The hardest part? Signing up. — GORUCK Challenge Event Overview
I’m signed up for another GORUCK Challenge event this year — June 20th in Minneapolis. This will be my second. My friend Rodney was interested in doing his first and, for motivation, I said I would be happy to be a part of his team. He was nice enough to let me use his buddy pass to get in for free. Last week, we went on a good training ruck together. I’m looking forward to doing it again. It will be fun. That is, if anyone can call this brand of self-punishment fun.
Now that I have one under my belt, have shadowed several others, and have gotten others to commit to the crazy, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that quote above. If you see the videos, read the after action reports of past participants, or even have done a GORUCK event yourself, you know that the statement above is true. Once you commit and show up, to finish a Challenge is easy.
Easy? Sure. I mean, it will likely be one of the the hardest physical tests you will ever put yourself through. Your inner-individual will be broken down to the point where it can be rebuilt to be part of your team. You will wonder every minute or two why the heck you ever signed up in the first place. That is, until you are so exhausted that your thinking just turns off and the strength to feel any emotion is lost (this happens about an hour in). And, when the sun comes up after a long night and you think it is almost over, you know that hope is simply a tool to make it sting more when you realize you’re only about half-way to whatever you think “over” means.
But, when you do finish, it will be one of the best feelings you can imagine. You got to push yourself beyond every physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual limit you thought you had. You are now a new version of you. A better version. One that just did that. Something that most people would never in a million years sign up and pay for. But you did. And, once you did, the rest was easy because all you had to do to finish was one simple thing.
So, the next time someone asks me about why I’m crazy enough to do another one of these, I’ll tell them what I know now. Signing up is the hardest part, finishing is easy — just don’t fucking quit.
P.S. The real take-away is that this same philosophy applies to finishing anything one starts.