• WORKOUT // 75 Push-Ups A Day
• BOOK // The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

"To create anything is such a gift and it exists outside the wire, where we belong — a work of art or a life we’re proud of or even something so simple and pure as a love letter. You don’t need a resolution to create, you don’t need to wait around for the inspiration. You have it, or you’ll find it on the way. And as you do, that becomes your path."

— Jason McCarthy
Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // Burpee Ladder of Regret
• BOOK // Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay

In recent years, Daniel Pink, author of the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, set up a webpage to collect regrets from around the world. According to the World Regret Survey, over 19,000 people from 105 countries have contributed.

• WORKOUT // "Shannon"
• BOOK // Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

“A consent to receive” — that is the definition of what it means to accept. Everyday, we are faced with making decisions, both big and small and in between, to accept what the world serves up for us. Will we accept that the weather is ruining our plans, the responsibilities that come with more authority, the road rage isn’t really about us in the end, the loss we can’t replace, the fact that most people are trying their best most of the time? 

• WORKOUT // Manion WOD
• BOOK //  Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

"I always thought words like nurture were for other people’s vocabularies, I’ll focus on my path where none of that is required. When I think, though, of nature vs nurture, and I think of the sacrifices given and what they represent, I cannot escape the fact that I, too, owe my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and so many more who have nurtured me throughout my life, and I feel deeply indebted to them."

— Jason McCarthy
Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // MURPH
• TV SERIES //  Masters of the Air Watch Now

"It’s impossible to fully forget our pasts, we have the memories we have and if we start with the good, the bad seems to be a little easier to handle. We’re headed to Memorial Day, and to Normandy, and we just did the Manion Hero WOD in our driveway. If I let each of those run their course, I would be immovable with sadness. Instead, sometimes it’s a picture or a song, a terrible workout with friends to remind me that I’m still alive and that I continue to owe a well-led life to those sacrifices. Only in service to others have I been able to find any real meaning in this life.
Next to the fields of white headstones at the American Cemetery in Normandy, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean from a breath-taking vantage point, there’s a chapel. By the time you get in there, your heart weighs so much more than it did when you first stepped onto those hallowed grounds." And therein lies the inscription:
THINK NOT ONLY UPON THEIR PASSING,
REMEMBER THE GLORY OF THEIR SPIRIT

— Jason McCarthy
Founder, GORUCK

WORKOUT // 101st AIRBORNE

BOOK // The Common Sense Way: A New Way to Think About Leading and Organizing by Pete Blaber

"Our team is in Normandy to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. We have a bunch of kids here under ten and had Rich been born a few years earlier he would have been one of the guys storming these beaches.
Our crew has a full arc of life and innocence and innocence gone. We’re staying in a chateau that overlooks the English Channel and the beaches. You can smell the cool, salty air and hear the birds singing freely and on the streets the people say bonjour to anyone they come across. The peace seems so natural yet you can’t throw a rock in any direction without hitting a memorial full of the names of the heroes who never left France."

— Jason McCarthy
Founder, GORUCK

WORKOUT // Capture The Flag

BOOK / FILM // The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

"A black-and-white copy costs 21 cents these days unless your office has Fight Club perks, and we got an interesting one in our mailbox last week. A simple picture with an address in the form of a house that Google wouldn’t find for you — you had to know. There was no RSVP, no QR code to distract your eyes, nothing digital. Neighbors Welcome it said, and Music by Three Leg Cat. It didn’t take long for neighbors to ask neighbors if they had gotten the flyer, spoken in grins as if the Count of Monte Cristo was behind it all. Nothing was lost in the simplicity, so you could imagine the rest. And our imaginations were dutifully rewarded — newborns to old timers to twenty-somethings on their tenth High Noon — hundreds of people showed up and talked and smiled and got sunburned."

– Jason McCarthy,
Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // The 13
• BOOK / FILM // Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman

"We have always talked a lot about service at GORUCK and we have no plans to stop. What’s been a revelation to witness, as myself and others have transitioned from the military, is not that we still crave that sense of service. It's that we don’t often know what shape or form that call to service may take. For now, for me, it’s serving as a pitching (and ball collecting) machine."

– Jason McCarthy,
Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // 9/11 Tribute
• FILM// Refuge

"The Tribe theme for September is ‘Reflect’ and what better time to look within than now. We find ourselves in the middle of a hotly contested election season, where bad actor bots proliferate click bait to exacerbate our divisions, and we start to look at our neighbors in a different light due to their yard signs or the shirts they wear. As the tempo ramps up, I invite you to take a tactical pause and watch this month’s recommended film as a reminder of the extraordinary power of compassion in the unlikeliest of places."

– Emily McCarthy,
Co-Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // MOGADISHU MILE
• BOOK // Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

In many ways, I have benefited from the gift of mercy over the course of my life. That said, none has felt as dramatic as the time I was invited to skydive with the U.S. Army Parachute Team last fall. I traveled to Maxwell Air Force Base with the Jacksonville-based team of USAREC and while honored by the opportunity, I had mixed feelings about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. On the morning of our scheduled jump, I donned a yellow flight suit to hurry up and wait for my turn. I got paired with a Golden Knight named Dan who invited me to sit close to him in the airplane while he strapped me to him.

– Emily McCarthy,
Co-Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // CHAD 1000X
• BOOK // Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I was twelve when Terminator 2 came out - a bunch of us snuck in to see it at a mall theater in Dallas because we weren’t old enough to get into an R movie. So we bought a ticket for something else, then went to T2. I thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen. The motorcycle chase, the Guns N’ Roses song blasting, the shotgun reloads, the other shape shifting terminator, the thumbs up in liquid mercury. “I know now why you cry” — my kind of action packed love story.

– Jason McCarthy,
Founder, GORUCK

• WORKOUT // NIGHTMARE WOD BEFORE CHRISTMAS
• FILM // The Holdovers

Humility is the theme for this month. Unlike money, the more humility you have, the happier you’ll be. Pride grows in echo chambers we’ve all been in and is the fatal flaw of all history’s and today’s great villains. Humility grows in service to others.

– Jason McCarthy,
Founder, GORUCK