I’ve been booked for this thing almost as soon as it was announced. Been looking forward to my first GoRuck event. The Stable crew has been indirectly training for this events for months with our Mayo Lane rucks. The work paid off.
F3 Louisville was 14 strong in total. We had sweet shirts printed by Swag. F3 Snickers did the design work. Kudos and thank you guys!
The goal for the 5 of us in Team PAX was to push the pace, try to maintain 15 min/mile, while knowing we would have some stops for pictures along the way. Team PAX was YHC, depends, Beans, Montezuma, and Twister.
Thankfully Montezuma figured out the routing as I was not getting my optimizer to work. Shout out and strong work to Brisket who killed the BFF basic functional fitness test, which looked a whole lot like a hard mode version of our RuckOps.
About 25 minutes late when Cadre Hand finished his intro, rules, guidelines, etc, we took off. But it really wasn’t until the finish line that we really realized we were racing, or someone was secretly racing against us. More on that later.
The ruck is split into 2 “legs”; River Road and Downtown. We go River Road first and I think it’s the best option. Longer of the two at 7ish miles will make downtown feel like a breeze. As instructed, we went right up to each monument along the way, you may notice the GPS location tracking showing us goes all the way up to the River Rd Water tower; ahem, like we were supposed to. Others may or may not have done the same. (The jury is still out). Long stretches of river Rd with no sidewalk was not ideal but march along we did and sometimes a light ruck shuffle/mosey. On the way back to the central start/stop location of Big 4 bridge, we hit a bonus waypoint at my vehicle for a mid-ruck refreshment. IYKYK. The soundtrack for Leg 1 was the F-1Trillion album by Post Malone.
Leg 2 of the ruck was downtown. We turned off the soundtrack for the downtown action. We enjoyed the shade and several more sites to stop for pictures. 3 of us did a sock swap in front of YUM Center. Despite the overall pace of the ruck being high, the mumblechatter for the duration of the event was even higher and arguably the best part. We passed along lots of “nice work!” and “way to go!” words of encouragement to the other Ruckers we passed along the way.
With Montezuma’s expert navigation, we get our last picture at the Belle of Louisville and then book it to the finish line. We saw some guys running the whole way with rucks and figured there is no way we are winning. Let’s just push the pace, have some fun and see what happens was our team motivation for the day. We got to Cadre Hand and realized we finished second to a couple by 2 minutes in the team division. Solid performance from the Triple H rucking crew. 15’11min/miles and 2 hours 58 minutes to finish. The couple who beat us were nice enough to hold the American Flag for our team picture. They said they were worried about where we were all morning….we must have been hot on their heels.
Cadre Hand verified our pictures and we enjoyed finish line fruit and a cold one to wash it down. Earned, never given. Cadre thanked us for the custom shirt (thanks Swag!) and that got me thinking, so I gifted Cadre one of our KY State Flag F3 patches. He was appreciative to our group. We had a great showing at the event. I had a pretty quick exit to meet my family in Nashville after the event so I didn’t get all of the finish line action but sounds like the crew had a great time.
Thanks to all who showed up and helped put our best foot forward in front of 45+ others who attended the event.
I’m excited to get involved with more of these types of events in the future. Until next time, keep on ruckin’.
-Steve-O
F3 Louisville 