It was only a few years ago that I met Michelle. She said she wanted to learn how to run. I remember our first run down Fig street. It wasn't easy at the beginning, but Michelle was determined. Her first goal was a 5k, then a 10k, a half marathon, a marathon, and now this. All I can say is AMAZING!!! If you are having doubts, struggling a little, or just not motivated enough to go on, give Michelle Potter a call.
GORUCK Challenge, New Orleans Class 078, Start time Saturday October 29, 1:00 AM.
One of our Battle Buddies, Nick wrote a summary of our experience….I could not have said it better….. up for 24 hours…..21 miles and 11 hours…..pure exhaustion….. this is an experience that I will never forget…..bonds that formed and friends made for a lifetime….no one can relate unless they were there or experienced a Challenge….I now feel like training for this upcoming marathon in March will feel like a 5K after what I have accomplished recently…. Happy Reading! Michelle
“A lot of people asked me before and during the event, “What is the GORUCK” challenge. I was unable to tell them much about it, because honestly I didn’t know. I knew it was going to be long, uncomfortable, physically and mentally challenging. Now that I have finished I feel that I can tell everyone what it was.
One of the things I got asked repeatedly was, “It starts at 1:00 AM?” Yes it started really early. I think this was for several good reasons. First some of the stuff we did falls in the slightly gray area of legal. Maybe not illegal, but the general public may not have want to see what we were doing, and they probably would not have liked it very much. Now mind you we did not hurt anyone, or damage any property. It was just a little shady, and best done under the cover of darkness. The fact that it was created and ran by Special Forces people probably has a little to do with this too. The mentality goes kinda like this: anybody can run a marathon, but can you do it with 40 pounds of extra weight, cold, wet, and in the dark?
So anyway, yes we started at 1 AM, yes it was dark, yes, it was cold, and no we did not get a proper night’s sleep beforehand. We meet up in Jackson Square in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, shuffled on down to the moon walk to sign paperwork, aka death waivers. They said things like, “you acknowledge that that this event is completely unreasonable, you know that it could kill you, and it not our fault.” Then we got our packs. The packs are a very important part of this challenge. The GORUCK challenge is both an advertisement for the pack, and a testing ground for them. You don’t have to buy one for the challenge, but it is recommended. If you don’t buy one you can borrow one, but you have to have one. So once get got our packs the first obstacle was packing them. Most people got the smaller, less expensive packs because quite honestly they cost a lot. This was a problem. Right before our event the rules changed, and we went from carrying 4 bricks (3 for under 150lbs people) to carrying 6 bricks (or 4). To my knowledge we were the first group to do this. This change probably happened because people were going to Home Depot and getting brick pavers, not real bricks. Just my opinion… For me I used bricks that I just wretched from my own house during my renovation. These bricks helped me train for the event, so I figured that those were the one that should have come along with me. Now everyone, regardless of what pack they had, struggled to get everything in their pack. At this point we were all feeling like these packs were a letdown because they didn’t hold a lot of gear. A bunch of stuff got left behind. I did learn at this point that the zippers were something of a gem. I yanked hard on these things to close, and they never even thought about coming apart, ripping, or getting stuck. After all the bags were packed was the next challenge, finding a place to pee in 5 minutes, at roughly 2 am. This is one of those shady gray areas, that I am not going to detail, but I will give the gals in our group extra credit here.
We assembled in front of Jackson Square with a great view of the Cathedral to start the real challenge, pushups. We did 30 or so fast paced “in cadence” crossed the street and then we proceeded to “practice” some of the things we would be doing that night. We ran around Jackson square a few time doing Indian runs. This is where you run in two lines, and the last two guys sprint to the front of the column. Once they get there, the next two sprint. To do this right we had to run at a slow tight pace. It took us a while to get it down. Lou, our Cadre said we looked like a bunch of Gypsies. I hope the fortune tellers in the square were not offended by his comments. Next we practiced bear crawls. The only hard part here was having you pack straps tight enough so that it didn’t hit you in the head. After this we did Fireman caries. This was something I was really worried about, but the packs along with providing a bunch of extra weight, also provide a kind of shelf for your battle buddy to lie on. The first pair to try this fell quickly and I though both had head injuries. Other than that everyone did ok. My Battle buddy and I learned that there is always a tree or light pole around to give you stability. The girls learned how to do a modified fireman’s carry, aka a piggyback ride. Then things slowed down a bit. We shifted our packs around and did crab walks. We had to take it slow as one of my battle buddies was not warmed up yet and struggled a bit with this. We were in front and slowed the group down. The up side to this was it gave us a chance to interact with the small crowd that was gathered around us trying to figure out what we were doing. Most were in Halloween costumes, and I would guess all were drunk. Some stooped down to take pictures, others tried to crabwalk along with us. A few tried to guess what the packs were about. One gal asked her guy, “What do you think they have in there.” He responded, “I don’t know but I bet its heavy.” We were instructed that when asked what we were doing we needed to respond “GORUCK” during this time our response was weak. As the challenge went on I noticed that the more tired we became, the stronger our response was. We survived this, only to start doing lunges across the front of the cathedral. No matter how much you train for these, they are tough.
We fell in as a group after the lunges and started off for Bourbon Street. We only went down about 2 or three blocks. I guess the crowd was too thick. We ran down N Rampart then to Eslpanade toward City park for what we all knew was going to be some cold nasty bayou water. This was rather uneventful until we started to do some crab walks, fireman carries, and Bear crawls. This was when the team came together and found out that we could drag our team coupon, Stan, a skeleton with his own weighted backpack. It worked pretty well, but it may have damaged Stan a little. Then tragedy struck, we were instructed to do lunges until the next block, the problem was that this block was twice as long as any other. We thought we would get some reprieve at this point as re ran out of neutral ground, but no it got worse. Lou found a diseased looking king sized mattress that someone had the good sense to throw out. This was our next team coupon. We decided to carry it 3 x 3 above our heads rotating out our team. Now it looked gross, smelled worse, and we were all fresh. We all held it high so that it touched us as little as possible. This would soon change…
As we made our way close to city park we found crossing Bayou St. John across a narrow bridge to be quite a challenge. Also navigating monuments that Lou wanted us to take pictures of while standing in front of was no picnic. They all have high curbs. Apparently this is designed to keep cars and teams of people carrying mattresses from getting too close to the statues. Did I mention that Dave, one of our other Cadres felt that Stan was tired and felt he should take a nap on the mattress? That made that unruly mess quite a bit more challenging. He also thought that Stan needed a girlfriend, an orange street cone. Why, I don’t know. They were apparently having a good time up there as they frequently fell off of the mattress. This may have cause further damage to Stan, whose last name is apparently Skelotor.
We made our way into City Park, and were instructed to turn our lights off. More shady activity. It wasn’t the sight of what we did next that was so bad, but the smell. We lined up and walked, ok stumbled into the bayou with all the duck poo and dead stuff. The swamp smell started to waft up and make the mattress smell like a bed of roses. Thankfully the shock of the cold water and the pushups we did at the bank distracted us from the stench, well a little. We started off again, wet and smelly, er. Lou was in search of some grass. Someone told him of a spot nearby where the parking lot had no lights and there was often a strange smoky smell coming from the parked cars, but no he wanted the kind of grass that dogs liked to poop in. We found a nice field a little ways down and started doing some drills that all seemed to have one goal in mind, dry us off by dragging our bodies and pack across the ground. This was actually quite fun, but not all that effective.
One we went, but this time silently, no talking allowed. We navigated the many palm trees, light poles, low branches, and assorted obstacles down Carrolton, only by pointing. We rotated positions by patting the next guy. At this point carrying the mattress, Stan, and his girlfriend was the easy part, because only then could you put your pack on. The other part of the time you had to carry it with your hands. The only bad place to carry the mattress and company was in the middle, that’s were Stan and company had cuddled up, and placed all their weight. No one was concerned with how gross it was to let the mattress touch your head. Our hand and arms were tired. Some even solely used their heads to carry the mattress.
About this time the scenery started to change. The neighborhood turned into the getto. This was made apparent when we passed by a late night mattress store that was having a party, or sale or something, at like 4 AM. They wanted to know what the hell we were doing, I kinda wanted to know what the hell they were doing. In the end we shuffled a little faster, just in case they wanted our mattress. Stan liked it and we didn’t want to upset him. We turned down Canal Street, which no longer has stuff in the way so our job was a little easier, but not as interesting, with the exception of the people we saw along the way, looking at us like we were carrying a mattress with a skeleton perched on top of it at 5 am.
Then a light at the end of the road appeared. It was only McDonalds, but they were open, they had restrooms! We took a break here and seemed to misplace the mattress and cone. We headed off deeper into the ghetto, down Jefferson Davis. Mind you if I was going to walk down any downtown street in the wee hours of the morning, this was the group to do it with, but the drug dealers have guns, and Lou decided against having us take their 300lb woman as a coupon. So we had no way to soak up bullets. So what street is worse that Jeff Davis at this time? Tulane? OK let’s turn there! I know we were trying to get to some land marks of the city, but there were better routes… This particular route did have a sidewalk that had been converted into a bayou and served as another water challenge for some, and a random statue of a guy throwing a grenade across from Charity. This hospital looks really creepy at night btw. Like they used to perform genetic engineering experiments on disabled poor people.
We made our way out of the Ghetto and into central city by City Hall. We did some fireman carries, and found some shady areas of the city. We then came upon one of our goals, Lee Circle. Before we made it we stopped at a grab and stab, restocked our water candy and beer. We yelled at cops for by newspapers, and waited for dawn and the start of the Jazz half marathon. We stopped just long enough to get really cold. It was right before dawn and down right frigid. Not to worry though. Our Cadres knew a way to warm us up, crab walks, bear crawls and jogging and sprinting laps around Lee Circle. Once we were properly warmed up we started to the same up and down the steps of the circle. About this time the sun finally peaked around the horizon. We started a relay race, battle buddy against battle buddy. Just as we got a few people deep, the Jazz Marathon started playing the Rocky theme very loudly. This motivated us all to push a little harder. The poor girls we hauled up the steps time and time again, as if we were reenacting a scene from King Kong, and Lee Circle was our Empire State building. Once the race was complete and the losing team finished their pushups we moved one down St. Charles crashing the marathon.
We all knew where Lou wanted to go, Audubon Park. Lou was on a mission to find a tree trunk for us to carry. We knew it was a long distance, but we were motivated by the crowd along the route cheering us along. We did a few Indian Sprints, and Fireman carries along the way. The fireman carries were becoming very difficult at this point. Our legs were turning into jello, and cramping up. We found one Portolet along the route but the real relief came when we finally made it to Audubon park and a set of real restrooms.
Once we rested for a bit we continued on the journey, ours toward the end, and Lou’s toward a log for us to carry. He never found it and settled on a chin up bar where we all we tasked with doing 10, with our packs. Then we were off down Magazine Street toward the end. Stan really started to fall apart at this point. He lost a leg, and all his bricks were flopping around like an oversized charm bracelet. Most of the group ran out of steam at this point. There was no more jogging. People started to have some bad leg cramps. Feet were sore. Once we got within a few blocks we mustered up the last of our energy and jogged to the finish.