Welcome to GORUCK

About GORUCK, The Rucking Company

“My timing couldn’t have been worse.”

I was transitioning out of the military, going through a divorce, and had no business experience.

I heard so many reasons why this would never work:

• The backpack market’s too crowded.
• The GORUCK Challenge is too extreme.
• Nobody’s that crazy.
• Rucking will never happen outside the military.

“Never,” they said.

Two things kept me going.

The first was my dog, Java.

“My life in 2008 felt like some sad country song, where a man’s got a dog and a broken heart. And he has to figure out what to do with his own ruins.”

One path is to bury yourself in a bottle of whiskey.

The other path is to do more of what you love.

Java forced me to stay active, and he kept me smiling.

Without him, there would be no GORUCK.

The second was my commitment to the Special Forces way of life.

The rules of business never really mattered to me.

My goal was to honor my roots in Special Forces.

This journey started with a napkin sketch of GR1.

And a couple years later, we started proudly building them in the United States of America and offering our Scars Lifetime Guarantee.

GORUCK is very personal to me.

My buddies take our gear to war, they lead our events, they pay attention to what we do as a brand.

And they all know how to find me.

“So I’m accountable to them.”

My nightmare would be if our gear failed them when they needed it most, or if we let them down in any way.

So Green Berets are judge and jury of GORUCK quality.

And Green Beret values remain our true north.

Special Forces is a people-first organization.

• You train others.
• You work by, with, and through them.
• You never quit until the job is done.

“It’s not about you.”

In 2010, when nobody wanted to buy our gear and I had every dollar—and then some—sunk into inventory, I fell back on what I knew and started building teams at the GORUCK Challenge.

Unknown distance. Unknown time. Unpublished route. Details not forthcoming.

Just bring a rucksack.

And welcome to a day in the life of Special Forces training.

The surprising thing for me was that people—all these crazy people that don’t exist—kept showing up and asking for more.

And more.

And more.

“Some things in life are not for sale. You have to earn them. And sometimes you just have to know where to start.”

Rucking has always been the foundation of GORUCK, because it’s the foundation of Special Forces training.

“Put some weight on your back and start walking. That’s it.”

These are our roots.

And our focus at GORUCK is clear:

We’re The Rucking Company.

Supporting an active community of ruckers all over the world.

So of course we build:

• Rucking gear
• Apparel
• Footwear

And of course we lead rucking events.

The magic of GORUCK is our global community.

Ruckers on sidewalks and trails the world over.

Ruckers forming ruck clubs and inviting any and everyone to join them for group rucks, free of charge.

Millions of people out there are looking for something more.

Something like this.

Many say the bridge is too far.

That the military and civilian worlds are too far apart.

“We see bridges everywhere, one mile at a time.”

Many say America is soft.

“I think they’re looking in the wrong places.”

Our Special Forces cadre have pushed over 180,000 participants through some of the most grueling events on planet Earth.

“You’ve shown us the human spirit is alive and well and burning brighter than ever.”

Sometimes you just have to know where to start.

Welcome to GORUCK.

“We’re ready when you are.”

Jason McCarthy

Jason McCarthy: Green Beret, GORUCK Founder

“You don’t ask for a lighter rucksack. You build up stronger shoulders.”

That’s the metaphor that you have to live by.

And when you get good at doing hard things, it makes life a lot more rewarding.

“You don’t get any reward out of easy stuff.”

“Embrace the suck.”

It’s gonna be terrible.

We built a company around showing people what they can do.

Push them. Challenge them. Lead them.

At that point, that became the brand of GORUCK.

“We have some problems over here right now. We might have a hijacked over here too.”

9/11 happened.

Those towers fell.

And it comes back when I think about what it felt like to watch that go down.

And, you know, I just knew what I needed to do.

Life gave me the answer.

And the answer was correct.

“I needed to go serve my country.”

“I wanted to be the guy on the tip of the spear that was making the most difference that I possibly could.”

So Special Forces seemed like a good place to do that.

Yeah, so in 2007 I was in Iraq.

My wife Emily, she was in the CIA. She was in West Africa, in a town called Abidjan.

When I went there, I didn’t have a lot to do.

So I focused on what I knew and the way of life that I was leading.

Coming back from war, you know, some home improvements—and I’m not talking about hanging pictures. I’m talking about base-fortification-type stuff.

So we were trying to get creative and think:

“What can he do that uses his skill set?”

And I built her a go bag, or a GORUCK.

We were going to put extra batteries, a pair of running shoes, extra supplies, extra cash, documents, extra radio equipment, some food, in the back of her car.

In case there’s a coup—which they love a good coup in Africa, right? It can happen like that.

And so that was the inspiration.

And it led to the creation of our first rucksack: GR1.

A mere two and a half years later, I’d come back on a one-way ticket home.

My marriage was in the crash-and-burn phase of its existence.

“Don’t start crying yet, right? I remarried the same girl after we got divorced. She’s awesome.”

But at this stage, it was a one-way ticket home.

I’m going through a divorce.

I’m not in the military anymore.

At one stage we’re fighting over the dog.

It was just miserable.

Then I’m in business school trying to hide my past because I’m ashamed of it.

Weird stuff, right?

Transition was hard.

And I’m crashing on my buddy’s couch on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

I put an ad on Craigslist New York City for a:

“Backpack designer.”

How this team in Montana found me based off that ad is just one of life’s mysteries.

This was when the economy was terrible.

The financial crisis was in full swing.

They were looking for work because they’d been let go from a backpack company they were designing for in New Zealand.

Sometimes you get a lucky break.

So they reached out and said:

“Hey, this is what we can do.”

And they did it for very little money.

They educated me on what it would be like to design and build.

What manufacturing is like.

I don’t know how to sew.

Sewing is not sewing.

You have to find the subject matter experts who can guide you through that process.

That took a couple of years.

Now it’s easy to say:

“Oh, a couple years.”

At the time it was excruciating.

I’m going through a divorce.

I’m not in the military anymore.

It was just miserable.

What eventually made sense was that I created an event called the GORUCK Challenge.

This forced me to get out and lead a bunch of people on an event based on Special Forces training.

And next thing I know, we’ve launched an event in San Francisco.

It was a proof of concept.

“Let me show you the type of abuse that we’re willing to put it through.”

I remember flying out to San Francisco and doing a route recon.

I had no idea how it was going to go.

It’s the Wild West.

He brought a bunch of bricks.

He made us separate them and put them in our rucks.

We’re just going to make it suck.

Make it suck for the gear, too.

Because it’s about the pictures.

We’ll show them rolling around in the dirt and doing all sorts of fun stuff.

What amazed me was that there were two Marines that showed up.

God bless.

They showed up with a 30-rack of Bud Light.

Then they started stuffing the beers into the rucks.

I said:

“What are you guys doing?”

They’re like:

“Oh, we’re good at this stuff.”

“You don’t even know what this stuff is.”

They were just so confident.

Smiling.

Happy about it.

And I gravitated toward that energy.

It was a pretty intense experience.

But at the end of it I just told them:

“Oh yeah, it was easy. It wasn’t too bad.”

Even inside I was thinking:

“If he ever puts me in that water again, I’m gonna kill him.”

That became the vibe.

A good, positive experience.

But I didn’t know how to define positive.

They defined positive for me.

That was really cool.

Then it became:

“How do you scale that?”

You find the right people to do it.

And it just kind of caught on like wildfire.

People were, in fact, looking for:

“Fight Club.”

Over the years I’ve gotten several notes from veterans saying:

“I was going to kill myself, but I found this community of people, and it gave me a reason to get out of bed at a time when I needed to get out of bed.”

It doesn’t get much better than that.

And those team events are what’s so important.

Because throughout life you’ll always operate better as a team.

A team brings people together and focuses them on a problem.

“You can get so much more accomplished as a team than you can as an individual.”

This is a Special-Forces-style mission.

“We are training the trainers.”

“We are showing them how to do it.”

“We are inspiring them.”

“And then we’re just getting out of their way.”

We think Americans can learn from the Special Forces lifestyle:

• Situational awareness
• Physical fitness
• Well-being

It’s really inspiring to see people take that on.

And to see how they pay it forward.

Whether it’s fundraisers for someone who has cancer.

Or bringing a community together for kids with cancer.

Or whatever the case may be.

We see this a lot.

And that warms my heart.

I think it’s cool.

And I think we need to inspire the next generation to serve.

And this generation.

And the generation in front of us.

“We all owe more.”

“We can all do more.”

The Standard Film

The Standard | GORUCK Selection Documentary Film - Official Trailer (2020)

“Everybody out there says it’s a bridge too far. If you never serve, you can never understand it.”

That’s a coward’s approach.

People need to say:

“This is how you can better understand it.”

Forty more hours of two-standard training. That’s the clock that ticks.

We call it Selection, really just to pay homage to our roots. We’re not trying to replicate Special Forces Selection, but we are trying to pay tribute to it.

“I wanted to go through the experience of being pushed to my limit and learn how to get past that so I could teach that to others.”

“I want to meet the kind of person that passes this event. I want to see that, feel it, smell it.”

But more important than that is that everyone who shows up learns something that makes them a better person.

This event is about winning.

Right now you’re failing to meet the standard. That is losing.

“He’s quitting. He’s quitting.”

I can’t think of anything that has this much time and this much physical and mental stress.

I can’t think of anything.

As you go through Selection, you almost reach a different plane of mental being.

And I think that plane—what I would equate it to—is an understanding of self.

You become a part of something greater.

There’s finally something where there’s a bar, and if you don’t make it, nobody cares.

Meet the standard or quit.