it, and it's very uncomfortable. It's very terrible position for it. But when we deployed, we would put our laptops in there. And so I was just like, okay, well, this is. Sure, you can put a hydration bladder if you want, but this is for a laptop as well. And so it became this travel bag. Well, okay, so then I have every dollar, and then some of what started out as mine and Emily's and then was just mine. My half poured into, you know, inventory and all this stuff of primarily GR1.

Which cost how much to make?

Well, it was $295 was what it cost. The price on the website at that time, it was, let's say, roughly. There's this idea of the golden ratio. Like, you would charge 4x, and that's wholesale pricing. And I think I kind of split the golden ratio, saying, okay, well, so if it costs 100 bucks. And how do you calculate cost? Is this very tricky thing. Say it costs 100 bucks. Everything costs more than you think. But let's say the direct costs were 100 bucks. It's like, okay, well let's charge 300 and we'll be able to make some of that up direct. But I can still have some margins at 147.50 to sell to wholesalers. And the wholesalers would be more about press. And direct is where there's more margin. And that was kind of the thinking king.

So when you're doing the 2010 tour of 48, you have what size inventory? Like you're ready to put these into stores if people are willing to take them.

I probably have 2,000 rucks.

What is it that people are rejecting? Are they rejecting the idea of a backpack or the idea of rucking?

So rucking was definitely not a thing.

But presumably you told them what it was.

Well, rucking was not the start point for this. It's going to come quickly though. I'll get to that. It was just this, hey, this is bomb proof gear. And here's this great story and I think it would go well in your store. It might be that over time it ends up in Nordstrom's or it ends up in these higher end things because it's quality and craftsmanship and all of that. People, I would meet with them and they would say, uh huh, huh, huh, yes. And then it was just silence. Everyone loved the story. But you have an unproven brand trying to charge $300 for what people perceive to be a backpack. That's very simple. And black. It's the anti features selling because everybody, you know, oh, look at all these features it has. I think that's terrible because it's more stuff to break. It's like, show me all the stuff that it doesn't have and tell me why it's going to last forever. That's kind of my thinking. That was very much against the grain of what, what people wanted to hear. Apparently we didn't have all these crazy colors. We had black. It was a Model T4 to give you any color you want as long as it's black. And that just was not a compelling argument. And nobody's going to walk into a store and say, I want to go ruck in 2010. So then they have to buy the inventory and educate the people. And education's really hard. I mean, really hard. So people are just completely unwilling to take a chance. And I understand that, that. And so I have all this money poured into it and sold none. And I'm back In business school, I'm still being floated by the taxpayer, in essence. And I'm like, man, I got to do something. There was partnership with an obstacle course racing company called Tough Mudder. This was kind of part of the long, longer journey of finding partners and working by, with, and through them to kind of get the word out on what Goruck is. And so I started showing up to these Tough Mudders, and this is when it was really hot. That market was. I mean, they were getting 10,000 people a weekend to show up. And so I started the first ever Tough Mudder was, I think May of 2010, and it actually kicked off that summer. And it's like, oh, this is going well. And then nothing. And the next one wasn't until the fall out west, but I put together a team, and we stuffed the rucksack with bricks, and we wrapped those bricks with duct tape, and then we did Tough Mudder together. And it was like, okay, let's do this like a team. I brought a bunch of my old buddies that I'd served with, and we did it at the first one. That was fun. That was how I got back into rucking. And so we had that, and it was like, people then like, wow, I want to do that. And like, oh, yeah, it's simple. Go back, become a Green Beret. I'll see you in 10 years. And one thing led to another, though, and it was, well, why not do something that's kind of like that, that's based on special forces training that doesn't require this huge obstacle course? And so created an event called the Goruck Challenge, which basically became Fight Club with backpack.

Thanks. So tell us about the Goruck Challenge.

First, it was led by me, current and former Special Forces, and it was, hey, meet me at 10am at the beach in San Francisco. Details not forthcoming.

And you were doing this through Facebook?

Yes, Facebook. And then Tough Mudder had it on their site for a while. We were partnered with them for about a year until maybe we became a little too successful or something, I'm not sure. But that faded. The hardest thing to do is go from 0 to 1. You have this great thing, and how do you break through? How do you do it? And I had so many other partnership talks and US manufacturing partners and all this stuff, but this was the one that ended up working because it gave me kind of a platform to fall back on what I knew. How I had been trained goes back to again, how much I owe.

And so you would just travel around the country, spontaneously popping up for a Goruck Challenge. Challenge.

Like Tyler Durden Fight Club with backpacks. And so the overhead was me flying out there. And the business model was pretty simple. The cost of the challenge was half the price of the rucksack. And you got to keep the rucksack. So if GR1 was $295, it was. The price to enter this event was 147.50. And you got to keep the ruck. And the first ones, I brought your bricks for you and I brought duct tape. Here you go. Now make them disappear. They go in the rucks.

How many people are showing up to these?

The first ones were 20. I mean, the second one was six. And I had to beg four of the people to show up. So there was some element of I was taking pictures and people were really responding to this because it was very challenging thing. There was no published route. There was no published course. There was nothing.

And typically, how long would a route be when you showed up?

We developed it over time and I started to bring in some of the buddies that I'd served with. And it started out as five hours. That proved to not be long enough. The tough, which was our original event, the tough challenge, it ended up settling in at about 10 to 12 hours. And we have all different kind of lengths now. There's a 24 hour version, there's a three hour version and a six hour version and stuff like that.

How is the weight determined?

We've kept the same thing since the beginning, which is if you're 150 pounds or over, you have 30 pounds, and if you're 150 or under, you have 20. In the early days, it was bricks, so six bricks or four bricks, and you had to put those in the rucks. And it was me or the special forces cadre going along with the group the whole time. There was no separation.

Okay, that's not a lot of weight, but it's enough weight that for somebody who is not necessarily in great shape, this is a hard thing for them to show up and do.

It's a lot more weight when you're doing Indian runs for what we call Indian runs. I don't even know what you call them now. Sorry. 10 miles of that. So you line everybody up in rows of twos. You slap the ruck of the person in the back and they sprint to the front.

That's what you guys do for the whole challenge.

Well, that was part. And then you're stopping along the way and doing physical training. Now it got more and it gets a lot heavier. When you start ripping logs out of forests and carrying down fifth Avenue, which we did.

So again, my point then is even more dramatic, which is these are not things that people show up to do when they just want to start to get in shape.

No. And that was the exact idea. This was meant to be.

This is finishing school.

School, yes. This was meant to be an extreme rite of passage that you would show up and you would do the same way that. How do you get confident? You earn it, you do really hard things and you show yourself what you're capable of because you can't cheat yourself. It started out as this thing and people were just blown away. I mean, sitting in the parking lots or wherever their cars were or wherever when we were done. And people are just exhausted and so proud of themselves and they've made friends with these people that they had nothing in common with. I mean, we didn't care if you're black, white, young, old, male, female, gay, straight, civilian military. Didn't care. Ruck up and follow me. That's what it was.

So how many of these were you doing a month?

I mean, it was every weekend. And so I would go somewhere and I do a route recon Friday, and that was hours and hours. Like, where am I going to find a log? Where's all this other stuff that I can do? What's closed, what's open?

And would you already post the start time the week before? Okay, so you give people like a week. You show up Friday, you spec the route, tape the bricks.

I got smart. I started telling to bring their own bricks, which was way better. Say it started at 10 o' clock on Friday night, was the first one 12, 14 hours later, it's noon. And then you can start at 10 o' clock Saturday night as well. And then you're going overnight and then you're done Sunday morning.

Oh, the challenge would be back to back.

Oh yeah.

Or two different groups.

Two different groups. And so I'm sleeping under a bridge or parking lot somewhere for a few hours between the events. And the greatest pep talk in the history of Goruck is the one that the cadre gives himself between those two events. Because it's brutal.

How many guys did you have doing this with you?

Hundreds. We've put on 10,000 of these since 2000.

But I'm saying how many of you were like instructors that were going to do both the Friday, Saturday, it was.

Always just one you and one. No, it was just me. Until you're training somebody else. And so then you have two of you but they have to sort of do and shadow and be shadowed and then they can do it. And part of the thing is you can't believe that how much people are willing to do. When you're transitioning out of the military and these are all special operations guys, you think that you have this exclusive license to doing really hard things. And what I found is that there's people all over this great country who really want to do hard things that want to sign up and say, send me. And they just didn't choose the military. And that's okay. I wouldn't have chosen the military either without 9 11. You've got these people. And man, the human spirit just burns so brightly. And it's such a gift to get to spend that time around these people. It's just magic. And you get to see it and you get to feel this transformation that they have as individuals and as a team. And it works because it's in the human terrain with these cadre who are well versed in the human terrain and pushing people and training people and getting them to where they need to be as a team. And so, I mean, I was doing this all over the place and then more of us were doing it it and more and more and more he got to where we were running over a thousand twelve hundred a year of these and then the pandemic crushed a ton of it. And so where did rucking come in is kind of the important part because it was just a rite of pass. And it's like, you're never going to want to do this again. Write a passage. Good, thanks for coming out. But people started to say, well, how do I train for this? I'm like, no, it doesn't matter, just show up and take your licks.

Yeah, but give me a sense of it. The people who are showing up, most people are completing it. It.

Oh yeah, that was the point.

What was the feeder to this population were these runners?

Primarily this goes back to what we tapped into. The military was much more prevalent than fronts. I mean, when was The Afghanistan surge? 2010 under Obama, 10 or 11. And so you still have this resurgence of special forces in the media. And then I was leading a Goruk challenge in Boston when Bin Laden was killed. There's just this very front page prevalence and people wanted to be around that.

Sure. But these people were what type of athletes coming in to be able to do something so extreme without training for it specifically? I'm just thinking of the little stuff I don't think I could have on my first day doing a ruck, done this simply because just the amount of discomfort due to how foreign it was.

That was the beauty of it though, was that it was a team event. So if I saw that you were struggling with your ruck, I've done this. This is one of the favorite learning points that I had. I would get these people, usually big strong dudes who have egos because they're big and strong and they think that they should be the strongest and carry all the weight and they should never show weakness. And so there's this one event that I was running in Key West. We were moving towards index. This is like 12 hours in and it has been brutal and it's hot and all this stuff. And I'm like, hey, we're moving. You're unable to keep up with this team. Give your pack to that person. He's like, nope, a real man doesn't give his pack up. I'm like, okay, that's fine. I go, so there's two courses of action here. The first course of action is you're going to give up your pack. You're going to submit to the speed that the team needs to go on to get to the index point. Now we're going to finish happy, we're going to have a beer when we're done. It's going to be a celebration of life. The human spirit will burn brightly. The second is you and your ego are going to quit this event right now, now. And for exactly 60 minutes. Not a minute less, not a minute more. This squad is going to do squad push ups on this sidewalk until it runs like the River Nile with their sweat. If you want to inflict that upon your team 12 hours in, that's what your choice is right now. Well, he gave up his pack and we went there and someone carried it for him. And we got to the end. And then I get, you know, a note after him like, thanks so much because, you know, I needed that in my life. Imagine that he's one of us that doesn't have feelings, doesn't that has a hard time asking for help. That thought he was checking the box on something that was another mud run, but he got a lot more out of it. That is a great gift. To be able to give that to somebody and to do it with a purity of heart. Like, that was not about me, that was about him and his team and that brought them together. And then we were up all night partying in Key west and it was a ton of fun. And that was just an important lesson that you would learn. So yes, you could have done it, but it may have been different. And so the thing is, those who much is given, much is expected, those who can carry more weight, they do carry more weight.

How did you choose who was going to carry 60 pounds?

What do you mean, which 60?

Well, his 30 plus their 30.

I don't care. Here's the beauty of it is that they have to rotate it for the team to optimize. It's like the log was the great instructor too, because they would get the log and they would immediately reject it because it's very heavy and it'd be like, okay, move that way. And they're expecting this to go on for a very little bit of time.

Time.

They would do it. And what you have to realize over time is that you can't keep getting the strong people exclusively to carry this because they have a breaking point too. They will get exhausted. You have to rotate people with frequency. So I'd rotate people. I would let them kind of fail for a little bit because pain is the greatest teacher of them all. And so then they would start infighting. I would never let that continue. So I'd stop. And so look, the first hour you're going to fight it. The second hour you're going to finally start to develop a system that works. And the third hour you're going to be ready to carry this thing the rest of the event. And they're like, what? They're 20 minutes in right now thinking that they're about to put this down. I'm like, no, no, no.

How much does this log weigh typically?

It's whatever we could rip out. I mean, they're big and they're always gnarly. They're not telephone poles. One side's way heavier with roots and nasty stuff right into your shoulder. And there was a lot of, of learning points and teaching points and it was very extreme and it felt great. I felt like I had mission and purpose again and that was fantastic. Like serving others and giving back with what I had learned about building teams and personal endurance and overcoming and sharing that and teaching that to other people was very, very rewarding. That was the foundation.

It wasn't until Covid that basically the idea of using rucking as the training came about, if I heard you correctly.

No. So it started much earlier than that. So people started asking, how do I train for this? And I was like, doesn't matter, just show up and take your licks. Well, then they started to self organize. They started to form ruck Clubs around the country where they would just meet up and people would go for rucks together. I'm like, that's insane. Who does that? Meanwhile, I used to do it, but that's insane for you to do it. And so they started to do that and then they became kind of social clubs as well. It finds out that people are looking to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to find friends that want to go do stuff. Not everybody just wants to doom scroll. Going to bars is fine, but going for a ruck, then grabbing dinner with the people that you know that you talk to about your life and what matters to you, and you listen to what matters to them, that stuff is hugely important. And those are the lessons that I learned in SF and Special Forces. And that's just what we saw from the community. And so it became this groundswell of, okay, so people wanted to self organize. I mean, those are easy tea leaves to read. This isn't me inventing something. This is people saying, we want to do this independent of this company called goruck. And that is such a amazing thing to have happen. And so then we started building around.

That because at this point, the company is an event running company that provides a pack.

Yes. I mean, it took two and a half years of figuring out how to develop the packs. We had, you know, internal sewers as well. We have a repair department called Scars, which is where we offer our lifetime guarantees. I mean, we have the DNA of a manufacturing company as well. We just also have the energy of our own events company. It's kind of a weird thing that we still wrestle with a little bit. I don't on some existential level because I can't imagine a world without both. But it's unusual. Usually a manufacturer will sponsor a race or an event series or whatever, or we developed both from the ground up out of necessity. And so it sort of turned into, okay, well how do I train for this? And then it was, okay, well what else can we do? And so we started to make longer events and harder events and heavier events and lighter events and shorter events, because you don't always want a 24 hour event like this or a 12 hour event like this. Then it started to be, okay, well let's live that life. And then we have rucks and we developed the Rucker, which was a pack specific for rucking, which removed the laptop because you could put a ruck plate in the laptop compartment. But what we found was if you do that at a Goruck challenge and you drop your ruck and the iron meshes with that zipper right there. It's going to break it. There's nothing we can do. No matter how well we build it, you can't do it. The zippers are the weak part in almost every piece of gear, no matter the gear. So we always use the best zippers, but you can't endure a crush load against a zipper like that. And so we removed that as a failure point for rucking and training, and the rucker was born. And so then we had cast iron plates, and we've been messaging that for a while. Almost decades. Decade.

Got it. So let's talk about the training, because this is where I think people who've listened to this podcast or heard me talk about it, I'm going to become a real fan of this. And I've talked about how sometimes I almost don't even include it in my tally of weekly exercise. If I'm adding up the number of hours in a week that I'm exercising, it's almost an afterthought to include the ruck, even though the ruck isn't a great source of exercise. But I often talk about how I sort of do it as. I don't know, I think it's kind of like mental health for me because it's the only thing I do without any other input. So if I'm in the weight room or on the bike, I'm either on the bike, I'm listening to a podcast. If I'm in the weight room, I'm listening to music or something like that. But this is something where I'm decidedly never carrying a phone. So I'm either just alone in silence, or I'm doing it with a friend or my wife or something like that. I've really fallen in love with it. And I've yet to bring somebody on a ruck with me if they haven't fallen in love with it. They've certainly come to appreciate why this is a great thing to do and gone out and bought their rucksack and things like that. But certainly I get a lot of questions, and so I kind of want to go through some of these with you. So I guess the first question is, do you need a rucksack? Because I have a Rucker 4.0, my wife has a Rucker 4.0. We have a spare Rucker 4.0 in the garage that if you come over, we basically have three packs, tons of weights to slot in, all different permutations. But somebody listening to this says, man, I don't want to spend 300 bucks on one of these things. Can I just use my backpack? It seems to me the answer is clearly yes. It's just a little more convenient to use one of the formal packs that you guys make. Is that fair?

The answer is clearly yes. You are correct. Look, the last thing I ever wanted to be was the Willy Loman of backpacks. I refused to do it. That's not why I was put on this earth. I think that people should be more active, myself included. Let's be more active. And so try whatever you've got. Don't wait on this purchasing funnel. About. Well, I'm going to deliberate this because it's expensive. And I'm going to wait and wait and wait and maybe someday I'll buy it and do this. Don't do that. Go find a backpack. You have one at your house. Put 10 or 20 pounds in your back or whatever you want. Put a bag of rice. I don't care. Put some water. Go walk around your neighborhood, cinch it down, make it kind of as tight as you can. And I'm reluctant to tell people to put too much more weight in it because that's where it gets more uncomfortable. And once you add too much more weight to something that's not built for rucking, it's uncomfortable, becomes a bad ride. And so then you're like, well, I hate rucking. And you can find a bunch of people that hate rucking, Right? It's usually people that served in the military that carried a ton of weight, that got no sleep, that had a fighting position when they got there. It's like, wrapped up into this whole universe. I'm talking about £20, £30 for. Pick your mental health, physical health, social health. If you're talking to your wife or a friend or a loved one, start there. Don't give yourself any excuses that you have to go buy something because you have what you need to go get started right now.

My kids use their backpacks and school books.

Great.

And it's just so cute to watch them load up as many books as they can put into their backpacks.

That's great. Great.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about some of the parameters around weight. So what guidance do you offer to. Let's start with a person who is not that fit, but they're listening to this and they're like, you know what, guys? I'm going to give this a try. But they're not an athlete. They're not capable of herculean tasks at the moment. They can walk around, they could put in 10,000 steps, but that's about the extent to their fitness. How do you start this person out?

I mean, £20? Try it for a couple miles. It's one of those things where this is completely different from running. From the standpoint of if you are walking as part of your daily life, that is the same movement. You're not doing this thing where there's all this different gait and new things with your Achilles, the way that you land or foot strike or heel strike, it's so much simpler than that. It's just carrying a little bit of weight. And the thing is, is that your shoulders will get a little bit sore the first time. That's good. That's how they get stronger. And so this should not be some crazy thing where you start out with a third of your body weight or more, and you want to really see what this is all about. I mean, start out simply go for a walk. It's so great to be outside. The sunshine and the wind and all of that, that those are additional benefits. If you want to start on your treadmill, start on your treadmill. That's fine. You'll get the physiological side of it at that point. But this is so simple. You get a little sore. If you want to go a couple miles, great, go a couple miles, come back and try it again tomorrow.

What kind of guidance would you provide as you escalate the weight and. Or if you're a person who's already kind of fit and wants to add this in?

So there are some variables here. There's the speed, speed that you ruck, and there's the weight that you carry.

And the elevation, I suppose, and the.

Elevation and all of this. And so you have to kind of listen to yourself or what are your goals in this? I mean, if you're training up for a hike, this is a great thing to do. If you're training up for hunt, this is a great thing to do to just baseline, baseline your fitness like that. I don't think there's any reason to go out of the chute too hard. I didn't. I mean, I started out with. With minimal packs and basic training, and I mean, 45 dry was by the time I'd done a little bit of this, and 45 on £200 is still less than 25%. I mean, we're not talking. And I was in really good shape otherwise, so there's no shame. Nobody cares. I mean, it's like if you come to my driveway and you work out or we go for a ruck. I don't care how much weight you carry. If you ask me, how much should I carry? It's like, okay, great. Well, let's talk about your specific situation. If you're used to carrying weights, or if you're used to. Used to squatting a lot, or if you're doing the things that are going to kind of prepare you to carry weight, then great. Try 30 or maybe 45 if you're really fit. There's no shame. Start out with 30. Go for a couple miles. What's the worst thing that happens? You're like, oh, I want to make that a little harder. There's no problem there. It's just getting out is part of the joy without the pressure about, well, what's your bench press and your deadlift? How much exactly can you do? Just simplify. Just simplify it all.

What about the differences between a rucksack and a weight vest? So I used to use a weight vest to train for hunting trips. So I would put it through my shoulders and go up and down hills with that. But I know you've thought a lot about the ergonomics of this. So what are some of those differences?

Yeah, and it was fun to see you and Dr. Humerman going back and forth on this a little bit. I think he had spent more time with a weight vest, and that actually inspired Michael Easter and I to go even deeper into weight vest versus rucksack. So an important thing is that weight vests are vital to the success of soldiers and police officers and those who are in those kinds of dangerous jobs. And so there's a component of train like you fight. You need to be comfortable in a weight vest. If your job requires you to wear a weight vest to do things like stop bullets, that's really important. What I will also tell you is that people that wear weight vests have. Have typically terrible posture because of it. It is just kind of a compression downward that doesn't really open up. In order to breathe better, you have to create this cavity of air in the front of your belly, which, the more fatigued you get, the more that you do that when you're wearing a weight vest. And so you're kind of hunching over a little bit. It's not good for what I would personally say. You want your spine to look like this. This Dr. Sarrett would say, you have to own your breath to own a pose. Well, rucking is no different. If you can own your breath, it means your shoulders are back and you can Take a really deep breath while you're rucking. The weight vest is also looks a little different than a rucksack. You can't quite blend in quite as well. This is getting into the aesthetics less than the physiological response. But the rucksack is more comfortable. And I say that from. From not the standpoint of I'm trying to live more easily. I say that from the standpoint of I can put my shoulders back. It's posture corrective for me. So it rolls my shoulders back when I cinch it down tight, which for me works well to maintain solid posture. That is the opposite of say lower back or neck curvature forward, which is more likely when you don't have that on your back.

One of the things that I remember from when we went out for a ride ruck last year was that you didn't use the chest strap, which comes on the rucksack and you weren't using the hip belt, which is an attachment you can buy for 20 bucks or something. I've played with both of these. I also prefer not to use the chest strap. I find it actually makes it harder to breathe. I actually prefer to have it wide open, which means there's a little more pressure on my shoulders. But that's a worthwhile trade up off because I have unrestricted breathing. But I do quite fancy the belt. And I just recall you weren't using either. Is that just a throwback to your days of the use case you referred to earlier, which is, look, in the military I wasn't going to wear a belt because it would get in the way of me grabbing a magazine.

So I did grow up like that with my rucking, where we just didn't use hip belts. And for a hip belt there's a but coming and the butt is for the fit. For me, when you start to transfer the load around your hip, it kind of reduces some of the stability that I have with the weight and the way that my shoulders go back and the way that I breathe. Now, when you get into very heavy loads, hunting style, elk loads or heavy military ammunition loads or something, I mean, I found that there's a lot of value in just alternating how you're doing it because you want the blood flow to go certain ways. Even when it's a shoulder only carry, there's little tips and tricks to kind of flex your shoulders around just a little bit so that you can get the blood flow to go there even a little bit more. It's just not a comfortable thing for me. I don't use it and what you find is that for the load to actually transfer can be at odds with how much you cinch the rucksack down.

Yeah, you can't cinch it down much on the shoulders if you want it to be cinched tight on the hips is what I found at least.

Least. Right. So then for that to be a both thing. That's why these hunting packs are enormous and they're really long and they're built to carry really heavy loads that you can do either with. For me, it's just not quite as practical. And I prefer the feeling of the shoulder carry. I mean, they taught us high and tight on your back is where you want the weight and stable always. So whether you use our stuff or whatever you're using, you want it to be stable. The more that stuff is shifting around inside of your wrist ruck, you have the opportunity to. Okay, you step on uneven ground and then you go a little bit too far this way, and then you tweak your back in the wrong spot or your. Whatever it might be, you don't want that. Stable is exactly how you want it. And so I really like that feeling of stability high and tight on my back, just right up on my shoulders.

So would you just sort of suggest that folks muck around with this and figure out what feels best to them?

Yes, yes, absolutely. The idea of the resistance side of rucking, starting with your shoulders and going all the way down to your feet, you're starting that resistance with your upper body. And when you transfer all the load to your hips, you're starting it much lower on the body. And so it's different strokes for different folks. Just my grandmother used to say, and people like it certain ways depending upon how the fit is, and. And especially at lighter loads. You know, people who are, say, used to carrying book bags or they're used to doing these types of things. I mean, you're used to carrying that on your shoulders. You've already prepared yourself. You're walking in part of your daily life. You're training for this, you're ready. And so there's this idea of ride that through. And as you get more weight, say you start to get up to 45, or. Or you start to maybe max out at a third of your body weight. It puts more pressure on your system, your technique, and you might want to transfer the load or you might want to do it a little bit differently. I mean, if I do really long, really heavy rucks, I will occasionally use the sternum strap in the front because it's Going to take some of the load off my shoulders, which allows the blood flow to come back to my shoulders and my hands and that then it just gives me that little break. And then I just continued with the mission for you.

Nowadays, how many events do you lead in a month typically or in a year now?

I don't lead a lot of events. I mean I have people over to my driveway every weekend when I'm home. People come over from the community or we run events. What it means to be a goruck event is certainly broadened. We've decentralized a lot of the hey, work out like this. Bring the people together in the parks, bring the people together in your driveways. This doesn't need to be so complicated. And go for rucks in wherever you want to go. And I do that a lot. No, I probably only lead 20 events a year now.

You led one in Normandy, didn't you?

I did. And we're going back next year in May and June for the 80th.

Tell me about the one you did. Was it for the 70th?

We went for the 75th. So we have different kinds of events. The one that my wife and I did together, it was a 75 kilometer ruck only, which was about 50 miles. And it started at Utah and it ended at Omaha and it passed through all the things that you saw in Bander Brothers, the cities, Pointe Du Haw.

Did you do it on the beach or did you do it above the cliffs?

You can't do it on the beach, so you've got to go around to the cities and then around the kind of inlet and then you come up and almost at dawn we were at the German cemetery, which is black tombstones. And you walk around and it's one thing to know that we were on the side of right and justice and God bless those men and everybody in our country that had any part in that war, because we did. Right? You walk around that German cemetery and you see 16, 17, 18 year old kids that are buried there. I mean it's just another perspective that you get from seeing that, especially that far in. And then you go to Pointe Du Hawk and you see where the rangers scaled that wall against those machine gun nests. The amount of sacrifice that's gone into this. And then from there we handrailed the final piece from Point Du Hawk to Omaha, which is my favorite rock on planet Earth, and it took us to Omaha and then the American cemetery is there. And I think that's the most American place on planet Earth.

It's Amazing.

And I get goosebumps thinking about it right this second. It's something that to see what they had to endure for that to happen, it is mind blowing. And think not only of their passing, think of the glory of their spirit. It's at the American cemetery. And it's hard when you're there because it's a very solemn place. But man was a lot of glory of a lot of spirit there.

So you'll be doing an 80th anniversary there.

We are, we're running a lot of different events. So there's an 80 kilometer, roughly a 50 miler again probably the same ish route. And then there's a 26.2. Put on some 12 miles, do some commemorative hero workouts. We'll do some of our challenges of different lengths. We'll put on some scavenger hunts. We'll put on some stuff for the kids. So we have two chateaus right on the beach, pretty close to Pointe du Hawk and we'll be running stuff out of there. We have this really crazy long endurance event as well called Goruck Selection which is patterned after Special Forces assessment selection. It's the toughest endurance event in the world. It's pass rates sub 1%. It's the only event where we try to get people to quit.

What is that event?

It's 48 hours. It's late May next year we're doing it for the first time overseas. It's going to be at Normandy. It's the dark side of Goruck. But people ultimately wanted the biggest test they could possibly find. And so this past year one person finished the year before, zero people finished the year before that, one person finished, finished. People come and it's aggressive. So that's the first event that we're kicking off with. And then we get into the. The more fun stuff that's there.

80K doesn't sound like it's just pure fun stuff. I mean that sounds pretty challenging.

That event is my favorite event to do as a participant. You have to put the miles in to kind of train up. The first time we ever did it, we did it in D.C. and it was a torrential downpour and I went in with a little bit too much pride, like oh, I've been rucking for a long time. Time. You have £20 so you end up having 25 including your stuff. And I was like, oh no, I'm good. And man, I had to go to the well to pass that thing. And it was under 20 hours. I mean you're rucking, you're not shuffling, you're not ruck running or anything like that, if you want to hit that kind of time hack. But the beauty is just, it does wear you down. It's longer than you want. It's harder than you think. The 40 mile mark is about where you're like, I'm ready to be done. But it's great to get the time with the person that you have there. What you'll find over the course of these longer events is that there's highs and lows for all of you, but they don't come always at the same time. So you're there and you need someone's help and they help you. They just lift your spirit up a little bit and then you in turn do that for them. I mean, it's like, hey, I got some M and Ms. You want some? I mean, that can change your whole life. Just amazing. It's little stuff like that and it really brings you closer or to people that you're there with. And that was great experience. I don't know that we'll do it this year.

You won't do the 80k.

Personally, I think we'll probably choose M and I will probably choose a shorter distance only because we have a lot of events to also put on that takes you out of commission for a couple days.

And you do this right on June.

6Th, we're there for basically two weeks prior. Normandy is a great place. It's also very big.

Yeah. And it's also going to be very busy leading up to the anniversary.

I mean, June 6th is where all the heads of state will be at the American cemetery, which just means there's more traffic, there's more checkpoints, it's harder to operate. So the way that we plan it is we let people show up early. We run our events like that during the week and the weekend prior. And then if people want to stay, they can stay. And if they want to go home by then, they can go home. It's kind of up to them. But like, I think people should go to Washington D.C. as well and go see our nation's capital and see the Lincoln and the Washington and can't get as close to the Capitol as you used to, but go see the Capitol and the Jefferson, go see these things, the MLK and the FDR and go see them and read what's up there. Read the Gettysburg Address at the Lincoln. You know, it's amazing as well. I think the more people that go to Normandy, the better. It's just an amazing place.

Let's talk about footwear for a second because this is something where you guys have started to take this as something you own. Now, why do you guys make footwear? And why do you think that the footwear you make is really, really good? I wear your footwear, Right? So I'm wearing. What's the one I wear?

The ballistic trainers.

Ballistic trainers is what I wear. I love both the high top and the low top. About an 8 millimeter drop.

That's right.

Supportive. I have found, at least I found prior to wearing these, that I was destroying shoes. There are certain minimalist shoes that I like, but I just felt I needed more support. But say a little bit about why you guys have taken the innovation and footwear footwear really seriously. You're almost a footwear company at this point now, aren't you?

We are. So an important thing happened was that I met a guy named Paul Litchfield. Footwear is a lot of dark arts. The process of building footwear. There's a lot of chemistry involved and there's a lot of dark arts. You can sew a rucksack. You have some sewing machines and a cutting table. You can sew a rucksack together. You can iterate a million times. You can do this. Footwear is just way more complicated with lasts and molds and foam chemistry and all this stuff. And so. So I met Paul with Emily a long time ago when he was still at Reebok and he was running the Advanced Concepts group at Reebok at the time. He had invented something called the Reebok pump and been a shoe dog. One of the foremost shoe dogs of his generation and still. And has sold over a billion pairs of shoes. So that's a lot. And there's a lot of expertise that comes with that to help navigate the dark arts. Because getting into your own. Hey, I'm going to start a shoe company because it sounds sexy. Is a great way to build terrible profit product because you have to liaise with the factory and get the molds built and there's just a lot that goes with it. So important was that we had someone who's a real expert. I'm a really aggressive product tester. I hate everything till I accept it, if you will. Right. And then great art is never finished. It's only abandoned. And so there's always this kind of relentless pursuit of excellence. But you have to have somebody who is just dogmatic in their beliefs, that knows what they're doing, that is in subject matter expert that has dedicated their life to this as A profession. And so without that was unwilling to get into the footwear business. The reason why footwear is so important is that if you lined up a hundred people who are masters of the ruck, most of them at this point would come from the special forces community. And you said, what's more important, the rucksack or the boot? 90 plus percent, if not all hundred, will say the footwear. And the reason why is because when that goes wrong, it is just excruciating. I mean, Napoleon lost because of foot problems, right? I mean, you can lose wars, you can lose everything based upon the feet of your soldiers. And if they're not doing well, it's really hard to do anything. You're living on your feet all of the time. And so it turned into this. Yeah, we had some footwear in the military and we were always just modifying it to make it more like a sneaker, but still supportive. And there's all this stuff in the civilian sector about, okay, well, minimalist. You cannot go through the training that we went through in minimalist stuff. Your feet just need more support under that kind of load. We just kind of took the most beloved shoe in the military repertoire, which is the jungle boot, and we started there and we made that out. That was basically the boot that I wore in the special forces qualification course. We stripped away the weight, we added tread that was lightweight, that would still work with that. Most importantly, we'll provide the support for your feet for all of the miles. It lets you scale up the weight and the distance. And because this is goruck, we want stuff to last forever. It doesn't, but we want it to last forever. And that's how we build it. And so that's just in our ethos and we're uncompromising about that. So we were unwilling to do it unless we could build best in class, world class product. And we wanted to solve a real world problem, not just a stylistic problem, like, oh, this is going to be a cooler looking shoe. That's a terrible problem to solve. The problem is you live on your feet and you're carrying weight of any amount, volume, distance, whatever it might be. And we need to build something around that. That's a harrowing task. Now there's all different facets of how people carry and is it off road or is it on trails? How did people grow up? Look at how Born to Run kind of ignited that, the vibrant five finger, which I called the five finger death punch when I would see it at events. Because people would just destroy themselves when they would Wear this because they're so unsupported with so much weight for so long and people just don't know and they are looking for answers. It's like, what's going to work? And if you are carrying weight or you're living on your feet, feet, you need supportive footwear. That's the deal. Yeah.

I love my minimalist footwear, but I have learned, I would say the hard way, that rucking is not the time for it. My daily drive is about 50 to 60 pounds and the amount of foot problems I was having, I have very hyper mobile feet. So that makes me, it seems even more susceptible to injury on uneven terrain with that much weight. Maybe talk about the ballistic trainer versus the boot. You have a couple of different models. How would you help somebody navigate those?

Yeah, we do. I mean, people do make decisions based off of how things look or how simple they are. I mean, we come from a special forces background, so we have stuff that's. The boots are inspired by our jungle boots that we used to wear. We just sort of strip them down. And then the ballistic trainers started out as the best garage gym shoe on the planet. There was a little bit of, hey, how do we solve a problem that you can lift, push, pull, drag, sandbags or barbells or stuff as well? But this is Gorug, so you need to be able to ruck in them as well. And you know, at that time, CrossFit had started out with a really minimalist drop for lots of different reasons, but I don't think many of them very good over the long haul. And we came in with an 8 millimeter drop shoe. We said this also happens to be the best shoe for CrossFit, but for us it's also the best garage gym shoe. And you can ruck with it and live in your feet with this ballistic trainer on as well. Well, the drop does matter. So basically the rucking offset or the heel lift as it might be, and that's how you prevent things like shin splints.

And it keeps the Achilles a little bit safer. You take a little bit of that strain off.

The thing is, is that you can argue philosophical positions forever. You should have a stronger Achilles and a stronger shin and a stronger foot. And the word should is not really very useful. The thing is, is that people, people grew up how they grew up and there's a lot of asphalt and people weigh what they weigh. And the more that you weigh, the more strain you're putting on your feet with every step. And how do you walk? And all of Those things. And so, yes, I think it's important to actually strengthen your feet as well. Walk around your house barefoot, do whatever, but when it comes time to perform and you have a lot of weight, your foot has three arches. You need to support them all over a lot of dynamic movements, pavement, uneven terrain, whatever it might be. And there's a lot that goes into doing that successfully. And so the stuff that we build is designed for that.

Yeah, I do most of my activity barefoot, but I take care of my feet when I ruck and when I do kind of my heavier carries and stuff like that, that makes a ton of sense. What are the most common injuries you see in people who ruck, and what are the steps that you recommend people take to mitigate those?

If you do it at lighter loads, you don't see a lot of injury. And you've seen this proven in special forces training. The number one cause of injury is running, and there's no close second. Lifting is number two. And marching is way down the list. The injuries that you'll see are usually from people that start too fast, too soon with too much weight. So slow down, reduce the weight, listen to your body. If you start to get shin splints, they're not going to to get better from doing more of the same thing. So, yes, you can ice and rest and do all this stuff. You can also just reduce the weight and the distance and the time and put the variables that are like that. You know, look, my standard, I have a 45 pound plate. I carry it often. It's by the door at my office, it's by the door at my house. If I walk the dog, I ruck the dog. If I can take a phone call outside, I put the 45 pound plate on and I go walk around the neighborhood and I think take a phone call lets me squeeze a few more hours out of the day that I don't have to dedicate to just fitness. Some days I don't feel like doing that much, or some days I want a little bit more. And you just have to listen to yourself. I mean, look, if you start running with weight, you're putting a lot more strain on yourself. So make sure that you're physically able to do that. There's a middle ground that's a shuffle that is really, really interesting to me. And when I want to do a little bit more and I don't want to want my knees to feel like I just went on a long run, I just try to keep my feet as low to the ground as possible. And I just move them as fast as possible, just kind of shuffle and my heart rate goes up a lot more. And you can really accelerate that pretty quickly. The faster you go and the more that you gallop, the greater risk that you're going to have of injury. So most people walking with 20 or 30 pounds, you're not really going to see a lot other than shin splints if you're unready, if your Achilles starts to hurt, hurt, dial it back a little bit, get a little more ready or look at supportive footwear. If your shoulders are sore, then decrease the weight, or if it's a good sore, then that's them getting stronger.

I always find that in the winter I just ruck less. For whatever reason, I enjoy the heat more, so I have less motivation to go out in the winter. And I always find that when I really ramp up volume in the summer, that first week I feel it in the shoulders again. But as you, you said, it's easy to distinguish a good sore from a bad sore. This is a, this is foreign to me sore versus this is causing an injury sore.

If you get too much weight, what you'll start to do is you'll start to lean your body forward, you'll pivot at your hips a little bit too much while you're doing it. And you're doing that because you're trying to put the weight over your stronger muscles and you're kind of cheating. You know how Arnold talks about, I don't care how many pushups you can do, I want to see you do 10 perfect picture push ups. Master the movement first and then get into the miles and all that. Do the movement correctly, remove the ego a little bit about how much weight that you have, especially if you're starting until you get comfortable or know what you're capable of and keep good form while you're doing it. And you're going to reduce the risk of really anything. So that's kind of really a critical thing because if you start hunching over and stuff, you shouldn't be doing that.

For someone starting out, what would be the frequency you would recommend they do it if they're starting out at a modest weight? Would you put any limit on it?

So much is subjective around. Well, what's their step count? Do they work out otherwise? I mean, try a couple miles a couple times a week. I don't know. I probably need to just have a more strict, hey, this is exactly what you should do. But if you tried two miles with 30 pounds and you're like, okay, that was cool. I mean, that's 30 minutes of your life.

Life.

I mean, you can do that.

Yeah. I think at light enough load, once you're in a cardio zone two or below, there's really no limit to what I think you can do in terms of frequency.

Yeah. So you're the expert.

People always ask me, hey, Peter, when you're doing your ruck, is that a zone two workout for you? And the answer is no, It's a zone one zone four. I'm never just a steady state heart rate of 130 to 140. The only way I can do that is the ruck Schmidt shuffle. Remember how we do our ruck and we end up at that track at the school there I can get into zone two. If I do a shuffle, I can titrate the speed of the shuffle to zone two. But walking here and there, my heart rate's either pretty low or pretty high when we're going up those really steep hills. Which is part of the reason why I don't really bank it as exercise. In my mind, what I really enjoy are those pushes up the hills. Because then you. You're getting that VO2 max. And I really like the walking down the steep hills. Cause you're really working on how do your brakes work. And brakes are the things that fail when we age. And so walking down a very steep hill and we have a lot of them here with weight on your back is a really good way to train eccentric strength while the muscle is lengthening.

So would you recommend going very slowly while you do that, or is there any value in increased speed while going downhill?

I don't think there's a value in increased speed going downhil. I mean, the only athletes I know that do that are sprinters. Do that. Sprinters will do downhill running to teach the muscle how fast the legs can go. I think the risk reward for a normal person like me is not there to justify it. So I'm not going incredibly slow. I'm just going at what I think is the safest pace possible when I go down. Whereas going up, I'm really limited by my cardio system. I'm basically going up as fast as my lungs will carry.

Carry me the way down. Hurts my knees more the faster I try to go. My wife was a really, really good runner. And when we would ever go for run, she's like, gotta make up speed on the downhills. I'm like, I'm just not willing to do that on a training run. If you Will. And it's the same thing for me with rucking. I know what you're saying about the brakes. It's a leg workout on the way down. Unless you're sacrificing.

One of my favorite workouts, and I don't do this often because this truly is a workout, is a heavy 80-100lb pack. Where we live, there are four short but very steep hills and it's an up and down of all four. So walking there and then an up, down, up. Yeah, there's four. And that is brutal.

Michael Easter and I have gotten into this hundred pound one miler thing and it is a thing, I mean, to actually baseline your time against that.

What's a benchmark time that one should think of for a. And you're doing this as a shuffle.

Oh, yeah. What gets exhausting is when you change too much like a walk to a shuffle. You need to pick a cadence that you can go.

Give me an example of, like how long would it take to shuffle a mile with £100 on your back?

I don't know. 9:30?

I was about to say 10 minutes. Sounds like it would be pretty tough.

I've seen a really, really, really competitive runner did it in 6:30. I mean that's insanity. Though still a VO2 max type of of game. I wonder at what point it starts being more about a strength carry a really extreme weight.

At a heavy enough weight, when you simply can't even shuffle, it probably shifts more to just pure strength.

Yeah. But the a hundred pound, ten minutes, it's a smoker. It's a lot of fun. So rucking can turn into this. For me it's more like a baseline. And I think about how do I sleep well at night. I really, really prioritize that. And getting step counts and some percentage of those with weight on my back is a very useful tool for me to sleep. Well, tomorrow comes and it's a better day yet. I think it's also fun to have these challenges with a rock on my back because I also hearken back to those days when I did that and it was really, really fun. And there were foot races and all of that. And that was a lot of fun.

So what do we know about the plates? Because you guys obviously sell these amazing plates now that just make this so easy. And plug and play play. They slot right into the pack. What's the over under on TSA Pre here in the US Allowing those through security because for many of us it would be great to be able to take plates with us when we travel to both have them at our destination, but also just frankly utilize the time we're in the airport.

Amen. So I personally have done this 50 times, I'd say, and never been confident. Confiscated. Now there's a raging debate inside of the Goruck community and a lot of people do get confiscated enough to where it comes up. I mean, I found that the best way to do it, if you want to do it, first off, you have to be willing to check it or sacrifice it if it doesn't go through. But you separate it out, you put it in its own thing. You can put a little descriptor on what it is, or you have to be ready to tell them what it is. And I think the more people that know what rucking is, the more likely it'll be that it's okay. Okay.

Have you got a sense of whether the people who are getting confiscated are lighter plates versus heavier plates? Is there any pattern to what's getting confiscated? Because there's a light enough plate maybe viewed as a potential weapon where a 50 pound plate, nobody thinks you're going to be wielding that.

I think the opposite. I think the heavier ones are more likely to get confiscated.

You've gone 50 for 50, carrying what size plate?

20 or 30? It's always 20 or 30. So the other thing that I do though is I just have a stuff sack. And instead of using a plate, it's more like you get somewhere you can find some rocks outside a hotel. And finding 20 pounds of that is not hard. I mean, you can wrap a dumbbell from a hotel gym, which I've also done. I mean, it's not as nice of a ride, that's for sure. But there's this ability to multi use the things that you carry or you travel with. So hey, your dirty clothes bag you can also use to put rocks in it.

The reason I really want to bring a plate is I'm thinking about you go on vacation to Europe or something where you're not going to have the luxury of going to the gym every day, but you're going to walk 10 miles a day. Wouldn't it be great to just have that 20, 30 pounds on your back for 10 miles a day walking around and have that not be a dumbbell jabbing into your.

More like a sandbag that goes in that takes up a little bit more volume that isn't iron. Like I've had good success with that. I've also had really good success with that. Even in the States with my garage and all of the toys that I have, you baseline with the weight and then you say, okay, well, I want to add 20 pounds today. I just throw a sandbag in. It's not always just stacking. It's easy in, it's easy out. You can use it for other stuff too. It works great.

You mentioned earlier a treadmill. So what are the advantages or disadvantages to rucking on a treadmill?

I mean, the disadvantages are very clear to me that you're not outside side. There's these fractals that Easter talks about, which you also have talked about. And you're missing out on sunshine and wind and light and all of that kind of stuff. Some advantages to treadmills are simply safety and practicality and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, I have a couple friends that are surgeons at Mayo and they get home at three in the morning and they want to get their workout in then, and they're on their treadmill. I'm like, okay, you guys do, do you. I think you should do what works for you at the end of it. Americans are spending something like what, 93% of our time indoors now. It's a ton. And so giving yourself a little bit more freedom to go outside. I'm more comfortable walking around with a rucksack on than I am with a weight vest or a big giant hiking hunting pack or whatever it is. I mean, you kind of look like you can blend in, you can go ruck and get the groceries, you can bake it in in. So treadmills are fine. It's the physical side. Staring at some screen the whole time and doing that. There are other downsides to that.

If somebody wants to do one of these really extreme events like the 80 kilometer Normandy challenge, how do they train for it? What do you recommend? They show up because we really know how to train for a marathon. That's a well oiled machine. What is the build pattern of volume to get ready for something like?

I mean, we do have mileage training plans against that. So you need to at least do a marathon. Like you need to at least do 40k. Yeah, you need to at least do that. And the way that I have always cheated the distance is by adding weight and trying to maintain the same speed.

Because you're trying to do the 80k in what time?

Under 20 hours.

Okay. So you need to be able to ruck a marathon. If 10 hours and the event is done with how much weight you'll have?

25, not much.

How much would you increase that to maintain the pace?

You'd go £50, 50 or 60 almost all the time. I would almost Never train with 25. The beauty that you can do also, it's kind of what I was talking about with the sock system to toughen up your feet with rucking. You can go a certain distance and you can drop weight if you, you want, and you can go faster if you're dropping weight to kind of start this descent into, well, I can't handle it anymore. I'm just going to walk. That's fine too. Do that. But you can drop weight and then you can pick up your speed. And so you're hitting the systems a little bit differently in the same type of movement or process. You just kind of have to experiment with it. Unlike running, you have this other variable that you can control. And it's fun to control it because it's a different, different workout. Like you're saying £100 is a lot different than 60.

Totally different.

Yeah, a lot different. And you reach this point and everybody's got this point where an incremental amount of weight added feels like an exponential amount of weight added. And that can change over time relative to how much you rock or what you're comfortable with, I'd say. But it's kind of up to you. If you have an hour, what do you want to do? You can do a lot of different things. You can go lighter and faster, you can go heavier and slower. You can go middle of the road and try to push on one of those systems a little bit more. And that's fun.

So you've said to me before, your goal is for rucking to be the.

New running, bigger than running. The goal is that rucking is bigger than running.

What's that going to take?

Well, we're in the early stages of it. First off, it takes awareness that people are actually rucking. Everybody that joins the military is rucking. Let's start up now. We've got millions of people. You go to airports, I mean, roll bags and stacking stuff so that everything is easy all the time. Like you sit on a flight for 10 hours and then you stand on a walking escalator and then you go sit at your gate. No, no, don't do that. Put everything on your back. You have hands free movement. That's freedom. You can do this in an airport. You can do this while you're traveling. It's going to make all of your adventures better. While you're doing it as well. You're training to climb the mountain in the airport right there. Training to explore the city. By any time that you put a ruck on your back, go to Europe, which you're mentioning, there's cobblestone roads, there's narrow sidewalks. There's. I mean, roll bags are just not. It's just a ball and chain around your line. Life. And so the first step is to just say, this is better because. And to get people to buy into that. And then there's just the physiological side of this is extremely healthy for people to do. I come at that from a baseline of activity. The best things that you want out of life require passion and energy and activity. You have to do them. We need to be people who do things. And the more that you do, the more confident that you. You get doing things. And this is a really important lesson that everybody has to relearn throughout the course of their life. And you have to keep doing stuff. The body is antifragile. The more that you work it, the stronger it gets. And that's an amazing, amazing thing that we have. And to not know what we're capable of is just a shame. And so let's intentionally do these physically harder things than nothing than just living our lives on phones or always standing. To then sit, to never move. There's so much benefit that comes from your ability to move yourself and to carry weight. And you are built and born and have evolved in order to do this. You just have to kind of do it. Yeah.

It is our superpower. Right. Michael wrote about this in the comfort crisis, that there's nothing that's evolved to carry more than we do.

So we have to just do it, and you can work it into your life. The risk of injury is fractional. You're kind of even describing it as like. I'm just don't even almost count it as exercise now. Most people would count an hour and a half with £60 on their back. Exercise. And when you do your hills, you'll count it as exercise. The scalability, it's a very simple thing to do. You carry weight. It's not a new machine that's going to turn into a towel rack. It's not Mr. Spandex yelling at you through some screen on a bike. It's none of these gimmicks. It's not a new band, it's not a new whatever. It's so simple. This has been going on for millennia. It's why humans exist. This has been proven by the Roman Legion. Rucking was their litmus test to get into that. It's been proven in all of the special operations communities. The SAS started in the west, and that came over to Army Special Forces from to Delta to all of these kinds of units. It's foundational to our ability to survive and thrive as a species. And for us to then take a little bit of that, that's been proven for millennia and enrich our lives so much to take these steps and to become more active. It's such an unlock in our lives. When you take this kind of responsibility and you say, I want to be a more active person. And all of a sudden you're around active people, people, you're figuring out how to move forward. I mean, I want to die with my boots on, moving forward, up a hill somewhere. And that's my hope and my goal. And part of that is physical, maybe, but part of that is also metaphorical. It's very much tied to a mental outlook of life. Do you want to take your two fingers and roll your bag onto the walkway and stand there and then go find a seat and sit down and stare at your phone? Phone, or do you want to take the bull by the horns?

Yeah. No. One of the things that we do with our patients is talk about this marginal decade. What are the activities you want to be able to do in the last decade of your life? And we want them to be noted very specifically. These have to be quantifiable things. I want to be able to ruck 3 miles over uneven surface with 20 pounds in my back in the last decade of my life. I have a feeling you'll be doing much more than that. But to your point, it's a really beautiful thing to be able to do. I'm so grateful for what you're doing, and I suspect that we're really on a both positive first and positive second derivative of the appreciation for this and the adoption of this. So I suspect that this time next year, you'll be looking back saying, can't believe how many more people are doing this.

There's been times in my life where I felt like I'm completely crazy. Crazy. The entrepreneur's journey. And I'm not asking for any kind of sympathy. I've chosen this path of my own volition, and I'm grateful to what has brought me to this path. And there's other times in life. I know that that's not how I want to live a life. We're all meant to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and we're meant to have friends and spiritual soulmates and people who are fighting the same fight without out this transactional approach to the world, like you want to believe in the human spirit in other people. And it's been very uplifting for me at a very deep level that you've embraced this and just lived that life and have told people that they can get a lot out of this as well. And it gives me more strength to drive on with this mission that is near and dear to me. And this is a mission so near and dear to me. We tapped into this, we didn't invent it. It comes from this long story that I have with 9 11, this terrible day happening that eventually helped me find enough courage to join the army, that somehow these guys who had fought in the invasion of Afghanistan put me through some gauntlet that somehow I passed and measured up to their standard, which is very humbling to do. Then I served with these people who had been there and done, done that, and they taught me so much. And what I left was this overwhelming desire to pay that forward because of how much I feel that I owe everything that I've been afforded. And so that can become a very lonely journey at times though. And it's been amazing to have your activity, your support in that. I don't mind being crazy, but I'd rather be crazy if you're also crazy. If that makes sense. Sense.

I'm happy to be crazy with you. Jason, thank you so much. It's been great spending this time with you today. Again, thanks for what you're doing and I hope that a lot more people after listening to this, are going to dip their toe in the water. And I suspect that they will experience not just what I've experienced, but what everybody I've dragged on a ruck has experienced, which is I'm going to go do that regularly.

Thanks. It's been wonderful to chat with you. I appreciate it.

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