The memes have spoken. January is officially the longest month of the year. The promise of a fresh start fades quickly when life keeps showing up. Family members catch the flu, or worse, contract lice, yuck. The “let’s circle back post-holidays” chickens come home to roost. The days are short and the nights are cold. Many of us already know the “clean slate” narrative is a trick we play on ourselves. There is no reset button. There is only moving forward, one foot after another.
This year’s Tribe theme is Forge the Self, and January’s focus, Origin, felt like the right place to begin. Not because origins are neat or heroic, as fictional stories make them seem. They rarely are. They are built from chance encounters, shared effort, old foundations, and new ideas. They happen whether we are ready or not, often in ways we do not recognize until much later.
One such origin story began when I crossed paths with a ruck club leader from Minnesota. She found herself far from the Land of 10,000 Lakes, standing among a group of strangers in the most biodiverse place on the planet. It was a place my children fondly refer to as Jurassic Park, otherwise known as the Osa Peninsula in southern Costa Rica.
There, I learned that Kayla Girgen had discovered rucking as a powerful way to get strong and fit. She used movement as medicine, co-founded the North Star Ruck Club, and even wrote a book, Ruck Fit, which came out earlier this month. Getting to know her at the Ruck & Flow retreat in Costa Rica, I could tell she was a genuine and adventurous spirit. We talked abstractly about working together to share the benefits of rucking with more people.
That conversation led to the January Ruck Fit Challenge, an accessible yet motivating way to kick off the new year. Ten rucks. You choose the weight, the distance, the pace, and the company. It was designed not as a reset, but as an invitation to get outside and get moving when it would be easier to stay warm and comfortable at home. A way to meet people where they are, at the start of a new year that is really just a construct of our strange relationship with time. What I liked most was that if you missed a day or two because you felt crummy or life piled up, you could still hit the goal of ten rucks, even if it meant a double-ruck kind of day.
In an effort to bridge the old school with the new, I connected Kayla with the founder of one of GORUCK’s longest-standing ruck clubs, Mill City Rucking Crew. They planned to have their two clubs meet up for a ruck on January 7 as part of the challenge. Those plans were not meant to be. As Oliver Burkeman bleakly paraphrases spiritual teacher Robert Saltzman in a recent conversation, “we suffer from total vulnerability to events.”
Unfortunately, those events were the killings of our citizens in the streets by federal forces. Shocking as it was to witness, this is not the first time we have seen or named this kind of injustice in our history.
To say that our country is going through a period of reckoning is an understatement. We’ve seen the bumper stickers and t-shirts that remind us that “Freedom isn’t free,” and it isn’t. Not for soldiers fighting in foreign wars, and not for the wars we wage at home. Freedom requires participation, in the different levels of our government and as neighbors. It requires standing up to protect the vulnerable, like what is happening in the city of Minneapolis, and in many other ways across our country.
That ruck may have been canceled on that fateful day, but it did not stop Mill City from coming together for a subdued pub ruck at a later date. Now more than ever, we need one another. We need to reach out and check in on our neighbors, our friends, and even those we'd consider enemies.
As I set out today on the last day of January for my tenth ruck of the month, I was moved by the perseverance of our Minnesota ruck clubs to call up some friends whose hearts may be feeling heavy to join me. I don’t know what the future holds for our country as it turns 250 this year. I only know that it feels like we are being forged for a new beginning and that we don’t need to face it alone.
— Emily McCarthy
Co-Founder, GORUCK
