WHOOP Podcast - Unpacking the Rise of Rucking with Jason McCarthy

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by Jason McCarthy the Co-Founder and CEO of GORUCK. Jason served in Special Forces after 9/11. He founded GORUCK in West Africa with his wife Emily, a Case Officer for the CIA, and a napkin sketch for a rucksack that could thrive in Baghdad and NYC.  He also proudly serves on the Board of Directors of the Green Beret Foundation. Will and Jason discuss how Jason joined the military (2:30), having accountability for the country (11:45), the idea for GORUCK (16:25), what is in a go bag (19:35), starting the business (21:20), defining rucking and its benefits (25:53), what’s next for GORUCK (31:28), baseline and extreme rucks (33:14), developing mental toughness (35:49), advice to future Green Berets (39:41), and how Jason uses WHOOP (41:36).Resources:GORUCK Website Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the Whoop Podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. A reminder, if you're thinking about joining Whoop, you can visit Woop.com and sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. That's right, try Woop for 30 days at no cost to you. Today I am joined by Jason McCarthy, the co-founder and CEO of GoRy. Jason served in the Special Forces after 9-11.

He founded Go-Ruck in West Africa with his wife, Emily, a case officer for the CIA. It all began with a napkin sketch for a rucksack that could thrive in Baghdad and New York City. Jason has overseen Go-Ruck's growth from living out of a truck, driving to all 48 contiguous states with his dog, to running 1,000 events a year and managing 500 go-ruck clubs all over the world. He proudly serves on the board of directors of the Green Beret Foundation. Jason and I discuss how he joined the military, his calling after 9-11, developing the idea for Go-Ruck, came to him while he was in West Africa with his wife, the sense of community and giving back Jason's Woop data and WOOP community rucking data.

Rucking is a hugely growing activity on WOOP. And what's next for Jason and Go-Ruck? If you have a question, what's he answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508.443-4952. All right, here's my conversation with Go Ruck founder and CEO, Jason McCarthy. Jason, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Great to be here, man. Thanks. So rucking, it feels like, has taken off in the last two years. Does it feel that way to you? I mean, we've been doing this for a long time, so it's nice to see a few more people kind of get into it, but I don't know about taking off.

I don't, when all the sidewalks in Boston are filled with people rocking, then it will have taken off. I mean, my sense, and we've got some of this in the whoop data, in 2023 it was the 12th most popular activity. And it had the fifth largest increase in the number of logs from 22 to 23. So it went up 49%. So our data would show that it's meaningfully growing in popularity. That's news to me.

It's fun to hear that. Yeah. So I guess let's go back. You're 20-something years old and 9-11 happens. Yeah, so I graduated from college in May of 2001, and it was one of those times in life where I didn't really know what I was supposed to do. You know, when you feel like you're meant to do something in this world and you just don't know where to start, where do I pay my dues, I'll do that. Where does, and the military was not something that I grew up, kind of, hey, this is the path that's for you. It just wasn't, that's not where our country was either.

And so, you know, I backpacked through Central America and, you know, traveling the world is probably not the best place to find yourself. You can have fun, but it wasn't the best place to find myself or my next calling or whatever it might be after college. And then the towers fell on 9-11, and I just immediately was drawn to, it provided a moment of clarity for me that I needed to serve my country. Was there any history of that in your family? Where did you feel like that came from?

You know, there was. My grandfather had been in Korea. He was an artillery officer. My uncle had flown helicopters in the Navy. But neither was really, my grandfather never talked about Korea, right? My uncle, I didn't see him much. He was always cool aviator, Uncle Mike, but it just wasn't something, I mean, you go back to before 20 years of war, however long we were at now,

it just, it wasn't a thing. You know, there was Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, and then there was nothing until 2001, nothing to speak of that kind of galvanized the country. And so it just wasn't top of mind. And I don't know where that came from. I mean, I did grow up in the family that loved and respected the military on all sides. And it's just, To go back to that time at 22 and watching the news where you're seeing guys with the green night vision goggles in the mountains of Afghanistan doing something that felt like it supremely mattered. In my core of my soul, like this really, really matters right now. And nothing else seemed to matter like that did. And so you joined the special forces? Well, it took me like two years to build up the courage to join the army.

It wasn't quite as simple as, okay, let me just go do this in a time of war. It was, you know, because it's a serious decision. And, you know, I just gotten out of college. I'm supposed to have some big brain to think about things and really well, I guess. And, you know, hesitation was probably, it took a little too long. But, yeah, two years later, I enlisted into the army and went through the, the training, which was about two years. And then in 2006, I earned my Green Beret, which is the same as Army Special Forces. That's amazing. It's interesting thinking about the two years.

Like, you knew in your gut you wanted to do it. You probably knew in your gut you were going to do it. I had a similar experience in college, like around the same age, where it took me about two years to know that I was going to, or two years to have the courage. I should say, to start whoop. And I think there is some theme of young people, early 20s, getting comfortable with trusting that intuition of like what path you're about to go on. Yeah, and then just doing it.

And doing it, right? I mean, because you can be the guy later in life that's like, well, I was going to do this and I was going to do that. And I find those to be kind of sad in some ways, right? I mean, regret is a powerful emotion to keep. carry with you. And so, you know, I don't regret the things that I tried. You know, I don't regret telling the girl that I love that I love her. I don't regret those things. Sure. It's, you know, give it your best shot and nobody has it figured out, right? Like when you started, you didn't know

that you were, that it was going to turn into this. Maybe in your mind you say, okay, well, of course it could. Sure. Right. But, you know, it's more you have to just, you have to just take your shot. For those two years when you were debating it, what were you doing? So the first thing that I did was I, it was a weird way that the war was fought. I mean, the CIA went in first, right? But the CIA went into Afghanistan with its paramilitary division. And there was a story whose, his name was Mike Spann. He was the first KIA killed in action in the global war on terror. And he died in prison uprising. And, you know, they told his story as a way to kind of galvanize America around the cause and sacrifice is a huge part of it and it demands blood, you know, I mean, sacrifice is important, but it demands blood. And some, and his blood was shed and that was something that was, you know, really impactfully hear that story. So I, of course, I did what anyone would do and I applied to the CIA first, right? Which is a very long and arduous process. And that ate up about a year and some,

change of that process until I got way, way down in the interview path. And finally, I'm like, hey, how do I do that job? I want to be that guy. And, you know, it turns out, Mike Spann had been a Marine before he joined paramilitary. He had special language skills. He was just the right guy at the right time to get sent on that, that mission. And this guy will never forget him. He had a suit on in this northern Virginia office and he was like, hey, check it out. We don't just take guys off the street like you to go do that job. We take them from the special operations community. This is how little I knew, right? I guess I got to go do that now. So it was almost like a restart. And, you know, Will, the truth is that's where I belonged at that time. I needed

to go join the military. And that was kind of a way, I mean, I will say, you know, the paramilitary side of the CIA is great, right? There's awesome people that end up meeting a lot of them. But I needed to be in the military at that time, and I needed to kind of be on the front lines. And you met your wife while she was working at the CIA. No, we met before high school. Well, before she went to our high school in 10th grade, she transferred. We met her in a tennis court in the summer in Florida, and, you know, we were friends all throughout college, or sorry, all throughout high school, and then stayed in touch and college. Never dated.

and then because you always got to make big decisions in never one at a time always lots at a time right yeah right so when i joined the army it's like you know in my head i'm thinking i'm probably going to die right i mean that's that's what you think when you say hey i'm going to join the special forces in the time of war just don't know any better you actually thought you were going to die oh yeah and you internalized that uh yeah i mean i didn't walk around and tell mom Hey, Mom, I'm probably going to die. She was already thinking that. But when I did this, you know, it brings about once you take that first step, once you,

like, man, I got to go for this and come what may, right? Well, the other thing that I did was I told the girl that I'd always loved that I loved her. So that helped? Yeah, it helped. You know, from the standpoint of if you love someone, tell them that you love them. You facing this enormously consequential situation and you coming to terms with potentially your mortality led you to just kind of get on with life in a sense. Yeah.

Tell the women you love you love or that kind of thing. Well, I think it makes it more precious and you don't want to die with regrets anymore than it's better than you don't want to live with regrets either. Do you think what you just expressed is common amongst everyone who joins the army or, you know, goes into war, this feeling that you're going to die? Or do you think that you were just being very pragmatic about it? I mean, I think it's probably a different time right around then. I mean, realize in 2003, October, you know, the invasion of Baghdad into Iraq was in March of 2003. Right. And so it's one of those things where you would watch the nightly news and at the end of the news hour or whatever,

they would show the faces of the fallen that day. I mean, it was real. It was pretty intense. It was very, it was just all around all the time. And so, you know, it was not a mathematical statistical analysis around, well, there's this many people and I'm only one and it's probably not going to be me. That was not it. It was, you know, there's a good likelihood that this is a decision that will cost me in my life. And you believed enough in the cause.

I did, and I do. to make that sacrifice. Yes. What do you feel like needs to be done from an education standpoint or a patriotism standpoint for more people to have that love or accountability for their country? That question almost gives me goosebumps to think about because I think that there's so many simple things that we can do that are not being done right now, such as we need to find a way for the world that's over here on the left, not politically

just in general, the left and the right in any way, shape, or form, to actually be able to talk and get to know each other. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, when you start getting into, should the military be on college campuses, my belief is yes. My belief is yes, because if you believe in a liberal arts education, I mean, you can study wars, but you can't meet a warrior, I don't get it. Right. Right? I mean, go study all the things of antiquity and you read it in a book, but these are the people that are right now going to

serve our country. And if you actually get to know them, you'll find out that they are people too. And so, you know, since getting out is when I, out of the military in 2008, you know, the aperture opens up a little bit and to meet more people who have nothing to do with the military. It's a very scary thing. But I've found that, that fitness is a way to kind of bring people together. I mean, it used to be supper clubs and bowling leagues and whatever it might be, but you have these people and they just meet up and they get to know each other as human beings. And it's not just, hey, you know, you joined the military, how many people did you kill, right? Like, it's not, that's just so kind of

cringe-worthy, right? It's just get to know somebody, right? And if they want to open up, they want to open up, fine. If they don't, then fine. Right. Right. But the point, point is, is we're all people. And I say that as I'm not better, I'm not worse, I'm just a person like the others. And I think it's important for people to ask questions and listen and not think about, well, that point of view is flawed and I'm going to attack them for this or that. We all have different perspectives. How do we lead an examined life, you know? You have to surround yourself with people that are different. You have to ask them about their lives. And you have to What was it like?

And nobody's perfect. And so you have to kind of take some of it on faith, you know? First of all, I enormously respect what you said and the sacrifice that you made in joining the army. And I bring this question up about patriotism because, you know, in a lot of ways I have like this deep gratitude for being raised in a America and my dad was an Egyptian immigrant and like, you know, I had this amazing education. I started a company and like, now it's this thing that, you know, I get to do every day and enjoy and create products for people around the world. And I don't feel like I'd be able to do that in any other country in the world, like that whole experience. Many would call that the

American dream in a sense. And so I have like a deep gratitude for this country and for being American and yet I feel like increasingly that sort of sense of patriotism or gratitude is fraying and decreasing like if I just sort of look at you know I'm 34 so if I look at maybe the last 25 years like I feel a sense that that's that's been decreasing and I don't know exactly what to point to for it but I'm curious if you sense the same you know I think America is a big place, and I think there's a lot that's out there. And so I'm fortunate to kind of have one foot still very much in the military world, just the people that I'm around. And those folks probably have a much more amplified. Yeah. I mean, cities and countries

in different states and, you know, it's different. It's different out there in farm country in Ohio than it is in, say, I don't know, San Francisco or something. Right. It's just, and the beauty of America is that we, we house all of these, all of these people. And, you know, for better for worse, it's just the reality that it does sometimes take an outside force, like a 9-11 or like a Pearl Harbor or something like that to actually provide this resurgence of patriotism. And because, you know, you're forced up front, up close and personal to deal with what other people are doing for our country. And then that gets passed along generationally. So, you know, it's the natural course of things, I think. Where did the idea for GOROC come from?

When we would go out on missions, we would, you know, we were, it was gun truck heavy, so Humvees was how we would get there usually. And everyone, you're on a team, 12-person special forces team. And everybody has a different job on that team, right? There's the weapons guy, there's the demolitions guy, there's the radio guy, the medic, the intel guy, right? And so everybody's kind of cross-trained, but everyone has a specialty.

And we would all have equipment that we need it. You're all shooters first, and that's fine. But we would cross-train on other people's stuff, but we would also bring extra supplies, right, in the Humvees in case your vehicle's disabled, you have to fight, the mission goes bad, Murphy strikes, you know, all those things. And so we would build or make a go bag or a go-ruck

and put it in the trunk of the Humvee and take that out on missions. We all would have one that was tailored to ourselves. And so after my deployment to Iraq in 2007, I went to West Africa where my wife then Emily was posted as a case officer. And it was weird, man, because I'd come from this world where we had gun trucks and our teams and, you know, there's machine guns mounted on the gun trucks. That's just how you're living.

And then get to West Africa and almost makes your skin crawl. It's like, it feels like something could go wrong at any minute. You just can't, it's different. And so, you know, you went to her house and there's barbed wire around the fence. There's, you know, guards that are there. Not armed, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately based upon the training. But, but, and it was just kind of a second nature to me to make a go bag or a go rock for her. And they say, hey, put this in the car just in case, you're out and about.

because they love a good coup in Africa, right? And so, you know, they want to flash mob a coup up and at least you've got something extra in here that'll help you, you know, get off the X. Did the same thing at the house and then started talking to some people at the embassy and they wanted, like, oh, that's a good idea. Like, yeah, it is a good idea.

And so we were trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I still had a little bit of time in the Army. And she's like, oh, you should do the go-ruck thing. She set it in her spare bedroom at her government diplomatic house. in Abisjean Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa. And it was like, oh, yeah, that'll be great, right? And so the first idea that that meant was provide these kind of special forces way of life

consulting security services or whatever that might mean, maybe in West Africa. And it kind of morphed into, well, this bag isn't that great. Maybe we should build a bag instead of just, you know, the consulting services. So that led us down just to, as I'm sure you know, it leads down a path of just a million different crazy back alleys and eventually you end up up here. Well, we're going to go down a few of those alleys. But first I want to ask, because I'm very curious, you've got a go bag for Emily that's to prepare her for a coup.

What is in the go bag? She was not allowed to have weapons or guns. at the time. But when you think about what do you need if you are removed from your house and you only have your car, and maybe you need to get to the U.S. Embassy, maybe you need to drive to Ghana, right? So you have, you know, a change of clothes, you have radios, you have a knife, you have a tire repair kit, you have stuff like that that would, you know, food for the dog. I mean, it's the essential sometimes, you know, not always the... What's something counterintuitive or something I wouldn't think of that's in that bag?

Well, I mean, this is a lesson after 9-11, but your shoes matter. I had a friend who was in southern Manhattan, and she had heels. She worked at Golden Sacks, and she had heels, and she had to walk the entire length of Manhattan north afterwards. And so after that, she always kept a pair of sneakers in her desk. And it's like, you don't, I mean, you make a checklist of the things that might be useful. I mean, it's medication or, you know, stuff like that as well. But it's really, it's really just the basics, a map, you know? Because if the cell phone towers go down, what then?

You know, what's where? Do you know where these things are? Another, another useful thing to have is a key that you can unlock the fire hydrants to get water out of them. Right. I mean, it's little stuff like that. If you don't have it, you can't touch it. If you do, you can stay alive a long time. That's one I wouldn't have thought of.

The key for the fire. or something to stay, you can get really cold and warm places if it's raining or you get wet or you have to take shelter somewhere or whatever the case may be. So at what point did you realize you were starting a business? I really fought it, frankly. It was a hobby for a while and, you know, I still was, I still was torn and I'm still at a very deep level torn about what it means to serve my country from the standpoint of I served officially for five years. And that's it. And so, you know, the guys when I got out, they went back to war. And I didn't. And that's something that kind of, it felt like they served

more, you know. And so as I was getting out, I thought the plan was going to be now to go back to the CIA and go in the paramilitary branch. And so we were back in D.C. And, and, It's like, okay, well, I'll go to grad school, thanks to the American taxpayer. I had some money with the post-9-11 GI Bill that made it kind of a nice way to have some time to transition. So it was going to grad school to get my MBA at Georgetown and, you know, had kind of started Go Ruck in 2008, started grad school in 2009, and it was just a hobby. And I started it, at least publicly, with a pseudonym. And because I didn't want to kind of burn my cover. You know, like, if I want to go back and join the CIA and serve like that, it's, I can't plaster my story or my face all over some company that's selling Ruck's. And so kept that until about, you know, late 2010, I'd spent a lot of years at that point, two and a half years designing and getting built this rucksack and started with an adding Craigslist New York City for a, quote, backpack designer, right?

I mean, there's a lot of alleys back alleys there, right? And had a drawing much like your drawing of your OG whoop there. And the problem was I'd been, the higher. I mean, I had to keep doubling down on it, right? You have to keep investing cash. So all my deployment money, all of my savings, I poured into building up stock and inventory, because if you don't have it, you can't sell it, right? And so at that point, when I had all of this inventory in my condo,

just swimming in bags that nobody wants to buy, I had to kind of figure it out. And so I started an event called a Go Ruck Challenge, and that's where, I mean, I'm leading a class of people, and I have to kind of tell my story to get the word out. And then there's pictures that I'm taking and pictures of them, but then pictures of us. And back then, you know, if it's on Facebook, it's on Facebook forever. And so that was the thinking. It's like I had to kind of, you know, below my cover to kind of go all in on Go Rock. And, you know, it was worth it because of the impact that I had on the people that showed up.

And so they changed my heart in a way that made it feel like service, right? So whether it's official, official service in the United States military or it's service to mankind in our country, however you want to look at that, like, I had to make my peace with that. It feels like that's maybe a core theme for you is to be of service. Absolutely. And a good lesson for anyone, frankly. I mean, I think if you fast forward to the end of your life, it's,

not going to be about what you accumulate. It's going to be about what you're able to give back. And that's really important to me to kind of bake that into the sauce as soon as possible. And you've built some of that even into your financial mission. We have. So we just willingly donate 1% of our top line revenue back to various non-profits in honor of those who serve or who benefit those who serve. And how did you decide on those nonprofits? Yeah, I mean, we've been in the military space for a long time. I mean, I'm actually on the board of the Green Bray Foundation, and we've worked with the Navy SEAL

Foundation, and we've worked with a lot of the Runded Warrior and Travis Manion Foundation and those kinds of places. And so these are kind of our friends, and we believe in their mission. And those two tend to go hand in hand because good people are serving great missions and you just kind of want to serve it with them. And then we also do stuff for teachers and, you know, teachers and firefighters and police and you name it. For people who aren't familiar with rucking,

what are some of the benefits to that as an activity? So, I mean, just to define it, right? I mean, it's to put weight on your back and carry it. Go for a walk. And so what rucking is, is if you can ruck, you can ruck 10 pounds on your back, or you can ruck 125 pounds on your back. They're both rucking.

They will have dramatically different feelings on your body and the outcomes will be different right it's the difference between jogging and sprinting like you're saying both or something right i mean it's just completely different completely different things so i mean the benefits are it's good for your heart because you're moving it's good for your posture because you your your shoulders go back too much of too many of us we hunch over screens we hunch over our phones you're just constantly in this state of hunch and so it pulls your your shoulders back and you know your spine goes straight like it's like it's supposed to it's good for bone density

because it's active resistance training and you know I mean the benefits also can can be very social which I think is an underrepresented part of our health journey is what are our relationships like and so whether it's you and your dog and you're rucking the dog or it's you and your kid on a front loader and you've got some extra weight on your back or it's you and your buddy and you're you're talking about your lives. Well, it does hit on a huge theme right now in the whole world of fitness, which is this notion of the importance of Zone 2 training and, you know, being at Zone 2 of your heart rate, which from looking at rucking data,

I have information here, 27% of the time you're in Zone 2 and 22% of the time you're in Zone 3. So you're spending a huge percentage of your time in those. two zones, which are, you know, now thought of as some of the more efficient zones for building cardiovascular health, for losing weight, and, you know, a bunch of other people have talked about it. Yeah, I mean, you can carry a conversation on. So I end up, I mean, you know, I love my family. I love our mission at Go Ruck. I only have 24 hours a day like any of us. Yeah. I try to get really good sleep and feel good and healthy and energetic. And so I end up taking a lot of meetings with a rucksack on outside because I can kind of multitask that way.

So it's more about how to how to fit it in and it's not always this carve out thing where you've got to dedicate this specific time to just exercising. And so I think that's a really effective kind of zone two, zone three outlet like that. So the data I shared was on your actual heart rates during your rucking. And it turns out that if you look at the top five activity, on whoop for what percentage of time people spend in zone two. Hiking and rucking are in that second slot. So 40% of the time in zone two. The number one is actually power lifting, interestingly,

which I wasn't expecting. Golf number three, yard work in the top five. How about that? I love it that you count that. Because it counts. I mean, you know, people get after it in their yard. man it's great yeah they want credit and you know whoops 24-7 what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop

that's right you can check out whoop at whoop dot com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days so you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. You've built this amazing business. Now, what's next for the company? So our big goal is rucking will be bigger than running. Wow. What would be reasons that that could be possible? So, I mean, first off, you know the deal. You something like that, and everybody's like, that'll never happen. And, you know, if you look at the history of jogging or running, I mean, in 1967, Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike, wrote a book

called Jogging. It sold a million copies, right? And then Nike got the early stages of Pre-Pontane and running and jogging and the fitness craze and all of that, all of that kind of took off. and America was moved to jog and to run and to have this sort of athletic bigger about them. And that is kind of waxed and waned over the course of time as it will do, right? If you look at rucking, so carrying weight, this has been around since the hunter-gatherer days.

We did not invent anything. We have merely tapped into something that is the foundation of special forces and infantry training. It's gone on since forever. And so reasons why are oftentimes easier to peg off of running. So running is the number one cause of injury in special forces. It's a very, very injury prone type of activity.

And it's become a default for people who feel they want to get in better shape to say, well, I just, I got to start running, right? Look, I'm for the things. Do the things. This is not some takedown where I'm saying don't run. Emily ran cross-country and track it. At Georgetown, I got into it in the Army. I'm for running.

The difference is, is the force load onto your knees is fractional. Every time you run, it's eight times your body weight onto your knees. When you walk or ruck, it's 2.7, right? So you're dealing with, you know, sprains and strains and all that kind of stuff. So you can do this throughout the course of your life. You can do this when you're younger. You can carry 10 pounds, 20 pounds, whatever the case may be. Book bags all over campus right down there.

You see kids with book bags all over the place. That's rucking if you put a little more action, energy, and purpose behind it. As you get in an age where, say you're your age, 34, you still haven't felt your knees start to go yet, you can really, you can, I mean, to scale rucking up, I mean, it is how you prove special forces soldiers, Delta Force soldiers, British SAS soldiers. I mean, it is an incredible way to test someone's metal and an incredible challenge as you add weight. and distance and time and you make you expect someone and demand them to meet those certain time hacks as you get older you start to say oh i can't i can't do all the things that i used to do but you can still put 30 or 45 pounds on your back and go for a walk any anywhere that you go and and then you get even older so you start to worry about bone density those kinds of things

and you say okay well i can put a little bit of weight on and go for a walk and i can get all of these kinds of benefits throughout the course of a lifetime You got me convinced to do a lot more of this. The question I've got is, what's the longest rucking you've had at the highest weight and set amount of time, like, you know, from a fitness standpoint, the hardest you've had to do? So I'll baseline and say 12 miles with 45 pounds is kind of a standard, right? Okay.

If you get more than three hours is the cutoff. If you don't make three hours, you fail. And under two hours is the goal. So that would be about 10 minutes, 10 minutes a mile for 12 miles. With 45 pounds on your back. That actually seems really hard. Especially if you haven't done it. Yeah.

Like if I were just go try that right now, I think I'd find that incredibly hard. And what you would want to do is shuffle. You have to kind of, it's just like. Because you're still walking, but your jog. Yeah, I guess you're moving. Yeah, you're moving. You don't want to collapse forward. You keep your backup, which means you need to have the strength to carry the weight, right?

And then you need to just shuffle. You can't really get that by just walking. Okay, so that's the baseline, 12 miles and 45 pounds on your back, and two to three hours. Well, three hours is the cutoff, special forces. You would say, all right, try to get under two. Now, at the final phase of my training, there's this event called Robin Sage, which is basically a mock war throughout the countryside in North Carolina. It's crazy what those good people down there put on for our benefit to go through that kind of thing, to learn what it's like. And the infill, the infiltration, we jumped out of an airplane and you have 125 pounds on a rock that's dangling from your basically your belt and your front between your legs, you can sort of waddle to the door, you fall out of the plane, you lower the ruck, the ruck hits, you hit like a sack of potatoes as well.

Then we picked up that ruck, the 125-pound ruck and rucked it for 18 hours. Oh my gosh. It was, that is, I can still feel the pain right now, right? It's like at some point you can start to smell the ammonia of your body just eating its own muscle to power forward. And it was, you know, that was a mental test, more than a physical test, because at some point you reach, this is not, this is just so dumb. You're so past red line. This is so dumb. And you have to have that grit in order to persevere.

What has helped you develop that grit? Like, what place did you go to in your mind? What things did you say to yourself? How did you get through that? Well, that was kind of the end of almost over two years of training. And so you can quit any time. This is not a, this is not something where they're forcing you to stay. And it's just, you've...

By the way, that actually makes it even harder to complete if you can just quit at any time. Because any moment, you can just raise your hand and say, I'm done. Yeah, but you're invested by that. I'm just saying, like, if you're stuck on the mountain or whatever, you kind of only have one place to go. But, you know, if you can just raise your hand and say I'm out, it's like at any moment. moment your mind can betray you. It can. And so I think what's important though is in that journey confidence is earned, not just the physical confidence to know, hey, I did this in phase two with 90 pounds. Okay, this sucks more, but it's going to end. Yeah. Like everything will end. And just the

idea of quitting, it just hated to even thought. The best worst shower you'll ever take is after you quit something like that. And I just refused to... The best or shower. I just refused. I could envision that because I know what the showers are like there and they bust you back and you have, it's you and your own thoughts and they put you in the back of a pickup truck. You go back and drop your stuff and go take a shower and what's that like? Not good. And were you able to eat and drink over the course of that 18 hours or was it pretty... Not really. Yeah. I mean drink, yes. They were real particular about hydration that was a thing and we had these oral rehydration salts which were

they were nasty back then there's a lot better stuff on the market now but they were they're really really critical if you look at the group of you that did that event did everyone complete it robin sage yes so at that point that group had already hardened its its capability i mean it's a huge funnel i mean and it makes like you start out with a lot of people and then it just goes down and down and down and down. Do you remember what the last sort of moment was where it became something of a straight line, like whatever the remaining group was,

was the group that just kept getting through everything? They break it up a little bit, but to be... Like the SEALs, you know, famously have But the Bud's moment. I mean, to be really honest, it was something that I did not believe that I was going to pass this course until they gave me my Green Beret and my certificate of completion. There was such an element of fear throughout the whole thing.

It was also very, very humbling from the standpoint of the cadre, the instructors, were men that had been on the invasion of Afghanistan. The same war that I watched on the TV, they were the ones fighting that. And so to have that here, I mean, it's like, am I worthy? You don't get to decide these things. And you have to do your best and come what may. And so I felt very humble and very fortunate. You do have like the day that you earn your Green Beret, though.

It's just, it's like you're king of the world, right? King of the world. But then you go to your team and everybody's a Green Beret. They've actually done Green Beret stuff. You've done training. Nobody cares. Yeah, right. So you just find that humility all over again.

It's great. That is amazing. Isn't it just that journey that, the journey. that the journey of continually refining your humility and the process of growth. You have to surround yourself with that or else you will, it is a fatal flaw. Huberous is a fatal flaw.

And if you don't surround yourself with people that keep you humble, you will fall prey to your fatal flaw. What do you recommend today to someone who wants to become a green beret? Well, first off, take the decision seriously. think about it, right? But don't think too hard. It doesn't take two years. If you want to go through this, I mean, the only place to start is just you have to go talk to a recruiter, and then you

have to join. And what I'm, I do believe in, in a call to military service. I think that America is better for people who answer the call to serve. I also think we need more than just military service, right? I think we need people who are called to become teachers. You need people who are called to become doctors and nurses. We need people who are public servants who put the greater good before their own. And so the military gets a lot of love. And I've been a grateful recipient of that love. And if you feel the call to serve like that, I think that you should definitely do it, right? Train up. Rucking is the foundation of special forces training. There we go. So you need a ruck, you need to run. Not so much time in the gym. I made that mistake.

I went for a lot of runs and I spent a lot of time in the gym and I had a good foundation, but I joined the Army and I weighed 225 pounds. And what I came to find out, which I'm about 195 right now, right? And what I came to find out was this is my exact fighting weight. This is the weight that I was meant to be at when I was at peak physical condition when I was 25 to 30, which is the same weight I'm at now. I just, you can't, the more weight you put on, the more you have to carry everywhere you go. And so I sort of learned the hard way that getting really big muscles in the gym was not useful.

The running cardio base was useful, but man, the rucksack kicked my butt when I first put it on. It was not like anything I'd ever done before. And so that was something that, you know, it hardened your body, it hardened your feet, it hardens your back, it hardened your shoulders, and it hardened your mind as well. And so I would spend a little bit more time under the ruck if I had it to do over again. I see the whoop on your wrist, so I have to ask. How long have you been on whoop? Earlier this year, so January, so three months.

And have you been enjoying it? It's mostly about the things that are not. I mean, I've learned my body to some extent. I'm not an amateur in matters of physical fitness, right? It's the recovery side. It's the, you know, what are the effects of alcohol? Right. It's the how well do you sleep and why, and what are the patterns in that?

And so I think it's really important for us to question our own habits at times, to kind of baseline and reset and say, hey, let's start, let's question this. And sometimes you need to take a hard look in the mirror, and Rup has certainly been, it's been along that ride. I've also been doing something called 75 hard since the beginning. beginning of the year, which ended, I don't know, a week or so ago, which is, you know, two workouts a day and read a book. And no, I was on a high protein diet, you know, because I struggle to keep weight on, not to take it off. And it was a lot of movement, and it was a lot

of, you know, I haven't, I don't really understand yet how to get this dialed in kind of recovery plus, like the sleep I'm good at. My sleep scores are good, right? Like between 94 and 100, almost every night that I'm not at a hotel or- You would get the sleep bonus at whoop. Yeah, there you go. It's the recovery side. I got to kind of dial that in a little bit more. Well, it takes time and it's figuring out what are all the different factors in your life that are contributing to it. And if I may, you've probably built a resilience to your body being run down that most people have not, which is to say that when your body is run down, your mind is capable of still pushing it to do extraordinary things. And in a way, that can be a disadvantage

to identifying what are the things that make me have a lower recovery? It is a long commitment and a long road for me to accept that I can't do everything I want whenever I want if I just put my mind to it. Yeah. And so that's a really, that's a really useful. useful side to it. It's also, I mean, a bunch of us have done this. And, you know, I've gotten feedback from retired Green Beret Generals and feedback from guys that work out in my drive, guys and gals about, you know, alcohol consumption way down. And it's a habit that they're sticking with, you know, screen time in bed down because they realize that it's bad, right? I mean, sometimes it's really, really obvious things. And I think for a lot of people, it's, it's

it's almost too obvious. It's almost like you can laugh it off. Like, hey, if you drink a six-pack of beer right before bed, you're not going to sleep well. But somehow, if you start to, if that really kind of, they drill, if we drills that in through your cranium over time, right? It's like, well, you can adjust this and feel better.

Do you want to feel better? It's a big, like, manage what you measure. You know, when you see the numbers against having that extra drink or, you know, doing the, fill in the blank, bad behavior that you kind of already know is bad, but when you just see it in the data and you realize that's what it's doing to your body, it becomes, there's just a much higher level of accountability, I think. Yeah, and it's a conversation that you have to have with yourself.

And I think the examined life is the life worth leading. And so providing some ammunition to the examined life is critical because guys like, guys and gals like me that just want to get after it all the time, I can rationalize almost anything away, right? Or say, I'm good, right? If you ask me, how are you? I'm always good, right? And yet, you can't argue with the data.

You can still drive on, but you can't argue with the data. And that's something you've got to make your peace with or adapt your habits and then make your peace with a different version of outcome. Where can people learn more about GoRuck? We're at goRuck.com and all the socials. are go rock g-o-r-r-e-c-k all right well encourage everyone to check it out and jason this has been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast and thank you for all you've done for this country thanks cool big thank you to jason mccarthy for joining me on the podcast and also a big

thank you to jason for his service if you enjoyed this episode of the wu-p podcast please leave a rating or review please subscribe to the woup podcast you can check us out on social at woup at will omit if you have a question you want to answer on the podcast email us podcast at whoop.com, call us 508.443-49-2. Reminder, you can join whoop for free for 30 days. Get the full whoop experience. That's whoop.com. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L-L, get a $60 credit on W-W-A accessories. And that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.