Ruck run

The unspeakable horror finally came to pass - spring break came to an end, and, having failed to marry rich, I was forced to return to work this week. Lame.

Our first day back was Tuesday though, so I did get that nice little boost of thinking it was Monday, and then realizing it was already Tuesday about 43 times throughout the day.

Plus, my new Tuesday night tradition of meeting Lily at her work for a brick workout gave me something to look forward to. Even though I took a complete rest day on Saturday (and basically an entire rest week from all of life's other demands), my legs still felt really tired and sluggish, so in my mind this was more of a recovery brick.

15 miles of biking, followed by 30 minutes of running, both at a pretty easy pace. Which was good, because the next morning the fun really began.

I've been talking nonstop about the triathlon, but I've neglected to mention another event that's coming up, mainly because it's too terrifying to think about. That would be GORUCK, which I mentioned briefly when I signed up. The idea is you show up at 10pm at a secret location (they haven't even told us yet!) with a backpack full of bricks, and the cadre, aka the man in charge, puts you through 8-10 hours of overnight torture. You cover 15-20 miles, but that's not even the hard part. The reason everything is a range is because they just make it up as they go along. No watches, phones, nothing, you are just at their mercy overnight. It's next weekend. And that's why I haven't talked about it.

Jackie is a GORUCK veteran, so she was nice enough to come over Wednesday morning with a backpack for me to fill up with hand weights and take me on a "ruck run". We wore the heavy packs, and stopped every half mile to do all sorts of other fun exercises. Bear crawls, crab crawls, pushups, lunges, just to name a few. All with the pack either on your back, or on your chest. I can only imagine what my neighbors thought.

Running with all that extra weight is hard. We averaged an 11:36 pace, and were totally out of breath the whole time. I guess we could have gone faster, but we were trying to practice to pace ourselves for 10 hours of running like that.

All in all, I was ready to die after a little over an hour of this type of activity, so, GORUCK will be interesting. My hands still hurt from doing pushups on the rocky street.

When we came back, Jackie said it was really important to practice buddy carries, which GORUCK participants are required to do. In her last one, they were only able to do piggyback rides, so she really wanted to do fireman's carries, the official method (carrying each other over our shoulders). It took some trial and error, but we did it!

The only proper response was to run upstairs, interrupt Eric in the shower, and demand he take pictures of us. He's really living every man's dream.

Don't judge me, with all the tri training, I just leave my bike by the door at all times. 

The process

I'm up!

Now my turn

She's up!

Now we just have to do it with something like an extra 60 pounds when we both have the packs on. I really didn't think I would be able to lift someone up like that at all though, and when we were outside we were both able to walk around holding each other. So there's that.


Do you think I will survive GORUCK without crying? I doubt it, I can barely survive a day at work without crying.

What's the craziest race you've ever signed up for or workout you've ever done?