NJFBOA - Home of New Jersey's Camaros and Firebirds

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jersey Mike (Post 784037)

Doesn't sound fun at all; I puked before finishing your OP :rofl:

J/K Nick, congrats on staying in shape & constantly pushing yourself. One of these days I'm gonna do a TM with you--not this psycho **** though, maybe one of the "milder" ones :lol:

Thanks, I'll be doing every PA and NJ TM until I die I think :lol:. This makes TM look like a 5k

Quote:

Originally Posted by 88WS-6 (Post 784040)

That's awesome. Congrats. I really wanted to do this but I knew I wasn't in shape enough. Hopefully next year...

I would suggest starting off by doing a Tough Mudder with a weighted bag. Do ruck runs and train for running and endurance strength. Not size. No heroes.

Below is what I sent to my coworkers who asked about it. I went a little more in depth.

Quote:

First off, I’m still alive. I know some of you were worried about that J

One of the cadres had to rush off to attend some business so my 8pm class almost didn’t start until 10pm which would’ve put us at finishing around 10 pm since most classes were running about 12 hours in length this weekend. Due to many people, including myself, asking if we could combine the 6pm and 8pm start times and start earlier, we were able to start around 8pm with a group of 38 of us. The remainder of the people went with the midnight start time. We formed 2 lines of 19 and would remain in this formation.

Any extra space in the rucksack was filled with bricks. For those with the bigger version of the bags, this meant that you’d be carrying about 80 lbs (these big bags are referred to as ‘party rucks’ or ‘bitch bags’). For the first 45 minutes we were able to use both shoulder straps and things were going pretty well. Then we lost the privilege to use the shoulder straps and had to bear hug our bags or use the top handle. This made doing pushups with feet on benches in various locations very interesting, as we had to help each other put the bags on our legs. We ran across the Brooklyn bridge like this after making several large circles near the WTC building (that’s a really long bridge!). We continued through the area to the East River, and interrupted some couple’s late night beach session by walking down and doing flutter kicks with linked arms. We got one backpack strap back for this activity, which made the pushups in 2 feet deep water a lot easier too.

From there, we ran around Brooklyn from more (I should say here that this includes stopping at all red lights for a “red light challenge” that would include a few minutes of PT – lunges, overhead bag lifts, squats, etc) and picked up a log like 10% of the way back across the bridge that was left by an earlier class. It was about 20 feet long and weighed probably 1700-2000 lbs, as it was at least 1.5 feet wide. There was a smaller 5 foot log that weighed probably weighed 300ish lbs, but had only 3 feet of weight, the front 2 feet were split and weighed next to nothing making this sucker very awkward to carry. One person took the brunt of the weight while the other took 30% of the weight and guided it along. Keep in mind we still only had one shoulder strap at this time as the cadre let us keep it after the water activities.

People carrying the logs gave up their rucksacks so everyone was carrying two bags with a couple of triple baggers (I was one of these lucky ones after about 5 turns on the big log and 4 turns on the small one). At one point I was carrying two normal bags plus the bitch bag. This hurt. Shortly after we got back off the Brooklyn bridge into the rest of the city I switched and carried the small log most of the way to Chinatown. About 80% of the way there, my arms and shoulders began to give out and I couldn’t pick it back up off of a red light. I switched and was carrying two bags (we had lost shoulder straps at some point because at a red light someone let the bag touch the ground – a cardinal sin) by the grab handles. One was the bitch. By the time we met up with the midnight class to give them the logs my arms were jello. I got stuck with the bitch but we got both shoulder straps back. This was akin to saying we won the lottery. I will never take shoulder straps for granted ever again, it was so much easier. We rucked our way to the stock exchange and did more pushups on the benches there, and at some park we did a Goruck first – a big pushup circle. Everyone had someone’s feet on their shoulders so only hands were on the ground. We had to do five straight through synchronized pushups – all at once up and down. Good luck getting 38 people to do it at the same time at probably 4, or 8 hours into this challenge. From here for the next 2 hours we had seven “casualties”, aka the cadre saying we had to do firemen carries for seven people. Again we had to trade off 14 rucksacks to the rest of the group (7 carriers, 7 casualties). We originally had 6 but after like 15 minutes we took too long to get going off of a red light so he added one more.

Keep in mind we’re constantly doing Indian runs with the exception of the 4-5 hours we were carrying the logs (yes, we did them with the casualties). For those of you that don’t know what that is, every time the cadre would yell “Go” we would yell “ruck” and the last two people would run up to the front of the line while keeping the same pace as their partner during the passing procedure. If there was more than a meter gap between the two runners, we would all be punished with more PT or shoulder strap privilege loss. This gap was not allowed at any time from start to finish, and applied to the main lines as well.

The team extra weights (or coupons as they are referred to) were a few bronze flags that weighed 10 lbs each and a fire hose that weighed 25 lbs, as well as a few other firemen tools I didn’t recognize that were taken as mementos, this challenge being in NYC on 9/11. These would constantly be traded off.

I had the privilege of meeting the only blind Green Beret. He lost his eyesight, had both knees rebuilt, and numerous other medical problems as a result of an IED in Iraq back in 2006. He runs 50 mile marathons with his Sergeant friend and does an 8 minute mile, and he’s probably 35-40 years old. He carried the fire hose and a couple other coupons with his friend while we had the logs. He was constantly joking, smiling, and singing things like “Party ruck is in the house tonight” or random other customized lines from songs. This man will forever be my hero. He never mentioned his problems and we only thought he was blind until after the challenge when his friend told us the whole story while this mystery man went to the bathroom in HQ (they rented a small warehouse above a storage at 385 Broadway).

We finished up the challenge around 7:30 am by walking the last 5 blocks to the Trinity Church near the WTC for their mini-memorials inside doing firemen carries. 50% carried, 50% were carried. This is Goruck tradition. It was an absolutely amazing experience from start to finish, both mentally and physically. I will forever remember the people of class 062.

We had a videographer along for our class along with a few people taking pictures. I can’t wait to see them all. Since I didn’t have my bag most of the time, I only drank 1/3 of my bladder and only had 4 gel energy shots. I had my own bag for the first two hours or so, and the last two hours or so (we stopped at 5:40 am at Mcdonalds because a few of the girls needed to go bathroom – we just ran block for guys, and this was our second bathroom break – the only times we knew what time it actually was).

http://goruckchallenge.com