Do you miss me? …… Call me
Want to meet up? …… Invite me places
Want me to understand you? …… Open your heart to me
Want to know something about me? …… Ask me
Don’t like something? …… Please tell me
Have some advice for me? …… I want it
(I need all the help that I can get)
Have nice thoughts about me? …… Share them with me, in exquisite detail
Want/need something from me? ……. Ask for it
Love me? …… Let me know
(Don’t let anything or anyone stop you)
Thank you.
Why don’t we skip the introduction. I want to hear your question, please.
-Marion Rosen
I have signed up for the GoRuck Ascent, an exciting 100-hour adventure where a group of active duty Green Berets, a group of hardcore athletes and yours truly will wear some heavy packs, climb a few 14k peaks in Colorado, run/walk/ruck through some local towns and cities, learn some fun/useful mountaineering, survival, and medical skills, and of course, toss back a few beers around a bonfire.
In preparation for the Ascent, we’re all committed to raising funds for the Green Beret Foundation (GBF), a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to helping wounded soldiers from the US Army Special Forces. Regardless of political affiliation we can agree that those who serve deserve our utmost respect and material support, especially when the going gets rough for them. And it is appalling to realize that sometimes that support is not fully there when they need it the most.
I kindly ask for your help in my fundraising efforts for the GBF. In fact, I have made this post with you, my blog reader, in mind. I have pledged to raise $1270 for the foundation, which will be a very easy to reach goal if each of you give, say, $2 . Of course, you can give more if you wish, but any amount, no matter, how small, counts. I’d love to have the support of as many as you as possible and I really am counting on you for this.
It only takes a couple of minutes, and a couple of dollars. Simply go to my Green Beret Foundation fundraising page and follow the directions on the page.
You will know in your heart the amount that feels right to give. And thank you for that amount, regardless of what it is. My gratitude is with you.
Eduardo
The Ultimate Challenge is to live with integrity.
Earlier this week I completed the Goruck Challenge, a crazy ass event that is hard to describe. I wrote about my positive experience completing it on my last post. Today’s post is about preparing for the Goruck Challenge, both physically, mentally, as well as logistically.
Others have blogged about these matters and I just want to produce here a very succinct document that has just about everything you need to know to prepare for the Challenge, without giving anything away.
Physical training
The essence of the training is to run with weights. Do a few runs with one of these in your backpack:
Then graduate to two of those.
Run in varied terrain. Asphalt, sand, hills. Sprint, every now and then. If there are hiking trails nearby, run (or at least fast-hike) them a few times as well. A nice way to train is to blow off a Saturday as follows: get out of the house with your backpack, and some snacks, and run away from home on the first half of the day, then run back on the second half. It’s a nice way to get to know the city you live in.
It will probably help if you do other stuff as well. Consider doing some of Eva T’s bodyweight workouts, with or without your pack on.
Mental Training
Attend the Challenge with the attitude that you have no idea what is going to happen in it. The truth is: we never have any idea of what is going to happen, but we believe we do. It is the illusion of control, also known in other cultures as the source of suffering. Part of what makes the Challenge a CHALLENGE is that at any given moment we wish to control a situation that is out of our control, and learning (as they say in Yoga) to relax into the pose, or (as they say in Buddhism) to be comfortable with uncertainty, can make the difference between success and failure in the Challenge. Jason puts it simply on the Goruck Challenge website: it’s all mental.
Gear
1. Wear clothes that are light, will keep you warm, and will dry quickly. Do what you can to stay warm, which requires for you to know what that will be exactly. Don’t underestimate this. Failure to do this will seriously debilitate you and it may make it not possible for you to complete the challenge. Google the lowest temperature that the city where your challenge will be can experience during the month of your challenge, and prepare for that temperature, under the assumption that you will be wet and that it may be windy. I ended up running with compression pants and shirt (long sleeve), a pair of shorts, coolmax trail socks, and a windbreaker. I also had with me a light fleece that I brought just in case but that ended not using. This exact mix worked well for me. Bring gloves, no matter the season, to protect your hands.
2. As far as shoes goes: pick a pair that is light, dries quickly, and can handle varied terrain, but don’t run on VFF’s. Those are awesome shoes (they are my preferred shoe for running), but the weight factor in the Challenge really calls for another kind of shoe. I tried them during training, quickly realized that I was going to need something different, and settled for a very light pair of Inov-8’s designed for off-road running that worked really well.
3. Wrap your bricks in duct tape, as you have been instructed, but don’t make too bulky a package, or it may not fit in the backpack you’re given. This is what happened to me, as I wrapped my four bricks on a towel that was too thick. Let’s just say that the consequences of that mistake made for some serious good livin’ out there!
Food, Water
Be prepared to have the snacks/gels/electrolytes you’d want for a strenuous 10 hour hike. Then add a bit more. You’re going to use them all up. My rule was to have a piece of something I could chew on more or less every hour, and this rule worked well for me.
Bring a hydration bladder with 3 liters of water in it, plus a bit more. I hesitate to say exactly how much more, as you won’t have much space left on your pack after you fit your bricks and your bladder into your pack (incidentally, a 3 liter hydration bladder doesn’t fit real well on the Goruck Echo). You will be replenishing your water reservoirs at some point, but nobody will know exactly when. So plan accordingly.
Drink lots of water before the Challenge begins.
This is the second post in a three part series. To see the final post regarding this incredible journey, click here.
I
I am very happy to report that this weekend I completed the Goruck Challenge in San Diego. Per their website:
Inspired by the most elite training offered to Special Forces soldiers and led by Green Berets, the GORUCK Challenge is a team event and never a race. Challenge cadre build each class into a team through collective conditions of mental and physical exhaustion. Classes are small, camaraderie is high, smiles are plentiful, and teamwork is paramount.
You and your fellow Challenge takers all wear GORUCK backpacks throughout the Challenge. Yes, your bags will be weighted down with bricks, but if the Challenge were easy you wouldn’t sign up.
There is much I’d like to say about the Challenge, and I will nevertheless refrain. Some things in life are best appreciated when encountered with fresh eyes. Consequently, this review will be intentionally vague at times, so as not to ruin a few of the surprises that the Challenge is known for in case you, reader, ever choose to undertake it. At the same time, everybody should have some idea about what they would be getting themselves into:
(This video is a rendition of when the Challenge was completed in NYC. I did mine in San Diego)
The Challenge delivers what it promises, and more. Now, whether that’s more of a good thing or more of a bad thing is up for each person to decide.
For me it was a very valuable and positive experience. It definitely tested the limits of my physical strength and endurance, and what I found out truly surprised me: that I am much, much tougher than I thought I was. I’ve known myself to be rather mentally resilient and resourceful, thanks to years of Buddhist Meditation and Self Inquiry, but I did not know that I was physically so, at least to the extent that it showed this weekend. This knowledge is quite priceless, and for this alone I am grateful to Jason for his vision that something as insane as the Challenge could be offered to civilians and non-civilians alike so that we can jointly see what we’re capable of, when we put our minds, hearts, bones, joints and muscles to it.
I am therefore very proud of the performance of my team (and my own performance) this weekend. To the point that it swells my heart to think about it. Really proud.
II
When we were in the middle of the Challenge, I wondered what kept us going. At the time I could not answer that question, but in retrospect, I realized that we had taken to heart that the Challenge is eminently about teamwork, that we had understood that when we each worked extra hard, this helped our teammates. Speaking for myself, I remember, vividly, towards the end of the Challenge (when we were all, without exception, exhausted, hungry and thirsty), having a thought like the following:
If I perform another Fireman’s Carry, or carry one of the Coupons for a little longer, that means one of my teammates does not have to do it. And so I’m going to commit to it, for this one more block, and then re-evaluate.
This way of thinking was hugely important in helping me break the laws of conservation of energy and manufacture stamina out of thin air. I am certain that, had I instead focused on my own survival during the Challenge, I would have burned out really early on. It is a bit paradoxical, but this is known to be the secret to successful teamwork everywhere:
Almost all the men who survived [Seal Training] possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the “fist” of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.
-Eric Greitens, in The Seal Sensibility
It is a lesson that, if understood well, can change the world many times over. It is reverberating in me like the ripples created by the dropping of a pebble on a still lake.
III
And so now it’s been 36 hours since the completion of the challenge, and every muscle in my body hurts: the soles of my feet, my calfs, my quads, my shoulders, my glutes. (Yes, those, too). And my body is decorated with bruises and cuts in a number of public and private places. And it all feels good, good, good, as all that is evidence of the vibrancy of life inside of this body that carries me around and serves me so well. It feels very good to see it put to full use.
And so the question arises as to how to best care and tender to that body in preparation for the Challenge. This is an important and lengthy topic about which I will blog in a subsequent post.
All the best to you!
I wondered for years why if TW was so effective nobody was as “advanced” as KT was even though there’s now been people doing TW for decades. One day I understood that we were all chasing the end of the rainbow. That day I “graduated.” It was a quiet ceremony. Nobody was informed. I did not receive a special certificate. If I had to put what I learned that day into words it would read like this:
.
.
.
It doesn’t end.
It’s just not a problem that it doesn’t end.
That’s the freedom.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The most amazing thing I learned that day was just how much I was like everyone else:
.
I
I’m just as fucked up as the man next door,
I just don’t beat myself up about it as much as he does.
That’s the enlightenment I know.
.
And sometimes
I notice he beats himself up much less than I do.
Those days he is the enlightened one
and I’m proud to call him
Teacher.
.
.
.
II
Deep forgiveness for our apparent imperfections.
Deep compassion for our apparent flaws.
A knowing that it’s okay to be just like this.
Even as I try to be a better man with time.
Perfection and Imperfection in perfect harmony.
That is the enlightenment that I know.
.
.
.
III
Anything that I can compare myself to
Is imagined.
Why would that be a fair standard of comparison?
Better to spend my time appreciating
How much of a good friend
I can be to myself.
Much more than some sort of ‘eternal bliss,’ the end of suffering is a kind of equanimity, a perspective of the sort ‘this, too, shall pass,’ a gentle endurance towards small and large discomforts alike. If those sound like some sobered up (even boring) claims about what freedom looks like in practice, good, because that is the point of this post.
Meditation and self inquiry, dutifully engaged, deliver a taste of this basic freedom, and the miracle, the mind blowing grace of it all, is that THAT IS ENOUGH for us to be able to live a peaceful, joy filled life. The realization of this enoughness can happen in an instant or it may take a lifetime to figure out, and some people die without fully knowing it. It is the veil that separates heaven from hell.
And this realization can’t be promised. No meditation, medication or ’spiritual technique’ can give it. This does not render our practices useless, however. Paraphrasing Joan Halifax Roshi: Enlightenment is an accident. Our practices make us accident-prone.
III
Blue may learn that it was seeing itself literally in a very limited light and of the futility of trying to strip itself of all blueness. Better to own your own blueness, your own purpleness, your own redness, and so on. All colors have their uses.
Even as these realizations may take place for Blue, it never really ‘transmutates’ to ‘White: ‘White (Enlightenment) is a myth.’ The radiation that ‘Blue‘ is may lose it’s identification with ‘Blueness‘ and then be fully able to see itself as showing up as all wavelengths, and one can call that a ‘truer’ Enlightement, but what’s really important is to be in touch with the fact that one shows up as blue, sometimes, red, sometimes, and so on. And that’s the part that is really important: to be in touch with how one is showing up this moment and to have intimacy with that. And the reason why that is what matters is because, right now, that’s all one’s got. All the rest is a story.
IV
This little model helps me explain people’s disillusionment with their spiritual teachers. In the same way we, as spiritual seekers, long to be White we want our teachers to be White, so that we have somebody in our life who we believe can show us the way. But n o b o d y is White.
‘White‘ is a story.
A spiritual master is somebody who is in touch with all her colors, AND who owns them when he or she shows up as that, and that equanimity with all colors is as White as it gets. When we don’t understand this and our teacher begins to show his or her blue and red and purple sides, we’re disillusioned. We attack them in our minds or write blog posts about them. We separate from them and I know that’s not wise because it all feels like pain. I know that because I’ve done it. It all stems from a basic confusion about what enlightenment is and is not, and about the deeper meaning of purity. The simple way to begin to clear up that confusion is to literally recognize that ‘Enlightenment is not what you think.’
This prompted me to write a little poem, which I dedicated to my friend Michelle Kassinger. We had a good time the other day talking about the matters that eventually became the ingredients for this post. Here it is.
I am aware of the colors I wear today
I am aware that those colors are not all that I am.
Allowing those insights to percolate right through my actions
So that I may live a life of balance
That’s the enlightenment that I know.
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