SWCC guys are cuddly.

So unless you’ve been living under a rock or just don’t pay too much attention to Facebook – something that I should probably aspire to do more myself – I am putting together a fundraiser for a 501c Non-Profit Organization known as Wounded Wear.  The organization is great, to say the very least.  They do a whole gamut of things.  For one, they offer a wicked-cool clothing line that spreads the awareness of wounded veterans.  I will admit, at one point in time, I pretty sure I paid these guys’ electric bill.  I love it – clothing that’s cool and acts as a constant reminder of the presence of our wounded among us, even for our most obtuse neighbors.    They also hand out completely-free clothing kits to our wounded vets.  So if you go to their website, there’s a place you can go and submit your information and Wounded Wear will send you a Wounded Wear bag full of goodies.  I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dan Jacobs, a local WW Rep in Jacksonville, and he broke out one of these kits and showed me everything that comes with it – blown away.  He told me each one costs about $250 to build.  It comes with assorted t-shirts, sweats, polos, a jacket, the WW duffel bag that it comes in, and a few other items.  Wounded Wear’s other primary mission is to provide, at no expense to the vet, civilian clothing and military uniform modifications.  Just as an example, if a Marine who has been wounded and has some sort of crazy apparatus nailed to his body or has a newly fitted prosthetic limb, and said Marine wants more than anything to be able to go to the Marine Corps ball with his wife, Wounded Wear steps in and hooks that Marine up and teams up with a tailor to make his dress blues from the ground up.   And trust me: the annual Marine Corps ball is important to us… very important.  I can continue to talk and write for days about how awesome this organization is but I shall spare you.  If you want to know more, please feel free to visit their website at www.woundedwear.org. 

Lt. Jason Redman -- Founder of Wounded Wear

As far as the fundraiser is concerned, I have been blown away by the contributions that have been made thus far.  For those of you who have contributed, I personally thank you.  I am looking forward to finding something to give back to those who have contributed.  If you have not yet and wish to do so, please visit my wepay.com site and donate there.  The fundraiser is going hand-in-hand with a self imposed challenge.  The challenge is to complete as many laps as possible in a two day period in at the Carolina Spartan Sprint.  It should be good.  For those of you who know what it is, I will be completing the Hurricane Heat as well.  Needless to say, I will be one tired puppy dog by the end but I can’t wait.  I have also opened the door to pledges.  If you wish to make your contribution size indicative of my output, email me and let me know who you are and how much you would like to pledge PER LAP completed.  I will annotate that info and get back to you once the event is done. 

  

 

 Well as most of you know, I am fresh out of my latest weekend event: The GORUCK Challenge in Raleigh, NC.   I must say that the event, as I expected, was the biggest gut-check that I have had to date.  It took place in downtown Raleigh and began roughly at 2200 on a Saturday evening.  There were 21 of us crazies formed up and fresh off of our “ruck-off” which, in essence, is a dinner gathering that we as a class have in order to get to know each other before we start on our journey.   It was roughly an hour before we started when we met our cadre, Patrick.  Patrick was pretty low-key as he handed out our “zero-liability” waivers for us to sign.  After that, and a quick introduction, we were off and on our way.

We started at a pretty hard pace with buddy carries around the neighborhood.  We weren’t sticking together as a team so Patrick put us into crab walks for a while and then bear-crawls.  A few laps around the general area and we began to jog.  We weren’t sticking together again so more crab-walks ensued.  I had, up to this point, realized that my brand new Mystery Ranch Crew Cab was not designed for this; of course, it would be asinine to think so.  The frame was applying constant pressure to my jugular and exponentially cutting off blood supply to my head.  In short, it was a perfect blood choke.  I remember seeing a small group of drunks lingering outside a bar and things just went black – I had passed out.  When I came too, I couldn’t see anything right away.  I saw those proverbial “stars” that one sees when you regain consciences and hearing everyone around me assuring that I was OK.  I was OK, but I was PISSED.  I don’t know why really.  Perhaps I regressed back to times when I was in the Marines and had came to after passing out – usually it was to the tune of gunfire and smoke but  at other times, it was to the tune of Marines giggling because of some sparing exercise that I just refused to tap out of.  Either way, I got back up and we moved forward.  I’m not going to lie, I felt a little emasculated.  And it’s ridiculous to really feel that way.  That little scenario could have happened to anyone.  I also had a wicked little headache that ensued but no worries; I had crammed a couple of aspirins in my pocket beforehand.   I took a couple with a swig of PowerAde in my camelback so I was OK after about an hour.   If there is one thing that I can state is my “Achilles heel,” it is headaches.  I regress back into being a whiny child with a shit-filled diaper, in a sense.

The evolutions seemed to repeat themselves for the next five or so hours: running, push-ups, crab-walks, bear-crawls, etc.  We were indeed all smoke-checked.   It doesn’t really matter how good in shape you are, if you ever do a GORUCK Challenge, you will get tired… fuck that… you will become exhausted.  That’s the point though.  You will ultimately have a chance to make that choice of whether to continue or not.  As I intermittently looked around at my classmates, it seemed that we were all on the same level.  Some were faring better than others, but overall, we all seemed to have that look of doubt about ourselves – doubt about our own abilities.  I felt a whole lot better after our first break.  It lasted about ten minutes and it was just to catch our breath and pull some fluids.   Keep in mind that one of the long-standing GRC traditions is that once you strap that ruck on, it does not touch the ground.  And God help you if it does.  It was after that break that we really started to act as a team.  And the second lesson sank in: no one challenger is stronger than all of the challengers.  Teamwork was severally reinforced.  So there was that.  And it was comforting.  To know that the guy to your left and right are going through the same shit as you and I inherently began to wonder if anyone was having serious thoughts of quitting.  Again, nothing but truth here: the thought had crossed my mind.  It was interesting, to say the least.  I’ve never considered quitting anything before.  It was a mental demon that I came to terms with and, in turn, began to care less about myself and more so about my newly acquired ruck buddies.  As we began to move again, I couldn’t help but digress back into negative land.  The fact is that we hadn’t even moved that far; perhaps a mile or so.  I knew that our evolution, in total, would equal out to over twenty miles of this stuff.  So I had to really compartmentalize my thoughts and, furthermore, stop worrying about the future and just work one step at a time.  Sound’s easier that it really was, I assure you.

For the next couple of hours, it was mostly running again but with a twist.  Indian Runs!  Now, for me, this is something that isn’t to foreign.  I did them all the time when I was on active duty for PT.  But therein lies the rub; not many folks there that night were former or active military.  Maybe twenty percent of us – and that’s stretching it.  No harm, though.  We did a few push-ups (a few means a hundred or more) fixed ourselves, and moved on.  The desire to be a team was there, it was just us getting the gears oiled up that which was taking some time.  We had all night to get that worked out!  After a couple/few hours of those shenanigans and gaining some real ground, we stopped for our second break and were given a task.   Patrick had built and briefed us on a mock TRAP mission.  For those of you who don’t know, TRAP stands for the Tactical Recover of Aircraft and Personnel.   It’s the type of mission that occurs in reaction to a friendly aircraft getting shot down in enemy territory.   There’s much more to it than that but, in essence, our mission was “to go to a specified location, recover any equipment, and egress to an extraction point.”   It took us about thirty minutes to get to the location.  Once there, we discovered that there was a manikin dummy playing the part of personnel and a log that acted as our equipment.  The log, just to put it into perspective, weighed about 900 pounds.  That’s a guess, of course.  You be the judge.

 We had to move it and the dummy for an untold amount of miles to the Exfil point.   The important part is, we were given four hours to do so.  We rolled in at about four hours and fifteen minutes.  Fail.  Sprints for everyone.  After the sprints, Patrick had us climb over twelve foot fence into a softball field, low crawl the length of it to the second fence, clime over it and egress back to our location.   Afterwards, Patrick lectured us about our inability to commit to a plan when it came to how the log would be carried and the system that we used to switch people out.  The lesson:  carrying the log was going to suck no matter what but what was really important is that we embraced the fact that it was going to suck, and just get the job done. 

After that, we carried the log for an additional hour or so – you’ll have to forgive me but details allude me at this point given that we were all so exhausted.    But it was at this point that the sun began to come up and with it, so did our morale.   We eventually ditched the log – I cannot confirm nor deny that we left it is some poor bloke’s yard.  Whatever… it makes a sweet lawn ornament.   Certainly beats some of the crap that yuppies put in their yards these days.   From there, we regressed back to our starting point.  Final stats: 12.5 hours, 21 miles.  The best part was that we started and finished with the same number of folks.  Up until this evolution, I was of the Darwinist mindset that if you want to be weak and quit, then do it.  But I remember that a few of our team mates needed to be talked off the ledge of quitting in the very early hours of the morning.  I was sincerely glad that they decided to stick it out.  I really, truly am.

I discovered that my journey for fitness needs to continue to progress.   I have always felt that I have been in the top ten percent of my peer group when it came to my fitness level but these guys (and gals) that I was with were champs and some made me look like a soup-sandwich in comparison.  All-in-all, I had a great time and I am looking forward to my next one.

So, as I have already stated, my next event is in just a few weeks.  A Spartan Sprint with a twist and, in conjunction, raising money for Wounded Wear.  It’s a great organization guys; seriously.  Just check them out.  I am looking forward to it.  I feel that this journey of mine has just stepped it up a notch, to say the least, and it feels good to be able to give back.  I’ve already thrown this offer out there on Facebook but haven’t gotten any hits back but if any of you guys want to provide support on the day of the event, I would greatly appreciate it.  As always guys, thanks for reading and following – all 400+ of you!