I’m sitting here in the airport wondering what the hell that dirty laundry smell is and it turns out that it’s me. Rather, my post-challenge clothes and ruck. Maybe I should’ve used my time wisely last night and did some laundry instead of drinking some beers (nah…I still think it was the correct decision).

This weekend started out with some sweet, sweet War Stories and Free Beer. If you ever have a chance to attend one of those then I’d highly suggest it. It’s a cool event, you also get to meet cool GORUCK celebrities you see online from around the country. Also, the beer and patch are pretty cool, too. Drunk Bee did not show up so he did not buy more bags.

As for the main event, it was great. It started at 21:00 and I regretted not bringing a windbreaker because it was windy as hell. That was probably the only poor decision I made at the event (other than signing up and showing up). So we show up at the start point around 2o:00 and I met a local GRT, Peter, who hooked me up with some taped bricks. I set up my stuff and then, like most events, either from nervousness or over-hydrating I proceeded to hit the restroom 3 times in 15 minutes.

There was a lot of background information given at the start of the Challenge and then we proceeded to run and I immediately regretted

1) signing up for this Challenge (all Challenges, really)
2) not running enough
3) not using my rower ever

But that’s OK. I’ve done a Light before and there’s no way we’d be running all night, right? Hint: I am not psychic. So standard summary: PT, water activities, running up and down hills, carrying all the things and how come nobody told me that San Francisco was this hilly? I wasn’t in danger of quitting but man I gotta do some cardio. Everywhere we went I kept thinking “if we get up this hill and there’s another hill behind it I swear I’m going to quit…I mean, bitch and moan about it and keep going.” So that happened. A lot. Like, every time we got a new target, I’d never know where it was but I could predict with a fair amount of accuracy that there were going to be some hills involved. We hit up a bunch of tourist spots over the night and picked up a sweet, sweet chair that we got to carry.

The finale was pretty sweet.

We had x-minutes to carry 12 casualties about 200 yards with our extra coupons (earlier in the night during a similar evolution it took us twice as long, if not longer) and if we failed then we’d get to do it again as our reward with even less time. When we got to the end, Jason looked at his watch and he said that our time of Good Livin’ is up and we were finished. Amazing ending and the team really came together once we accepted that yeah, this shit sucks and it’s not getting better anytime soon.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. These are actual things you can experience over the course of 14 hours.

This was a great Challenge class (um…eventually) and everyone who started on Team 3 finished. Team Runnin’ and Gunnin’ aka Team 3 of Class 1,000 learned during the night that straps are definitely a thing that exist and you appreciate them more when you have them.

 

Team Runnin’ and Gunnin’