All Day Ruckoff Podcast

I am beyond grateful to Alex Stavdal for taking the time to chat with me for over an hour about his incredible GORUCK Selection finish. He’s a very humble guy and it was great to talk to him about this huge event.

Thousands watched him over the duration of GORUCK Selection 019 cheering him on from the live feeds. It was truly something special to witness and we were all very excited to see him walk away completing the event.

During this interview we cover how he found GORUCK and his first event, when he decided to sign up for GORUCK Selection, what it was like to fail GORUCK Selection 018, what he changed between 018 and 019, then how it felt to complete 019.

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or even our Facebook Page! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

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Brain: Thanks so much again, Alex, for just taking the time to talk with me. I truly appreciate this and I’m super excited about it.

Alex: I know. I’m stoked, so it’s great.

Brian: Let’s start out with your involvement in the GORUCK community. How did you first stumble upon GORUCK?

Alex: Yeah. I have to give credit specifically for signing up my first GORUCK event to my buddy, Eric. I knew him through the obstacle course racing community. It was actually funny, he was one of the first guys I met when I signed up for my very first Spartan race, which was a Hurricane Heat, followed by a sprint, and I saw this dude camping out in the parking lot, like in a tent, and I was like, “Hey, that guy has got the right idea. I got to be friends with that guy.” We met from there. We kind of had a big group that all molded together and we camped before a lot of obstacle course races, that sort of thing.

Just all of a sudden at one point he’s like, “Hey, man. I noticed people are doing this thing called GORUCK,” and explained a little bit about it and said I did one. It was super cool. You got to try it out. Yes, I signed up for my first challenge. He was there, a couple of other friends were there and I had a great time. It was with Cadre Jesse and Cadre Heath in New York City and it was really cool. It was definitely different.

Brian: That’s awesome. Back to the Hurricane Heat, what year was that?

Alex: That was — It wasn’t too long ago. That was 2014.

Brian: Okay.

Alex: Yeah. I did one obstacle course race the year before that, which was the Rugged Maniac, and then I was like, “Yeah, this is cool. I need more of a challenge. I got to train more for this.” Yeah, the next season, it was 2014, and that was the Tuxedo. I did the Hurricane Heat and then I did the Sprint.

Brian: Very cool. When was that first GORUCK event?

Alex: That first GORUCK event, I guess it was probably — It wasn’t the same season, so it must have been the season after that, which would have been 2015, and if I remember correctly, I think it was like the end of March of 2015.

Brian: Very cool. Leading up to that GORUCK event, you’ve done a number of Spartan races, mud runs, the Hurricane Heat. At that point, had they switched it over to the kind of ruck-based individual event, or was it still a team-based event?

Alex: The Hurricane Heat?

Brian: Yeah.

Alex: Yeah. The Hurricane Heat back then, that was still — The Hurricane Heat now is a much more introductory event. They smoke people in the 12 hour, but the Hurricane Heat back then was like — Now, it’s a much more introductory event. They really — They put us through the ringer. Granted I had a lot less experience with any sorts of endurance events or anything like that. Yeah, it was only 5 hours or so, but I remember that event. They definitely — They smoked us.

Brian: They brought it.

Alex: They didn’t mess around back then. Yeah. That was a Tony Matesi event, so that was solid.

Brian: Wow!

Alex: That was still when almost everybody involved with Spartan, especially endurance events, were death racers, from like the old school crew. He put us through the ringer for sure.

Brian: Yeah. I did my first Hurricane Heat back in 2011, I want to say, or 2012, and then I did another one a year after that. I know they’ve changed a ton since then, but they’re pretty interesting back then.

Alex: It’s great, but it gives a scaled event for people that — Just like a lot of the companies, there’s some more introductory and then it gets more advanced as you go. That’s the way they do it now, but yeah, it is funny because we’ll talk about it sometimes, like, “Man! They would smoke you back then, for sure, regardless of the length.”

Brian: Yeah. When you finished your first GORUCK event back in March-ish of 2015, were you hooked and did you wanted to do another event afterwards or did you need some time to process it all and recover a little?

Alex: No. I think I was definitely in the camp of like that was really cool. I loved it. Definitely wanted to do more. I was in Boy Scout all growing up. I was outside a lot. I was used to backpacking. I had done a lot of backpacking trips, heavy packs, lots of miles in the woods. It was funny, because when I showed up to my first Tough, I was, “Oh, man! I know this stuff.” You know what I mean? I was doing this my whole life, and I had my stuff all like neatly tied up in my ruck. I was like, “Ah, I’m going to put,” — it was still bricks then. I was like, “I’m going to put my bricks really high and I’m going to singe down my water bladder and do all these fancy stuff. I know all these. It was going to be great.” I showed up, like, “Oh, I got this. It’s going to be good.”

Still with some hesitation about what was going to happen in the event, but like, “All right. At least my gear is solid, because I know this stuff.” Of course, immediately, right off the bat, Jesse is just like, “All right, dump out all of your shit.” I’m just like, “Uh-oh! Everything is tied up. I have a disaster going on here.” That was kind of like my very first dip in the water was Jesse with a flashlight in my face, like, “Dump all your shit out!” Of course, I can’t, because there’s a million knots tying everything up. It was definitely funny.

As far as after we’re done, loved it. Thought it was totally cool, and my second event, I ended up signing up and buying a GORUCK bag for the Memorial Day Heavy, which was at that point like a month and a half away. I was hooked definitely.

Brian: That’s awesome.

Alex: Yeah, the team sense of it and everything. That’s why I still love doing the team events, meeting a group of people that you don’t know. I think it’s even more fun many times than doing it with a group of people you do know, because you go from nobody knows each other to, “Hey, we went through this thing together that was rough and we forged together and we got to know each other and have a great time. I think that’s one of the coolest parts.

Brian: Yeah, it’s always really fun, especially if you’re doing it in a new city that you’ve never been to. You know, explore a town. At times you generally are now at exploring and you get to meet a ton of people who are also crazy enough to sign up for the same stuff you are. It’s a good company.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Going city to city is definitely one of my favorite parts and something I want to do even more of for sure. That second event, like I said, was Memorial Day Heavy and that was back when if you signed up for a Heavy, you were automatically signed up for the Tough and the Light. It was my second event. I had done okay in the Tough, but I was not conditioned to ruck. That Heavy was Madi and Logan, and then Cadre Jeff showed up as a surprise, because he was in town, and they went on a solid rotation. That was a 27-hour Heavy, and I still didn’t have a GORUCK bag at that point. I haven’t yet gotten it. It was with bricks, so it was some crappy off-brand ruck, and 27 hours later, like we finished that heavy and I was like, “I can’t walk anymore.” I had done all the prep. I had read all the things, but it didn’t matter. Physically, I hadn’t been training rucking for barely any time a month or two at that point. There was nowhere that the Tough, which at that point was starting in 18 minutes, it was going to happen. I was like, “Nope!”

I finished that Heavy, but that HTL didn’t happen. I said, “Okay. Before they change it,” that was when they were going to go to HTL from an HCL, but I just said, “I want to do it while it still what it was, since that’s what I tried.” I ended up signing up for the Vet Day HCLS the following fall in San Francisco, because that was the only one left. That was awesome, because I flew out to San Fran, met all the NorCal GRTs, awesome group and got to know so many of those people just from doing that trip and it’s all because I failed at the first HTL. Yeah, sometimes things work out like that, and it was super cool. That definitely gave me the bug of, “Oh! I got to go around and meet other crews.”

Brian: That’s awesome. Yeah, there’s a huge group of GRT down in California. The NorCal group is awesome. That’s great you got out there.

Alex: Yeah, they were really cool. Yeah, even the HTLS class. There were tons of drops, yet it was still like a 30-person, or 31-person HTLS class. Yeah, it was a big group, but they don’t mess around up there.

Brian: No kidding. March 2015 is your first Tough. A couple of months later is your Heavy. A bit after that you do the HCLS. When did you decide that you wanted to attempt GORUCK Selection?

Alex: The first time with Selection, I guess I probably — I remember I was at Wintergreen for the Spartan Super in Virginia. That same group I was talking about. It’s like a big condo there. It was that same weekend and I watched Stoney in Bozeman, Montana and I had never really heard of Selection, once or twice maybe. I knew it was like all these thing that’s much harder than the other ones, but I hadn’t read anything on it or really seen anything at that point.

I remember such a big group between the endurance community and OCR and that whole community. You know a lot of people and then a lot of people know a lot of people and it’s like — I remember like this person — “Oh, yeah! I know this guy. He’s an animal. I know this guy, and he’s an animal.” It was like the huge group of us watching, it was like, “Oh, there’s a ton of horses in the race.” Then it was practically like we went to bed and we got up the next day and nobody is left. That’s what caught my attention originally as well. I have all these people who are respecting the community who are like, “Oh, yeah. I know this dude. He’s a beast,” and they’re literally all gone. I followed through and I watched Stoney finish and I said, “Man! That is awesome that it went down to one dude.”

I guess a little after that is when I started researching it a little more and read some of the past AARs, looked at the low finish race. At that point I had already finished the Death Race, which was a huge item to check off a list. I said, “Okay, I read that original outside magazine review where they’re like the hardest event out there. One and two were the Death Race and Selection. I was like, “All right, if I’m going to train for something hard, Selection is the next thing.”

I didn’t know necessarily how long it was taking me to get ready for that, because I still at that point hadn’t been rucking for that long. I guess probably from the time I saw Stoney do it and then I kind of felt out my training in my events and did another HTL and I said, “Okay, I think —” At that point I started researching or reading everything that I could find on it, even it’s amazing in the past two years how much more is out there versus how hard you had to look for it before. I read everything I could and I guess probably — yeah, it was maybe eight months before my first attempt in 2015 where I said, “Okay, I’m going all in on training.”

I didn’t actually sign up till, I guess, a month and a half before it, because I didn’t see the point in spending all that money if I could have got injured during training or in other events or something, because as you’ve heard Jason mention, a lot of people mention, you need to be motivated to train and then signing up is like the formality. If you think that signing up is going to motivate you to train and you don’t already have that motivation, it’s not going to happen.

I knew there was no rush to sign up. I waited till I knew I wasn’t injured and then I laid out the money for it. Yeah, about eight months for which when I said, “Okay. I’m 100% now.”

Brian: That’s wild, and Selection is not an event that sells out. I don’t even know it can sell out. Makes complete sense to work it that way.

You had eight months to train leading up to your first GORUCK Selection attempt in 2016.

Alex: Yeah. That was Selection 018 in Bellbrook, Ohio last year.

Brian: Yeah, that was quite the event. That was one of the first GORUCK Selection events that there was some real life coverage going on there.

Alex: Yeah, if you looked at past events, 015, Selection 015 in Jacksonville — I don’t know. Something I had maybe four years ago, whatever it was. That one had serious coverage. Then Stoney in Bozeman for 017, they gave some coverage, but most of the other ones before that were pretty black. Yeah, last year was the first year that they started to dabble in some of the more live updating.

Brian: Your first attempt obviously didn’t end in success, or I guess completion. How did that impact the way you trained for round two?

Alex: Yeah. Like I said, for the first attempt, I ended up — Like I said, I did all my homework. Event that small difference in time, I had to put together and find a lot of those AERs and reviews and any little clip for video tidbit I could find online. I scoured and scoured and scoured to find it. I’ve built just like a little notepad file with all the finishers and all the classes and where they were and stuff, because that wasn’t even listed anywhere. There was like no official list, which still — I think some of the blogs in the last year are too funny enough that have maybe put together some of that information. It’s much easier find. Even two years ago, it wasn’t around.

I read, like I said, every AER review or anything I could find. The training was solid. I smoked myself. There was the same kind of dedication, 12, 13, 14 workouts a week before work, after work, weekends, long ruck, short rucks, really heavy rucks, running, weightlifting, the whole thing, I did it. I was ready in Bellbrook.

Part of it, my experience in multiday events or stage races or whatever you want to call it kind of worked against me. Of course, the cadre. The cadres were good at what they do, and it just — Any other event as hard as it is, as gnarly as the stuff they might have you do. When it comes down to it — Even during the Death Race and events like that, you’ll see people and they’ll give you a thumbs up or, you know, like you talk to other people. Selection, one of the things about it is you’re just in your own head. You literally don’t get to talk to anybody the whole event, which that probably — At least I know it. It probably messed with my head. I think that would mess with a lot of people’s heads, because it’s just like during your own head, the whole time, you have to be.

Yeah, that killed me when I dropped and I looked at — Everybody looked at me, the cadre, and they switched out of cadre mode and they’re like, “Hey, many. You were doing great.” In the moment you just feel like, “Oh, I’m doing terrible. This is embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m doing so bad all of a sudden.” You go from winning, winning, winning, and then it’s down the four of you and all of a sudden you’re the worst out of the four. If you don’t really have a good luck on what’s happening, it feels very discouraging. Yeah, it certainly wasn’t a good feeling afterwards, and that I literally never quit anything in my life, but I had said, “Okay, I’m going to do that.” To train so hard and then just, “Oops!” It’s all gone fast. It was certainly a bummer. It was fuel for sure.

Brian: I’m sure. That’s tough, and the other GORUCK Selection finishers that I’ve had on the podcast have said that it’s challenging especially as you get further into the event, because you’re so used to knocking out X-number of pushups or running a mile in a certain time and then as you progress to the event, obviously, your times and your numbers get worse and worse and you start thinking like, “What’s going on? Am I falling apart?”

Alex: Yeah. for me, I guess what happened last year in Bellbrook, it was like — Like I said, the PT test was, “Okay, yup.” I mean I had a plan. The whole plan was like get through Thursday and like if you’re there for sunrise on Friday and that small group, that’s awesome. I crushed PT test, welcome party. I felt in my head like, “Oh, man! I smoked that. That was awesome.” We went through all the evolutions at night. I made it to sunrise, and in my head I’m, “Oh! This is great. The sun is going to rise,” and that’s always a motivation. Funny enough, the sun is always the thing that gives you power. Mark just took off. He just like turned the switch on when the sun came up like an animal and just started crushing stuff. That just happened to be when I was in a dip. I got behind, the sun started to come up and then of course the evolution is a couple of hour along the beach.

I was behind. Each time, he’s resting for 10, 15, 20 minutes in between evolutions. Of course, then he is winning more and more. Yeah, it just gets really discouraging. All of a sudden, like, “Man, I was crushing it all night. How am I doing so bad?” So then you’re thinking to yourself this is going bad. You have the cadre telling you this is going bad. Yeah, it’s weird how you just end up in your own head like, “Oh, man! I can’t believe I’m doing so bad,” even though everybody else looking from the outside, they’re like, “Oh, those guys are all crushing it.” Definitely a great mental teaching moment.

Brian: Yeah. GORUCK Selection 18 is done. At one point did you decide that you’re going for GORUCK Selection 19?

Alex: I was sitting around the fire, the quitters fire if you want to call it, in the back of Jason’s dad’s house. Like I said, I walked back up there. Jason carried my ruck and I think it was Garret made me eggs. I’m sitting there eating and just like, “Man! You’re an idiot.” You’re having that moment of just like, “Oh! I can’t believe I just threw away all of that training.” Is this a mix of like being pissed off and just, “Hey, I definitely — There’s no way I’m waiting two years to do another one or to come back here, because I’m comfortable with it,” or anything like that. It was almost immediate where I said, “Yup, that’s it. I’m doing this next year and I’m going to train just as hard, crush everything and just buckle down and just buckle down, like that’s it. I’m doing it next year no matter what.” It was almost immediate to be on it.

Brian: That’s awesome. GORUCK Selection 019 was in September of 2017. Did you have to make any modifications to your training schedule before you went to that? It seems like you had it pretty well dialed in doing 12 to 14 workouts a week for 018, but was there anything that you found from 018 that made you tweak some of your stuff for 019?

Alex: There really wasn’t too much. It’s funny, because that’s the one question like everybody asks. Obviously, they’re like, “Hey, what did you change? What was the difference between the two years?” There wasn’t much speaking from a strictly physical standpoint. There was very little. I knew that I couldn’t jump the gun and go super heavy into training mode for Selection as soon as I got home from 018, because I know I would have burned out. There’s just no way that you can maintain Selection level training for a full 12 months at least without the high chance of getting injured or having a problem. You’re going to burn out. Even on just the mental social level, it’s just too much. I just said, “Okay, time to reset.” I gave myself time to recover. I focused a little more on lifting over the winter. Just tried to build up strength, bulk up a little bit, and then that’s when I got like little impatient.

When I got to that point of 7, 8 months, it was like, “Okay. Time to start cranking it up,” and I just kind of slowly dialed it up, because as I got closer, did the same thing a little further out this time. It was about three months. I cut out all the alcohol. A little over two and a half months, I guess, cut out all the caffeine, coffee, stuff like that, which that’s really sad, because black coffee is the one thing that keeps me happy during meal prep, but that was it. Just cranked it as I got closer and closer and just did the same thing, really didn’t modify too much as far as a physical standpoint.

The only real focus was I knew it was going to be super hot, so I just made sure to get as much time in the sand as I could and in clothing, uncomfortably hot as I could. As far as the training program, it’s very similar.

Brian: That’s tough. Black coffee is my advice too. Love that.

Alex: Yeah. Black coffee is like the one thing, like whether it’s hot or cold. That’s like when you’re meal prepping and you’re just eating chicken and broccoli constantly and the same stuff over and over, bland and whatever. Black coffee is like that one point in a day where it’s like, “Alright, at least I have that.” Yeah, doing that two years in a row for two or three months is definitely a bummer.

Brian: I bet. During your interview with GORUCK, you mentioned a couple of things that you changed, and just now too, in your life to succeed this time around. You cut on alcohol three months before. You cut out black coffee two and a half months before. It sounded like you were not staying out late. You’re getting your sleep for your recovery. You kind of had to skip summer. How tough was that?

Alex: Yeah. Last year for 018, it was the first time I was doing it. I’ve done similar things for whatever it might be. The first time I did the Killington Beat and Ultra Beast back to back, the Spartan Race or OCR World Championships, of for Death Race or for some of the longer events. I’ve done things like that before, but it’s usually for a much shorter period of time leading up to the event. Selection last year was definitely the first time where I had — It was a few months where I just said, “All right, no messing around. Let me just see what happens. Let me give this a try.”

Selection last year was in October. I was able to at least start halfway through the summer, so it wasn’t so bad. All the Labor Day festivities, my birthday is in September. We’ll have the fun stuff going on. You get into Halloween and stuff. It all sounds silly, but it’s just — When you combine thing after thing after thing after thing where you’re telling your friends like, “Oh, sorry. I can’t do that either.” Like, “Sorry, I got to train,” or whatever. It adds up, but it was okay the first year. It was that thing I was doing. Everyone was like, “Hey, man. That’s awesome,” and whatever.

Doing it then this year again for the second summer in a row and then with Selection being a month earlier, five weeks earlier, whatever it was. Having to kick start it basically at the beginning of summer and do the whole thing again, like a whole summer of drinking, going out late, just skipping a ton of events, or even racing. Not doing obstacle course racing, which I love. Doing all of those types of things to avoid getting injured. It was definitely harder this year just because it was like, “Oh, man! I’m in all these stuff again.” I knew it was the way to do it if I want to finish. It was certainly a good motivation to keep going during the event, like, “I’m not doing this again next summer.”

Brian: Yeah, you don’t want to spend another summer missing OCR.

Alex: Yeah, missing OCR, just hanging out or, “Oh, look at this fun show,” or whatever it might be, concert, fun night out or overnight ruck with friends doing like a fun ruck or something. Yeah, that was it. Like I said, this is the year, because I do not want to do this third year in a row.

Brian: Right. 12 to 13 workouts a week over the summer, what did you do for recovery?

Alex: My TENS unit is definitely my best friends. I just pick that on all the time, that I don’t even know. Maybe it’s more of like a placebo than what it actually is physically, but I love that thing.

Brian: What is that?

Alex: Like a TENS unit with the sticky pads with the electricity, got all different pulse settings.

Brian: Got you. Yup.

Alex: Yeah, the thing they’ll put on you, like a chiropractor or a physical therapy or whatever. Like I said, I don’t know. Probably one of those things where it’s partial science, partial placebo, but I love that.

Most important thing to me for recovery was getting enough sleep. I feel like people try all these crazy, wacky things, and for me just making sure that I was disciplined enough to go to bed so that I can get 8 or 9 hours every single night. That made a huge difference.

The other thing which I think is really overlooked by a lot of people, and I know it helps me massively. Again, I don’t know how much of it is mental, but I do very little sitting throughout the day. I have a standing desk at work. I’m in New York City, so I stand on the subway, on the train in and out every morning. I really try and sit as little as possible. I probably have it down to certain times eating and for meetings and stuff. Probably, compared to the average person who might sit for 11 hours a day or some huge number, I sit for maybe two or three hours a day all today, adding everything up.

I noticed when I started doing that purely from a health perspective, that it actually — I don’t know if it’s just because your circulation is up and your body is actively doing stuff more, but I certainly felt like that helped with muscle recovery. Yeah, I certainly wouldn’t claim that’s a science thing, but I feel a lot better doing that and it certainly seems like something that helps.

Brian: That’s interesting, right? I’ve had a standing desk at my office for six years now and that was awesome and I just got one for the house, I think, two years ago. You can really feel the difference.

Alex: Yeah, it made a huge different. Like I said, who knows what the science behind that is, if it’s just strictly a moving around thing, but I just felt like looser and heavy lifting session after a heavy lifting session after sprint running work and all that kind of stuff, I’m like it doesn’t matter. I get up the next day. I do my morning lifting workout and I’m all standing on the train and it just feels right. Yeah, I feel like that made a big difference for me.

Brian: Awesome. You’ve trained all summer. We’re getting into September. GORUCK Selection is coming up. How are you feeling the week or two before this time around?

Alex: I felt good. Obviously, I think everybody for any event, it’s significant in any way. You always sit there in the back of your head and despite all the workouts, all the dedication, all the time you’re like, “Did I do enough?” You eyeball — As much as I try and stay off social media and ignore all the junk that’s going on there, you look at some — You eyeball what other people are doing. You’re like, “Are they training harder than me? Do I have this all wrong? I am doing the wrong stuff?” You, to a hilarious level, question everything that you’re doing and how you’re doing it. That’s all just in your head. Ultimately, I knew I put in the work. I knew I had experienced it and knew what it took to finish and I felt good. I was just focused on keeping my nutrition on point, making sure all my gear was where it needed to be and not getting injured or doing something stupid post the event.

Brian: Yeah, it makes sense. It’s funny how your mind plays tricks on you like that and just start sucking or third-guessing everything.

Alex: Yeah, I don’t know how — It seems fairly common. Like I said, on a logical level I’m like, “Oh! The confidence was all there. I know it’s all the right stuff. I know it worked for me last time, but it is just funny how, yeah, you’d start thinking like, “Do I have this all wrong?” You know what I mean?

Brian: Yeah.

Alex: Did I just totally miss the boat here? Yeah, ultimately that’s just your head and you got to just brush that stuff aside and compartmentalize and say, “Okay, time to get down to business here.”

Brian: Yeah. That’s how you felt leading up to the event. I’m sure a lot of people felt that way too. You get to the event and for this GORUCK Selection 019 there was a ton of live coverage. GORUCK really used that Facebook Live feed to the max and it was just kind of funny watching from our end Jason’s phone heating up and shutting off because they’re putting out so much live video. You probably didn’t realize that because you were in the thick of it.

Alex: Yeah, I had no idea how extensive the coverage was. You couldn’t hear any of the commentary and so you could see obviously when I went back and watch the guys whispering and stuff. I couldn’t hear any of the commentary. Even, honestly, you’re so focused on what you’re doing and whatever. I could see some cameras around. I figured they were just maybe taking some picture, this or that, or some footage to put together later or something. I had no idea that they were doing the type of coverage that they were doing. I figured that it might had just been like one or two of the years pass where they gave decent update here and then every few hours. Yeah, no idea that it was all live like that and there were just thousands of people watching at all times.

Brian: That was pretty wild. My guess is that the majority of the listeners watched at least some part of the life feed, and so I’m going to put links in because I believe there’s still up on the GORUCK site for those who missed it. What were some of the most memorable moments from that GORUCK Selection event?

Alex: I mean probably to start, I know the live coverage wasn’t there yet, but I touched on this when Jason and I were talking afterwards. I failed the pushups the first time. It was so hot and my nerves were just at like a 15 and I was so mentally locked in and just started banging out these pushups that I literally didn’t even hear Ragnar being like, “Hey, you’re not counting reps essentially. You’re not locking out at the top,” because I was doing them just too fast. You get nervous, you start just — Basically, during training, it was like I would drop to the floor all the time throughout the year. If I couldn’t immediately bang out 80, 90, a hundred pushups in two minutes without stopping, I was like, “Uh-oh! I got to keep training harder.”

To do the pushup test and then just mishear him and then have to start over, which takes two minutes and everything and just totally tank it. I went and sat back down in line and I was like, “Oh, man!” Instantly, everything we just talked about, all that training for two years and prepping and everything. I said, “There is no way that I’m leaving here 10 minutes from now and going back and facing everyone and being like, “Oh, I just really screwed that up.” Obviously you get a retest. I retested, everything was fine, I’d been complaining more than I needed to. That was definitely like an, “Oh, shit! I can’t believe I just did that, or almost did that.” That was before the live coverage.

Once we got started the PT test, the rest of it was standard and the welcome party is always crazy. That’s such a blur. It’s hard to remember much from that. I guess besides that, when I was digging that whole with the shovel, thinking back on it when Mickey was like, “Hey, you’re stopping too much,” and he duct tape my hands to the shovel. That’s hilarious in retrospect. In the moment it was just like awkward, but that’s hilarious to think now. It’s really funny for me to go back and watch some of the footage and just laugh at either the things they’re saying or doing, because it’s absurd, of course. The whole situation out of context is absurd, but duct taping my hands to the shovel was definitely — I’ll probably never stop laughing about that, because it’s hilariously ridiculous.

Then, obviously, I’m such a water person as everyone found out during the event and stuff. The water evolutions with PD, it was super cool. For me, the water is the place of comfort where I feel most secure or comfortable, confident in my skills, whatever. Just being in a dead silence swamp in the middle of the night, seeing the stars, being completely physically beat down and exhausted, but just like swimming through the swamp was cool. I definitely will remember that well.

Brian: Yeah, I bet. There aren’t many people who get to do that.

Alex: Yeah, I mean BD said that afterwards. They’ve never done a water-based evolution like that or to that extent in Selection. That was cool. I guess the plan was to kind of see how the candidate, which was me in this case, how the candidate handled the water. Then when he could see how comfortable I was in the water, they just decided to just crank it a little bit, crank it, crank it, crank it. They ended up with that, so I guess that’s probably — They wouldn’t have went to that extent if it was the guy who was strong and doing really well, but not necessarily a water person. Yeah, that was definitely cool to do.

Brian: Yeah. After the event, you were surprisingly coherent. I remember watching your interview, and I don’t know why, but I was very surprised at how well you were articulating sentences. You could have told me that you just woke up and I would have believed it, that you looked that good afterwards. How are you feeling?

Alex: Yeah, it’s funny. A lot of people said that. They’re like, “Oh! Your interview was so coherent.” As far as what I looked like, I have to give credit to my girlfriend, Anna, because that — Mickey B, the medic, went out and bought a bunch of like antibacterial scrub soap and all the stuff I needed, the sling and all that and he basically pushed me into the outside shower and physically I couldn’t move. Everything was a bloody mess because of the silt and the rocks and sand that was — The sand that you get in brackish water, very high abrasive, whatever that’s in a swamp compared to a beach. I was just a disgusting bloody mess and I couldn’t move. Obviously, I had the issues with my shoulder. Anna was the one who like shoved me under the shower, got everything off of me, scrubbed me down and put my hair back and at least physically got me so I didn’t look like a swamp monster. That’s all her.

Then as far as the coherent part, I don’t know. I guess it’s the same as like when you’re so tired that you’re awake. I don’t know. I think I remember being like, “Okay, there’s a video interview. You just finish this thing and try not to sound like an idiot.” I don’ know, I might just have wired myself because after the shower it was like, “Hey, I sort of feel like a human being again.” At that point the pain hasn’t really set. You’re sore obviously, but you’re still like kind of riding that high. Yeah, I guess that’s probably why I seemed awake.

Brian: Let’s talk about your hair for a second.

Alex: Yeah.

Brian: For those who — Well, I guess even if you did wash the live coverage, you wouldn’t know this, but you have long hair. You have really long hair.

Alex: Yeah, it’s down —

Brian: Does it hit your waist?

Alex: Like stomach — No, it’s not quite waist level. Unfortunately, I’m getting older, so it doesn’t grow quite as fast as it used to. It’s like the middle of my stomach.

Brian: Okay. That’s still pretty long, and you had it pulled back the entire time.

Alex: Yup.

Brian: How terrified were you that that was going to come off?

Alex: The level of prep I’ve put into that is hard to explain and that’s one of those things like all the girls, the female GRTs that are listening will understand, but there’s very few dudes listening that will really be able to grasp it, because when your hair is that long and you’re throwing a ruck on, like I give credit to any girl that leaves their hair even partially down during an event, because to me my hair has been long. I had crazy like punk metal looking hairstyle all in high school, but I started growing it out when I was like 18 and it’s just got longer and longer since then. I’m used to having long hair, but when it’s down and it’s wet and then you’re trying to put a ruck no or something like that and it’s all in the straps, because there’s literally like an extra foot or two feet of it that’s like curled around the straps and stuff. It’s awful. It’s an awful feeling when it’s wet and it’s tugging and pulling. I knew I was like I need to do something that’s going to keep it back and out of the way, because if it’s come down or — I heard about this at another — I think it was 015 where there was like a group of people all with long hair, a couple of females and they were just playing with it, playing with it in the ocean and it was like, “Oh, you guys are going to lose hair tie privileges.” I’m like, “If I got to deal with something like that, that’s —” It’s hard to describe how much more annoying that’s going to make everything. I said whatever I get to do, I just got to get it back and up and out of the way. I don’t want to think about it the whole event.

Yeah, I definitely practiced. Again, it’s only if you have long hair that you’re going to understand, but I practiced the type of bun I was going to use, how many hair ties and how I was going to put them up. It’s like you got to get it up and out of the way. Also, in case it loosens up and it starts to come apart, you got to be able to take it apart pretty easily like during a two minute rest and get it back up. Fortunately, it stayed up the way I had it. Yeah, I did put a comical amount of time into making sure that it’s going to be out of my way for the whole event.

Brian: It’s only comical now, because it didn’t come out. If it had come out, I bet you would have wished you had put more time and do it. It sounds like it all paid off.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, for anyone wondering, trying to keep it back during an event without using hair products, it’s going to just immediately come out in the water. I loaded it up with keratin spray, which is like the protein that’s in hair. It gets very sticky. Keratin spray and then I just gauzed it in coconut oil and then pulled it back. Yeah, any of the female GRTs that are trying to figure out the best way to do it, that’s what I did.

Brian: There you have it. GORUCK Selection 19, from my couch in my living room, as I watched on the TV, there were some parts that seemed — I don’t know if dangerous, but like at least scary. How did you feel during the event? Were there any times where you felt like you were in danger?

Alex: No, I don’t think so, because as brutal as it might seem that the cadre are being, and they are. It’s meant to weed people out, right? That’s the whole point. It’s like you are not prepared to this please quit and go home. You can tell that they’re watching like a hawk. Mickey B, who’s been a medic for the last two years, he’s watching like a hawk. They are constantly reminding you, like, “Hey, you drink water or you’re going to drop and have a serious medical issue.” Keep drinking water.

Yeah, you can tell as harsh as their being and as stern and as up to the standards of their being. You know those guys have your back. I stress this to people all the time with endurance events, not just GORUCK, but it is extremely important if you’re going to go do an event like this and put yourself out there 110%, that you have confidence in the people running the event. I’m not going to sign up for an event where I’m going to push myself past my limit and I could very easily pass out or drown or fall and hit my head or get lost out in the woods because I’m hallucinating and so sleep deprived. I’m not going to do that and put myself in that position unless I know that there’s competent staff running the event that essentially have my back, that even I they are the ones putting me through the ringer, when it comes down to it, they know that, “Hey, these guys are out here giving it their all and they’re paying attention.”

There’s a lot of copycat type of events that are out there, and I would just encourage people to do your research, make sure that you’re signing up for an event that’s ran by people who are either like in this case, where they’re all SF guys and they know exactly how to run a professional event, or it’s put on by veteran endurance athletes who have a long list of accomplishments themselves and understand medical issues that come up and have a team on standby to watch out for you. That way you can go into the event and not even think about your own safety basically, which maybe isn’t the best way to think, but that’s how I think.

If I go, “Yeah, this is a good event put on by good people,” I can just go in and put my all into the event and know that the staff has my back if something should happen to me while I’m out there. I think it’s the same thing with this. For me, I knew those guys were there. Ultimately, if a serious medical emergency went down, they’re going to be able to take care of me. I really had no concerns about anything that was going on during the event.

Brian: That’s great, and that’s almost how you have to look at it if you want to give something your all, otherwise you’re giving it 80% and you’re spending the other 20% worrying about safety or other concerns like that. That’s great advice.

Alex: That’s definitely it. Yeah. There are certain events where you’re way out there, so you have to be a little mindful of your safety. I did Fuego y Agua Survival Run in Nicaragua and you’re like literally out on that volcano yourself. It’s like that kind of event. It’s more of an adventure race. Yeah, you have to be responsible a little bit for your own safety, but if it’s an event where you’re constantly under the watchful eye of a cadre or staff or whatever it might be, then, yeah, you should feel confident in the event you’re participating in and the people running it and just be able to throw everything you got into the event.

Brian: Before we talk about post event and the recovery process, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about GORUCK Selection 019?

Alex: No, I don’t think so. I think I’ve probably been rambling on for long enough. Certainly, do you have any other specific questions? I’d be happy to answer them. No, I don’t think I have anything particular to say. It was awesome and all of its terribleness. It was an awesome thing to experience and train for and take on. It was great.

Brian: Yeah, I don’t think we need to spend two hours describing the event, because there’s just so much live coverage footage out there that people can see it for themselves, everything that you endured.

Alex: I’ve been telling people especially like if they don’t want to go hunting or there’s so many people outside of the endurance community, people at work and all over who they ask questions. GORUCK’s got it on their site at like GORUCK Selection 019, the definitive edition. I went back to be able to look at it myself. That’s got like — You can get the gist of it if you’ve never seen it or you didn’t watch any of the stuff live. There’s enough stuff linked there. That’s good work.

Brian: How do you feel looking at that, looking at the definitive edition? Seeing all those hundreds of pictures that they’ve got on their site, they’ve got videos. Do you look at it and do you remember everything happening or is that kind of you’re looking at — When you look at pictures and you don’t quite remember it even occurring.

Alex: I don’t think there’s any picture I looked at where I said like, “Oh, I don’t remember that,” although it is funny. If I was sitting here and somebody was like, “Okay. Sit here and tell me exactly evolution by evolution of what happened and what you did and who is still there.” I’d probably have a ton of empty spots, because your brain is already in such overdrive to trying to force yourself to keep doing what you’re doing.

When I look through it in a timeline fashion with pictures, it’s very easy, because for me every picture you’re like — It’s almost like you go back in your brain to like that moment of pain. You’re like, “Oh, yeah. I recall that.” Looking at, it definitely keeps it all fresh. Probably, if I was forced to sit here and narrate it step by step or evolution by evolution as well as it does in the timeline like that.

Brian: Yeah, make’s sense. You know, like we said, the only way to give it 100% is to put it all in there so you can spend time trying to remember everything that’s going on. You just got to put out.

Alex: Yes.

Brian: Post-event recovery. You mentioned briefly that during your interview, that was before the pain had set in. What’s the pain and how was that?

Alex: I expected it to be rough, but I have to say compared to last year where I’ve done half that amount of time at Selection or any other event that’s 40, 50, 60, 70 hour long, just how I felt after this just crushed all of those other event. It’s hard to overstate — It certainly ended up being nothing major. Certainly, people go through worst every day in horrible accidents and stuff, but as far as just, “Hey, I signed up for this event and I finished it.” My body was destroyed. As far as cuts and scrapes from that filthy sand, rocky, hard-packed dirt roads, stuff like that on a level as far as my skin, I was missing all the skin around the back, inside my neck, under my armpits where my pecs meet my arms and the strap is just all gone there. My arms are obviously heavily tattooed, but not that it would get own to a level where it messed the tattoos, because that would be like cutting off your skin with a knife. It’s not that deep. The ink is way lower, but I still have giant pink patches where all of the skin on the top layers is all just still growing back.

My legs, the bruises were hysterical, like huge, like I’ve never had before. Obviously, Mickey, he put me in a sling because we didn’t know what was going on with my shoulder, which I did end up going getting x-rays and getting examined. They came short of making me do an MRI, because they felt that it was fine after all the tests. It was just dead basically.

Yeah, my ankles, all the way from the knee down to my feet basically swelled up to such an extent that like I Converse all the time, and my Converse were — The laces were stretched out all the way to the ends of the laces to the fact that I couldn’t even tie them. My legs, my ankles were actually wider than the shoes themselves. It was like hilariously blown up. It made it extremely painful to walk, because I have my shoulders where I couldn’t change my own shirts, I couldn’t tie my hair back. Like I said, just even with the post-event shower, and I had to do everything for me.

We were on a trip obviously. She packed up all our stuff for both of us. She would help me shower, get me dressed, help me sit up in bed if I had to, which was like ones an hour. She drove us. She literally had to do everything for the both of us because I was useless for a couple of days afterwards, and still in strong pain for a week and a half after. Yeah, I was trashed. I had never been beat down like that before. Ohio, last year, doing half the event, I was able to drive myself home, and I drive a car that’s stick. I drove five speed all the way home from Ohio to New York. Stiff and sore and cuts and bruises and stuff, but it was nothing like it was this year. I was definitely destroyed.

Brian: Wow! That paints quite the picture.

Alex: Yeah. I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic. Like I said, people go through far worse things every day. Yeah, considering it was, “Hey, the event that I signed up for and just did and paid money for, yeah, I’ve never been beat down like that.” Mickey was awesome. Mickey checked in with me twice a day every day after the event to make sure, “Hey, I would try taking this. Do this instead. Change this method.” He’d checked in like a doc would and made recommendations and stuff. Yeah, it’s only in the last couple of days where I can really walk around comfortably and wear my ruck to work. I didn’t put the weight plate back in yet, but even my gear from work and stuff weighed something and just to be able to walk and not have like splitting headaches and stuff. Yeah, just in the last day or two, it’s finally like, “Okay, I’m starting to really feel normal again.”

Brian: It’s been a while since the event we’re recording this. We’re almost halfway through October.

Alex: Yeah, I think it will be three weeks on Saturday. I would put it easily at a two-week recovery time.

Brian: I think I know the answer to this question, but it’s so fun to ask. Was it all worth it?

Alex: Oh, yes. It was totally worth it. It was awesome and it’s awesome to — I love just that, just pushing yourself as hard as you absolutely can and really testing what you’re made out of, because it’s really easy especially with how big the endurance community has grown, whether it’s OCR or Endurance GORUCK or whatever. Really easy to do stuff that’s kind of hard and then stand back and look at your wall of patches or your rack full of race medals or whatever and be like, “Oh, wow! Look at all the stuff I did,” and you go on social media and people pat you on the back and stuff and it’s really easy to not truly test yourself and just be like, “Yeah, I’m doing awesome stuff.”

To take a leap of being like, “Okay, this is that next level thing, and I really have to put myself out there and give it all I’ve got.” That to me is very rewarding. I don’t want to end up in that point where you settle and you get comfortable and you’re like, “All right, this is my level.” It’s important to always push.

Brian: Yeah. I see that a lot.

Alex: Yeah and that doesn’t also mean, “Oh! I just started doing these events. Yeah, I got to push myself and sign up for Selection,” even you’re not at all ready. You know, that to me doesn’t make any sense either to just sign up for stuff that’s the hardest thing out there and then just fail miserably and just get used to failure. That’s no good either. You want to work up to it so that — Everybody has a DNS now and then, or everybody failed something. You have to fail something every once in a while because then you know that you’re pushing yourself hard enough. I never want to get to the other point where it’s just like you’re failing everything and you’re signing up for just everything that you’re not ready for and trying to speed through the test. We sign up for all hard stuff, hundred mile races or major events, like Selection and people pat you on the back, “Oh, yeah. You signed up. Good for you.” But then you fail all of them and you just get used to failure. That’s no good either. Earn your way up the ladder, but always reach for the next rung I guess would be the way to put it.

Brian: I like that. I like that, and I think both the OCR community and GORUCK have enough rungs now where you can make that possible.

Alex: Yeah. There’s a good half that’s just — If you want to conquer the hardest stuff that’s out there, all these various disciplines offer. There’s a task there. There are tons of material of how to train and how to prepare and put in the work. Start small and train hard and just get better and better, and especially something like GORUCK where there are team events, like don’t train for a Heavy to just make it through it. You can pick an event where it’s a really big event and gray man your way through and be like, “Oh, yeah. I did it.” That’s not rewarding. Rewarding is knowing that you trained the hardest you could train for that event to be that strongest team member that you could be to be a crotch for somebody else, if maybe they get injured or they’re having a hard low moment or something like that. Train the hardest you can for that event so that you crush it and you can be as strong as you can be for it. Then when you really have mastered that event, then move on to the next thing and challenge yourself that way. Don’t scape by.

Brian: Absolutely. Speaking of training advice, I think you’ve got an interesting perspective on this, because you can give both types of advice. What advice do you have for people who have attempted selection and didn’t complete it and are considering giving it another shot?

Alex: That’s a hard one, because I think it depends on each particular person. Some people just don’t have any time under the ruck. They might be really strong and fit and well-equipped to kind of handle all the different like neat stuff, but they’re just not used to rucking. You know what I mean? Whatever you want to call it, even though if you want to use the word boring, like just miles and miles. They’re just not used to being underweight. Even if they could exercise really good or train really hard, they just don’t have the time under the ruck.

Other people have done a ton of rucking and they’ve done hundreds and hundreds of miles with lots of weight and they could just walk for days-on-end with weight on their back, but they haven’t maybe lifted or they don’t understand the way to properly do, not body weight movements, but movements that are almost like a replication of lifting. Those sandbag workouts, if you don’t know how to clean a bar and suddenly 15 hours into one of the hardest events out there, they’re like, “Okay. Take this 80-pound sandbag that’s now wet and loser to a hundred bag and press clean it for the next two hours or three hours and you don’t even understand the mechanics of a clean, that’s going to be rough on you.

It depends. I guess probably the biggest thing is whatever you’re not good at or whatever killed you at Selection, don’t necessarily just focus on that same, that one type of exercise, but really look at it and just go, “Okay. What was the overall fitness discipline that I failed at,” and train that way harder than the other stuff that you know you can do well.

Brian: That’s really good advice. I haven’t attempted Selection, but, personally, my training, even if I’m doing it half an hour or an hour-long sandbag workout, I find myself drifting towards exercises that I like. I absolutely hate sandbag overhead squats.

Alex: I don’t know what maniac would like those. I guess there’s somebody out there.

Brian: Yeah, that’s my nemesis. I can do an hour-long workout and not put any of them in there just because I hate them that much. I think that’s great advice that to pass Selection you can’t do that.

Alex: You have to train what you’re bad at. That’s the same thing with — You could look at a million different disciplines or professions or sports or whatever, if a guy is a good runner, of course he’s going to do a lot of running workouts, because it’s satisfying, it feels good. It makes them happy. If a guy is just a meat-head purely and hates cardio, he’s going to do all lifting stuff. People gravitate towards what they’re good at. I think that’s an important thing if you want to be the all-around, well-rounded person for something like Selection. You have to focus on what you’re not good at.

Brian: Absolutely. Bridging from that, is there any additional advice that you’d have for someone who’s never attempted Selection but is considering signing up after seeing the live feed and watching your completion?

Alex: Yeah, I guess that’s probably — I don’t know if it’s a cheap answer, but it’s probably the same thing. It’s probably like really understand what your weak points are, because I heard Stoney say this before, and he’s absolutely right. Live feeds have a hilarious tendency to make people feel that, it’s like, “Oh, I could definitely do that,” because when it’s a blackout event and you don’t see much of what’s going on, you just see the dude who’s bloodied and destroyed at the end, you’ll be like, “Oh, that’s gnarly.” But it’s terrifying. Who knows what they had that guy do? It’s scary, because it’s so unknown.

When they broadcast the whole thing and you can sit there — We never used to be able to do that. When you can literally sit there and watch three-quarters of the event live video, it gives you this false sense of security of like, “Oh, I’ve done all that stuff before. I’ve done sandbag workouts and I’ve ran and I’ve rucked and I can totally do all that stuff. I’m going to sign up and I’ll just train a little more than I usually do, and this will be great.”

I don’t want to be negative, but there’s just people who, “I’ll just do a little more than usual,” and you’re like, “Man, those people are going to get so crushed if they even make it out of the PT test.” It’s the same thing. It’s like you got to put down the video for a second, put down the social media. Read some of the AERs, the older ones, the real meat and potatoes of what somebody’s past finishers have said and really understand that these are the guys that finished and they’re all saying, “Hey, you got to commit to this like you’ve never committed to anything.” Almost every finisher had said, like, “This becomes your life for at least six months before.”

If you don’t want it that bad and you’re not training that hard, you’re just not going to make it. The statistics just show, you don’t stand a chance. You have to think about every aspect and eliminate as many variables as you can. Right off the bad, one of the things that we’d hear people talking about is their feet, right? They’re like — They want like the magical sock and cream combination that’s going to save them from any blisters.

To me, I watch people going out on practice rucks and they’re putting on — I’m not going to use any brand names, but they’re putting on all these creams and they’re putting on liner socks and thick socks and boots and like all these stuff. Most of my practice rucks of any sort, whether it’s do it from work or just out and about or whatever, I can tell you did a really old Converse with holes in the bottom wearing socks with holes in them and I stepped in all the puddles I could find and I did that day after day after day literally for years, rucking in Converse with holes in them while they’re wet. That is what protects my feet.

When I do an event, I have a certain way that I prep my feet, but they’re already so toughed up from just rucking in Converse that I would never think about, “Oh, I’m going for a half hour practice ruck, so let me go through a half-hour procedure to prep my feet.” That’s just crazy. You have to train not as your body, but stuff like that. Think about those kinds of things and train that constantly everyday if you wanted to perform what you needed to perform.

Brian: Yeah. I think that hits a few different parts. For one, at GORUCK Selection or some of the more difficult GORUCK events, you don’t always have the time to apply all that stuff to your feet.

Alex: I can tell you, I have very good luck at events, because I train my feet in Converse all the time. I don’t have many problems at all. When I put on boots and Vaseline and stocks from the whole set up that I do, I’m like, “Well, I’m walking on clouds, and I can do a heavy and not even have to change my socks.” I’m just like, “Yes, my feet are totally fine at the end of the Heavy.”

Yeah, the first night it was good. The second day, it was going well. I can tell you, because I was so amped up and ready to go for the long walk. I didn’t do any foot prep in between those seven hours of swimming with BD and then whatever evolutions were after that, and then the long walk. I literally went into the long walk with like destroyed feet. I started it, which was stupid, and that was definitely a lapse of mental judgment at that point. Cody pointed that out, like, “I gave you time for that and you didn’t take it.” My fault.

Anyway. Yeah, I mean, there’s going to be stuff you have to grunt out. I had to grunt that out. My feet were pretty trashed after that. Overall, I got through that, because they were prepped for that. They were doing great up until that point, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Brian: Yeah. There’s nothing saying that you’re going to show up and you get to use your own shoes. For all you know, you’re going to show up to Selection and they’re going to have 200 pairs of whatever, Saucony’s there in different sizes and you have to put those on and do the whole event in those shoes.

Alex: Yeah. Selection, what I liked about it that’s different from some of the other events is it didn’t have that wacky, zany, let’s see how crazy we can make this. It’s standard. Everyone gets the same stuff essentially with the list. You’re going purely based of your training and your performance. Yes, you’re absolutely right. People, they worry way too much about the little tiny details. We’re a year out and they’re just like, “What brand of like middle sock did you have and stuff?” It’s like, “Hey, man. Why don’t you be able to do on your pushups at a moment’s notice no matter when first, or worry about that stuff first and then start to dial in your gear if you ramp your training up?” Get the commitment down physically first.

Brian: Yeah. I mean that makes perfect sense. My rucking shoes right now are a pair of Brooks running shoes that have over a thousand miles on them. I think they’ve got like 1,200 on them. They’re just beat, old running shoes. I did back to back Toughs in them. They are what they are you can’t really purchase your way to completing some of these events.

Alex: Yes, definitely not. I literally — I do a lot of barefoot funning. I don’t like that huge heel-toe rise even in my running shoes and stuff. Yeah, my running shoes, I didn’t even want to change them from last year, because of like a funny sentimental thing. They’re like the New Balance trail shoes that have a zero drop. They’re practically putting on like ballet slippers. There’s nothing to them and they have holes in them, and I run in them without socks. They’re like nothing.

Yeah, when I’m like, “Oh, I can’t wear these, because I got a to ruck and be able to support some weigh, I put on my Converse which are full of holes. Yeah, do it rucky style. Just worry about the physical stuff and not the fancy equipment. Dial in your gear and get used to it and train with it, but worry about yourself and your physical fitness first.

Brian: Absolutely. We’re only — What? Three weeks from this event. Have you started looking towards the future, what’s the next event for you?

Alex: I haven’t picked out anything typically of like, “Oh, this or that.” There’s a few events that kind of live in that same realm of someone like the bigger tier events. I haven’t really figured out a schedule yet. I know I definitely missed obstacle course racing this year. Last year I got to do races in the first half of the year. I knocked out Spartan Delta and I did like an Ultra Beast stuff in Montreal and some miscellaneous other OCRs and trail running and Ultra Marathons and stuff. This year I did very little, because I didn’t want to get injured. I knew it was like my year.

As anxious as I am to get back to that and have another season where I just run elite and try and do as best as I can leaving up to OCR World Championships. I don’t think that’s going to be next year, because I haven’t had a fall or like a late summer fall to myself now in four or five years, because of just all various events. I might do a couple fun, maybe run elite to see how I’m doing obstacle-wise and stuff.

Still fun OCR and maybe one or two bigger events, just have a good time with it. I don’t think next year is going to be a very serious season. I’m not going to be going for points or anything like that. Yeah, I haven’t picked out anything specific. I think for the winter it’s just going to be get back into lifting, get some of my strength back after this long recovery and see where I’m at in the spring. See what I want to do and train for.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t run many OCRs, but I do listening to OCR podcast. There’s quite the selection out there now.

Alex: I like stuff that’s on mountains and through woods, especially whether it’s an early Heat and there’s not many people out, or a later Heat where there’s not many people out. There’s nothing like just flying through the woods recklessly on a cold morning or whatever it might be, a rainy day or something. Yeah, I like just being out in nature. That’s part of why I like OCR so much.

Brian: That’s great. It takes a lot of time, energy and commitment to train for an event like this. Obviously, you’ve given Anna a couple of shout outs so far, but is there anyone or groups of people that you want to give a shout out to or thanks to?

Alex: Yeah. My parents and my family gave me a ton of support. They’re all about it. I think my mom always does like the one handed horror movie watch of like hand over the face and stuff, like, “Oh, I can’t believe you keep doing this to me, but I’m proud of you,” sort of thing. I’m sure that the live feeds were painful for her to watch. My family is super supporting.

Like I said, Anna has been amazing through the whole thing. Early morning workouts, canceled dates, cancelled plans, “I’m training. Yup, no, I can’t drink. I can’t this or that.” She’s been amazing. All my friends, supper supportive. People, especially our group. Like I said, that does all kinds of camping around OCR and trips and hikes and adventures. I love those guys. Even though they’re — We always do a big Labor Day camping trip. We know they’re all partying and drinking and whatever. They all understand what I was doing two years and even before that for elite races and stuff. They’re all just super supporting of it. They’re stoked.

Certainly, everyone that’s fall along and shouted out encouraging stuff while they’re watching the live feeds. That was super cool to see. It’s always fun with Selection, whether it’s me or somebody else. It’s always fun to watch the whole community end up kind of rallying behind the last couple of people that are left and really pushing for someone to finish. That’s always great.

Also, my job. They’re super cool. We’re a small company that’s just growing at a huge rate, and we have a ton of work and they’re like super supporting of how much training I do and the fact that I’ll give it 150% when I’m at work, but then when I leave it, training is super important and my meal prep and eating and schedules like that are important. My job has been super awesome about it as well. A bunch of them were all following along when the live feed was out there.

Yeah, just everybody, trying to surround myself with people that are pushing themselves and doing good stuff and having a positive outlook. I’d say everybody around me has been really positive about it, really cool.

Brian: That’s awesome. A great thing to do is surround yourself with people who want you to be a better person and make you want to be a better person and more successful.

Alex: Yeah, it’s amazing. You surround yourself with people that are doing better than you or working harder or accomplishing things. It’s amazing how much that pushes you to then want to work harder and accomplish more and do better things, like you’d surround yourself with. Yeah, I think that’s very important and that’s definitely something that I’ve seen tenfold and the more positivity is out there and just people encouraging each other and killing balls and crushing life, that just makes you want to work that much harder and be that much better.

Brian: Absolutely. Alex, thank you so much, man, for just taking a ton of time out of your evening to chat with me. I know this is late for you and, man, I truly appreciate this. It’s been a ton of fun for me. Thank you, thank you so much.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely, man. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, certainly. It’s way past my bedtime with how it’s been recently. I’ve been calling in now hours before. Yeah, it’s funny that I’m — Same thing, I guess, still coherent. Yeah, I appreciate it very much. Thanks for having me on.

Brian: Absolutely, man. Take care.

The post ADR 018: Alex Stavdal 062 Interview (GORUCK Selection 019 Finisher) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In this episode I am very excited to bring an interview with both Tim Whitmire (aka OBT) and Dave Redding (aka Dredd) who are the founders of F3 Nation.

There are already numerous interviews out there where OBT and Dredd give the story about how they founded F3 Nation. We wanted to make sure we got the most out of the time we had with them so we focus on how they got involved with GORUCK, their custom GrowRuck GORUCK events, and how their first GORUCK experiences turned out.

It was great spending time with these two at the F3 Custom GrowRuck GORUCK Tough 004 in Seattle and they truly put out a ton of effort at their events. If you’re curious about F3 Nation or are a member then hopefully you get something good out of this!

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or even our Facebook Page! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

Brian: I’m here talking with OBT and Dredd who are the founders of F3. I’m very excited that these two guys have taken time out of their day to chat with me and I can’t wait for you guys to hear what they have to say. OBT and Dredd, how are you two doing today?

OBT: We’re doing well. We’re going to teach some people this morning, so that’s always fun.

Dredd: Yup, having a great day.

Brian: Excellent. I can’t argue with that. Before we get going with your experiences with GORUCK, can we set the stage for the listeners who are tuning in who have never heard of F3 before, who this might be a new concept to them. In your own words, what is F3?

Dredd: F3 is a network of men’s small workout groups and it’s no fee, whatsoever. There is really no agenda whatsoever other than to come together and workout in the morning with the hope of solving three problems that exist in a man’s life, and the first one is inconsistent fitness. The second one is lack of deep lasting male friendships, and the third one is lack of purpose. We call it F3 because we believe what this workout group does is attack those three problems. The first half is fitness, obviously. The second half is fellowship, and that’s making friends, and the third F is faith, which we just defined as a belief in something outside of yourself. That’s really the long and the short of it.

OBT: I’ll jump in there — This is OBT, and just give a little more background on kind of the history. This is something that Dave and I started back on January 1st, 2011 with one workout here in Charlotte, North Caroline, which is where we both live and it kind of grew from there and it’s turned into this really volunteer-led organization. We often say a good organization has leaders. A great organization is composed entirely of leaders, and we happen to tap into a mother lode of leaders in F3 who basically threw their own volunteer efforts, have spread this thing, really, across the country. Actually, all the way out to where you are, Brian, in the Puget Sound area and we’ve now got more than 1,100 weekly workouts scheduled in 21 different states, from here to California and Washington and just launched this past weekend in Chicago actually, and we’ll also be going into St. Louis and Austin, Texas this fall.

Brian: Congratulations.

OBT: Thank you.

Brian: That’s incredible expansion and I think it just drives home the point of how special this is to a lot of people who get to take part in the training and the boot camp style events.

When I introduced OBT and Dredd, you might have guessed that’s not their real names. When you show up to an F3 workout you’re considered an FNG, and at the end of the generally your first workout you’re given a nickname. We’ve got OBT and Dredd here. Do you two want to elaborate on where you got your nicknames from?

Dredd: Actually, Dredd is my real name. My name is Dave Redding and I’m an attorney in my real life, so when I showed up at that workout they combined Dave and Redding and got Dredd. Originally, I was Judge Dredd, like the movie, but after a couple of weeks chopped the judge because I don’t have a judicial temperament.

Brian: Very nice. Dredd is quite the nickname for F3. Generally, the nicknames are pretty humorous, but when you hear Dredd, it’s kind of ominous.

Dredd: Yeah. It doesn’t dread to see me. It just means —

OBT: The corps guys thought it did.

Dredd: There actually are some people that think that. I guess it’s whatever you think it means.

OBT: Some of our guys gave him a monogram towel recently that had his nickname on it. This is to celebrate the 5th anniversary of their workout and they spelled his name Dread on a towel, which everybody got kicked out off.

Dredd: It’s true. Some people thought that.

Brian: That’s awesome. That is hilarious. You guys had a great job explaining what F3 is. You’re on the All Day Ruckoff Podcast right now, which is a podcast about rucking and we both know that F3 is not a dedicated rucking club. It does a lot of things. What would you say the typical F3 workout is like or what would you say that F3 gets at with its workouts?

Dredd: Yeah. I mean that’s a question that we get asked a lot, because I think people look at F3 and they say the first half is fitness. You’re a fitness group and they’re thinking cross-fit or something like that, and we don’t actually promulgate any particular workout routine or anything. We have ideas, but mainly at F3 we act more as a platform to trade other people’s ideas. When we read about some guys in Wilmington, North Carolina doing something good, not only do we want to thrive, we want other guys to thrive too. That’s more of an exchange of ideas.

Yeah, we do a lot of boot camps and I think we do a lot of boot camps, because they’re cheap and easy and fast, right? You don’t need any equipment. In 45 minutes you can get smoked and you can do it in a Walmart parking lot. That doesn’t mean we’re boot campers either. Really, what we’re trying to do is get the best possible workout under the condition that you have available and to try to do that every day that you feel like that you can’t.

That’s why for us, rucking, and what we call ruckership, really is a great extension of what we’re doing, because while there’s probably guys in F3 — A lot of guys say, “Well, I’ve never put on a ruck. I don’t see the point of it. It sounds like a military thing,” or “I don’t like it. It’s too slow.” All the guys that like to ruck all the time and they say, “Boot camps to me aren’t very much fun and I never run and I think it’s bad for you.” Who knows whether or not either one of those things are true? We are not exercise physiologists or experts. What we’re really aiming at is invigoration male leadership and along the way try to get guys to get as much fellowship as they possibly can, which is why for us, rucking is a natural extension of what we’re doing, because it puts guys together for at least 45 minutes or an hour to go five miles and gives them an opportunity to get their bodies moving, their hearts pumping harder and maybe more importantly it really gives them the opportunity to talk.

The workouts in Charlotte, at least, and I was in Wilmington yesterday, and it was crazy hard as well, are getting so difficult that I don’t care how good a shape you’re in and how good a mumble chatter you are, it’s difficult to talk. You lose a little bit of the fellowship that way. A good 45-minute workout, you come back, nobody said a word. All we do was pant. That’s fine, but I kind of miss it, the chance to talk.

When I was in the army, when we rucked, that was part of what we did when we train, just rucking. We’d put on a ruck on and get out there and talk things out. For some reason when you’re walking side by side with a man, it’s much easier to open up to them than it is if you’re sitting across a desk face to face. Who knows why? But that’s really true.

That’s for us why ruckership and rucking has been such a great thing why we consider ourselves, OBT and I, kind of at the center or the tent pole of the big tent of F3, why we advocate on its behalf and why we’re really happy that it’s with us.

Now, that puts us open to the accusation which we hear from time to time, “Well, you guys are just trying to be all things to all people,” and Tim and I always laugh and say, “Is that an insult or a compliment? Yes, we’re trying to be all things, really, to all men, all things positive.” If it works, we don’t care why. We just want to know how to do it so we can do more of it. If it doesn’t work, we’re like, “Don’t do that anymore.” Quite frankly, at its most basic, rucking works. It’s good for your body. It’s good for your heart. It’s good for your soul, and it’s good for F3. We’re a huge believers in it.

Brian: That’s awesome. I love that word ruckership. Today is actually the first time I’ve heard that and it was on the F3 Nation Twitter account. I like that.

Dredd: Whoever that F3 Nation Twitter guy is, he comes up with some good stuff. When we saw ruckership we were like, “Wow! That’s a good idea,” because it obviously combines fellowship and rucking. At least when I — And I heard Jason McCarthy, the GORUCK founder, on the Podcast giving just a great impassioned argument for why rucking was actually a great fitness tool. I remember thinking, “Man! He’s really kind of just captured that idea of what I just thought in a much better way than I just did.” It really is true, man. It’s a fellowship of rucking, so it’s ruckership. Perfect for F3.

Brian: It’s perfect, and it’s nice that rucking follows the rules of an F3 workout, which I don’t believe we’ve touched on yet. Would you mind going over the rules for the F3 workouts?

OBT: Sure. The rules of an F3 workout, and there are only five of them. It has to be free, it has to be open to all men, it has to take place at a publicly accessible location, preferably outdoors. It needs to be led by participants on a rotating basis and with no precertification required. Basically, what’s that saying is if your plan is to come out there with a clipboard and tell other people what to do and you run the workout every week, F3 is probably not for you. Then the fifth and final requirement is it ends with something that we call a circle of trust, and that’s where you’ve seen it in action, but when we sit around on a circle and we a count of the number of guys who are there that day and we’d go around and we see our names and our ages and our F3 nicknames and we have some announcements and then we usually close with what in some parts of the country is a prayer and other parts of the country is just kind of words of wisdom or sort of thoughts for the day. Those are the only five rules for an F3 workout. If you want to go play pickup basketball at your local basketball courts for 45 minutes to an hour and with a circle of trust, then that is an F3 workout and we are welcome to include you in our midst.

Dredd: Well said, OBT.

OBT: Thank you.

Brian: Very well said. Shifting form the F3 workouts slightly into the realm of GORUCK and rucking, how were you two introduced to GORUCK?

Dredd: Well, a few years ago. Really, right at the start of this when we are building the group up, we started doing things like mud runs and Spartan runs, Spartan races and they were great, because guys got really energized. It didn’t have the regularity as just a workout does. It was outside the normal bandwidth of things we were doing. Guys, look, they’re great recruiting tools. We’re looking around for something else to do and I think OBT stumbled into GORUCK somehow. This is 2012. He said, “Hey! This will be a great thing for us to do.” I looked at it and this is early on, so there wasn’t anything on the internet about it that we could really figure out really what it was.

We bought go rucks and fill them full of bricks and we thought the best way to train for GORUCK was to practice running with the go ruck on, or the ruck sack on. We actually did six-mile runs with these things on, which are probably not very good with your knees and got to the point where we’re pretty good at running with ruck sack on. Of course, five minutes into the first one we did. In summer of 2012 we realized that there really wasn’t much else you could do that was of less value to being ready to do a GORUCK, then running with a ruck is one of the one things you won’t do.

We made a mistake there, but we still love the event. We had about 30 guys the first time we did it. It was the hottest day of the year of 2012 and it’d beat us down like crazy, but you still, to this day, we see guys that participated in that first one with us and we laugh about it and talk about it. It just strengthened the bonds between our original set of guys and we realized really right from the start that it was something that was very helpful to F3 and something that we would like to partner up with GORUCK on.

OBT: I’ll add to that. Just to say, actually, I can’t take any credit for it. It was another one of our guys who’s involved in F3 from very early on named Trip Davis who really was the guy who knew about GORUCK and what Jason was doing and kind of the events to sort of demonstrate how tough the rucks were. He was the one who was like, “Man! We got to do one of these,” and we looked at it and we were like, “Yeah, we can probably get 30 guys. We can do a custom class.” I think that was the other thing was, that that first one was all F3 guys in the class and we all kind of did it together. I can still pick out moments from that. First of all, we still talk about how I was the one who planted the flag in some uncertain ground and only to see the flag fall over and got us all punished by and hour’s worth of jock web, so everybody likes to hold that over my head.

There were other guys who really — Brian, you’ve probably seen this in everyone you’ve done. I know I have, where you get down there, two, three in the morning and guys are hitting bottom and that’s where you really see real character come out in some people and you see the guys who are — There’s always going to be some guys who might go, “Great man.” But then there’s some guys who really step up in that situation and we certainly had that happen with some guys that night where we were like, “Wow! We had no idea you were that kind of leader.” That really kind of made it a special event, because the reality behind F3 is it looks like a workout, but it’s really a leadership academy. Guys come in and they get an opportunity to get in shape and develop this group of friends and almost inevitably guys turns into leaders in that context. Part of the whole F3 ethos is if we show up for a few weeks we’re going to ask you to lead a workout yourself. What they do during the GORUCK event just turned out to just perfectly dovetail with what we were doing as well.

Brian: That’s awesome. I think you see that at almost every event, and it’s really cool to see the leadership from participants pulling people out of the gray man role, when you see people start to internalize the pain and kind of gloss over. There’s a great leadership opportunity to bring them back and get them back in the fight. I definitely see the correlations between F3 and GORUCK.

Your first GORUCK event was a custom. That’s pretty awesome, because especially back in 2012, very little information out there about GORUCK, how to train for it and what even happens half the event, the fact that you could pull together 30 guys for a custom event is pretty amazing.

OBT: I actually think they were a little taken on the back by us, I think, because we showed up — What I remember from that night was Dredd has a background in the military. He was a Ranger, so he spent several years in Special Forces. He had sort of prepped us for this whole thing and kind of given us a few ideas about what the cadre was going to do and kind of be prepared for kind of shock and odd techniques.

My memory is that they showed up, it was Patrick and a couple of other guys. They showed up and we were already lined up in formation and we were divided into squads with squad leaders who we had appointed. We were sort of ready to go. It took them maybe a couple of minutes to figure out what we had done and they immediately said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are all fired. Now, we’re going to put different guys in charge.” Dredd, you shut up and go back in the line for the night.

Dredd: Yeah, they figured out in about 30 minutes who probably the most skilled leadership amongst us were from previous history of our lives and said, “You guys are all dead. You’re not leaving for the rest of the night.” It was interesting to me that they did that, and it turned out to be great. It’s exactly what we needed. We did try to lean forward in the fox hole a little bit and ahead of this thing. As you know, brother, you’re not going to do that on them. They’re going to stop you from doing that. That’s part of it. You can’t game it.

OBT: We’ve kind of carried that forward with the Grow Rucks that we do now where if you’ve done one of these before, you’re going to be kind of last in line to take any leadership role. We really want to put the guys, as Danny does them with us, as we rotate through various leadership roles. Let’s foucs on the guys who have not done this previously and put them in those roles and see how they do.

Brian: Yeah. I really like that from the Grow Ruck event that came to Seattle. This is an awesome segue to the next piece I want to talk about, which is the F3 Grow Ruck GORUCK events. As many of the listeners know, Cadre Danny Stokes was on a previous episode where he talked about his capital ruck tour. Danny has been the lead cadre for each Grow Ruck event and you too, OBT and Dredd, have been at every Grow Ruck event so far as well. Is that correct?

OBT: Yes, my wife will remind of that, but yes.

Dredd: Yes, we have.

Brian: That’s awesome. Grow Ruck is an entire weekend of events which kind of culminate in a custom GORUCK Tough. Where did the idea for Grow Ruck come from?

OBT: This gets into a little of F3 history. As F3 grew, we started doing what we call leap glance, and that means going to new cities that were more than a car ride away from where we could project. We’d put guys on planes and literally leap over the intervening territory where there was no F3 and plants a new F3 workout, somewhere like Nashville, Tennessee, or New Orleans, or in your case, out in Seattle. What we saw was as we kind of extended our range a little bit, some of those locations on the periphery of what we think of as F3 nation, they would tend to go through this cycle where they would grow initially for about 12 to 18 months and then it would hit a plateau. I call this kind of the pizza party phase, and that’s when you got a good group of guys out there. They’re all solid. They’re all really happy that they’ve found F3 and F3 has found them. The temptation is to sit in a circle after the workout and pat each other on the back and say, “Isn’t this great? Isn’t this wonderful? Let’s have a pizza party now. It’s perfect and it’s going to stay this way forever.” The reality is that is the day before I pull a hamstring and Dredd gets fired from his job and has to move to a new city and you go through a divorce and start hitting the bottle too hard and disappear from the workouts and all of a sudden the natural forces of life and entropy and everything pull it this perfect little thing that we had.

For that reason we try to teach guys that there is a growth requirements in F3. If you are not always head-locking new guys and trying to get new guys out to the workout, this thing will inevitably kind of wither and die and you just have to — We call it ABH, always be head-locking, always be bringing new guys out. We started once a quarter made this commitment to, “Let’s go down range to these different locations. Let’s talk to the guys at these workouts about this, about the need to grow.” We came up with a curriculum for it and Dave and I would fly in on a Friday and have some beers with the guys on Friday night and then lead a workout Saturday morning and then we would teach something that we call grow school for about two hours. Then for the first couple of times, that was it. Around noontime we’d wrap up and we’d get on a plane and we’d come back home.

After doing this two or three time we actually happen to be in New Orleans doing one when the 2000th GORUCK Touch Class came through. It was some sort of big GORUCK reunion. A bunch of classes actually came by us and we were finishing up the workout in City Park on Saturday morning as they were getting toward the end of their Tough challenges. We talked to a couple of cadre and introduced ourselves. I think it was after we got back home, we were talking about it and we’re like, “You know what? We got to do a GORUCK with this thing.” You’ve got this growth curriculum, but we don’t know of anything that is a better catalyst for growth among these F3 groups than getting them together to do a GORUCK Tough challenge. That’s an incredibly powerful experience to put these guys through and help them understand kind of leadership and all the stuff that we’re trying to teach.

That was kind of the origin of the idea, and we did the first one in Jacksonville, Florida last November and it’s really just a marriage of what we’re doing before and then adding a GORUCK challenge on to the end of it. We come in on Friday night and we get together and have a few beers. Lead the workout Saturday morning, teach for a couple of hours. We’d give the guys Saturday afternoon off to get their minds right as they say and maybe take a nap. Then about 6:00 on Saturday evening, it’s go time.

The other nice thing that we’ve been able to introduce with that is it’s a chance for guys in the region that we’re going to to really kind of personalize it to their region. Does somebody want to host a party at their house? Do we want to get together at a bar? Where do you want to do the event? What shows off your city or region bets? It really becomes kind of the ultimate F3 getaway weekend in some ways. With a substantial side dose of leadership training as well.

Brian: It’s got to be really fun for you guys too to fly out to these newer locations that you might not have been to as often and see what the F3 groups are doing there and what they’re grown into.

Dredd: Fun. It’s really fun. To us, it’s a shocking honor, I guess. The thing that got started here in 2011 that has just progressed to the point where it’s helping guys three, four thousand miles away to us is amazing. The fact that so many men have helped us do it, have joined us to try to move it along and progress it and help other men just never stops overwhelming us. For us, it’s very humbling experience. Fun, but humbling.

OBT: I would say it’s fun right until about the time the log hits the shoulder for the first time. Then it gets real.

Dredd: Yeah.

Brian: Speaking of the log hitting the shoulder, in our Grow Ruck class we had quite the log in Seattle. For those who are listening, I’ll try and pull up pictures to put in the show notes. Every class says that they have a giant log that they carry. We had a giant log that we carried and it came down to three people carrying the log for, I believe, five or six city blocks and if we could accomplish that, we’re able to put the log down. One of the people who stepped up for this challenge was Dredd, and he, with two others, carried this giant log five or six city blocks. Can you briefly talk about the feelings that you’ve felt each step of the way?

Dredd: Beyond intense pain? Yes. That’s one of those — Part of the reason we do the GORUCk in the Grow Ruck is so that we can form the bond of trust with the men in the workouts that otherwise we really wouldn’t see them other than in the Twitterverse and whatnot. We don’t have that much time. We’re only there for 72 hours and we have to make the most of that. Because of that we want to get the bang for the buck. The GORUCK gives us a chance to build those bonds, the reliance between team members.

We thought about every once in a while, usually in the first few hours after we’re done with one of these things, “Hey! Maybe we don’t actually have to do the GORUCK.”

OBT: Next time we could be in the shadow crew.

Dredd: We could show up and tell them some war stories and encourage these guys. After the pain goes away a little bit, get a little bit of your energy back, you say — Okay, you realize it wouldn’t be the same. If we expect men that we’re meeting in these very short period of time to believe what we say that this works. That if you do hard things together, that builds durable bonds. We’ve got to do the hard things. We’ve got to do them too. That’s the backdrop of this idea.

That’s why, really, OBT and I and then we usually bring at least one or two other guys with us, Robber, comes with us from Columbia and then we usually have a guest or two that we bring along as well from an existing region. Our main thing is we’re not there to lead anybody. We’re there to get under the log. For guys that have done a GORUCK, they know what that means. Some percentage of the mileage has to be done under the log. That’s a basic of it, and that’s really the most painful part of this thing. If it’s an ungodly log, like this one was, it’s going to be ungodly time period.

What we do is we’re there to do the log time. Not to carry the flag. Not to carry any of those stuff, the sandbags or anything else, to get on to the log and to stay under the log so that the other men see that that is where you belong. That is how you help the team prevail. If nothing else, that’s what we’re going to do. We may not say a word but we’re going to be under the log a whole night.

In this particular occasion, Danny being Danny, he had us go a long way on that log and realized, I think, as a group we were doing a good job, but it was killing us and gave us that option, was you can keep going or have three guys carry this thing.

OBT: I think it was a wager with Robber.

Dredd: Oh, okay. Maybe he was. I didn’t hear all that, because I was too busy doing my log time. But I realized once that kind of cut through the fog that there was no way us going to not be a guy that at least held up his hands and said, “I’ll be the guy.”

Now, to be truthful, I’m only five for 10, which puts me on the lower side of the average guy out there.

OBT: Team shorty.

Dredd: Team shorty. I really thought when I raised my hand that, “It’s a pretty good bet that three guys were six feet tall are going to do this,” because you really want to have equality of size. That makes it a lot better, but not everybody volunteered, and then I kind of looked around, we were standing there and I said, “Oh my gosh!”

OBT: I think Brian, I think you and I were both there as willing volunteers, and so like Dredd, I think sort of hoping to get picked. It’s like, “I’m going to put my hand up, but I’m going to hope the teacher doesn’t call me.”

Dredd: Right. I knew I had to be that guy, at least put my hand up. That, to be fair, it wasn’t like I volunteered with the sure thing of having to do it. I volunteered with a good bet of not having to do it, but from a leadership standpoint I felt like I had to and so did Tim. Tim, OBT, raised his hand as well.

But as it worked out from a size standpoint, I was one of the guys. When we put that log on my shoulder, I realized I was either going to thrump on myself or start walking. I just chose the later because it would be less embarrassing. As we moved along an the guys started to cheer us on and the pain turned kind of more like a numbing thing, I kind of got caught up in it and before you know we were there.

OBT: Brian, you can post the video. I think it’s probably still out there on Facebook. Brian and I were among the people cheering loudly. Apparently, we woke up half the neighborhood.

Brian: Yeah, I’ll do my best to grab it and post it up there. It was quite the sight to see, and Dredd, you definitely hit what I was aiming at that it was incredibly inspiring to see both you and OBT raise your hands to step up for this. You guys flew in across the country, three-hour time difference, two days earlier. You’re not in your home territory. You’ve got that working against you. You’re out here, it was roughly three or four in the morning, something like that, which time change. It’s already 6 or 7 a.m. for you guys and here you are saying, “Yes, I’ll do it.” Dredd was chosen to get under that log and got right under there, pushed through and I know for myself seeing it, and I’m sure everyone else who is there, it was one of those — These guys are truly living what they’re saying. It’s not a bunch of talk. It’s not a bunch of text on a computer. These guys are living it and they truly believe it, so it was awesome. Thank you for doing that, because then we didn’t have to carry the log afterwards.

OBT: I said thank you as well.

Brian: From a very selfish standpoint.

Dredd: We’re honored to have that opportunity every quarter. I’m not sure we want to be honored more than that.

OBT: Yeah, it’s a nice quarterly honor.

Dredd: It’s a nice quarterly honor.

Brian: Just long enough to forget about the honor and how it felt.

OBT: It’s a little bit how magically about a year after you have that first child, you remember how horrible that first year was and then suddenly you have that amnesia and then you go and have a second child.

Dredd: That’s good. It’s good analogy.

Brian: Sounds about right. You mentioned quarterly. That’s about what it’s been right now. The first Grow Ruck was in Jacksonville, Florida, as you mentioned, November 2016. Your 5th Grow Ruck event will be coming up in Chattanooga, Tennessee I believe this coming November of 2017. You’re on track for quarterly Grow Ruck events around the country. Clearly, they’re working for the groups because you guys keep putting them out and the response is always amazing.

What is the future look like for Grow Ruck? Are you planning to keep it quarterly or expand it?

OBT: There’s a couple of things going on with this. One is we’re going to keep doing — Those are what we can consider, and this is a little bit of an insider lingo. Those are push GORUCKs, and that Dave and I along with Sean Rankin, Robber, out of Columbia, look at the F3 map and select locations where they’re kind of in that 12 to 18 months now where we think we can get a lot of bang for our buck.

For instance, Chattanooga, we’ve got a new F3 group there. We’ve got still relatively newer groups in Nashville, in Knoxville who we’re going to send guys to it. We’ve got a relatively new group in Alpharetta, Georgia that’s coming up for it and we got just a booming region up in North Eastern, Tennessee that’s sending a bunch of guys down for that. That’s a location where we can pull from several F3 regions and really go in and hopefully have a real impact in one weekend on a number of regions and give guys something to really kind of take home and some leadership lessons to really take back to their groups with them.

We’re going to continue doing those on a quarterly basis. We’re going to go to Ohio I think in March of 2018. It’s going to be the next one on the F3 push cycle. We had a huge bunch of launches last spring in Ohio including Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. Actually, Cleveland has been around for a while. We’ve had kind of a big spring in the Ohio River Valley. Louisville really took off as well. We’re going to pick a location in Ohio and kind of pull from all of those regions. Do something in the first quarter.

Then Q2 will be Texas, and we’re going to have a group we’re planting in Austin in the next few weeks. We’ve got a group in Houston that’s not just going to cover off the ball right now. Those guys got written up in People Magazine a couple of weeks ago for all the work there we’re doing on Hurricane Harvi recovery down there. We got a strong group in Dallas as well and San Antonio. Again, kind of pulling from a whole region.

Then the other thing we’re going to start doing is the feedback has been so strong from these things, particularly guys saying this is better than any leadership training course I’ve ever taken at my corporation, and I’ve been in the corporate world for 20 years. We’re going to start, and Dave and I aren’t going to do these ourselves, but we’re going to start offering the same curriculum and the same Grow Ruck format to existing F3 locations.

Actually, we’re going to do the same thing for FiA groups as well, except we’re going to do with a GORUCK Light challenge instead of a Tough challenge. That’s more the four to six hour format. One thing I wanted to do Brian, I’m going to read off the list of upcoming events here and the dates. For any of your listeners who are not part of F3 or FiA right now and want to come try one of these things out, we would love to welcome you, get you signed up and offer a $25 discount on the registration price. This is exclusively for All Day Ruckoff podcast listeners.

We got Chattanooga coming up, November 17th, 2017. We are going to do a FiA Grow Ruck in the midlands of South Carolina, which is kind of Columbia and surrounding areas. That’s on December 2nd of 2017. Then F3 in the midlands of South Carolina, so a tough challenge, that will be on January 27th, 2018. That’s been scheduled as well, and that’s an existing F3 workout group where they want to go ahead and do a Grow Ruck as well. I mentioned Ohio will be sometime in March. Texas will be, we think, late April. Hopefully before it gets too hot down where. The guys in Myrtle Beach are talking about hosting an F3 Grow Ruck the weekend of September 28th through 30th, 2018. One year from now. That’s what’s on the calendar right now, and we’ve got some other ideas in the hop or so.

I would just say if you are in interested, if you’re from outside of F3 and FiA and you’re interested in rucking one of these with us and learning more about what we’re about, just drop us an email. My email address, I can be reached at [email protected], T-H-E-I-R-O-N-P-R-O-J-E-C-T.com. We’re happy to get you setup and get you a discount on the event.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you guys. That’s amazing. I’ll make sure to put the names of the events and a link to your email address in the show notes so that people can easily click that and send the email.

OBT: Awesome.

Brian: For those who are listening and know that I’ve done a lot of GORUCK events and that feeling that you get towards the end of the event, if it’s a GORUCK Tough, I think maybe 8 to 10 hours in, where your team is really jelling, you’re feeling good, you’re laughing with your team. You’re having a good time and you’re really bonding with your team, that’s the same sort of feeling I get at each F3 workout with the guys there. If you’re interested in an F3 workout and you’re wondering what it will be like, those are the kinds of people who show up to F3 are the people who you would meet at a GORUCk event and you’ll feel like you’re on the same team as them similar to a GORUCK event while your soul is crushed for an hour during a boot camp style workout.

Those are the upcoming F3 Grow Ruck events. F3 has done a number of custom events outside of Grow Ruck. I’ve heard of a heavy-heavy. Do you know how often F3 has custom events?

OBT: I would say about once every two months or so. There’s some group doing something and maybe even a little more often. Maybe more like kind of eight times a year. If you’re a leader of any kind in F3, you’re called the queue of something, and he is our queue of ruckership within F3 nation. He’s basically the kind of primarily liaison within F3 too to GORUCK and the guy who’s kind of working with all the different groups, to setup their GORUCK customs and come up with insane new ideas, like the heavy-heavy. Because, I got to tell you, somebody tried to talk me into doing just a plain heavy and I was like, “No, that’s good. I’m good with the tough.” The next year they came along with the heavy-heavy and I was like, “You guys clearly have something wrong with you.” Then we got a good clam digger from Columbia is a good friend of ours and works with us on these Grow Rucks. He went down in Wilmington and did that thing and I was just like, “I got a lot of respect for your brother, but I also think you’re crazy.”

Brian: Yeah, when they’re trying to pitch you the heavy-heavy, the single heavy doesn’t sound too bad anymore, does it?

OBT: Exactly.

Dredd: Yeah. I don’t know. When I’m going with 12 hours, I’m smoked.

OBT: I’ve had enough.

Dredd: Unless 24 hours is not a repetition of the first 12 hours, because if it’s the same intensity, I’ll tell you, I don’t have it.

OBT: Yeah. Have you done a heavy, Brian?

Brian: I have. I’ve done one heavy. It was the 9th heavy class in Seattle and it was a number of years ago. They’ve definitely change since then, but they’re definitely different. They’re not just two challenges stuck on top of each other. That’s good.

Dredd: Maybe there’s hope. I always thought it would just be two challenges in a row, which —

OBT: Not really. No, thanks.

Brian: Yeah. It’s not like you get to the end of the first Tough and they say, “Alright. Time to turn around and repeat.”

OBT: “Hey, let’s have welcome party number two.” “No, I think I’m good. Thanks.” I want to just sort of throw a shout out to Jason McCarthy and Kit and Bomber and all the guys at GORUCK headquarters, because they have been just really awesome for us to work with on this stuff. Extremely — They get what we’re doing with F3 and have been very supportive of us really from day one. The synergy between the two groups, we got plenty of guys in F3 who have absolutely zero desire ever to put on a ruck on. They will tell you about it very vocally how they stupid they think it is. There a ton of us who have done one or more of these events who understand kind of the beauty of what goes on when you get guys together and push everybody to their limits and you hit bottom and kind of see what you’re made of. We’re got a term within F3. We have CSAUP events and CSAUP stands for completely stupid and utterly pointless.

Of course, the whole point of being completely stupid and utterly pointless is that actually there is a big point to it, which is you’re going out there and you’re doing stupid stuff together and you’re bonding and learning leadership skills, but we’ve really — Dave and I, I think, have found no better CSAUP events out there than the GORUCK challenges.

Brian: It’s nice. The GORUCK team, I’ve had Jason on the podcast. I’d have Kit on. I’ve recently interviewed Bomber, but that episode hasn’t released yet, and everyone over there is just very down to earth, very approachable, very nice people, very similar to you two.

OBT: It’s nice of you to say about us.

Dredd: Yes.

Brian: It just makes sense that your two organizations would work so well together.

OBT: I was having this conversation with Jason. I was down in Jacks Beach in July and dropped in to see them and the groups — And they had just brought Blayne in from RWB to be the president of GORUCK. The three very different groups engaged in kind of very different businesses, but with ultimately the same mission at heart, which is at the end of the day, getting people off their butts and getting them to do something and have an impact in the world. We love those guys.

Brian: Absolutely.

OBT: Can I turn the tables on you real quick? One thing that I think might be helpful for your listeners, what did you perceive as different about kind of the way Danny led the challenge as well as having kind of that grow school component layered on to what was done during the challenge? Did you feel like that was a different GORUCK experience from the “traditional” GORUCK Tough?

Brian: I absolutely thought it was a different GORUCK experience. It was really cool how Grow Ruck school in the morning tied into the event. For those listening, as OBT mentioned, there’s a two hour course in the morning after the workout called Grow School where they teach you leadership skills and there’s some practical applications during it. Then there’s that nice break where you get to take a nap, or in my case, deal with a baby with colic for a number of hours before stepping out for the F3 custom Grow Ruck event.

OBT: Sorry, honey. Got to leave. Got to do this Grow Ruck. I hate to do it, but —

Brian: Yeah, their running joke for the weekend was that the Grow Ruck was easier than being home with the children. Between a three-month-old with colic and we have an almost three-and-half year old foster son. It’s pretty busy over here.

Anyway, stepped out for the Grow Ruck event, and it was different and that there’s a higher expectation of being able to perform leadership skills quickly and efficiently. It was really interesting to see how people were pulled out of the class and given leadership positions. As most people know, during normal GORUCK events, there’s a team leader generally chosen and then there’s an assistant team leader and they kind of just keep the group together, figure out where we’re going and make sure everything doesn’t fall apart.

At Grow Ruck, the team leader had three or four kind of assistant team leaders who came up and then they would disseminate the knowledge to their eight-person teams. We kind of had a nice hierarchy there. Just the way Danny taught through repetition, getting into our ranks and figuring that out was awesome. He definitely put a lot of pressure, I think, on the leaders, which is nice, because it is a GORUCK event, but it’s also a safe environment. If you fail getting your class together or getting into the proper PT formation right away, the worst thing that’s going to happen is some more PT. Which isn’t great, but it’s not a life or death situation. It’s not leadership at your job where it’s going to impact your potential performance or your family. There’s no better place to fail under pressure than a GORUCK or a Grow Ruck event.

The way that Danny kind of built that in to the class, it was really cool. I don’t know what your guys thoughts are no that.

Dredd: That’s why we love Danny. He really embraces the idea of improving — And improving is the wrong the word. Enhancing, I guess, would be better, because GORUCK — There’s one we did. Before we did the Grow Ruck, we did three. We talked about the first one and then at least I did two more, and I think Tim did two.

OBT: I did two.

Dredd: One we did, we call is sand rock. Tim, did you do sand rock?

OBT: Yeah, class 707.

Dredd: Sand rock was summer, maybe 2013 or 2014.

OBT: Yeah, August 2013.

Dredd: He’s got a better memory than I do. It was intensely hot, and we moved very fast, didn’t do a lot of leadership stuff. It was very physical. We did the worst logs I’ve ever seen, and it was incredibly physically tough. It was a big class too. It was —

OBT: It was two classes. There were 60 guys.

Dredd: It was two classes together, 60 guys, and maybe it was hard to do the leadership thing that night, but after that one I thought — Well, actually I didn’t do another one for about three years. Not that I didn’t like it or anything, I just thought. Well, I kind of reached the level of physicalness about it. That was probably one of the last ones we did here in Charlotte. That’s fun. I still got a lot out of it and think a lot of other guys did too, but it wasn’t a leadership experience as much as it was a resilience experience. How physically tough are you? How willing are you to preserve through intense pain? Very long welcome party. First movement in a riverbed for miles and miles.

OBT: We got in a sewage catch pond, a water processing plant.

Dredd: It’s nasty.

OBT: We threw sand on each other. We carried just the most monstrous log ever.

Dredd: Right. It was wonderful.

OBT: It was a total beat down.

Dredd: Now, Danny really takes it in a different direction. Doesn’t focus so much on the welcome party and just a physical beat down, but more on combining the mental challenges, the leadership challenges with physical fatigue. You don’t have to do that much to smoke guys, he does it. It’s less of a haze and more of an opportunity for you to learn leadership skills. He shares a lot of his leadership knowledge with guys and he knows a lot. I know guys really appreciate that, and he’s also, because he’s an F3 guy, has embraced what we’re trying to do with the Grow aspect of this.

What we hope is that if you go to the Grow school in the morning, that what you’ll see in the evening and overnight is Danny giving you a chance to take what you’ve heard and saw and put it in your hands and try to do it. The way he’s done that I think has just been wonderful. For us, that’s been a great experience. He’s evolved it I guess is the right way to put it.

OBT: Yeah. When we first came up with this idea, I think Sean Rankin was someone who said, “You got to get Danny to do this, because he totally gets what you’re trying to do.” We went down in Jacksonville, did that first one and it was just the perfect combination of beat down and learning experience. Lest anybody get the wrong idea, and when Dredd says not so focused on the welcome party — As you know, Brian, from being in the water in Puget Sound at 3 in the morning, there was still plenty of stuff to hate. It’s just different.

Dredd: It’s really two different approaches. I went to Ranger school, you got the world’s worst welcome party. It’s like first four days of welcome party. Then you go through Green Beret training, they’re the Special Forces qualification course. Nobody ever yelled at me. Nobody ever raised a voice at me, and I was smoked the whole time. I think it depends on the cadre that you catch, but I think the best ones do a great job of combining those two experiences and challenging you and getting you as close to what I’d like to think of as close as the bottom of yourself as they can get you.

What they get to realize, all great leaders do this, but nobody does it better than our young Green Beret and Ranger NCO, and that’s mostly who these guys are. Nobody does a better of job of showing you that if you think you’re going to do it along, then you’re not going to anything. That all you have is that very shallow reservoir of who you are. If you have a different attitude, if your attitude is that you’re going to see what you’re going to do as part of a team, then the limits of what could be accomplished are infinite.

You could preach that, and I guess I kind of just did, and write blog posts about it.

OBT: Which you just did.

Dredd: Which I just did. Well, I’m reciting what I wrote two days ago, or you’re going to live it out in 12 hours overnight and maybe a combination of those things is really what works, because the first part of if, it will write it on your brain, the second part of it is it will write it in your heart. That’s really what we’re after with this program is to as quickly as we can possibly do, take the things that we have learned in the first few years of F3. What we have seen work in the regions that are growing and are very impactful and then transfer those skills to a new region and take guys that maybe haven’t seen it and as quickly as possible show them what it looks like, so after we leave they can put it into action. That’s really why we started this thing. So far, we think it’s working. We see it working.

Brian: it was an incredible event and you could definitely see the tie between Grow School, Grow Ruck and how implementing everything you learned during Grow School in Grow Ruck cemented it for the future. I have to give you guys props for finding Cadre Danny to do this, because like you mentioned, he’s a very tactical cadre. He doesn’t yell a lot and he’s not screaming at you to do PT, but just the way that he uses these events to test your mind, I guess, is a good way to describe it. Every location that we ended up, we always had to do a gear check. We had to do a whole list of things after rucking a distance and doing PT and every fun thing that comes with a GORUCK event. You didn’t have a 10 second breather when you got to your next location. You had a whole list of things you had to go through. If you forgot something, you’re punished. He just set a really good job of building that.

Dredd: You’re right. You’re absolutely right.

Brian: I would definitely call Grow Ruck in Seattle a huge success. I’m very excited about eh future of these events and it’s really cool to hear the information behind how you plan out where these will be. You look at the F3 groups and when they’ve been planted after 18, 12 to 18 months, seeing where they’re at and then possibly doing the event out there. There’s a lot more behind it than I think a lot of people realize. Thanks for going in depth about that.

Dredd: Yeah.

Brian: For those who are listening and go to the F3 nation site and possibly don’t see an F3 group within their area, what are their options?

OBT: First of all, we encourage you to go and check out the nifty map on the F3 site. If you pull the dropdown on where is F3, you should get to a nationwide map and you can put a zip code in there and it will tell you where the nearest workout is. If you do not have one near you, we would really, really like it if you would click on the link to send an email and ask to have F3 brought to your region, because it goes directly to a very good friend of ours who likes getting those emails and likes to have 50,000 different people ask for every workouts to come to him.

I sort of joke about that, but we are, as I said earlier, I think we’re in 21 or 22 states now. We’re kind of within site to where we can see getting to every major city in the country by 2019, 2020 arguably at our present pace. From there, it’s really a matter of those city groups then planting the regions around them. We used to sort of say when we get the email from kind of Nowheresville, Kansas, well, that’s great. We’d really love to bring you F3, but it’s going to be 2035 before we get there. Quite honestly at this point, the way the growth has been going, I think there’s a reasonable chance that’s going to happen sooner rather than later. We do want to know where you are and we want to be able to get in touch with you when there’s an opportunity to plant and get the culture right.

Brian: That’s awesome. Congratulations, guys.

OBT: Thank you.

Brian: I’ll just throw a side note in there. The map for F3 is really well done, so congratulations for whoever your web dev is.

OBT: That goes to Sleuth out there, to AP in Seattle and then Superman here in Charlotte. They are all over that and really nailed it.

Brian: Awesome.

Dredd: Every once in a while, I get frustrated with those guys and I want to fire them, but since we don’t pay them, it’s awkward.

OBT: It makes it a little awkward.

Dredd: What do you say?

Brian: It’s tough, right?

Dredd: Thousands of hours of work into something.

OBT: Wait? You’re firing me? But I’m a volunteer. That’s what makes it so hard.

Dredd: That’s what makes it so tough.

Brian: For those listening, it’s got all of the locations, and not only does it have the locations, but it has the dates that the workouts are on and the times. So you can easily see when there’s a Saturday morning workout in your area just based on the map colors and the location. It’s awesome and it’s super easy to use. I’ll post the links on the show notes.

OBT: One thing I will add to that too, Brian, is just so people know. This is not something where you got to have a sponsor to show up or you need to know somebody already or let them even know that you’re coming. We literally just show up at the location, be on time, because always start on time. If you show up, I can guarantee you — A guy said this to me recently and it really, really resonated with me, “F3 is one of the only places in the world where you can be a complete newbie, you can be at the back of the pack, a total — In the first percentile of performance out there, and you will be the most celebrated man out there, because there’s nothing out groups love more than to have an FNG, a friendly new guy out there get a chance to nickname him and bring him into the group.” I think sometimes guys are a little intimidating. You mean I just show up? Yeah, just show up and they will be glad to see you tell them that the podcast brought you there and they’ll probably tweet it out and let us know that as well.

Brian: Yeah. I guess I’ll just quickly toss in my input. When I showed up to my first F3 event I didn’t know anyone there. I was told to go there by Dora and Robber. For those who don’t Dora, is Lyle Peterson who runs the Pathfinder Ruck Training program. I’ve had him on the podcast and he just kept pestering me to go out to this and then between him and the F3 Grow Ruck account tweeting at me almost every day saying, “You’ve got to go out to these workouts.” I showed up and knew no one there and it doesn’t matter. Thank you to Robber and thank you to Dora, because without you two then I probably would not have found F3 as quickly as I did.

When it comes to F3 and rucking, I know there’s the F3 Grow Ruck Twitter account. I believe there’s a new F3 rucking account.

Dredd: It’s @f3nationruck.

Brian: Perfect. If you’re curious about the Grow Ruck events, you can easily hit F3 Grow Ruck up on Twitter. If you’re curious about rucking with the F3 crew in general, then F3 Nation Ruck.

Dredd: Yes.

Brian: They’re very responsive, because I’ve talked to them both quite a bit. Thank you OBT and Dredd just so much for taking this time out of your day to chat with me about the Grow Ruck event. This has been awesome. OBT, I know that you have another project that is near and dear to your heart called the Iron Project. Would you want to take a minute or two to talk about that?

OBT: Yeah. That actually could be relevant to some of your listeners as well. Dave, as a partner with me on this, I just happen to be the one who’s kind of working on it fulltime. The Iron Project is a side business that we started to take F3 and FiA leadership principles into other organizations. Dave and I did an event this morning with a group from a company that does IT infrastructure development and we did something very similar to a Grow School where we ran a workout with them that was mainly focused on teaching and introducing some leadership principles and did kind of a two-and-half hour Grow School in the classroom with them. This is something we’re always interested in doing.

We would love to find a corporation that wants to do that and then add a GORUCK Light challenge on to it as well, because I think that basically having an in-house Grow Ruck in a corporate setting could be a really pretty amazing team building experience. Having shadowed a couple of the lights, I’ve got a sense for being a little bit more — A little less confrontational of the people on the physical front than your typical Tough challenge.

Anybody who is involved in the rucking community who happens to be listening and wants to find a way to kind of bring it into your company from a leadership perspective, from using this as a platform for talking about leadership, we would love to have that conversation. Our website is at theironproject.com and the general email address for inquiries is [email protected], and I would love to field any and all inquiries and pretty much everything we do is completely customized to the client and to the ends that they’re trying to achieve.

Brian: Awesome. For anyone listening, if you think the leadership training, your place of business sucks and you want to bring in something better, like a Grow School plus GORUCK Light event, because we all know, we’re all ruckers, that a GORUCK Light event is a great way to build leadership. Hit up the Iron Project and maybe just send them a message to see how you can present the idea to someone who could make a decision like that.

OBT: We promise no Power Point presentations.

Brian: If I could trade the next five Power Point presentations for a GORUCK event, I would in a heartbeat.

Thank you guys so much, taking the time. It’s been an absolute pleasure. For anyone listening, I’ll put all the links to absolutely everything we talked about in the show notes as well as links to how to contact OBT and Dredd about the Iron Project. I believe that there’s a really good F3 dictionary out there, because you probably heard some terms during this that might not have made a whole lot of sense, so you can use that, pull it up and figure out what they’re saying. Thank you guys, again, and have a wonderful rest of your day.

OBT: Thank you, Brian.

Dredd: Yeah, we appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

The post ADR 017: OBT & Dredd Interview (F3 GrowRuck Custom GORUCK Event) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

Christopher Goad… but you all probably know him as Bomber Bash. In the 16th episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast Brian sits down and chats with the fan favorite, the one and only, Bomber Bash. We get into where the nickname came from, what his first event was like, and what he’s looking forward to at GORUCK.

The only thing that would have made this interview better was if it was done in person and videoed. A huge thanks to Bomber for taking the time to chat and hopefully he doesn’t have to go on any more 18 hour drives with Nick.

Here’s the links from the show!

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or even our Facebook Page! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

For those who don’t like listening to interviews here the transcript in its entirety!

Brian: I’m here talking with Christopher Goad who goes by Bomber Bash. Before we get started, Bomber, how did you get that nickname?

Bomber Bash: I’ll tell you. A lot of people asked me because I was in the Marine Corps and they’re like, “Oh, were you EOD? Did you work on bombs?” I’m like “No. I was just in weapons company, I was a pack mule. Bomber Bash is actually a car show that I’ve done for 10 years called the Twin City Bomber Bash. Before Facebook made everyone change their name to their real name, I went by Bomber Bash. It’s kind of strange the whole GRT community knows me mostly as Bomber Bash unless they’re newer and know me as Christopher Goad and they don’t really know who Bomber is.

Yeah, it’s a car show that we’ve done for 10 years. It’s rockabilly. All the cars are rockabilly based who do a pinup pageant, and actually last year we did a custom light, the Twin City Bomber Bash Light and we had David Lyles as the Cadre and had 38 people come down and almost all of them were GRTs that traveled down that came from New England, Texas, allover, and it was a lot of fun. Yes, the Bomber Bash is actually a car show called the Twin City Bomber Bash.

Brian: That’s really interesting and I’m sure you do not expect this to happen then for everyone to call you Bomber Bash from here on out.

Bomber Bash: No sir. No sir. It’s funny because, Robert Bash, when I first met him as that same weekend that you were here when I first moved here. He’s like, “Hey!” I’m like, “Robert Bash!” He’s like, “Oh! You know who I am.” I’m like, “Yeah, we have the same last name.” Anyway, he’s a great guy, but it was funny because people have confused us before or asked me how we were related. That’s when my name was still on Facebook as Bomber Bash.

Brian: That’s awesome. Bomber, how is it going?

Bomber Bash: It’s going fantastic. I’m having a great day. Little tired from the selection weekend, but other than that I’m feeling great.

Brian: Excellent. I’d imagine pretty much everyone down there is a little tired from the selection weekend.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir. Nick is extra cranky this week more than his normal crankiness. There’s that.

Brian: Bomber, let’s start out with your involvement in the GORUCK community. How did you stumble upon GORUCK?

Bomber Bash: In 2011, I signed up for a Tough Mudder and I know a few people remember this from back in the day. There was actually a link to GORUCK with a little bit of video. It had like a little Tough Mudder logo with the hand. I watched the video and checked it out and I was like, “Man! That seems cool.”

I did a little research and I think the only video or any information I could find, because back then they still kept everything that went on in evens pretty quiet. I found there was a video from a Philadelphia event that was shot with a first generation GoPro. There wasn’t a lot of information out there, and by watching that video is when I decided to sign up for one. It was about six or seven months out to order a GR1 and then my first event was in October of 2012.

Brian: I think I know what video you’re talking about. I’m pretty sure I watched that video a dozen or two dozen times before my first event, because that was the only information out there.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir. Yeah, for the longest, it was the only video.

Brian: Yeah. Where was the first event you signed up for?

Bomber Bash: It was in New Orleans, which I’m from Shreveport. I was living there then. It was about five hours away and I knew the city and felt I would be more comfortable doing it in the city that I was familiar with than traveling off some place.

Brian: This was back in 2012. There’s not much information out there. No one really knows what’s going on with GORUCK and the events. What were your thoughts leading up to the event and how did you feel during that event?

Bomber Bash: When I want to do something I just need to go ahead and sign up for it, because if I don’t I’ll talk myself out. I signed up for it the same day that I first saw the video Tough Mudder page. Just was nervous. Now, there’s all kind of training programs, squads, there’s the ruck clubs. You have so much more information out there. There was a little bit of anxiety about what we were going to do, and my training just consisted of — As I look back, it wasn’t the best idea, but I just ran, I did some five 5Ks with my ruck, add my six bricks in there. When I signed up, you could still do it with four bricks if you were over 150 pounds. Then they went away from the flame patch and then went to six bricks. Yeah, I didn’t do any push-ups, sit ups, anything. No overhead. Just squats, just ran with it. That’s what I thought I needed to do.

Brian: Those were the days, right? Back when a tough — If you’re over 150 was four bricks, and under 150 it was two?

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir.

Brian: I remember, and they made a switch to six and four. I was thinking, “Man! This is getting real.” When you completed the event, how did you feel? Did you know that you wanted to do another one or were you thinking you’re going to be one done?

Bomber Bash: I was one and done. I was like, “This is stupid.” It was class 294. Had a great route. There were a couple of people there that done multiple events. A lot of the New Orleans crew was there. There was a couple of other events. Team Farm was down there for a Scavenger back in the day and it was crazy, crazy. I just remember being exhausted and then I wanted a beer, and I bought a 32 ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon and then took a very long nap after I had that. I was wiped out, man. It did me in.

Brian: Sounds like a pretty good way to celebrate.

Bomber Bash: It was. It was.

Brian: Going fast-forward a bit, when did you start working for GORUCK?

Bomber Bash: That would be in — My one year anniversary is coming up. It’d be September 28, so a couple of more days will be my one year anniversary for being here in Florida at HQ, which is now the PX.

Brian: Congratulations!

Bomber Bash: Thank you, sir.

Brian: Hopefully I’ll make it down there again. I think I was down there on the weekend that you started with Team RWB for a ruck club meet up.

Bomber Bash: Yes. Yeah, I had a little luau. Y’all were here Saturday. It was a lot of fun.

Brian: That was a really good time. Speaking of ruck clubs and meet ups, you’ve been traveling the U.S. hanging out with ruck clubs. Is that correct?

Bomber Bash: Yes.

Brian: Who had the idea to send you around and do this?

Bomber Bash: I hear Lee likes to say it’s his idea. Nick says it’s his idea. Jason said it’s his idea, so I’m going to stick with that it’s my idea. It was totally my idea to do it.

Brian: I like that. I was worried it was someone else’s idea just to get you out of the office.

Bomber Bash: That’s most probably. That is totally correct. I think they pretend that they’re excited to see me when I come back, but sometimes I don’t believe that.

Brian: Yeah. I’m sure they’re excited to see you.

Bomber Bash: Yes.

Brian: You’ve been leaving GORUCK and traveling to various ruck clubs in the area. Where have you gone so far?

Bomber Bash: It kind of started in North Carolina with Brag. That was kind of the first trip that I went down with the company. On the way back we stopped by to see Andrew Handley in South Carolina. Met up with a lot of the GRTs there, the South Carolina area. We’ve been to Detroit. Well, all over Florida first. Went down south, Miami, went across Tallahassee, Fort Myers and just kind of followed all around the coast and came back and then do the blog, just told their stories.

After that, Detroit, Cleveland, had a blast with them. Then went to Texas and went to Dallas, Austin and Houston. We’ve done a few other trips. We went to Auburn for the Raider Ruck Nick and I did and did a couple of the legs with them and had a good time. I feel very fortunate, very blessed. We hung with the F3 guys. It’s been a lot of fun.

Brian: It sounds awesome.

Bomber Bash: Traverse City also. Yeah, for beach. I went up to Traverse City, which has been the whole town looks like a postcard. It was beautiful.

Brian: That’s awesome. You’ve got to make out to some amazing places.

Bomber Bash: Oh, for sure.

Brian: When you travel, do you mostly fly or drive?

Bomber Bash: We drove a lot with Nick, with him and I taking turns, and we’ll take Ripley with us his German Shepherd. After driving with him to Detroit, I decided that I didn’t want to ride with Nick anymore. I was like, “We got to fly.” We were in the jeep like 18 hours. It was crazy. Ohio was a long way to drive across. I will tell you that, sir.

Brian: That is a long trip. Did you start in Florida for that?

Bomber Bash: Yeah, I’ve left here from Jacks Beach and drove straight.

Brian: That’s a trip. One thing I’ve noticed when getting out and driving around between states. Some states are a lot better to drive in than others. Where is the worst place that you guys had to drive through? Either in terms of road quality or drivers or just how you’re feeling.

Bomber Bash: Nick wasn’t with me on these two trips when I went back to Shreveport for Extortion 17. Louisiana on I20 is absolutely horrible. It’s like it’s been bombed by the B52s at Barksdale Air Force Base. It’s just a horrible place to drive. In Dallas, if you’re not driving 80 plus miles an hour, you’re going to get run over. There is two speeds there. It’s stopped and then as fast as you can go. I would say those are the two places most challenging to drive in.

Brian: It sounds like it. On the flipside, what’s the most enjoyable place you drove through?

Bomber Bash: Traverse City was absolutely beautiful. Also, driving around Detroit, that was really cool. Then we went to — I guess it’s called the Sand Barren, Sand Flats at Fort Bragg. Nick has to get some photos there of some gear and we camped out and it was really — That area is really pretty.

Brian: Very nice. You’ve been to a lot of new cities traveling for GORUCK. Has you been to a lot of these cities before or was this your first time there?

Bomber Bash: I’ve been to Ohio before. Detroit was the first for me. Traverse City was the first, and I had not been up to the Fort Bragg area before. I am getting to see some places, and I hadn’t been to South Florida. Most of my experience from Florida was here in Jacks Beach or in the Palm Kendall. I have seen a lot of America and met a lot of the best people.

Brian: When you first get to a new city, is there anything that you try and do?

Bomber Bash: As soon as we’re there, connect with some of the local GRTs. Just let them know, “Hey, we’re in town, and let’s go eat.” We want to go in eat and have a beer at the places that they go to and just kind of have their experience and show us your town. That usually we’ll check into our room and like, “Hey, where are y’all?”

Brian: Awesome. You show up to town, check into a room, hook up with the GRTs and grab some food and beer.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir.

Brian: Where you have gotten the best foods so far?

Bomber Bash: There’s a couple of places. Andrew Handley’s place, Andrew Handley’s Pub is absolutely amazing. He had a huge spread of food there for everyone and he took really good care of us. Man! There’s GORUCK memorabilia all over the place. It’s a really cool spot to hangout. I’d love to go there again with my girlfriend. Blacks Barbeque in Austin, Texas is one of my favorite places. Really, just all the local spots. BD and I, Traverse City at a hamburger place that was just amazing. I tried to stay away from the chain places and just support the local businesses.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. You always grab a beer when you’re getting a meal. Do you stay with PBR or Bud?

Bomber Bash: No. We’ll go to the local breweries. We’ve been to some really cool ones, especially — Oh! I’m not going to call out any certain ones, because there’s so many favorite ones. The craft beer business is booming and we’ve had some really quality beer. I just like to go there, see what everyone else is drinking and have one of those. Yeah, usually stay away from the Budweiser and PBR just so I can experience what the locals are drinking or what they’re making.

Brian: It sounds amazing. Fly to a new city, hang out with some GRT, eat the good food, drink the good beer.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir.

Brian: You’ve been to a number of spots already. Do you have plans to keep the tour going and drive out again or fly out again?

Bomber Bash: Yeah, and I need to do it — It’s probably going to happen next year, go up and do the Snowdrop event. I got to go hang with those guys and then I’ll be up at Bragg next year, but we’re entering to the holiday season here where it gets super, super busy, so probably no more trips.

Brian: Yeah, Rooney was calling you out on that, wasn’t he?

Bomber Bash: Oh my God! Yes. I’ve got probably about five unanswered messages from him on Facebook that I’ve got to answer today.

Brian: I just talked with him a couple of days ago. I interviewed him about Snowdrop and that event that he runs in Appleton.

Bomber Bash: Yeah. That’s an amazing event and he’s probably my 40th or 50th favorite cadre at GORUCK. He’s a great guy. I love him so much.

Brian: Yeah, he’s awesome. I did an event with him out in Seattle, and Rooney is a great guy. Next year, you might be out then in Appleton for Snowdrop.

Bomber Bash: Yes. I committed to that with those fellows. Yes, everybody.

Brian: There it is. If you want to do an event with Bomber Bash, check out Snowdrop, Appleton, Wisconsin 2018.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir.

Brian: Let’s talk about ruck clubs and custom events. I heard through the grape vine that there might be a custom event for members of Rucks clubs coming up. Can you elaborate on that?

Bomber Bash: Yup. One that I would like to talk about is Mark Otto who’s put together for the Veteran’s Day Parade in New York on November 11 a spot for 200 GRTs and are going to have people from the ruck clubs come. I know the Cleveland rucking crew, there’s going to be a lot of them driving over that will actually be in the parade. There’s a couple of cadre coming. I’m really stoked about that. It will be great to be — I’ve never been in a parade. I’m looking forward to it. We’re going to go up there. 200 GRTs are going to be marching with our rucks in the Veteran’s Day parade in New York, and that’s pretty cool. He’s already done a couple of interviews. He was on Fox News last night talking about it. I didn’t get a chance to catch it, but that’s going to be a fun one. I’ll be up in the New York area the first weekend of November.

Brian: That’s awesome. If people want to sign up for this, is there a link on the website or where should they go?

Bomber Bash: We got it as a private link, but if they want to hit me up, it’s bomber AT goruck DOT com. I’ll make sure to send the link to them.

Brian: Perfect. Thank you so much, Bomber. GORUCK has a ruck club battle coming up in early 2018. That will be in Jacksonville, Florida. How excited are you about this?

Bomber Bash: I’m super stoked, man. Lucas, he reached out to me. He’s down with the Palm Beach Rucking Crew. Shot me a message and he was like, “Hey, man. What about let’s do a custom event where we have all the ruck clubs come?” You already got almost 50 people signed up for it and it’s going to be a Light. Probably Garrett and Cody and everyone’s going to be teamed up. I’ve got a couple of people from HQ that are going to sign up, so we’re going to have our little team going to. I’m really stoked. It’s a great idea, and if I didn’t like Luke so much I’d say it was mine. I’m really stoked about that. It’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s going to be a pretty tough Light. There will be a lot of fun involved, but we’re going to get thrashed too.

Brian: It’s probably for the best, since everyone showing up is in a ruck club. Luke is a great guy. I had him on a previous episode where he talked about the Brad event.

Bomber Bash: For sure.

Brian: He’s always fun to talk to.

Bomber Bash: Yeah, he’s an awesome dude.

Brian: We’ve got the ruck club battle coming up, GORUCK Selection just finished, and so you guys are all recovering from that. What else is going on?

Bomber Bash: I look forward to see what the beach events turn into. I think they’re going with calling them Poseidon. Super stoked about those and just being able to see the one in Traverse City, and it was a lot of fun. That’s what I’m excited for event-wise, is to see what happens with it. Constellation is constantly evolving and changing and there’s people that have done a couple of them and talked about that event has evolved and got better. I did the second one of the Betas and I look forward to doing one of the others one come up. They had one in St. Augustine this weekend that a lot of people come in. They caravan from here down there did it, come back. It’s one of the few times I’ve not offered hugs, because all of them smelled like pepper spray.

Brian: Yeah, I’d stay away from that.

Bomber Bash: Yeah. I’m like once you’ve showered, for real, give you a hub, but let’s just fist bump.

Brian: Yup. No shirtless Bomber Bash hugs when you’re covered in pepper spray.

Bomber Bash: That’s right.

Brian: GORUCK’s already released the date for 2019 Selection. It’s September 20th in Ohio. Can we expect you up there for the Bomber Cam?

Bomber Bash: I’m hoping so. I’ve put in my request to BD to let me go up there to Selection, because mostly I got to see the index and I got to see the PT test. There were a couple of people I’ve known for a while, but I want to go and watch them and give them a little love while they’re doing it. Most of that weekend, we work up here at the PX and just making sure everyone had a cold Budweiser in their hand, making sure they were checking out the gears. Also, a ton of people brought their rucks in and Joe and even Christian, who is our quality control guy, got them turned around same weekend. There were very few that had to stay due to the repairs on them. It was cool for people to bring their rucks in and let them inspect them and did grommets for a couple of people, repaired some straps, sewed up a few holes and everything. That was another cool thing that happened this weekend. I’d like to say congratulations to Alex and everybody else, but that dude is a beast, man. It was crazy watching him on the live feed and then it was an honor to see him finish here at the PX.

Brian: He was surprisingly coherent during the interview with Jason afterwards.

Bomber Bash: Oh, yeah. I think he was absolutely wiped out, but he was still him, and that was pretty amazing to me. Yeah, that was an hour or two after he had finished. He had got a little ice cream from his girl and got some beer, Kill Cliff, and water. He got to recharge his batteries, which that was cool.

Brian: Yeah. Let’s talk about the PX and scars now in Jacksonville.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir.

Brian: When I travelled down there last year, I came and hang out and the GORUCK office and that office is what it looks like has been turned to the new PX and the new scars.

Bomber Bash: Yes. When I moved here, there are like I think like 21, 22 or us and it got up where there was almost 30 people, like 27, 28 folks. It was just so packed in here. They moved HQ down the road for the business part of GORUCK where marketing, the inventory folks, finance, Lee was there heading up on our fire base partnerships and over off to the left where I used to be, they’ve got all the scars. All the machines are set up and they’re kind of — It’s a really cool system of how they check them in, do the inspections, put them in the queue to be repaired, have them repaired, then ship them out. It works really well and SP says really fast. Joe block party. He handles all the scars, emails coming in, and then he also sew some and we have Christian that’s in our quality control, that he gets behind a machine as well.

They do a pretty quick turnaround and it runs around very smooth. Jason is over here, myself, Nick is over here. We just got a little small crew and I feel very fortunate to — I’m not seeing everybody every day like before, but it’s cool to be over here, because that’s where the GRTs come when they want to visit.

Brian: That’s awesome. I’ll have to make it out there again and see everything going on, but it’s very cool —

Bomber Bash: The plan is eventually have us all under one roof again, and I’ll be stoked when that day, but it’s also having scars here at the PX and watching those guys do their things. They’re a great crew.

Brian: Yeah, and it’s got to be awesome seeing all those beat rucks from GORUCK events coming and get nice and patched up and sent out for more adventures.

Bomber Bash: Yes. Oh, and my note to them, because I love these guys, is make sure you wash your rucks really well before you send them. There’s a couple of them that I’m like, “Oh my God! Ugh! Ugh!”

Brian: You just kind of get the box and the box wreaks before you even open it.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Brian: You’re wondering if they sent you a backpack or a dead animal.

Bomber Bash: That’s right. I’ll have to start shaming those folks on the Tough page.

Brian: That seems like a great way to do it.

Bomber Bash: Oh, yeah.

Brian: You’re very excited about the GORUCK beached events that are coming up. We’re about to hit the super busy season for GORUCK, which is the Christmas time, holiday season.

Bomber Bash: Yes.

Brian: What are you most excited for about the future of GORUCK?

Bomber Bash: Just seeing where the events go. Jason is working on a lot of secret apparel stuff. The apparel lot is really going to expand. I’m stoked to see what happens with that. Not only like the GR3 did really well. It’s a fantastic travel ruck and just seeing what the next big thing is going to be. I just like seeing the ruck clubs expand, the family grow and just when you think, “Oh! This is about it. Something else comes along.

Last year, Constellation beach come back around and is turning into something new. I just like to surprises that are in store.

Brian: Yeah, and Constellation 24 is coming up, so that should be incredibly interesting.

Bomber Bash: Oh, yeah. The reunion this year is going to be in Austin, Texas. I’ll be down there for sure. I got my daughter and son-in-law lives down there. I really — Austin is an awesome place. There’s a lot of good food. There’s a lot of hills to go up and down.

Brian: Perfect. Awesome, Bomber. Is there anything else that you want to talk about or tell the listeners?

Bomber Bash: As I always say, monster is the best part of HQ, and the people, are the best part of GORUCK. I enjoy meeting everyone, having them come up here and hangout with them. I just want to tell them thank you and come get a shirtless hug.

Brian: You heard it. Come get a shirtless hug from Bomber Bash pending no pepper spray on your body.

Bomber Bash: Exactly. Thank you for clarifying that for me.

Brian: Yeah, I’m just looking out for you. Got your best interest though, Bomber.

Bomber Bash: I appreciate it.

Brian: Bomber, thank you so much for taking all the time to talk with me today. It’s been awesome, just awesome to connect again and chat. I truly appreciate it and we got to do this again.

Bomber Bash: Yes, sir, anytime. You take care and I hope you have an awesome day.

The post ADR 016: Bomber Bash Interview (GORUCK Ruck Club Tour) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In this episode we interview GORUCK Cadre Roony. We discuss how he found GORUCK, his favorite events, and his upcoming custom event Snowdrop.

Cadre Roony puts a ton of love into every event he runs so we are very excited to see how this year’s Snowdrop turns out. We’re sure it’s going to be an incredible weekend for absolutely anyone who is able to attend the event. Although it doesn’t fit in our schedule this year maybe there’s a chance we’ll travel out there next year for it.

If you’re within distance of the event you should definitely give it some consideration. It’s not often you find charity-driven events like this that are also going to be incredible fun. Plus, you’ll get to see Roony pull the winner for his raffle and, probably, make a similar face to the one he did last time!

Here’s the links from the show!

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or even our Facebook Page! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

Brian: So I’m here talking with GORUCK Cadre Josh Haas, aka Cadre Roony. Before we get started with how you got involved with GORUCK and the Snowdrop line of events, let’s talk quickly about your nickname. Where did Roony come from?

Cadre Roony: Roony came from my grandmother. I was her oldest grandson and she started calling me Joshua Roony and my aunts and uncles and eventually cousins picked up on it. It got shortened to Roony and I was just Roony when I was a toddler all the way up until currently my aunts and uncles, grandmother still call me Roony. I guess it stuck.

Brian: Now the entire GORUCK community calls you Roony too.

Cadre Roony: Yes, absolutely. Yes, when I first became cadre, there was already a Cadre Josh and I didn’t want to be Cadre Josh II or anything like that. I went with nickname I’ve always had and it kind of stuck. It does confuse people because a lot of folks are like, “Is that your last name?” It’s just a nickname that my grandmother gave me and I went with it.

Brian: That’s awesome. Yeah, I think Cadre Roony is definitely better than Cadre Josh II.

Cadre Roony: Yes, absolutely.

Brian: Speaking of GORUCK, how did you first hear about GORUCK?

Cadre Roony: I first heard about GORUCK over 3-1/2 years ago I guess it’s been now. One of my friends that I’ve met through crossfit was asking me if I’d ever heard of it and if I would do it with him. I asked, “What is it?” and he explained it to me and I just gotten off act of duty and I kind of looked at it and I’m like, “You want me to pay to go do what I’ve been doing my entire act of duty career? I think I’m not. Take a hard pass on that.”

He was really into it and I told him I would put on some miles with him while he trained for his first event, and he’s excited about it. Then GORUCK had a promotion going on. I think it was called the Buddy Pass, where it was a buy one get one free. It’s like, “Hey, I paid for the event in Milwaukee, it’s on a buddy pass. I’d really like for you to do it with me. It’s not going to cost anything.” I caved in and said, “Alright, I’ll do it.”

The event date came and my youngest son was really, really sick and I decided that I was going to take a pass on going to do the event because I didn’t want to be gone when my son had a fever that was right on the border line of him going into the hospital. I didn’t go. Woke up in the morning and my son was magically A-okay, his fever broke overnight and my friend went and got his patch and became anointed as a GRT and I had a credit and then that following September 11th, some friends from the local police department SWAT team were going down to do the 9/11 light in Chicago, so I cashed in my credit to do that and it was at that event three years ago, just crushed three years ago where I met Brian Squared, Cadre Logan and my first exposure to GORUCK. Had an awesome time. Had a friend come up from St. Louis who is a former FISTER from the 101st and he’s a SWAT team leader down in St. Louis, so he came up and we did it together and we had fun, but I had to see what GORUCK was about, so I thought, “This is the light. I need to see what it talks about. On the drive from Chicago back from Wisconsin I signed up for tough in December in Milwaukee, which is probaBriany a bunch of that decision all rolled into one. It was Cadre Mickey, and I met Mickey there. Had an awesome event. We got to talk in and I did my application to become a cadre and here I am, just crossed the two year special as a cadre.

Brian: That’s awesome. Completed one light, then one tough.

Cadre Roony: Yes. Then after the tough, before I got hired, but while I’ve got the tough and the light under my belt, let’s see what the heavy is all about, and signed up for Memorial Day Heavy in Chicago and that’s where I’ve met Flash and Jason J. at the Memorial Day Heavy in Chicago and shortly after that is when I got the phone call from Garrett Noonan. He said, “Hey, I’m hearing some good things. Let’s see if I’ll get you on board.” Here we are.

Brian: That’s awesome, and you’re still doing events.

Cadre Roony: Yes. I enjoy the heck out of the community and I love everything about it. I had an epiphany at an event where we’re in the welcome party and one of my good friends told me after the event, he said, “Hey, it would have been anybody else’s cadre, I probaBriany would have quit at the welcome party because that was pretty brutal.”

I thought to myself, “It’s pretty easy for me stand here on the beach and tell these guys to front, back, go and roll right, roll left and all that fun stuff. It’s easy to kind of lose touch with the emotions and struggles that the GRT are going through while they’re participating in the event. I promised myself that I would do at least one event per year just to kind of keep my roots and understand what everyone’s going through in these events. I don’t lose focus about what they’re going through and that sort of things. I’ve exceeded that one event per year thing and it’s easy to do, because we all know how fun it is.

Brian: Absolutely. Speaking of being a cadre for GORUCK and running events, what are your favorite events to run?

Cadre Roony: My favorite events to run. I’d say just the standard tough is a lot of fun. I think the ones that I get the most out of believe it or not, is the lights, because you get a lot of people who are kind of dipping their toe into the GORUCK pond and they’re not sure what it’s about. They’re not sure about their ability level and if they can do it. When you show them their ability and that they can do it and that light bulb goes on over their head, that’s when it’s really rewarding.

You see that in all the events, but at the light you have a much broader base of ability level for this level and that sort of thing and when you show people the value of teamwork and DFQ and that sort of thing and show them what they have inside, maybe you like that, they realize at that point there’s probaBriany a bunch of other stuff that they’ve never tried or even thought about attempting, because they’re always believed that they haven’t had the ability and now they realize that, “You know what? Maybe I do have the ability and what else can I do that I never I could do?” That’s what’s really awesome for me.

Brian: That is awesome.

Cadre Roony: Scavengers of course are a lot of fun too.

Brian: Yeah, you can’t go wrong with those.

Cadre Roony: No, absolutely not.

Brian: All GORUCK Special Operations Cadre clearly need to have a military background. Can you elaborate a little bit on yours?

Cadre Roony: Absolutely. I did eight years active duty. Had seven deployments, one to Iraq, the rest are all with Afghanistan. Served in various roles and capacity as well as part of the regiment the last four years, I was in a Regimental Reconnaissance Company, 6-man reconnaissance team and that was some of the best memories I have from my time on act of duty.

Got off act of duty in 2012, moved from Fort Benning back to Wisconsin. Moved back and just kind of took a break from military. Really missed the brotherhood and camaraderie and shared sense of purpose that the military offered and end up joining the Wisconsin National Guard, and I’ve been in the National Guard for almost three years now. Currently a platoon sergeant, I was light infantry company air platoon and recently we were activated. I was actually in Chicago getting ready to start the 9/11 heavy. I received a phone call, it said, “Hey, you are effectively on orders for Hurricane Irma release. I need you to report tomorrow morning at 8:00.” I’m like, “Well, I’m in Chicago. I’m running this thing. I can’t get back till Sunday.”

They decided to let me report on Sunday. I worked with Cadre Chad, ran the heavy then ran the tough. Put on a pretty good welcome party for those guys and then went straight from North Avenue Beach back home and grabbed my gear and reported in to the unit. We deployed down to Florida and we’re down there for just over a week and helped out the people down there. Get back up on their feet, recover from Hurricane Irma. Got back here to something — Monday, was it? Sunday. Yeah, I got watch Packers. I got back on Sunday. Got back on Snowdrop again.

Brian: That’s wild. That’s truly amazing.

Cadre Roony: Yeah, it was a pretty busy 10 days.

Brian: I’m sure.

Cadre Roony: Yeah. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it, and I definitely have a sense of serving, helping out the community and just being part or something that’s bigger than me. That’s what service is for me.

Brian: thank you so much for both your service and for continuing to serve. Let’s talk a little bit about your custom event, Snowdrop. Where did the idea for Snowdrop come from?

Cadre Roony: When I first became a cadre, I wanted to do every event I could. I wanted to get out there and meet as many people as possiBriane, but I also wanted to kind of showcase the area that I live in Wisconsin. It’s a great community. Tons of stuff to do here, and I think it’s a great city to host events. I decided I wanted to do a custom here just to kind of bring people here and maybe bring up some interest in the community in GORUCK.

If I was going to do that, why not try to raise some money? The local police department was really involved with Snowdrop Foundation, which is a pediatric cancer nonprofit and I was like, “You know what? I don’t know what I would ever do if I found out that my boys had cancer, and I hope I never find out that I want do everything I can to help the families and the kids that are suffering because of it.”

I put Snowdrop as the benefactor and ran the first event three years ago, so 2015 it would have been. We raised just under a thousand bucks. Didn’t have huge numbers. Didn’t have a lot of third party if you will fundraising going on. We covered the cost and raised a little bit of money. As I gained experience and kind of looked at other customers to see what they were doing, the ideas started to populate in my head, if you will. Last year we did the second Snowdrop and we were aBriane to raise just under 8,000 and that was the large part to efforts of GRTs that wanted to help contribute.

We raised money to get a Pikachu costume. We raised money to get me to wear a Chicago Bears jersey after the event at the post-event party, which was humiliating.

Brian: They must have raised a lot for that.

Cadre Roony: Yeah, they did. They actually raised enough money that need to participate in the Joe Warner Bragg Heavy, and unfortunately for fellows that helped get me to that level, I wasn’t aBriane to participate last year, because I had to work an event. I still owe the community a Joe Warner appearance. That is still on the taBriane. I don’t know if I can commit to this year or not, but we’ll see.

This year, instead of just doing a light, we added in a tough and a scavenger. We are on phase right now to come in right around 10 grand after all the classes are covered for planning the event, etc.

Brian: Congratulations.

Cadre Roony: Yeah. We’re on phase for 10 grand and a lot of that, again, is due to the efforts of the GRTs that have helped me with creating raffles. I think I’m going to be carrying a big concrete yellow crayon during the event and sort of a Pikachu costume. What else? Something else — Yeah, we’re doing a big raffle for calling it the UberRuck. The raffle is going to be fore a GR1 that comes with donated Shadow Tactical frame sheet from Ruck Customs. A donated Shaddox Tactical plate pouch. Some company, All Day Ruckoff donated a ruck handle as well as some patches and a tac-hat. It’s all going to go into this UberRuck raffle and got a bunch of other stuff that we’re going to all pull winners for after the Ruck.

Brian: Speaking of the location for the event, this occurs in Appleton, Wisconsin. That’s correct?

Cadre Roony: Yup, that’s right. The Appleton area is called The Fox Valley, and there’s some cities that comprise the Fox Valley. Appleton is kind of the hub and everything branches off of it. First year, we did it on east side of Appleton. Last year we did it in a town called Kimberley. This year we’re going back to Appleton, but we’re going to cover different terrains.

We’re going to have it in Appleton or the Fox Valley. We’re going to explore different areas every year so that people aren’t seeing the same old stuff every time they come here. Got a lot of repeat offenders that have done every event coming back, so just want to give them a different taste of the area every time they come.

Brian: For those who aren’t familiar with Wisconsin, Appleton is not the biggest city. It’s not the destination city for Wisconsin. It’s pretty exciting that all of these people are traveling in to Appleton just for your event.

Cadre Roony: Yeah. Last year we had people from Phoenix, New York City and all the big cities in the Midwest, so Minneapolis, St. Paul, Iowa. We had some folks coming from Iowa, Chicago of course, as well as Milwaukee, Indianapolis. The Team Ninja crew showed up in fourth last year. They’re coming back. Got some representatives from the Cleveland area rucking crew coming in. The same standard folks from the Minnesota Ruck Club are coming. We got gentleman coming from New York City another one coming from Alabama. The very first person to sign up for the event, all three events, he’s coming from Japan. I think it’s pretty badass, but there’s somebody that’s going to travel to Appleton, Wisconsin from Japan to help raise money for Snowdrop Foundation and have a good time as GRTs know how to do.

Brian: That’s amazing. That’s quite the trip.

Cadre Roony: Yeah, definitely. It’s hard to do, but kind of left me speechless that someone would do all that to support and help raise money for Snowdrop Foundation.

Brian: After you completed the first Snowdrop event back in 2015, did you know that you wanted to make this a yearly series, or did it take some time before you realized you wanted to bring it back again year over year?

Cadre Roony: After the initial event kind of took a week to let it all try to sync in and did a lot of looking back, “Hey, what could we have done better?” and got a lot of feedback from GRTs that have completed it. As I’ve said, I was a pretty new cadre at the time. Really, kind of a baptism by fire, if you will, and took a lot of the suggestions part and really started to get the wheels turning for how can we do it better next time, because I know we could definitely Brianow it out of the water.

About a month after the first one was over, I reached back out to my contacts at Snowdrop, I’m like, “Okay. I want to do this again and I want to do it better.” After last year’s success, and the feedback I got, it become evident to me that it needed to be a yearly thing.

Brian: Very nice. Speaking of this year now, what are you most excited for about this event this coming year?

Cadre Roony: I’m excited for the tough, because it will be the first time there’s been a tough in Appleton. There’s lots of varying terrain and, of course, water with the Fox River running right through the city. I think the thing that I’m most excited about is the fact that we’d be playing knocker ball during the light. Do ever seen those guys trying to playing soccer while they’re inside those big rear bubBrianes? We’re going to be integrating that into the light and some former fashion. Should have some pretty good pictures and video footage from that.

Brian: Absolutely.

Cadre Roony: Then of course the scavenger. The scavenger will be fun as well.

Brian: Very cool. The tough is Friday night, which is going to be October 6th. The light is Saturday during the day and the scavenger is the following day?

Cadre Roony: and then Sunday morning we’ll go and get our amulets and Brianoody Mary’s.

Brian: Sounds perfect. Sounds like the ideal GRT weekend.

Cadre Roony: Yeah, absolutely. Some people that are coming in the day early, going to take them out to good old Wisconsin supper club, show them what that’s all about. Show them what a real old fashion tastes like. Maybe teach them how to play bar dice or something like that. The idea is I just want to get people a real good taste of the culture and the people that basically I grew up with and grew up around. I think the people here are like the salt of the earth and know how to work hard and play hard and that’s what it’s all about.

Brian: I love it. That’s awesome. Do you think spotted cow is going to make an appearance here?

Cadre Roony: Spotted cow is always an integral part for Snowdrop. One way or the other way, spotted cow is going to get worked in the event.

Brian: Perfect. I have to thank you for getting Cadre Danny Stokes to pick up spotted cow and bring it back to Seattle, because I was aBriane to enjoy some of it down at his house and usually I only get it on my trips back to Wisconsin. It was quite the treat. Thank you, Roony.

Cadre Roony: Yes, you’re welcome. I wasn’t aBriane to meet up with him in St. Paul for the capital tour. I was a military course and I had some people bring in some spotted cow and I wasn’t there and they gave it to him and it’s made its way in your hands. It sure was a welcome treat for you.

Brian: Sure was. Is there anything else that you want to promote about the Snowdrop 2017 event?

Cadre Roony: The biggest thing that I just want to say regarding Snowdrop is thank you to the community for all your support. Thank you to the GRTs that give up some of their free time to help me out with the fundraising efforts and all of them that travel to come do this event. A big thank you to all the companies and folks that donate product, like All Day Ruckoff and Shaddox Tactical and Ruck Essence helping put together pretty awesome raffle package to raise money. Snowdrop won’t be anything without the community and the people that pitch in to give me a hand with setting it up and running it. Just a big thank you to everybody.

Brian: I can say at least from All Day Ruckoff, I’m more than happy to support in any way I can. I’m sure the other companies feel the same way too. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to support you, because we appreciate that.

Cadre Roony: Absolutely, man. Appreciate you having me on here to promote Snowdrop.

Brian: Absolutely. Thank you, Cadre Roony, for taking the time to talk with me about your military experience, how you found GORUCK, your GORUCK experience and this incrediBriane custom event that you’ve set up and run for the 3rd year now in Appleton, Wisconsin. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re an incrediBriany busy guy and I truly appreciate this.

Cadre Roony: Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate you giving me a platform and, as always, rangers lead the way.

The post ADR 015: Cadre Roony aka Josh Hass Interview (GORUCK Snowdrop Challenge) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

This interview with GORUCK Cadre Mikey Bee focuses on the GORUCK Selection event. We get into how Mikey Bee found GORUCK, why he loves being a Cadre for GORUCK Selection, and he shares some incredible advice on what it takes to succeed at Selection.

The release of this interview falls on the very day that the GORUCK Selection 019 class is kicking off in Jacksonville, Florida. There’s under 100 people registered for the event and GORUCK’s team of cadre will ensure that they reach new limits.

We truly hope that everyone who shows up to GORUCK Selection succeeds in the event and can’t wait to see how it all shakes up.

Here’s the links from the show!

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or even our Facebook Page! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

The post ADR 014: Mikey Bee Interview (GORUCK Selection 019 Cadre) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In the thirteenth episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast we’re back with another interview with GORUCK Cadre Chris Way. This time around we talk about about GORUCK Selection Class 001 which Chris was one of three finishers of.

The next GORUCK Selection starts in one week down in Jacksonville, Florida so we thought it would be interesting to bring another Selection finisher onto the show. Chris provides an interesting point of view because of his depth of event knowledge outside the realm of just GORUCK events.

If you’re signed up for GORUCK Selection then this is definitely a podcast episode you’re going to want to listen to. If you’re not considering Selection then you can still get some great insight into the mind of someone who completed this event.

Here’s the links from the show! I’ve included links to PACE Lid because Chris Way runs that and it’s always nice to promote him.

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or Stitcher! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

The post ADR 013: Chris Way Interview (GORUCK Selection 001 AAR) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In the twelfth episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast I am very excited to interview fellow GRT Eric Kling about his GORUCK Selection event. We talk about how he found GORUCK, why he signed up for GORUCK Selection, and he gives some amazing advice to those currently registered for GORUCK Selection.

During the interview we talk about the moment that Kling was the last remaining participant of GORUCK Selection class 002. The video below is of when that happened and you can see that Kling is pretty out of it.

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or Stitcher! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

Not everyone likes listening to audio… we get that. For those that don’t here’s a transcript of our interview.

Kling: What’s up man?

The post ADR 012: Eric Kling Interview (GORUCK Selection 002 Finisher) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In the eleventh episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast I am very excited to interview fellow GRT Kristie Iverson about her recently completed GORUCK Beached Core event. We talk about her first time shadowing a GORUCK event, her first GORUCK event, how she felt going into Beached Core, and what occurred at the event.

Kristie has done a ton of events including one previous GORUCK Beached event. After her first Beached she swore she would never do another one again…

… and here we are interviewing her after completing another one. If this is an event you are even remotely interested in then make sure to give this episode a listen. You won’t regret it!

We talked about a lot of stuff during this podcast and here are links to everything!

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or Stitcher! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

The post ADR 011: Kristie Iverson Interview (GORUCK Beached Core AAR) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In the tenth episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast I am very excited to interview GORUCK Cadre Danny Stokes who has run 150 events for the company. We discuss his 2017 Capital Ruck Tour and what it’s like to be on the Operation Enduring Warrior Masked Athlete Team.

We start with how Danny found out about GORUCK and what his first (and only) event as a participant was. He’s got great stories from the night that he shares in detail and they’re definitely worth listening to.

Then we dive into how the Capital Ruck Tour came about and what the goals are for that event. We finish up with potential plans for 2018 and what the future could hold for the events!

• The idea to turn Capital Ruck Tour into a charity event for Operation Enduring Warrior occurred between a conversation between Cadre Danny and Chavela Briones, owner of Fitlife Healthy Vending.

We talked about a lot of stuff during this podcast and here are links to everything!

• GORUCK & Rucking Glossary
• GORUCK
• GORUCK Cadre
• Capital Tour 2017 Website
• Capital Tour 2017 Facebook
• Capital Tour 2017 Instagram
• Capital Tour 2017 Events
• Operation Enduring Warrior
• Operation Enduring Warrior Masked Athlete Team
• Charity Challenges
• Knotted Cords
• Sew Strong
• ASPE
• Live For A Living
• Infinite Life Fitness
• Lalo Tactical
• Military Muscle

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or Stitcher! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

The post ADR 010: Danny Stokes Interview (Capital Ruck Tour & GORUCK Cadre) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.

In the ninth episode of the All Day Ruckoff Podcast I am very excited to bring you an interview with fellow GRT Luke Cussen, whom you might know as Luke MC on Facebook. Luke is part of the Palm Beach Rucking Crew and was able to convince GORUCK to host a Brat event in Florida.

After the GORUCK Brat event he posted in the GORUCK Tough group about the experience. I reached out because I was curious how the event went and how he was able to get GORUCK to host one as there are none on the calendar at this point. We ended up chatting on the phone which turned into this episode!

A huge thank you to Luke for taking the time to chat and, more importantly, working to hard to make this event what it was.

• GORUCK & Rucking Glossary
• GORUCK
• GORUCK Custom Events
• Palm Beach Rucking Crew (PBRC)
• GORUCK Brat Event
• Speak Up For Kids

Thanks so much for listening! If you missed any of our earlier episodes you can give them a listen right now. Hopefully you enjoyed the podcast and are excited about the next one. This is very new to us so we would appreciate it if you would cut us some slack as we work on perfecting our methodologies. Did you enjoy the podcast? We’d love a review on iTunes or Stitcher! Didn’t enjoy it? Leave a comment here in the show notes and let us know what we can do better!

Thanks so much for the support and make sure to check out the links in the Show Notes. Subscribe through iTunes, Android, Google Music, Stitcher, or TuneIn and never miss another episode!

The post ADR 009: Luke Cussen Interview (GORUCK Brat Event) appeared first on All Day Ruckoff.