PRE-EVENT
In the days leading up to Bragg, I was less confident than usual about my ability to finish. Training-wise, I felt fully prepared. But there were some physiological factors beyond my control that were going to make this more challenging.
When various rucking-related Facebook communities asked who was going, I avoided commenting for a long time, because I wasn’t totally sure if I would make it, and it would feel bad to post that I was going and then not make it. Why did I feel this way? For one thing, I had rolled my ankle on a trail the weekend before Bragg, and it stayed tender, even for a couple of days after Bragg. It was stable enough to still use, but it wasn’t 100%. Another matter had to do with the timing of the event, and various physiological factors that would make the event more troublesome overall, but it could also impact my ability to stay properly fueled during the event. I eventually decided that whatever happens, happens, and posted anyways. I guess if anything, it gave me extra incentive to go out and do my best no matter what.
Preparing gear was different for this Heavy. It felt so easy packing for this, compared to packing for an HTL, because you only had one event, and no intermissions to worry about! My packing list is about the same as it is for the Tough, but I added extra food, and I added hand warmers in case I got really cold. To help with my ankle stability, I applied some KT tape the morning of the event.
For clothing, I went with my trusty Salomon XR Missions, which I’ve worn for each of my 50 mile Star Courses and HTLs, with knee-length Darn Tough wool socks. I continued to use Simple Pants since they’re lighter than BDUs, with Smartwool baselayer leggings. On top, I had a Smartwool base layer, with an Under Armour full-zip hoodie mid-layer, with a Challenge Windbreaker outer layer. The full-zip part of the hoodie was important, since it allowed for more ventilation in case I got too hot. I had two neck gaiters for extra warmth, plus a full-panel tac hat (vs. the mesh tac hat that I’d use for warmer events). I brought my rubber-palm gloves, which offer protection from wet grass and rough coupons while being overall lightweight and stuffable enough in the shallow pockets of the Simple Pants. On my ruck, I used my "FOR YOU I WILL NOT QUIT" patch, and on my tac hat, I used my PATHFINDER roster patch.
I carpooled for the trip to Bragg with my buddy SBass. As we made our way out East, we discovered that our class of 84 would be run by a whole host of Cadres (Dan, Chuy, Bo, Bill, LDB, Nate, and Rich) with photographers and shadows supporting. We were going to be on their home turf, at their mercy for the upcoming 24 hours.
We decided to go to the house that one of our teammates was kindly sharing with us, first, to settle in. We got there with time to spare (since you don’t want to leave a lot to chance right before a Heavy), so we decided to take a quick nap before going to the start point. I am an avid napper, and I try to catch sleep when I can. Any little bit helps before a Heavy or HTL. I don’t think I actually fell asleep, but it was good to even lay down and quiet my body. When my tummy grumbled during the nap, it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was already about 3pm. Normally, I get hungry every few hours.
Our other friends arrived at the house, and it was a happy reunion. It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that it was November, and we were doing the Hard Hitter HTL together. One was somewhat of a local, and gave us some intel about the area to help us get our bearings. Next, we went to Chick-fil-A to get a hearty meal before the event. I was going to just stick with my almond butter sandwich, but then the thought of meat was appealing, so I got some chicken tenders.
We arrived at the start point, a Special Forces Association gathering area. We parked in the field, and there was a kitchen building, but the eating area was a covered picnic area. Most importantly, there were real restrooms that were open. We ate, and started meeting and catching up with people. A flagship event like Bragg draws in GRTs from all over the country, so it was cool to meet new people or people that I had only previously known through social media. There were many GRTs for whom Bragg-like events are pretty standard. For others, it would be their first experience with a Heavy. I stretched and drank my pre-workout. We prepped gear. I went to the restroom.
When it was time to start getting in formation, I wasn’t feeling that great, even just sitting still. I don’t know if it was the combination of chicken tenders and pre-workout, or if it was just some of the nausea that I had been fearing. I was genuinely wondering if I was about to be the first person to puke before a welcome party. I was otherwise perfectly fine. So if it did happen, no biggie and I’d keep rolling on, but it would’ve been embarrassing.
THE HEAVY
We lined up in a single row alphabetically to do gear checks, and then we got back into 4 ranks. Each of us received a strip of engineering cloth, to honor Jerome Gonzalez, who we lost at Bragg 2018. Cadre Dan made a decision on the spot that all of ours would stay unmarked through the event, just like Jerome's was.
Our first order of business was a run of unknown time and distance. We followed Cadre Nate as he took us through a powerline and through swampy trails. It felt very much like Spartan Race terrain, so I was quite in my element. We’d go for maybe half a mile, then pause long enough for the entire line of GRTs to all re-consolidate, before heading out again. At the far point, we all had to do a burpee in some deeper standing water before we started making our way back to base camp. It was a nice warmup.
When we got back, we did some admin, and broke out into groups that rotated among the Cadres for our Welcome Party. We started with LDB, who led us through picnic bench step-ups, and then pull-ups. Next, we went to Chuy, who led us through push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and monkey lovers. He makes sure that you follow proper form. It was cool that he joined in on some of the reps, too, leading by example. We penguin huddled for a while before moving on to Cadre Dan.
With Cadre Dan, we rucked fast out to the entrance of the driveway, where a pickup truck was waiting for us with coupons. The coupons were of various sizes, ranging from 10-60#. I don’t know if this was some kind of test, to see what people would pick, so I didn’t touch the 10#er, even though it would’ve been easiest. I was pretty far in the back of the pack, but I wasn’t last, and I figured that maybe someone further back could use the 10#er, anyways, so I took a 40#er. Everyone was going pretty hard. You were encouraged to not be last. I was going hard enough that my quads were burning, even though I was close to last. I wondered if I was going too hard since there were still maybe 22 hours left to go, but everyone was moving! When I made it back to the car and waited for others to finish, I started stretching as soon as I could.
The last station that my row went to was the Jerome WOD with Cadre Bo. It includes a Fireman Carry of the casualty to the other side of the field. Then, once the carrier runs back to the start, they carry two rucks to different milestones that lead back to the casualty. At each milestone, they drop for 10 burpees before continuing on. Once back at the casualty, the carrier drags the buddy to the nearest cone, before both can run back to the start. Then, you repeat, with the casualty becoming the new carrier. The Cadre was very firm about having the casualty be completely lifeless, offering no physical help to the carrier. If you didn’t follow that rule, you had to go dunk yourself in the pond, and several people got dunked. It was chilly, so you didn’t want to get dunked.
This station took the longest, so while we were doing our rotations, the other groups got extra doses of PT. We watched from a distance as they moved around the picnic tables and then started doing military presses with them, over and over again. I guess one good thing about the stations for newbies is that you know that each component has a very finite end, so if you’re really struggling, you know that you just have to make it until the end of that segment, before you got to move on to some other form of pain. At typical welcome parties, it’s unknown time, unknown pain, and you could be afraid that it would never end or let off.
The whole class of 84 reunited, and then we made our way to the far side of the compound where we picked up some logs. One of them was super long. A few were really short. There were dummy rifles for everyone who wasn’t on one of the logs. We went back to the field, where the rifle group went with Cadres Bill and LDB, and the logs went with the other cadres. One guy ended up overexerting himself and was taken to a hospital as a precautionary measure.
For rifle PT, we were jogging in place the whole time, while moving the rifle around. It’s only 10-15#, and you’re typically holding it with two hands, but when you have to hold it with outstretched arms, you feel every pound of that in your searing muscles. We held it out, held it up, held it at our chest and combinations of those three. We did one arm holds to the side, then the other side, and swapped between the two. We did some pushups, where the rifle had to stay on our hands so that they didn’t touch the ground. We probably did some flutter kicks with rifles in the air. Rifle PT was something that I had never done with a dummy rifle before, so I had been looking forward to this, and it didn’t disappoint!
After that, we went onto logs, and another row went onto rifles. We did maybe one exercise with logs before we switched to picnic tables for more Picnic PT… haha… that should be the standard name of it from now on. I was of limited help for my table because of height discrepancies, but I tried.
After the Cadres got tired of us doing log PT, it was time for us to get our first TL/ATL and prepare to move out. We got a variety of sandbags (9x80, 3x120, 4x60, 6x40, 2x20… total guesses), a brass knuckle team weight, our 50# spearhead pole carry team weight, 3 folded stretchers, 2 rucks, a hammer for the TL, 6 jerry cans full of water, and 4 flags. Our first TL liked to use cussing and anger as a way of motivating the team. Not my style, or something I really respond to, especially at the start when everyone’s still happy and optimistic and fresh, but everyone has their own style that they’re developing.
We walked along the wide grass on the sides of the road. One rule was that you’re not allowed to drop the coupons. The jerry cans got dropped a few times. One time, we had to split our group on either side of the road, and then roll in one direction, with arms outstretched, rolling the rucks as we rolled our bodies. That was new. We might’ve made about 20 turns or something. Some people lost water bladder mouthpieces or other items during that roll. Another time, we had to bear crawl to one of the event Shadows. I guess it was a third time where we had to crab walk. After all of those drops, a rule was implemented where we had to keep the jerry cans at or below our waist, which makes it much more difficult to carry.
The Cadres watched over our safety, and had our Shadow drive behind the formation. Even though we were on the side of the road, if anyone did come along in the middle of the night, there was no way that we’d be in danger.
I think we got a second set of TLs/ATLs on one of the movements. We started having to place our coupons in a specific arrangement of our choosing, which we’d have to replicate at all future stops. That was at the end of the crab walk, I think. People were encouraged to take a look at the sequence that the TL/ATL selected after they were done. I looked at one end of it and tried to remember it as much as I could, but there wasn’t a lot of time, since I was towards the end of the crab walk.
We switched TLs again at some point. There was a guy who was doing his first challenge-style event. Brave of him to choose Bragg as his first! It definitely helps to have experience to lead the team, though, since you know how to delegate some duties to your ATL and go up and down the formation to make sure swaps are happening, and that gaps aren’t forming by keeping a consistent and manageable pace, and by making sure that everyone’s doing OK. It takes some stamina, too, since even though you may have no coupons or just a light coupon, you’re doing a lot of movement up and down the formation the whole time, and it takes mental energy and focus to stay aware of what’s happening, give direction to fix situations, and keep the team motivated. One experienced GRT was called upon to help as ATL, and he helped to get things moving. Then that ATL (and maybe TL) was fired, and I was swapped in as ATL, while we were still on-the-move.
I had been one of the ones carrying the jerry cans, and I had already been trying to get those dispersed more throughout the formation, so that it wasn’t jerry can people having to swap with other jerry can people over and over again. Once I became ATL, my first order of business was being able to do that more broadly. Cadre Bo soon told me that he was going to fire me. I thought I might’ve been doing something wrong, but he told me that things were going too smoothly, so that made me feel better. We were turning into our next stopping point before we knew it.
For the SOP of coupon arrangements, of course I had no idea what the full arrangement was, since I wasn’t one of the TLs who picked the arrangement, and I didn’t see the whole thing after it was made, so the best thing I could do was crowdsource it. I just told everyone that if they knew where something went, go ahead and put it there. If they didn’t, stick the coupon on the other side so that we could place it later. It worked out, and we only got 3 items wrong, and some of them were kind of picky. There’s always something that can technically be wrong, so 3 was pretty good. We did some burpees as a class as a punishment. The most important part is making sure that everyone stays together so that you don’t have to start over. Then, we switched to a new pair of TL/ATL.
For one segment of our movement, we had to go along a road with not much of a shoulder, so we had to stay single file. The Cadres asked us to go single file and do Indian runs to get fresh bodies in the back onto the coupons in the front. It seemed like something really difficult to execute. When it was my turn to run up, it took a long time to run up the column of 83 people carrying a bunch of heavy things. It was a while before I finally made my way up to the front and switched onto the team weight. I’m not sure whether any of the coupon carriers who weren’t near the front ever got relief, with the way the swaps were happening, and with the rate of new people coming to the front. I was glad that I wasn’t the TL at the time, because that formation and coupon swapping arrangement would’ve been really hard to execute.
We finally got to pause and reconfigure. The TL/ATL got to rally some extra help, which is critical with a formation that long. The TL was a local friend, so he recruited me and SBass and maybe someone else as support. As I was walking up, I kept thinking to myself, “please let SBass have a good idea on how to do this” repeatedly. And she did! SBass recommended getting 4 Squad leaders, based on lessons learned from Hard Hitter. She divided coupons into four even groups while I went straight to AT to recruit her as as our 4th leader and communicated the plan. People lined up into 4 groups behind the coupons, and we’d swap the coupons within our groups. Our team was the first in line, since we happened to have the team weight in our pile.
This worked better than what we had before. It was still challenging to keep the formation tight. It was still a lot of stuff to carry, but at least we could organize within our groups with a tighter focus of control. Between the squads, we communicated about holes and other ankle traps to avoid, and larger pace and manpower concerns.
At one point, one of my squad members tripped on a curb. I saw it happen. She messed up her knee. It was a tough decision for her. She wanted to finish really badly and to keep fighting. I admire that. We could’ve put her on a stretcher and carried her for a while, to see if her situation would change, but she made the right call and med dropped, because her situation was pretty rough. She was in good hands, though. There’s nobody better to have around than Cadre LDB for stuff like that.
We continued on. Our previous TL got another chance at being TL, I think, as the sun started rising again. Near the end of a greenway, we were met by Cadre Chuy and Cadre Bill. The sun was rising, and that’s one of the milestones I have in my mind for a Heavy. What I tell myself is that you get through the Robbie Miller WOD and then the Timed 12, and by then, you already have about 7 hours done, and then you can think of the rest as a long Tough. And during that Tough, when the sun starts rising, you know that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you just have to hang in there. Well, this event was going a bit differently, because we did the Jerome WOD instead of the Robbie Miller WOD, and we had not encountered the Timed 12 yet. But, the sun rising was still a good thing. Except Cadre Chuy’s greeting when he met us was to tell us that the first half was just a warmup, and the real hard stuff and testing was going to start now. And if we wanted to quit, now was the time to quit, because for everyone who was staying, we were about to get our sh*t pushed in. Oh, snap.
I think I had had a break from being Squad Leader in the previous movement, because I got re-picked as a squad leader when the TL got reinstated. I’m not sure how the previous arrangement with 4 squad leaders got stopped, since it was working well. But anyways, the gang was back! This was meant to help set the TL up for success.
We had to put our coupons down in the SOP arrangement again. I still didn’t know what the full thing was supposed to look like, so I tried crowd-sourcing again. It didn’t go quite as well this time, but the number of infractions was still pretty minimal. We had to do ruck squats. There were a lot of them, and they did burn, so I did feel bad about that. But that was about as good as the SOP was going to get.
We started moving again. One notable thing about this event was the lack of breaks. No stories, no breaks, no breaks via PT… just work. Lots of work. Even for bathroom breaks, a good chunk of that was happening on the move, which added a little bit of extra chaos sometimes with our formations and keeping the four squads at full accountability.
We made our way to a field with a shack. While the 5 of us did some planning, the rest of the class went on a run. We momentarily considered recommendations to use the stretchers, but we decided against it, knowing that it would require 4 people of matching heights to carry those, plus 4 empty-handed people ready to swap in for them, instead of having maybe 4 single-carry objects with no height pairing concerns, offering much more flexibility to swap and requiring fewer people overall.
During the run, the buddy system wasn’t used, so we had to do shuttle runs in 4 groups, where each group needed to go faster than the previous group. Our group was last. Fortunately, we had a pretty strong group, so as a whole, the class met its objective of having each group beat the previous group’s time. But it was also an “it pays to be a winner” event, so our group got to take care of priorities of work while the other three groups had what felt like a looong PT session. I’m not normally in the “it pays to be a winner” group, so it was nice to be able to rest, though I did feel bad for everyone else getting smoked. Based on past experience, I made sure that my squad took care of priorities of work during that break.
After the others got done and had 2 min to drink water and eat, we re-formed. Rahter than moving out like I expected, though, it was time for another round-robin among the cadres. My squad started with Cadre Bill, who led us through controlled PT where he taught us how to execute the movements with correct form so that we would avoid injury. He made sure that everything was done 100% correctly, and I was terrified of doing anything but that. We did stuff like pushups, cherry pickers, lunges, and maybe squats with rucks held up with the people to our left and right.
Next, we went to Cadre Nate, who had us do fireman carries, high crawls, and low crawls. Then, we went to Chuy, who had us do a few different carries (2-man, fireman) a few times, plus low crawls. The low crawls helped us appreciate what the soldiers in D-day had to do for a ridiculously longer distance. My heartrate was racing after going only maybe 10m, without a ruck.
We finished this session in the field with a talk by Cadre Nate, who shared his personal story. It’s such a privilege to get the opportunity to learn from him and the other Cadres through these events. They give everything. They put it all on the line over and over again for their country, our freedom, and the mates beside them. There were very few dry eyes after his talk. Cadre Chuy also made some remarks that I hope to not soon forget. God put us here on Earth for fellowship, and it’s opportunities like this where we get to do that. It’s the community that makes these events that we do meaningful. Figure out what you’re good at (gifts you’ve been given, the passions you have), hone it to its max, and then use it to bless others. You have those gifts for a reason, and that reason is to help others. Even really cool and meaningful opportunities (like serving in Special Operations) don’t last forever, but they can be a platform from which you go on to do great things and impact people in other ways.
JB became our new TL. We kept the 4 Squads. We continued on. People are more tired. You keep things moving as best as you can. You try to motivate your team to keep pushing. You gain a deep appreciation for teammates like Sweeting who are there time and time again when you need someone to step up and help save the day with a coupon, even though they’ve already been working nearly non-stop. Yori was also a gun, who had put in the training so that he could be a critical asset to the team. I know there were many other stellar performers on the team, too, but with the squad setup, I was most familiar with what was going on in my group. That was a different dynamic with this event. We were in groups most of the time, so I wasn't interacting with SBass and AT in the usual coupon trading way as much, but we were interacting as fellow Squad leaders. And then some people, I didn't get to see or work with as much as I wanted to.
As a Squad Leader, my primary role is supposed to be to direct the squad, but sometimes, the thing the squad needs most for a while is an extra body to take a heavier coupon for a while, so I had to navigate that dilemma sometimes. It’s harder to keep a tight formation when the event wears on and some people are naturally going to be more tired and slow than others.
Another thing that made this leg difficult was that the coupon split between the four squads got all mixed up. The idea had been that whatever you put down in the SOP, you pick back up when it's time to move again, so that we could keep everything the same. That did not happen this time, so swap groups that had jived together really well now found themselves with what felt like coupons that had multiplied.
Another thing that made this leg difficult was that the coupon split between the four squads got all mixed up. The idea had been that whatever you put down in the SOP, you pick back up when it's time to move again, so that we could keep everything the same. That did not happen this time, so swap groups that had jived together really well now found themselves with what felt like coupons that had multiplied.
I was on super light coupons most of the time, mostly for the purpose of freeing up hands for the squad to swap on the substantial coupons. In theory, the squads and coupons should’ve been pretty even, but it’s kind of human nature to see your own efforts, and downplay those of others, so there was some of that going on between the squads. It took some work to keep reminding people that everyone was struggling, across the squads, and that we needed to keep stepping up to help each other whenever we could. At one point, we had to swap out our empty jerry cans for full ones. That was not a good feeling, since we were already struggling with the coupons that we had, and now, we had more.
I wish that I could’ve carried some heavier stuff and been a squad leader, but even the light stuff (near-empty jerry cans, for example) was tiresome as it was to hold while managing the team. I think the other squads and squad leaders had it worse, though, and they carried heavy stuff while still leading their teams.
We arrived at a park, and we made our way on a long road into it. I could feel it coming… it seemed like a natural place for a Timed 12. We put our coupons down in SOP. I was asked to help arrange it again. I had picked up on a little more of it each time, but I still didn’t know the full thing, so I did crowd-sourcing for a third time. We probably got some more stuff wrong, but I’m not sure that we ever had to do anything for it this time, because it was time to get ready for the 12. We got a break where we got to refit. I ate and filled up on hydration. It’s different having to do a 12 this late in the event. It might’ve been 2-3pm by then. There were already many miles under our tired bodies, but that doesn’t matter, because the Timed 12 is all about standards. There’s the 3-3.5 hr time hack, and the distance is the distance. Each loop around the park would be about a mile. The rules are always at Cadre’s discretion, so they added a twist, where on each lap, in honor of Team Assessment, we had to do 10 sandbag cleans, with 80# for the men and 60# for the women. It was intimidating for one of the I’m guessing first-timers, so I tried to comfort her with ideas on how to mentally approach it so that it wasn’t as intimidating. I framed it as a 12 mile victory lap, since I was pretty sure that we were pretty close to the end of the 24 hours. Just do what you can, and keep moving forward.
The break actually did me more harm than good, because the arches of my feet got stiff. I started to feel like I’d be going very slow. AT, SBass, AW, and I set off together. We weren’t fast, but we were ready to tackle this. Yori was along for the ride, too. We did our loops, occasionally having to move to the sides of the 1-lane single-direction road for cars. At the squat clean place, there were separate areas for the men and the women. The womens’ sandgbags were monitored by LDB and sometimes Cadre Bo. They were in a circle.
The three of us kind of settled into specific spots along the circle. LDB remarked about how we always came in together, and that we all had our designated spots, like there was a natural order of things. We’re teammates, and we have our system down. We’d do our cleans, then move out again.
I do have strong suspicions about my sandbag, which I think might’ve been more like 40#. I did ask around with a few others after the event, but oddly, out of like 6 people I know of, we all happened to work at different sandbags, even though we weren’t all there together at the same time. I think most of the others were 60#, but I think I lucked out with a 40#, and there might’ve been one other 40#er in the circle. I struggle with cleaning 55#, which is why I think mine had been a 40#er. I'm even wondering to myself why I'm obsessing about the weight of the sandbag, but I think it's because it's my nemesis for TA right now.
When we came back around after our fourth loop, we saw that a crowd had gathered back in the formation area. It turned out that this would be a Cadre Discretion Timed 12. We waited for the others to finish their last loop, and then we formed up. We were told to leave our rucks, and we followed the Cadres out into whatever unknown was next. We went down a trail. We saw a sign about a river, so we had some suspicions that we were about to get wet. We ran by Nick Schrein and Rich who were standing above a muddy puddle. It turned out that they were capturing actions shots for the new 2nd gen MACV-1s.
We came to a halt. I was at the back, so I couldn’t tell what was going on at first, but we were going to low crawl through mud and water. People were stripping off gear and layers. I kept everything on, for protection against scrapes. I was in my baselayer top, since I had taken off my jackets for the Timed 12. People were coming out of the little course very muddy. I was glad to be at the back, because it meant that I was going to be cold and wet for a shorter amount of time. There were a lot of people to send through, so it took some time, but I finally went through, and we jogged back to the formation area.
Once there, I took off the muddy base layer, and put on my mid-layer. It felt really good to be dry, and it provided instant warmth. I had a zip-lock bag in my pack where I could stuff the base layer without getting everything else in my ruck muddy. We got to ditch all of the sandbags, and just carry 4 jerry cans among our four squads, plus the 4 flags. Seems nice and easy, right? But, Cadre LBD turned up the heat. We now had to keep pace with Cadre Nate. Those full jerry cans, plus our rucks and muddy bodies made for really hard work at what felt like 15 min/mi pace. Cadre Nate was just striding out a solid rucking pace, but I was shuffling to just keep up. Within our squads, we’d take turns carrying the jerry can for as long as we could before passing it on to someone else. The cans made their way to the back this way, but then someone would have to shuttle it back to the front. Fortunately, there were strong and brave souls who offered to do this. Like I said, even keeping up with just the rucking was a struggle, so kudos to whoever could beat that pace with a jerry can.
This was serious. Cadre LDB threatened that if there were breaks in formation, whoever was falling behind would get punished with PT, and then they’d still be made to catch back up afterwards. I had no desire to fall behind. We kept going. I thought that at some point, we’d get to wherever we were going, or the pace would go back to normal, but we kept pushing at that insane pace… on and on. Finally, we stopped and reconfigured. My squad went towards the back, to shift things around. This ruck was beating everyone up. Somehow, while I was in the back, the jerry cans never got back to me, because I kept anticipating it and wondering how we in the back were going to deal with shuttling them back up to the front. It meant that some hardcore GRTs ahead of us were carrying the burden for the team. Thank God for them.
This was getting brutal. The pace mellowed slightly, but it was still nearly everything I could do to keep up. Some people were struggling to the point where they had to get help carrying their rucks. I’d normally offer to help if I could, but I was in no shape to do that. Fortunately, others stepped up to help. There was another pause, and the TL asked for volunteers to go on the flag. Nobody responded for a while, and I figured that carrying a flag was better than carrying nothing, if I wasn’t able to help on the jerry cans or on the extra rucks, so I went up to get a flag. We continued on. It started sprinkling at some point. Finally the rain that we had been fearing had come, but it was actually a welcome thing by now. It was near the end of the event, and it would’ve helped to wash off some of the thick layers of mud that was caked on people.
There was a big road to cross, so we got another tiny pause there as we broke up into groups to make a safe crossing. But it was time to move again. At last, we turned onto a street that I suspected would lead us to the driveway that led to base camp. I was excited to see the American flag that Cadre Dan had planted to show us where to turn in with our cars when we had first arrived, 26-ish hours prior. The Cadres told us to keep going past the turnoff. I was disappointed that our misery wasn’t going to end as soon, but I figured that we’d just be taking a slightly roundabout way of going home. Fortunately, it was just a way of psyching us out, and we turned around and went into the driveway. We had been encouraged to sing earlier in the event during the daylight when we had needed a morale booster on the leg leading to the park where we did the Timed 12. We sang the Star Spangled Banner again as we made our way home. There were shadows and family members waiting there. We knew we were nearly there.
We formed up again. We were mentally preparing ourselves for some finishing PT, but instead, we got to help empty sandbags and put away the logs, and then it was time for patching. That ruck run had hands-down been the hardest part of the event. It was brutal. I had to dig deep and go into the “zone” (not the good kind of zone but a survival kind) to keep my body moving even when it doesn’t want to. Standing there at the end with my teammates, knowing that we had made it, was an awesome feeling. We took a team picture.
After the patching, everyone was eager to get out of their wet and muddy clothes, and get some food. I was very glad that I had changed tops, since I was cold even after changing. Once you stop, you can get pretty chilly. After dropping off my ruck, I picked up the shovel flags. We got into cleaner clothes. Half of our group went back to the house to get warm, but SBass and I decided to stay and get food while we were here. BBQ is maybe my favorite food, so I was glad. I was hungry, too. I realized really late in the event, some time during daylight Squad leading, that I hadn’t really had time to eat or drink. I remember feeling low on carbs twice during the event, but nothing critical. I normally don’t take in much during training, so I’m used to it. I am very glad that everything held together with my body, and that none of the issues that I had worried about at the beginning really became issues. My ankle was fine and I never noticed it, and I was able to get the nutrition that I needed.
At dinner, we got to talk to some of the Cadres who came around to our area. It was interesting to hear their take on the event, once they were no longer in Cadre mode. They put on a great event, challenging us, helping us grow, upholding the standard, and giving us enough stress to overcome to make the victory meaningful and sweet.
Back at the house, we brutalized it with all of our dirt. AW is a very gracious host. It was good to be clean and warm, and to enjoy more food while sharing stories and memories. We hung in there for as long as we could before calling it bedtime. SBass obliged me with waking up at zero dark thirty for a drive back home early enough for me to go to work the next day.
Another solid event with great teammates.
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