The other reason I signed up for this, besides the "on the horizon" thing is that I love pushing the limits of what my body can do. I love CrossFit, I love physical challenges, I love races, all that crap. But rarely do these thing push me to my complete mental and physical brink. If you don't ever go that far out to the edge, then what do you really know about yourself?
I love knowing these kinds of things.
I am going to attempt to treat this as a running diary despite the fact that I had no watch, phone, or access to a time at all.. I will use the phrase "a while later" a lot just to give a hint that some time went by. Whether it was 10 minutes or an hour is up to interpretation.
Friday 3/16/12
-Day time (approx 8:00AM - 10:30PM) - Plenty of R&R, lots of hydrating, watching of college basketball, etc. Ate a bunch of chicken, steak, veggies and rice for dinner.. Needed to be full of calories. I went to bed around 7PM with the intention of napping until 10:30 or so to get ready to head to the first meeting point, Cheers in Beacon Hill. We were supposed to arrive at 1AM.. But on our Facebook group, people had suggested coming in around 11:30 for some meet and greet time to situate ourselves. They also had the intention of getting in some beers, but I don't really drink much anymore, nor did I want to dehydrate at all, so this would just be an opportunity to put some faces to names.
-11 PM - Packed up my shit.. My packing list included: my 6 bricks required taped up with bubble wrap, headlamp, extra socks and a shirt, Camelbak bladder filled with water and coconut water, and for my "nutrition" I just packed a bunch of high calorie stuff like Larabars, protein bars, mini Almond Joys, and peanut butter M&Ms.. The name of the game with this food packing was obviously not paleo.. But when you do a challenge of this sort I have been told "you basically cannot eat enough calories to account for what you are doing".. So everything I packed was of high caloric density, easy to pack and easy to eat quickly.
I wore my inov-8's, compression socks, compression shorts (didn't want any sand getting all up in my nether-region), regular shorts, synthetic shirt, windbreaker, gloves, and a warm hat.
We left around 11:15 and got to the bar before midnight.
Saturday 3/17/12
Here's a few of us in the lobby, shooting the shit.. Nervously awaiting what was about to go down.
~Circa 12 Midnight. (PS any of these photos below of our group are credited to Leia Amarra or Steff Gentile, who were out volunteer photographers for the evening.. They are both fucking champs.)
The next half hour was mostly filled with nervous pees and a lot of jittering and running through my packing list another 1000 times in my head to make sure I did not forget stuff..
Around 1AM we were told to head outside and wait. Simple enough.
Here is me yawning.
The two guys to my left are my buddies Eric and Rick who signed up to do this with me. It was definitely better to do this sort of thing with friends, looking back, coming in alone would have been so much worse. We proceeded to sign our death waivers, and got our official rucks to pack up. Six seconds after packing everything up neatly, I put the pack on and realized: "Good god, this is the most uncomfortable fucking thing ever, I had LL Bean backpacks in 7th grade that were more comfortable than this".. I realize now the only reason we were told to use the official ones instead of our own packs is because these ones were fucking BOMB-proof material and were extremely durable. But the comfort was flat-out awful. My shoulders were in for a very, very long night.
We then lined up across the street from the bar in the Boston Common and had our bricks checked and got our "buddy" assigned for the duration of the challenge.. basically this was person you either had to carry or be carried by when the time came. I got paired with Eric, who has about 20 lbs on me.. Great.
The group of 60-ish was divided into 2 and we were assigned our "Cadre" for the evening, Devin.
Devin pulled us away from the other group, lined us up and gave us the quick rundown of his experience in special forces, the army and green berets, and how he had done 4 tours in Iraq. He is a certified badass.
We then went over some quick rules. The biggest 2 being that the rucks were never to touch the ground, and our group was to never split up or break formation. If you had to pee, you went with a partner, never alone. Seemed simple enough. (But I knew people would fuck it up once exhaustion and delirium set in.)
Our group demographic ran the gamut of ages, builds, genders, etc. I guess I would say the majority fit into the "mid-twenties, generally fit, clean cut dude", but there were younger girls, some soccer moms, and mid-forties guys as well. (Note: As a coach at Forever CrossFit, I have learned never, ever to take the "40-something moms" lightly, nor do I ever question their toughness or abilities. They surprise me pretty much every day. However, we realized early on, that although they were not necessarily the weak links mentally, they were in fact the lightest people, so they were going to be the ones we carried when called upon or the ones who gave up their rucksacks to a dude twice their size, and not the other way around.. This was just common sense to keep the team moving, not a judgment of their character.)
Next we delved into some of the finer points of Army style PT. The exercises included burpees (my fuckin favorite), push ups, flutterkicks, bear crawls, buddy carries, etc.. We did all of these for a long while.. At the time I was just thinking "this is stupid", but looking back I now realize the whole point of this was to give the cadre an idea of how hard he could push the collective group. I also did not realize how ridiculously awful bear crawls and burpees are in a Rucksack.. I have done weight-vest training before, and yes, it sucks.. but at the very least the weight stays in place on your chest during the suckitude.. the backpack fucking flops all around and ends up knocking you square in the dome A LOT.. Headache commenced in the midst of this.
Here is me buddy-carrying Eric's 200 lb ass.. I look pretty pumped about it.
One of the notable penalties we incurred during this hellscape of PT was the failed execution of the "caterpiller push up".. This is done by laying down in a line, with one person's knees/calves on the shoulders of the person behind them, with this pattern continuing. On the count of 3, everyone pushes and tries to hold the whole line up. Apparently the group got it once, but couldn't replicate it, so we had to do a reverse bear crawl for approximately forever. I was mostly OK with this stuff because we do it all the time at FCF, but some folks were STRUGGLING, and we were hardly 2 hours into the whole charade. Some rucksacks started being passed off to the stronger players at this point as needed.
This is me on the left in the midst of holding after I completed the caterpillar push up..
As you can see, others were not so successful which led to more PT.
(Side note: any time we were running together in 2 lines, whenever Devin said "Go", the people in the back had to "Indian run" sprint to the front.. This concept continued for the remainder of the challenge.. We tried to keep the team "weights" continually passed up to the front so that the indian runners never had to run with the weights.. a 25 lb chain and a large sandbag Devin picked out as a "coupon", as he lovingly called it..)
Here's me carrying the team weight chain.. very festive..
Next we learned the concept of the IMT. (Individual movement training). This is basically performed with groups of 4 running in unison for a brief moment, then dropping to the ground, holding for a second, and then repeating.. over and over until you get to the enemy. The idea is basically that when you are in the middle of an assault, have no cover, no shield, or otherwise, you basically need to run at the target even if they are shooting at you because "what the fuck other option do you have?" We did this IMT drill from about the middle of the common to Frog Pond. At this point we had our first change in leadership and got our first "mission".
Mid-IMT
My buddies Eric and Rick were selected as the Leader and the Navigator for this next portion so I was pretty comfortable knowing they were not total morons and would hopefully not get us lost or into more PT trouble. We left the Common and entered the city for the first time, jogging through Downtown Crossing and all the way to the seaport, right by the Children's Museum.. I am going to refer to this Map that I sketched out in Google as a reference to where we were at certain points of the night/morning. This part I described is from about Point B to Point C.
At Point C, we learned something awful. We did not have bridge privileges. In battle, if you navigate your group across a bridge, you are exposed and compromised, so we had to pay for this choice in route. (Obviously for some of what lay ahead, bridges are necessary, but this "bridge toll"went more into the category of "I am going to fuck with you now, deal with it").. We now had to bear crawl across any bridge we came to, not run. Many of the teammates were crumbling 50 feet into this, so I took on someone's pack behind me so they could finish and I was told I had to do walking lunges instead of crawl, because it was not really feasible to crawl with two on. I think this sucked just as badly, who really knows. The leadership switched at the museum to Brian and Kristina. They led us from the seaport to the North End, where we stopped at Paul Revere's statue. We got to chill, eat, and take a photo for a minute here.
Bear crawling the fucking bridge..
At Paul Revere Statue in the North End
We had to do a "silent PT challenge" here.. There are about 16 benches along the little alcove behind the statue looping around in a circle. We had to go in groups of 2 to each bench, do 2 elevated (feet on the bench) push-ups, then walking lunge to the next bench.. In 15 minutes. The group made it barely in time. No part of this was particularly challenging for me, just annoying.. lunging on pavement sucks..
It was at this point that I was more and more coming to the realization that this was going to be different than I had expected it to be. I sort of envisioned it like a 12 hour long CrossFit class run by a constantly screaming Drill Sargent, with the rest of the teammates being people in much better shape than me. But after we finished this exercise I realized we were 100% hand-strapped by the pace and strength of the slowest or weakest person, respectively. There was no room for showing off or being the hero, it would not help. The name of the game was just to get the least qualified person to the end through teamwork. I sort of changed my mentality at this point to a more team-oriented mode and was constantly looking out for other people who were struggling. I think a lot of others started to do the same implicitly.
The next bit is not terribly exciting, but we went from the North End up the Freedom Trail all the way across the Charlestown bridge to the USS Constitution. This time we were allowed to cross the bridge without bear crawling (...thank god), and instead we got the following stipulation: 4 people could carry as many rucks as they could, and the rest had to split into a "half carrying/half being carried" regime. Eric and I switched back and forth carrying each other about 3 times each and made it across eventually, it sucked, but was not impossible. Once we were across, we jogged to the shipyard and had a scheduled break for food, water, and piss.. Unfortunately, a lot of the team didn't get the concept of "break now" and sort of puttered around for a while and didn't "go" in a timely manner. We ended up wasting like 20 minutes of just "standing there", Devin got all pissed off and decided the next segment would suck complete ass. We made our way from the ship yard to the Bunker Hill Monument, almost entirely bear crawling, crab walking, or reverse lunging our way there (a lot worse than it sounds).. This took a long time even though Points E/G to F is pretty much the shortest part of the mapped route. We learned about proper army crawling procedures at the monument area, climbing up the steep hill on our bellies, faces clamped against the ground. Once everyone made it up the side of the hill once, we changed leadership. It was sunrise now.
Crawling up Bunker Hill Memorial...
I got selected to be the Navigator and Janice was the Team Leader for the next segment. I was pleased with this because of all of the areas we ran through, this next part is the part I travel most often as a Celtics season ticket holder, and was confident I would not get us lost and/or fucked. We traveled back across the bridge the way we came, moving back across in the same format of buddy-carries. With me and Janice running the show, we lowered our time across the bridge from 9:30 to 6:30.. 3 minutes knocked off the top just by organizing it well. KA-BOOM..
Running over the footbridge to the Charles by MGH
On our way in...
Almost there..
.. And it's official.. my balls are just for show now...
We then crossed the LongFellow Bridge into Kendall/MIT station area. We were now in "enemy territory". The new stipulations became that anytime we were within 50 meters any sort of local law enforcement or public servant, our group would have a "casualty".. meaning someone had to get carried for a while. We ran down Broadway St. for a while and saw no cops or anything which was great, so Devin decided in addition to the cops, anytime he saw an out-of-state license plate, we got a casualty as well.. (Ya this should go fuckin great, there are only about 8 billion Asians from California at MIT .. perfect..)
With this new rule, people started dropping like flies, and we had to carry people a whole bunch.. When we got to the end of certain blocks, they were "alive again" and we continued on our way. This was probably the longest single run of the entire thing. It took forever at the slowest person's pace.
Here's me eating probably a big mouthful of Almond Joy before we headed into Harvard...
***Side note from this portion: Going into this, two of my biggest concerns were being cold and dehydrating.. We only ended up swimming that one time and I dried fast so that was no biggie, but I drank a shit ton of the coconut water from my Camelbak throughout the first few hours and I think I reached a point of almost 'overhydrating'.. I had to piss like every six seconds so it felt like, and because the intensity of the run was so low (but long) I never really sweat.. I was just burning calories, not sweating out my hydration.. Really weird.. I will know the difference next time I do something like this.. or the Marathon maybe?
The next phase was a "reconnaissance" mission at Harvard Square. We were to loop through the main drag of Mass Ave and JFK store fronts and take mental notes of areas of interest: sniper nests, meeting points, security breaches, etc. etc... We reconvened at JFK park by Memorial Drive to talk about it. Everyone made a lot of really good points. This was from point J-ish to K on the map.
Getting Ready for Recon
On our way down JFK
...Debriefing
The next part was a little different as we basically abandoned the "military beatdown" portion of the PT and were more-so just trying to "cover mileage" so we could meet our deadline to get back into town eventually.. We changed up the leadership and Adrianna took command and selected me as the Nav since I was one of the only people who knew where the fuck we were going. We then went alllllll the way to Fenway Park as our next checkpoint.. Not a lot to report on this part, it was just an extremely long run along the Esplanade. Shoulders were killing me from the pack at this point. We were also carrying our "heavy sandbag coupon" in the poleless litter at this point, 4 people at a time. This was a gigantic pain in the ass for some reason. The thing was heavy and you could barely get into a real running pace with it, it was just a fast walk, if that.
On our way to the Esplanade
Poleless Litter (basically a military gurney)
Along the Charles..
We finally made it to Fenway and I could tell everyone thought that it might be the surprise ending because everyone picked up the run pace in the last quarter mile or so and was SCREAMING in cadence all the military chants Jesse was leading us through.. (think the "I don't know but I've been told..." type group sing-along-songs)..
We got there, and of course it was not over.. But I did get to do some HSPU against Fenway..
Final trek down Boylston St..
The last segment was pretty fucking trying, as most of the group could barely feel their legs or feet, we were running on complete fumes, no sleep, and the only thing getting us to the end was the thought of getting our patches, and a very large burger or pizza. We jogged all the way from Fenway down Boylston St. through the commercial district to the Boston Common where we finally met up with the other group of Ruckers and finished with the receipt of our patches. Finally.. I asked for the time.. it was a little past 12:30 PM..
Almost 12 hours, and over 15 miles later.. we were GoRuck Tough.
My main reflection of this whole experience basically mirrors what a great General once said: "The best teams are created through the right mix of humor and misery"..
This was pretty much exactly what this was.. A whole shit ton of hardship and challenging physical tasks, but mixed in with a lot of jokes, farting, and general sarcasm from me. Keeping it light-hearted as best as we could made the whole thing tolerable. If I can get through this, I am confident I can get through the Marathon next month.
Side notes from the rest of the weekend outside the realm of the GRC:
-When I got home I proceeded to eat 6 slices of pizza with spinach, ricotta and prosciutto, an XL Reese's Peanut Butter Egg (800 calories of deliciousness), and a protein shake (gotta be healthy, right?)..
-I passed right out for 2 hours, woke back up around 5, iced my knees and feet, took a triple dose of ibuprofen and watched some March Madness.. I could not even remotely bring myself to fire back some beers for St. Patrick's day.. I ended up going back to bed for good right around 8:30 until 8 the next day.. Sleep was amazing.
-Nutrition was obviously way off the FCF Paleo Challenge boat for the sake of this weekend, but I don't fucking care. This was worth it. Probably one of the hardest things I have ever been through.
-Sunday I got back to normal a little with the following as part of my extensive rest day:
Breakfast - Omelette with tomato and avocado, hash browns.
Lunch/Dinner - Irish Boiled Dinner.. Ham with veggies.. Irish Soda Bread with butter. (It was St. Patrick's Day, sue me, at least I didn't get drunk too...)
-I have no idea how my body is going to respond to this for Monday, I will probably not do anything with high intensity to make sure I fully heal up.. We shall see..
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