My Rucked Up Life, Part 1
The one where I talk about not fucking up again
Every time I go to ruck, my mind wanders. I think about various topics while I'm rucking, and maybe eventually I'll get around to writing some of those thoughts and topics down... if I can remember to do so after I'm done sweating and downing a metric fuck ton of water.
But today, I don't want to talk about any of the topics on which I dwell... but rather about the nature of rucking itself. I want to talk about rucking and its parallels with life: burdens, perceptions, etc.
For those of you who don't know what rucking is, it's simply the act of walking (or hiking) while wearing a backpack with weight in it. That's it. Weighted walking.
Now, for most people, their experience with rucking is through one of two things: either their time in the military... or through doing one of the civilian rucking competitions like GoRuck that are meant to emulate military rucking. I don't pretend to know the entire history of it all. It may predate any military history or training, and now I have something that I can go research and write about later.
However, for most people, it has to do with their time in the military - donning a pair of boots, full gear, uniform, weapon, and signals equipment, along with... a heavy backpack.
When I was in the service, most of my time rucking was purely done in training. So we carried anywhere between 35 and 100+ pounds, and walked for 12-15 miles. The biggest issue when rucking was your feet. You had to make sure you had proper boots and socks, that your feet were dry, and some people even had orthopedic inserts in their boots to make sure their feet didn't hurt. Some of the staunchest "grin and bear it" amongst us would think the last suggestion was too sensitive, but I would challenge you to find a single sergeant or officer worth a damn who didn't take comfortable and safe feet seriously when it involved walking over 12 miles with that much gear on.
Much like your avid hiking enthusiast, few people are going to accost you for cushioning your feet to feel better. It's a matter of "whatever gets the job done."
I always admired that.
In fact, it might have been the first grain of sand in my brain that eventually turned into a pearl of wisdom that you don't have to fight every fight like you're fighting on hard mode.
People talk a lot these days about "make it make sense" and "fuck around and find out." Well, rucking is about making it make sense. Because if you don't make it make sense, you will have fucked around, and you will find out. You don't fight battles you don't have to fight.
Rucking that far cannot happen without pain if you don't plan. And it can't happen successfully if you don't learn from it each time. You take what you learned from the last time you rucked, and you apply it to the next time. What caused back pain? Were my shoes the right ones? Did I bring enough water? Why didn't I wear the right undewear, and why does chafing hurt this much?
A couple of months ago, while training my dad at the gym, he started doing his walking laps around the gym with a rucksack. I got excited and I joined him. We graduated from laps around the gym to longer rucks on trails in the woods. We even set a goal to do a 12-mile ruck in Birmingham in November.
In that time, we have gotten up to about 5.5 miles at a time. Any rucker can tell you that's not the shortest distance to ruck... but it's not the longest distance either. We're dealing with a 39-year-old man who has been out of the Army for 10 years now and has the body composition of a powerlifter... and a former Green Beret in his late 60s who has been out of the Army for decades now and has had a TBI since then.
So we're both building back up. I have the muscle mass but need the cardio, and he is working through chronic joint issues.
We both remember a time when we could roll out of bed, throw on twice that much weight, and ruck that and just pay the price on our bodies for the next 24 hours and move on.
But now? Now we can still do it, but we have to think smarter.
On our collective rucks, each time we get done, I come away with things I need to improve on for next time. I have now cycled between about three different ruck sacks, a couple of different types of plates, tweaked how things sit on my back, and even invested in better socks, longer compression shorts, and roll-on anti-chafing ointment. There's actually quite a few more things that I have really honed in on, but the point is that every single time I come away with something I noticed I could have done better, or something I could have done to prevent pain for the rest of the day afterwards as I lay on my couch with a glass of wine and a bottle of Ibuprofen on standby.
And as I catalog these things, I act on them immediately. I go look up how to change what I'm doing and fix it, so that I'm not in that situation again.
My point with all of that is to say that once we are locked into each ruck, we're locked in the entire time until we're done. We can't change most things about how we're doing it until next time. So I find solutions as quickly as I can before next time, and as long as I have the resources to acquire them, I prioritize doing so. In the moment, I have to suck it up and deal with it. But that doesn't mean I have to suck it up and deal with it AGAIN.
Who wants to keep making the same mistakes over and over again?
So... where am I going with this? Well, I'll probably continue writing about my thoughts on rucking AND my thoughts WHILE rucking, and as you've probably guessed, I find that almost all of it has a broader application to our lives in general.
The "Too Long Didn't Read/TLDR" version of this all is that there are things we can take away from rucking that apply to our lives:
1) Set yourself up for success. Try to go into things as prepared as you can be, but accept that you can't plan for it all until boots hit the ground.
2) Stop setting your expectations on what you used to be able to do, or what others can do. Sergeant Fuckface might not need insoles or extra padding on his rucksack, but with my traps, I do.
3) You don't have to just "suck it up" and do it the wrong way over and over again simply because it's what you know, and it kinda works. You can improve and tweak as you go... and you SHOULD.
4) Are there going to be times/eras/patches of life where you have to do it a certain way just to make it through? Yes. But it doesn't mean you have to KEEP on doing it that way.
5) Make things make sense for YOU.
These have been the ramblings of a sweaty, muscled madman, and if you made it this far... I'll see you next time, when we talk about something else I've learned from walking with iron in my backpack, and stubbornness in my veins.
--Coach Cap
Perfect, the concept of rucking was new to me. But I have been doing it without knowing. Whenever I do hikes/tour with other people that are on a lower level (in a physical/sport sense), I intentionally carry more camera gear with me. Even when I know the conditions probably won’t be right to actually use it. Just to make it harder for myself and even out the differences in fitness levels.
Very good read!