Sandlot Jax 2023

TRAINING LEAD-UP

Monday, April 17:

GORUCK T&T "225" WITH A 40#SB in 18:49, followed by 5.25 miles of night biking including 1+ miles on the trail in 37 min, to make sure my bike still worked, my headlamp still worked, my bike mounted light still worked.

Lessons from the Night Bike:

1. Head/helmet-mounted lights are a must, so that you can look around without having to point your handlebars in that direction.  That's helpful when you need to look for trails.

2. It was good to explore different roads, since all roads during adventure racing will be new to me.  If I repeated the same loop every time, I'd already know where all the speedbumps and obstacles are.  With new-to-me roads, I'm kept on my toes and have to be able to dodge whatever comes my way.

3. Obstacles come up on you much more quickly at night, since you can't see as far ahead.  Everything, for that matter, looks different at night.  It's good to practice at night.

 

Tuesday, April 18:

4.5 mile ruck in 1:37:51 with 50# in the Ruckerv3 wearing the Altra Torin Plush after dinner.

Thursday, April 20:

My home-grown "Trip" workout in 39:30, followed by the GORUCK T&T "Swole" KB workout in 12 min.

SANDLOT JAX 2023

Thursday: Travel Day

We had organized a "party bus" to make the trip down to Jax from CLT.  With 5 people and all of our gear for the long weekend, we used the top of the car for storage, too.  

Our initial install job ended up being upside-down and was making noise, but we pulled over at the next rest stop to re-do it.

Long drives are much better done with friends!

We got to our AirBNB in the San Marco area, which worked out well for us last year.  We went to dinner at a seafood place with large portions, and then stopped by Publix (which is really big down there) for groceries, mainly for breakfast and for drinking.

It was a very inopportune time for me to be on a "sober for 1 month" challenge from Goodwerks, where you ruck for raffle tickets for an opportunity to purchase one of the highly sought-after Boogie Bags, and also earn a bunch of extra tickets for going sober for a monht.  I missed out on the whiskey tasting, but the smells were still something I could experience.  

Friday: Day One

The festival started mid-day on Friday.  In the morning, GRHQ hosted a workout, though, and many GRTs from around the country and world were going to take every opportunity to do GORUCK stuff and get together at GRHQ, even at 6:30am in the morning.  SCARS had swapped places with the main office area, which was a bit disorienting until I confirmed what had happened.  SCARS needed the extra space, which makes sense.

Our friend Gabriel, who works at SCARS, led the workout.  We rucked to the beach with a bunch of sandbags, and then the workout began with a buy-in of 100 clean-and-tosses with a partner (a nice twist on workouts, which I typically do alone).  Allison and I partnered up, and we started with a 60#SB, but she felt bad for me and told me that she was afraid I would get rhabdo because I was fighting to do each rep, so we switched to the 40# not long into it.

Then, we did a workout with clean-and-presses and burpees.  It was an intense 20 min.

After cleaning up and eating breakfast at the AirBNB, we went downtown early, to knock out the Art Ruck.  GORUCK posts a series of on-your-own "Star Courses" that you can do.  For each Star Course, you get a hit list of waypoints to navigate to, in whichever sequence you want, but you want to use a logical route to not walk a million miles.  Take selfies at each spot as proof, and then you can go to the festival to get a patch for each Star Course that you complete. 

We went for the 5K-or-so "Art Ruck", because it was different than the standard 5K/10K/15K and more manageable than the Ale Trail, which is typically really long for some reason.  We had a whole weekend of activity ahead of us, so we wanted to keep it reasonable.  QR codes for the hit lists were posed ahead of time, so that you could knock them out after/before festival hours.

Inspired by a friend who loves to find painted murals on the sides of buildings, I've hosted "Street Art Rucks" for the ruck club before, so I was a fan of this idea growing.  There is so much cool art in cities everywhere.  SB navigated, and I took pictures.  We all had a good time.  

We didn't use Road Warrior, since there were many points, and it was easy enough to guesstimate an optimal route by eye.  It wasn't a crazy long course, anyways, so a little bit of extra distance wasn't going to matter, anyways.  I'm sure we went the optimal route, though.

(There was another event in the same area that day!)

We finished the ~4 mile ruck (that's what it took to get the points plus a little part of the way back) in 1:18:15.  We had some time before the Leaders' Meetup would start, so we found a little park with some shade where we could rest for a while.  A very cute blind dog visited us, and peed very close to SB.

At the Leader's Ruck, there was free beer, which I had to skip to stay sober.  There was a little bit of food, but not much, and nothing that I was interested in.  I wanted to leave room for the Hot Sauce contest, anyways.  I figured that if I was hungry enough, I'd eat anything.  It was my first time competing in a spicy food eating contest, and I researched tips on how to win, the night before.  This one article was really helpful and gave me a lot of confidence.  I already had a good bit of confidence, because I have an above average tolerance and love of spicy food, even among those who say that they like spicy food.  The competitor pool wouldn't be too big, either, I figured.  I did request the "vegan wing" option, which was deep fried cauliflower, though, because the wings had skin, and I do think I might gag with the idea of eating chicken skin.  

The hot sauce was expensive, so there wasn't enough available to pre-coat all of the "wings" in sauce.  Instead, we were given little cups of sauce to dip our wings into.  We went one at a time, and you could tap out at any time.  Maybe 1/4 or so of the ruck club leaders participated, and the others watched it go down.

There's an interesting variety.  Spice and burn can come in many different forms.  The 8th one was probably the hottest, and it actually got a little easier after that, but the 8th one did take several out of the competition.  

It doesn't hurt before you eat it, and while you're eating it, it doesn't hurt much, either.  It's only afterwards that it may burn, so all you have to do is eat it, and then the rest just works out however it works out... it's like bungee jumping, in my mind.  The easy part is jumping, because that part goes quickly and only requires a second of courage, and once you've jumped, you realize it's not that bad.  

Whoever got through all 10 hot sauces ended up getting the special gold-threaded Hot Sauce Ruck patch.  There was a good number of finishers, which I guess isn't too surprising, considering this is a group of people who love to do events where you get to suffer.

I had really wanted this, so I was glad to have been successful.  It was something different.  I wonder if part of it was that it gave me something to "compete in", since I wasn't doing GORUCK Games this year.  A mini contest of "grit".

It was time for the festival to open.  The leaders got an early tour of the grounds.  The SCARS tent got worked through quickly, for their one-off items.  I was lucky to get a couple of things, although not a Grenade.  

Another new activity for this year was Bingo... it encouraged attendees to visit different vendors and do different activities with them.  Before our first scheduled event, the first GORUCK Self-Responder module on TQs, SB and I knocked out a couple of bingo spots.

I squeezed in one lap of the Savage Urban Obstacle Course.  I did well on the obstacles, completing everything except the tire throw and the rig where you hold wooden dowels and try to stick them into swinging handle grooves to make your way across.  It took me a loooong time to get through, though, because physical exertion triggered blood flow patterns to my stomach that made the settling hot sauce cause a lot of pain.  I was keeled over after each obstacle, trying to let the pain subside enough to go for the next attempt.  The volunteers / staff of Savage probably didn't know what to think, haha.  I explained to them that I had competed in a hot sauce contest 1 hour prior.  SB stood by, offering support and wishing that I wasn't in such pain.  

Self-Responder was well-attended, and we even got to meet GM's new fam.

After the class, we went directly to the Tribe Reunion Light.  We did a little warmup workout, and then JC had us get into formation.  We got more sandbags from a truck.  We split into two groups, and we went with Fagan for some more PT.  We did a couple of laps around the field.  We made sandbags and rucks into a mountain.  We earned patches.  That took us into 7pm and about the end of day 1.

I did squeeze in my second lap on the speed side of the course and did the rogue challenge afterwards.  A bunch of Bakery people happened to congregate at the time that I was doing my 60#SB tosses, giving Allison another opportunity to laugh at me.

After this, we went out for Mexican food at a place called La Napolera, with perhaps the worst service ever.    It looked so promising - busy and nicely decorated, but the staff had no desire to be there whatsoever, and some really strange show was playing on TV.

All of that was only Day 1!  

Saturday: Day Two

SB and I had volunteered to be role players in a firearms-related evolution for the GORUCK Games.  They announced that week that they wanted us to meet at a location 30 min away for a morning brief before our actual shift, though, and that was hours before the shift, but not so early that there was enough time to go back to the festival in between the brief and our shift.

But we made the most of it by hanging out after the brief to spectate part of the Games, which were otherwise out of view for most people.  They had almost every evolution off-site this year, and would only be bringing the athletes to the festival on the last day.  We got the brief, and then we watched the "Sandbag Suckfest", where the athletes had to ruck with increasingly heavy sandbags in little laps.  Even among these world-class athletes, there was still a surprising amount of spread in performance.  They were all beasts, though.  Strong bodies and minds.

We left after that evolution ended, before they did the "Secret Service Snatch Test" - a 10 min AMRAP of snatches with 53/35#, and went to pick up food for ourselves and for the cadres on our way to the evolution where we were volunteering.

A really cool thing about the Games this year was that there was a firearms element.  The participants got a crash course in how to use a firearm safely, and how to apply a TQ.  Many had no prior experience.

Then, there were two evolutions where their skills would be tested - a live fire scenario where they did 3 rounds of shooting at plate racks of 6 targets from 10m away, and then carrying a sandbag of weight based on the number of misses (0-120#).  

The other scenario involved simmunitions.  The role players acted out a scenario that involved an active shooter, and the competitor had to respond to the threat, and then treat the wounded with the TQ within a certain amount of time, and then do a heavy sled drag to mimic a casualty carry.  It started raining at the very end.

We got to eat lasagna and salad with the athletes afterwards.

Sunday: Day Three

We got to go back to the festival for the last day.  I hit up the SCARS tent again in the morning, and then did the 100#SB mile, and then ran straight into Light & Fight, a couple minutes late.  This was the first time a Light was blended with a Fight class.  We started with more team-building stuff, where we formed teams of 4 with 2 sandbags per team.  We did a lap around the field with our SBs hand-carried, and then we went up the A-frame and slip wall, with our sandbags, which was a neat challenge.  Tough, but doable.

Next, we rucked a short distance over to the gator statue and did the "FIGHT" portion of the class.  We practiced disarming techniques.  

I tried to participate in the Tiki Tales ruck club leader interviews and drinks, but each interview took a while, so I never got a turn.  They cut it off right in front of me, actually.  At least I got to meet some new people while waiting in line.

Finally, it was time for the GORUCK Games Finals for the top 8.  I squeezed in my last couple of requirements for BINGO as the final evolutions got underway, taking a picture with a 1st Phorm drink and taking a picture with a buddy doing a rogue challenge, thanks to Brandon for being willing to repeat the assault bike.

The first challenge consisted of doing a 2 min SKB hold, potentially followed by a 2 min sand ball hold, potentially followed by a SB zercher hold, depending on whether or not you and your single-elimination opponent gave up within a certain period of time.  

The top 4 then did several rounds of grappling, with a twist where an inert plastic pistol or rubber knife could get thrown into the ring and give whoever grabs it and properly fake-employs it a critical advantage and win.  You had to be situationally aware about whether weapons came into play during the round, on top of keeping an eye on your opponent.

The final evolution took the top two in a race to carry a all the coupons at the event, it seemed.  The more you carried at a given time, the fewer trips you had to make.  One athlete was Carly Wopat, an Olympic team volleyball player, and she did the most boss move ever when she carried three sand balls at once.  Just one is hard.  Two is a real challenge.  Three is unheard of.  She could have coasted to victory, too, but she pushed hard the whole way.

Like last year, they had some good discounts on used gear after the last event, and Brandon helped me find a 60# sand medball.  

We went to dinner at a really great restaurant called 1937.  It had a menu where multiple items looked really good, and it was difficult to decide what to get.  I ended up going with a beet salad and fried gator, because when in Florida... both were fantastic.  

People wanted to go out afterwards, so I tagged along, but did my own thing.

Monday: Travel Home

What an awesome weekend with the crew!

A different kind of experience this year, but definitely unique as well, and a lot of fun.