(RWC 001) 2020̶1: The AAR Itself&Proper (4th)

(Broken into four parts because while I was originally going to just cram it all into one post, I figured that at least three of the bits were distinct enough to warrant their own things and the fourth was… not so much really, but by this point it was halfway in-between two of those bits, so why not just go for it? And totally not because of anything like this… And oh yeah, maybe in honor of our getting 4th? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) So!

• Post 1 (⇠You Are Here): RWC 001 AAR *4th* AKA We Was Once Again Beaten By the Best and Also Two More Teams As Well Who, While They Were Not By Definition “the Best” As They, Too, Were Beaten By the Doubly-Aforementioned (See DC 2019 AAR) “Best”, Were Nevertheless Solidly Better Than Us So Mad Props & Respect To Them For Sure Even Though I Don’t Know Exactly Who They Were (See Post 4…)
• Post 2: A Brief Discursion into the Design, Construction, Functionality, and Market Targeting of the “Speed Rucker”
• Post 3: RWC and/or/vs Star Courses – Exegesis, Eisegesis, and Comparative Anatomy Thereof
• Post 4: WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCKITY FUCK GORUCK I MEAN DO YOU EVEN MARKETING JUST HOW IN THE COUNTRY-STYLE CHICKEN-FRIED FUCK!?!?!?!

(And just to clarify for those too lazy to click on the link to Post 4 above [or, well, an inch or two ago], or the “Read More” below – the event was great. The stream-of-consciousness-profanity is about, well… let’s just say that if you didn’t sign up for the event when it was first announced in the middle of 2019, you would have had no idea that it was held this past weekend.)

We signed up for the RWC in fall of ’19, right after it was announced. We figured, we’d gone 1–1–2, so even if we didn’t think we were quite “world championship” level competitors, it would be good to have a deeper field to get a better idea of where we stood. Then CoViD hit, there was like a year off from ultras – including the postponement of RWC – and then things slowly started back up. So!

Training

I actually prepared for this event! As opposed to previous Star Courses where, with the exception of doing a 12-hour race with rucks (to make sure that we actually could expect to finish slash do well) and throwing on a ruck while doing a run on the weekends every now and then (when I could do so without ending up the slowest person in the group), I sorta just didn’t do anything different.

How did we still do well if I didn’t train? See, if it’s something that I would do anyway, as part of my regular routine and/or because it’s fun, I don’t count it as training. It’s only “training” to me if I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t doing the event.

Of course, that’s a moot point here because I actually did adjust the ol’ workout routine with at least a third of an eye towards doing well. So, the basics. This is what I started out with:

• 10km run every weekday morning. Base miles.
• Weekends – one ruck-run at 30# dry, one heavy ruck at 50#. 10km each.
• Starting Strength 3 days/week.
• General bodyweight / sandbag stuff 2-3 days/week.

I think that one more condition for being a gentleman would be keeping quiet about what you do to stay healthy. A gentleman shouldn’t go on and on about what he does to stay fit.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami (Foreword)

(That said, this isn’t really about what I do to stay fit, and more just providing a data point to help some nebulous, imaginary reader fit a function and get a sense for what RWC/Star Course outcome, O(p), to expect for a given level type and level of preparation, p.)

When race season started up in April with Promise Land, I dropped the Starting Strength. It’s fun, sure, but I haven’t been able to get it to really mesh well with ultras. We ran a backyard 12-hour in March (just so we wouldn’t go a full year without an ultra), and then hit UROC in May and the OSS/CIA 50 miler in June. In August, I started prepping a bit more for Grindstone, adding a mile or so of speedwork (MWF) or other legwork (TR) to the base miles and weekend rucking.

Then, after Grindstone, the focus switched over entirely to rucking. No more extra bodyweight / calisthenics stuff, just running and roadwork during the week, rucking – up to 40# for the run – on the weekends. October I swapped out two of the weekday runs for 30# ruck-runs, keeping the distance the same.

We ran the Richmond marathon the second weekend in November, and the week between that and RWC I took it easy, just doing base mileage and a few slower “check-out” miles with the ruck to tune in my final gear configuration.

Did we feel ready for the event? I mean, well, sure, kinda? At least, I didn’t feel as if there were anything more I really could’ve done without, like, full-time training for it.

Gear

Rucksack was the Speed Rucker with a 30# “shorty” (Rucker / RPC) ruck plate, a sternum strap, and a 1.5L hydration bladder with an ITW keeper. (Because we didn’t anticipate a movement longer than ~10 miles, were both carrying bottles, and it was nice and cold, we didn’t think we needed the full Source 3L.)

Steve recommended a hip belt to keep the bottom rumple of the ruck from chafing – I tried it out with a FirstSpear battle belt and rather liked it, as well as the extra PALS for hip-carry, so I ended up using the same belt he’d found, a random Krydex belt off of Amazon, and added a couple of Clakit water pockets as hip holsters. (Started off with some 500mL Gatorades here.)

Inside the ruck I had a small drybag with an extra pair of socks, a Salomon rain jacket / windbreaker, and some Thinsulate mittens; a mylar rescue blanket, and a packet of wipes, just in case. The top pocket had a USB power pack and charging cables for my Garmin and phone, and extra headlamp batteries, as well as a small blister kit and some tubes of anti-chafing stuff.

(Incidentally, if you’re just looking for an emergency, just-in-case option to have in your ruck and never use until you realize five years later that you should probably replace it, the GORUCK blister kit isn’t bad. It’s just that if you actually get blisters even once a year, you can & probably should roll your own kit off of Amazon or wherever. It costs like 5x more up-front, but you get 100x the kit, so it’s like 20x cheaper.

They also had free blister kits from… some company whose name I can’t recall, maybe “Battle”-something, at a stand next to the tent at the start point.)

Apart from pulling out the pair of disposable 500mL water bottles I had in the ruck, I didn’t use anything out of here the entire race.

(I also only used my headlamp for seeing where I was going once, IIRC, along a particularly root-heaved section of the Four Mile Trail in the shadow of those roots’ trees, and several times just in case while crossing a road.)

I had good experiences with the chest admin pouch in Philly and DC, so I decided to look for a more refined version of that here. Hill People Gear has some great options – in fact, if it weren’t for the GORUCK-ruck requirement, one of their Kit Bag + backpack combos (either a Tarahumara or one of their other light packs with a Prairie Belt) would probably be <chef’s kiss> for an event like this – but they weren’t quite modular enough, intended more to integrate with the rest of HPG’s gear than with generic PALS shoulder straps.

So, I ended up going with a random admin pouch off Amazon that had some very nice features, actually. Hooked it on to the sternum strap, left shoulder strap, and PALS belt with some miscellaneous hardware.

Inside here, I had the rest of my stuff – cell phone, notebook, pens (ballpoint and Sharpie), ID & credit card & cash, snacks, hand warmers, some pills just in case (ibuprofen, caffeine, electrolytes), mask, some toilet paper, chap-stick, caffeinated gum, and hand sanitizer. I also stuffed the waypoint slips in here as we checked them off into the navigation app.

The only things I ended up using out of here were the snacks, hand warmers, and pills.

The last minor modification I made was to sew up a couple of loops of webbing and run them through the topmost PALS loop on the shoulder straps, adding fist-sized aluminium carabiners to the ends. They gave me something to do with my hands when we dropped down from running to a quick ruck –

– as well as, in a pinch, hooking through the handles on another weight plate for cross-loading:

Of course, we ended up not having to do anything like that, so they really didn’t end up seeing a ton of use.

And then, of course, there was the sloth.

Previous Star Courses we’d done various different methods of attachment for the sloths. For this one, I decided to kick it back OG style to the “medium” sloth that I’d used for Philly 2018 – I took the rest of the stuffing out of the legs and face when the forecast was still calling for rain. The original attachment method had used a combination of grommets and buckles, toggles, etc., to put it around a Bullet ruck (IIRC) – I went ahead and upped the sloth-skin-attachment-game here by sewing half a dozen small side-release female buckles to the perimeter of the back panel of the Speed Rucker, with matching male halves on the sloth itself. That way, the ruck can be easily & quickly zipped without having to mess with the sloth.

And that was my gear situation. (Of course, I also had a complete stripped-down backup set, including ruck plate, clothes, shoes, etc., in the back of our crew vehicle, just because… Eh, my general rule of thumb is that if literally everything short of my body collapsing goes completely tits up, I want to be still able to complete the event.

And if the backup stuff goes tits up, too? Well, then that’s the universe’s way of saying –

)

[Because technically I opened one earlier and, while Roy Blount, Jr. may be fine with dropping the closing parenthesis for stylistic reasons, years of math and physics followed by programming professionally mean that isolated parentheses give me the whispering fantods like a clown in the moonlight.]

Before the Race

Steve ended up actually scouting the field a bit – it looked like the Balance Gym team that beat us in DC in 2019 was going to be competing again. He figured our primary hope was that their dearth of inherent insulation would lead to the anticipated cold temperatures impacting them disproportionately, even given the weight advantage.

My bet for our route to victory, slim though it may have been? Urban coyote attack.

Anyways, Brandon beat us by like, nine-and-a-half hours at Grindstone, two and a half weeks after another 100-miler. (And that margin included two hours spend walking & vomiting in the first half.) And his teammate, Ken, put in 27ish hours at Cascade Crest, which is basically Grindstone West. So… yeah. Maybe they’d choose to run as individuals? After all, if they were the fastest two people there, they could snag an extra $1,000 for going 1-2 vs. as a team, and the only possible negative would be they couldn’t cross-load weight if needed, but… they weren’t going to need to anyways.

(Interesting question from a game-theoretical view, given the incomplete information, in any case.)

A little bit of further scouting didn’t find any public-facing summaries of permits filed for events, and there weren’t any road closures listed – so much for figuring out where the waypoints might be ahead of time. (I.e., if they were going to be setting up a tent with water, Gatorade, volunteers, a weigh-station, etc., then we figured there might be a permit with the location(s). Alas…)

Other suppositions were that the long movement outside of DC would likely be along the C&O canal (Balance Gym also put odds on Mt. Vernon when we were chatting before the briefing), and given that we were starting across the street from a Balance Gym, and had finished at a Balance Gym in 2019, and that GORUCK had been relentlessly pushing the Chad 1000X for the last forever, I was half-wondering if the “surprise” at the end would be some number of ruck’d step-ups.

(The traditional “ready for anything”, “don’t stop until you cross the actual finish line” for the Star Course is that they keep giving you waypoints and then at some point they stop you as you’re leaving and tell you that you just finished. The fact that they likely couldn’t go that far over 50 miles, and would probably have a recognizable ENDEX setup, made all but the shortest out-and-back at the end a bit impractical in my view, though.)

The Plan; el Plannerino, If You’re Not Into the Whole “Brevity” Thing

1. Aim for an average of ~5mph in the first half, ~4mph in the back half, average out to about 4.5ish and a 13-something pace.
   1. We did DC at about 4mph overall, but that had a fair few phone issues, some unnecessary walking around Arlington, route-finding time, etc.
   2. We’re (hopefully) better trained and prepped this time.
   3. More weight, though… But cooler weather, so… ?
2. Push it at the start (11-12 minute pace, per Steve) to –
   1. Break free of the pack – last thing we want is for, say, Balance Gym or whoever else to get an early jump on us, and then be caught behind a line at a weigh-station.
   2. CRUSH OUR ENEMIES AND SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE US FALL BEHIND US, that is, bank an early lead and hopefully drag some of our nearest competitors into trying to follow at an unsustainable pace. Tire ’em out early, if we can. (Does that assume that we’re faster / have deeper gas tanks than them? Absolutely, because if we don’t, then we’re not beating them except by trickery anyways, so yeah.)
3. After the first 10 miles or so, push it whenever we see another team. If they’re ahead of us, try to overtake them by surprise at a hurry-hard pace, Jurek-style, to break their spirits. (You know, in a friendly, camaraderie-of-competition way.) If they’re closing from behind us, use it as motivation and hope that they’re on a brief push and if we can hold them off, they’ll fall back for good.
   1. Again, of course, we could end up on the wrong end of any of these stratagems but, well, you gotta first assume that you’ve got a path to victory, and second, walk that path as best you can. Can’t do much more.
      1. Well, you could have trained harder, prepared more, etc. etc. so on.
         1. Let’s be clear – ain’t no one of us got time for that.
4. Push as much as we can starting from mile 40-45 because we’d be on the final leg.
5. Adjust all of the above as needed based on conditions, competition, observations, etc.

The Race Proper-Like

Getting There and Miscellaneous Stuff Before the Pre-Race Brief

Our crew (AKA our dad) drove us up into DC and parked along the edge of Folger Park. We wandered over and got checked in and weighed plates. Not a ton of people at that point – Cadres Mocha Mike and Igor standing around, volunteers at the weigh table, a blister-kit company with a little free-sample stand on the other side. Park was nice, I guess. Porta-johns on one side, near the street.

Back to the car and chilled for a bit, since we’d gotten there a bit after seven and the briefing didn’t start until eight-thirty. Started changing into race gear slowly, gradually, and wandered back over for a bit. Chatted with the Balance Gym team from last time and kinda forgot that everyone was wearing gloves when I awkwardly no-sold one of their handshakes in favor of the right-fist-thump-to-left-shoulder no-contact greeting I’d decided on ahead of time.

(Sorry ’bout that, Ken.)

Miscellaneous Stuff During & Around the Brief

I, uh… can’t remember much about this? (Ed.: No shit, because you’re finally finishing it like… six months after the event…) Cadre introduced themselves, went through the usual introductions, shout-outs to various branches, teachers, firefighters, medical personnel, etc., the National Anthem, and so on. Laid out the plans and procedure for the event.

Clothing / Weather

Started in the upper thirties, dropped to about thirty by 0700 Saturday, and then warmed up to the forties/fifties pretty quickly. I went with thin compression shorts under midweight tights and running shorts, boot-length base socks and a second pair with VFFs (Ascent Insulated), a thermal shirt over the obligatory Team Sloth rashguard, and a pair of Mechanix gloves.

All told, it worked out pretty perfectly for the conditions, even given how our pace varied. (I also had a GORUCK watch cap at the start, but took it off pretty quickly once we got moving and never put it back on.) Sleeves rolled up at the start as we burst out of the gate, but they went back down after a couple of hours. Popped some glove warmers next to the mitts in the middle of the night.

It got a bit warm as we were finishing up, but since (spoiler alert!) we only had an hour or two left at that point, whatever. Just sucked it up and pushed through towards Endex.

GO TIME!

As we sat around in the car getting our clothes set up and doing last-minute gear checks, we saw the first two waves – Individual Men and Individual Women – heading out. It looked like the front-runner in the Individual Men had a bicycle pacing him.

That said, competitive muling is… I’m split / torn on it. Obviously, you don’t want to / it’s impossible to impose strict self-supported guidelines on the ruckers; but on the other hand, it kinda seems… off that the best way to approach a rucking event is to essentially have someone on a bike next to you carrying all of your food, water, and basically everything other than the weight plate itself.

Maybe have official crew access points at the various waystations? ‘s tricky.

Coordinates

The way these worked was, you got a slip of paper at the start with the coordinates for the starting point (Folger Park) and your first point of interest, as well as the phone numbers for the Cadre in case of emergency or drop. Each subsequent waypoint, after you’d checked in and been checked off, you’d get a slip of paper with the coordinates for the next point of interest. After you got the coordinates, you had to verbally / visually confirm with the Cadre/volunteer(s) running the waypoint where you were headed – path, name of destination, whatever – before you got the go-ahead to leave.

• Start Point: 38.88489961389899, -77.0021636042558 (NE corner of Folger Park)
• Point of Interest #1: 38.84868586958148, -77.10386167506095 (A spot on the Four Mile Run Trail; the actual tent-and-station waypoint was close by at 38.850566, -77.101436, in the parking lot. Come to think of it, they never said specifically which datum they were using…)
• Point of Interest #2: 38.921377028333524, -77.02815905690905 (The football/track field at Cardozo High School – this had been crossed out and replaced with the following coordinates, perhaps because of access issues?)
• Point of Interest #2: 38.9212562, -77.0353553 (Meridian Hill Park)
• Point of Interest #3: 38.79429562537813, -77.04572365018038(Jones Point Recycling Center)
• Point of Interest #4: 38.88489961389899, -77.0021636042558 (NE corner of Folger Park – swinging by for the ‘back’ portion of an out-and-back!)
• Point of Interest #5: 38.95175816015312, -77.07725569917183 (Fort Reno Park)
• Point of Interest #6: 38.88489961389899, -77.0021636042558 (NE corner of Folger Park, return to the start for EndEx)

So… Yeah. The coordinates were oddly precise, and I really can’t figure out why or how. AFAIK, Google Maps only returns up to seven decimal places in the browser URLs, so unless they’re pulling directly from an API or something… but no application I’m aware of goes to that level of precision.

Was it because of a weird conversion from degrees-minutes-seconds to decimal degrees, maybe? Plug it into the conversion and just write out all of the machine precision it spits out? The latitude of the start point, 38.88489961389899 degrees, corresponds to 38°, 53′, 5.6386100364″ using minutes/seconds, so I don’t think it’s that, either.

The most ‘reasonable’ explanation I can think of (assuming that they were not intending to be picking out individual MOLECULES for the waypoints) is that they just wanted people to have to do a whole lot of typing. Or, I suppose, reward people who realized just how much typing they didn’t need to be doing.

Grub

I had a bagel and a bag of beef jerky sticks with a liter of water once we got to the start point and checked in, while waiting for the briefing, and then two more bags of jerky while we were running along with a couple of dates. Maybe three and a half liters of water during the event, along with a liter each of Gatorade and whatever fruit punch type drink I’d started with.

Add in a pack of caffeinated gum, and that was pretty much it – much less than I’d expected, honestly, but the cold weather and the general “cruising” pace seemed to have kept the metabolism pretty balanced.

Point of Interest #1

After we got the first slip of paper, we were a bit slow in getting out of Folger Park. Had to get our map checked off a second time, because of a confusion as to what the target area looked like on Google Maps’s Satellite vs. Map overlays. But then we were off!

HAHAHAHA JUST KIDDING! We were off more like –

We took off – according to my Fenix3, we hit a peak of ~7 minute pace right at the start, slowing a bit, of course, but staying at about a 10-minute pace for the first hour or so. Managed to pass a fair few teams and even catch a few of the individuals on our way.

Point of Interest #2

Uh… can’t remember much about this one. We looked around for a bit, wondering if there would be a landmark or something, cut past a parking garage looking for something of note, and saw the GORUCK tent and lights.

Point of Interest #3

We find ourselves looping back across the same bridge as before – Steve asks me as we approach it if this all looks familiar. I remark that yeah, it looks familiar to me, too; but then, kinda all of DC looks familiar at this point, so… Then he informs me that it is, in fact, the same bridge.

One waypoint later, as we ponder the possibility that the course could end up being a true out-and-back overall – as we were slated to hit just a hair over 25 miles at Point of Interest #4 – I muse that if so, we’d end up crossing the bridge going the same way four times which is a bit much. I’m informed that no, we’d be going over it the other way on the return “back”.

In my defense (other than it being like two AM at that point, so only a couple hours from when I’d normally get up, having started the event an hour and a half after my bedtime), after the second time across the bridge I’d explicitly figured that, for the purposes of this race, the bridge crossing was invariant under parity reversal and thus we’d only ever be going the one way.

Saw the first-place individual head back past us (i.e., we got lapped here, more or less) with their bike crew, and then the Balance Gym team a little while later. Rough back-of-envelope calculations had their paces – relative to ours – at about what we’d’ve expected, based on prior finishes.

Reach the waypoint at the gate and swing back around. Cadge the clue from the staff there that we’re the fourth team through. We see some people hanging out at a crew vehicle – probably doing it as individuals, maybe a team that’s pausing for a moment before hitting the waypoint, but we can’t be sure that they weren’t one of the teams ahead of us. Onwards!

Point of Interest #4

At about this point, we slow up a bit, and I start blathering about random Magic: the Gathering nonsense just to pass the time.

Coming back into Folger Park, Cadre Igor mentions that it looked like Steve took a tumble. His tights were ripped to begin with but, yeah, he did catch his foot at one point. (No lasting damage.) I state that I’m paraphrasing a Klingon proverb but, an ultra without at least two falls is considered a dull affair.

I am later informed that it’s actually from Game of Thrones –

Writing this up later, I remain unable to find any evidence that this was a reference, homage, or outright yoink from Star Trek, so I’m forced to go up (down?) a level and turn my misremembering of nerd trivia into a metafictional deep cut:

Point of Interest #5

Started seeing a lot of black squirrels in the neighborhoods we were truckin’ through. Mused about whether they were a separate species, subspecies, morphs or what. Huh. I’ll spare you our (well, my) nonsense – here ya go.

Random note, my Fenix recorded a dramatic increase in air temperature a few hours before this, because I stuck handwarmers in my gloves in the early hours of the AM. Heh.

Point of Interest #6

There were so many dogs along the whole out-and-back here. As we passed one apartment building we saw a guy walk out holding a corgi in his arms. I inquired as to the health of the hale-looking fellow, and the guy clarified that he was fine and dandy, just prone to peeing on the shrubs next to the door.

We passed a lady walking an elderly pug, who – quite predictably & understandably – looked somewhat askance at us. I – thankfully – resisted the urge to shout “IT’S A BONES DAY, BABY!”

Anyways, we tore into Folger Park again and hit the ENDEX table. Hung around and had some donuts & coffee, chatted a bit with Cadre, the usual, until it got too cold and we headed out. Checked our phones for anything we might’ve missed during the event.

ENDEX

We finished in an official time of 11:55:14, for the fourth place team and the ninth overall finishers. (Three teams beat us, as did three Individual Men and the winner of the Individual Women.) Balance Gym and the top Individual Man both broke nine and a half hours, so… yeah. Now, we both broke nine hours at JFK in 2017 after a year of heavy race mileage, but JFK in 2016 I was in at nine-twenty, so… yeah, they’re on the order of “as fast as us when weighed down by 30# extra”.

Oof.

That said, we’re pretty happy (I think) with where we ended up. We didn’t want to be “outrucked”; i.e., we wanted ultrarunners to do well overall, and we’re pretty sure they did. The gap between 3rd and us was an hour and a half, and between us and 5th was two and change, so nothing came down to the wire. (I.e., we didn’t have to bust our asses to stave off a last minute sniping/push, and we would’ve had to shave off two minutes from our pace to take a stab at the money.)

Plus, compared to previous 50-miler Star Courses, we went farther and faster (pace and absolute), while carrying more weight – hella hard to be disappointed with that.

Maybe we started off a touch fast early on, but we finished up with a 14’05” pace on average and things went pretty much just as we’d drawn them up beforehand – the field was just that deep.

And, in the vein of radical honesty? 4th is pretty much our ideal finish here. Yeah, yeah, it would have been cool to have placed, and going into the event it was definitely a possibility based on previous events and our overall backgrounds, and we’ll absolutely not turn down, you know, prize…

– but, in a world that obeys any semblance whatsoever of order, logic, or the linkage of cause to effect in a manner conceivable of by the rational human mind, the two of us should not be winning cash money at a World Championship in a brute (as opposed to more fine-motor-skill or technique areas, although we shouldn’t in those, either) physical arena. Just, no.

So, yeah. We’re good with how things went.

Plus, since it was – y’know – the Rucking World Championships, and we’re both Canadian, too, that means that we’re – I guess? – the #1 Canadian rucking team in the world? Maybe? Eh, we’ll take it.

Future Adjustments

There are definitely a few things I’d tweak going forward – nothing that was actively bad, but some suboptimal bits that could be cleaned up. The carabiners and straps I never really used, and probably won’t need if we do another event like this, so they can be shucked off. (The chafing and blister stuff, yeah, I’ll be keeping that, just in case, even if I didn’t use it this time, because the failure mode is just that bad in those cases.)

The Clakit water bottle pouches were very nice – a touch tight and hard to get the Gatorade bottles back in, but a perfect, snug fit for the water bottles. Probably get rid of the shock cord buckle bit that’s intended to hold stuff in – the elastic does fine on its own – but I liked the on-waist first-line hydration. (For a hotter, summer event, I’d likely switch over to the 3L bladder, but for the temperatures we had here, it was more than enough.)

The biggest thing is that I’d get rid of the admin chest pouch and just go entirely utility-belt. (The belt was excellent at its intended purpose of preventing chafing from the ruck – even if I switched to a Rucker or something, I’d likely keep with it for that reason alone.) I did use a decent amount of the stuff from the pouch – snacks, hand warmers, pill baggies, gum, etc. – but I never really “worked out of it” like I did at previous Star Courses. No referring to Hit Lists, no taking pictures or texting Cadre, etc.

Especially since my phone was the backup (and even if it weren’t, a belt holder like Steve used would be perfectly fine) there really wasn’t a need for the whole chest rig set-up. I only had to take my ruck off once at a porta-john, but it was still a bit of a hassle, disconnecting the chest pouch from the far strap, from the belt, getting everything hooked back up, and so on. So get rid of the chest pouch, put another admin pouch or two on the hip belt.

As for rucks – hot take – I don’t think it really makes that much of a difference. As long as it holds the plate in position so that you don’t jack yourself up running with it, and doesn’t take off skin like a sandblaster by the twentieth mile, whatever works. It’s not like a Challenge where you’re taking it off, putting it on, doing PT, passing it around, etc. and whatever. Ideally, you should only need to take it off to refill a hydration bladder, and even then only if you’re solo.

(Of course, ideally, I think the best setup would be something like a Ruck Plate Carrier with a regular ultrarunning vest on top of it – maybe one of the running belts instead, even, depending on what your fluid needs might be. [And, if you’re truly in it to win it while occupying every single square inch bounded of the rules, you’ll have a bike crew swapping out your empty handhelds, so… just an RPC, then.])

Clothing and such was perfect for the weather, so no adjustments there (and even if there were adjustments, they’d end up depending on the weather at the event, so there’s no point in poking at those choices now).

So How Do You Feel?

On Saturday, the morning afterwards?

Lower back was a bit tight, quads felt like they’d gotten a good workout, upper back / shoulders a helluva good workout, no real neck effects to speak of. Mild ache in the tibialis anteriors for a day or so, but nothing like Pine Creek 2017 (where I had tendonitis there so bad from 100 miles of flatness and the repetitive lifting of the balls of my feet that for a few weeks my tendons felt like pulling a shoelace through a straw of rolled-up sandpaper).

Other than that, musculo-skeletally, pretty good. Minimal chafing, too – a single thin line across the bottom of my shoulder blades (just out of scratching reach from either above or below), and a single dot on the lower back, which wasn’t from the ruck or the waist belt, but rather the messily sealed seam-end on my compression shorts. Sleep was rough for a bit, since I normally go to bed half an hour before the safety brief started, let alone the event proper.

Feet were fine, though. VFFs are great for rucking on pavement – if you’re taking any real amount of impact in your shoe to begin with, you’re gonna have a bad time, so the lack of cushioning isn’t really a factor, and the trail-running risk of toe stubs is much diminished. I mean, I primarily run in ’em ’cause there ain’t no normal shoes that fit, but an argument can be made apart from that.

As of writing this bit the Sunday (i.e., one day – it’s taken longer to finish this up than anticipated; thus, the clarification) after the event?

… However, regardless of how I’m feeling, there’s… a marked deficit of gas in the tank, so to speak.

And, well, that’s it!

jk there’s like three more sections to the AAR, albeit each not nearly so long as this one.