Fit 360: GORUCK Battle of Baghdad Tough CHS + Starting Something Special

TRAINING LEAD-UP

Tuesday, Apr 30:

Now that I had gotten past GORUCK Reunions, I could focus on finishing up Lucky 7's, with the Day 7 workout.

Ruck 1 mi in 18:52

10 x

10 Dead Lifts
10 Walking Lunges
10 Ruck Pushups

Not bad... not hard, not easy. 45 min, including the rucking part. The lunges ended up making me sore for the next couple of days, since I'm weak on lunging.

Wednesday, May 1:

I had a mini work trip down to SC. On my way back to NC, I stopped to get a geocache, and it turns out that it was on a little trail (a part of the Overmountain Victory Trail). The park had an early closing time, so I had to hoof it to make the most of the time that I had. I found the cache relatively quickly, and pretty much shuffled the whole ruck.

2.0 in 35:47, 17:45 pace, even with whatever time I spent looking for and logging the cache. Plus, this was on a trail, which makes things slower.

Thursday, May 2:

Rucked a mile and worked on mobility, with a lot of the kinds of stretches that I normally do a couple of times a week as part of my stretching and foam rolling routine.

After work on Friday, I drove to CHS. I got to meet up with 2 of my college roommates the next morning. They have cute kids. One of the kids is my BFF now.

BATTLE OF BAGHDAD TOUGH

I went back home and napped a bit, before the 10pm Tough. When I got to Waterfront Park, public restrooms were closed. I had to find some stealthier alternatives.

This was an HTL weekend. I like it when Toughs start on Saturday night, since you don't have to go straight into the event from work, and you get to go in a bit more rested. I knew that one of my rucking buddies was doing the Tough, but I didn't realize until the night before that she was going for her second HTL, when I was watching some live feeds on Facebook. Amazing.

There weren't a ton of people at the start. 30 said they were going on facebook, and as usual, about half of them actually go to the event. We were 16 strong. The Cadres were DS and Belman. This would be my first time with Belman, and my fourth time with DS. I had heard of Belman, so I was excited to see what he would be like. And I know DS, and how he goes the extra mile to make his events memorable.

We started with a gear check shakedown. Put under stress, gotta hurry up, do this, do that. Next, we had to bear crawl to the spray fountain, low crawl through it, and go back. Well, when we got back, we found the flag was on the ground. OH NO. If there's one thing you never want to do in a GORUCK event, it's to let the flag touch the ground. In previous classes, we've had to do some serious PT, for far smaller infractions than that. I think my heart dropped when I saw it, and then the Cadre saw it before we could get it back up, and then the mood quickly shifted. It became serious. I thought we might be doing a full smoke session for the next few hours, before a welcome party even started, and before we even walked a single block. I was afraid for what that would do to the 3 HTLers who had made it back for the Tough.

Fortunately, the Cadres used it as a learning opportunity for us, and we got a reduced sentence of 50 burpees instead of 500. After that, we learned our lesson, and got ready for our first movement. I got picked by the first TL (who was a guy from the Heavy, I think) to be the next TL. We went to the Customs house, where we did reverse bear crawls. Belman asked me how long I thought the team needed to make it up the steps. I didn't want to sandbag it, in case that would make him give us an even tighter timeline, so I picked 3:40, which seemed doable. The team quickly suggested 5 minutes, instead, and Belman gave us 4 minutes. I had failed to consider that some people were already pretty tired from the Heavy already.

We made it up, and then DS gave a first history lesson about the establishment of Baghdad in 746, while me and a navigator got instructions about our next destination. We made our way 2.2 miles north, just past the bridge. We didn't really have any coupons... just a jug of unpotable water that someone thought was a good idea to bring, a bag of empty sandbags and rope, the team weight, and a flag. It's actually easier to be TL at the beginning of the night than at the end of the event, so I didn't mind it. I just had to keep everyone moving at a brisk pace, make sure we had road guards when needed, make sure that we stayed in close contact with one another, and that we were swapping coupons.

We made it with about a minute to spare, just under our 45 min time hack. Our destination was a lot with piles of gravel and sand. I wonder how the Cadre found this. We heard the story about Jessica Lynch and those who died that day who you don't hear about. We honored Lori Piestewa, who had gone down fighting. We filled a bunch of sandbags (1 x 40, 5-6 x 60, 4-5 x 80), in memory of what the soldiers had to dig up at the soccer field in Iraq. For Lori, we connected the sandbags with carabiners and did a grueling workout of 15 sets of 5 dead lifts, 1 lunge, and 7 overhead presses. Since I was still TL, I was calling out the cadence. Even 1 set was really hard. It was also challenging to disperse people across the sandbags of various sizes effectively. Nobody was excited to do the 80lb sandbags, and you only had so many people for the sandbags. The team did awesome, though, and pushed through the challenge.

Unfortunately, we ended up losing one of the HTL candidates after that. We switched TLs, and we started our next movement with the sandbags to Hampton Park, with Belman. At the park, he told us about how Iraq became what it is today. Then, we did the Rooney WOD, split among teams of three (so we each did 1/3 of the reps of the Rooney WOD).

There were no restrooms open, but we made a stop, and just as we were heading out again, with our next TL, it started pouring down rain. I didn't bring a rain jacket or wind breaker, since I had thought that the chances of rain were small enough that I'd be alright. It was pouring, though. I had no visor, either, since I thought it would be cloudy during the day. The rain kept going into my eyes. Makes me appreciate my visor, more. There was so much rain that you couldn't see very far in front of you. There was also some lightning, which added some excitement, but nothing close enough to be considered dangerous. We walked to Stony Field stadium, where we did some PT while the Cadres switched off.

DS took us to Riverdogs Stadium. He makes a special effort to show the class cool things about the city, that even people who live there may not realize are there. We shared stories about Bill Murray, who is one of the owners of the team. Then, we carried the coupons (with an extra stretcher, now) to Brittlebank Park, where we went on the dock for a while to enjoy the special view before resuming the tough ruck. There were a lot of heavy sandbags.

Next, we went to a park by Colonial Lake. We had to do a certain number of pullups collectively, and then do a variation of bounding. Instead of going down and pretending to shoot while lying prone, though, we had to do kettlebell swings, to mimic mortar shots. That was pretty cool, and a fun variation of an evolution that I've done in the past with other Cadres. We pushed our way to the lake with all of the coupons and the bounding, to honor the Battle for Mosul Dam.

At the lake, we learned a bit of first aid, with a lesson on how to apply a tourniquet. There was also a quiz about the Battle of Baghdad, and for each set of questions we got right, we earned the ability to drop one of the sandbags. We still had about half of them, but it was much better than before.

We went down to Battery Park next. We got a short breather, before we were told to go down to a tiny strip of beach that appears at the edge of the battery during low tide. I thought for sure that we'd be doing surf PT, since we had mostly gotten dry already after the rain. That would've been the easy thing to assign. Instead, though, DS gave us an awesome lesson in self-defense, and we got to practice with partners. He is a natural at teaching this kind of thing... it was amazing. It was one of the coolest things that I've gotten to do during a Tough.

We found out that Belman had made a post about the flag incident on the GORUCK Tough Facebook group, and by the morning, there were over 350 comments on that post. Lots of jokes about us being dead meat, and about how we were still probably doing PT for it at that time.

Next, we learned how to make a stretcher out of webbing, and how to make a backpack carry harness to piggy back a person. I got to be a casualty, of course. But the Cadre made them carry a bigger guy on the stretcher, to make up for me being an easier carry. On our way back to the start point, we got a little sloppy in our formation and had breaks in contact, so back at the start point, we had to pay with 1 ruck curl per second of broken contact, which meant 60. Then, patches.

After the event, I enjoyed the views for a little bit, swapped GORUCK Mystery Tees with my ruck buddy, and then rucked another mile to meet my dad for a ride back home.