I woke up today, sooner than I expected after an early on bedtime Friday night time. Each day It is uncommon to see my pregnant wife still in a deep sleep, and I understand what it might be like if I inadvertently woke her up. With this in mind, I decided my best course of action was to leave the house at the earliest opportunity.
It’s been five a few months since my first PATHFINDER Class (001) was completed, and admittedly I haven’t rucked enough since then. PATHFINDER003 kicking off this week, this was the perfect chance to get out and get some good miles within the ruck. This morning stroll During, I started to keep in mind what it was like getting out and rucking for the very first time. It was a lot of trial and error – figuring out my gear, my clothing, my shoes, my feet, my food, my water, and everything else that switches into rucking for sport or exercise regularly.
About four miles in, I started to keep in mind few things that I had forgotten that were once second nature. I also started to feel some muscles being worked that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while. It had been like beginning with a scratch! I made a decision that this “getting back again to my roots” ruck experience was a good chance to start a series about “How To Ruck”. I’ll start out with the fundamentals in this post, and work towards more descriptive and advanced information in future articles.
This is from a civilian’s perspective, as I am not armed service. I’m no expert or trainer either, a regular guy just so take my advice at the own risk. You armed forces men out there know rucking all too well probably; however, for civilians like myself – rucking may appear to be a foreign concept.
- Walking at a quickness of 5-6 km/h – two hours
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What exactly is “rucking”? Rucking is simply walking with a weighted backpack. That’s it – pretty simple. Civilians may additionally know this as “backpacking”. You might be happening an overnight backpack camping trip – carrying all your gear and other supplies on your back to your campsite and back out each day.
Or you may just be holding a backpack with water and snacks for a day hike. In it’s simplest form, this is rucking. In the armed forces, timed ruck marches are common in training. That is, of course, training our military to move themselves and their equipment quickly across differing landscape by foot. For civilians, rucking might not be quite so relevant to our everyday lives.
So why would we consider doing it? I’m not going to go into the positive or negative physical ramifications of rucking in this article, but there’s a complete lot of information about it via other web sites. Personally, I started rucking to be able to train for a GORUCK Challenge. I quickly realized that walking or PT’ing with a ruck on was a completely different animal than training without one.
This is what got me started and I completed my first GORUCK Challenge – and then my second – and then my third – and it continues on. At this point, rucking has been for me to remain, and it is loved by me as a part of my overall training program. If you’ve found this post, you probably already have your own private reasons for learning more about rucking.