What 24 Hours of Ruckapalooza Taught Me About Type Two Fun

Earlier this month I did something I would not have said yes to if anyone had told me what was actually in it.

I drove to the GoRuck HQ in Jacksonville Beach, FL with my two nephews — Andrew and Adam, both twenty-somethings — and their good friend Parker, and we did Ruckapalooza. GORUCK's twenty-four-hour, six-part endurance gauntlet. Rucksacks on. Beach sand in your shoes. Sleep, theoretically.

Andrew (who is loose with details generally, and in the best way - he is a great hang) had pitched it to me on the phone as a tidy little structure: one hour of exercise, three hours of rest, repeated six times around the clock. I can sleep in the Sprinter van, I thought. I can do that, no problem.

His math turned out to be a little suspect. Like the kind of math I used to do when I was in my twenties.

The "one-hour" workouts were combined with a ruck - walk with a weighted backpack, some of which were seven miles long, and in the dark. There were four hundred flutter kicks. There were burpees. There were more lunges than I have done in my entire life. By the time we were under streetlights at 2 AM, three twenty-somethings and my feet quietly filing a formal complaint, I had figured out that Andrew's pitch had been a well intentioned fiction.

And I was grateful for it. Because if someone had handed me the actual schedule on Friday afternoon, I would have found a reason to be somewhere else.

I did Ruckapalooza for the workout. I came home with three things I didn't expect.

Sometimes not knowing is the only way you do the thing

Most of the meaningful chapters of my life — starting a company, the dodgier trips, the things that became stories — were chapters I would have talked myself out of if I'd had the full briefing in advance.

We tell ourselves a polite lie about preparation. That if we just understood what we were walking into, we'd be braver. Most of us are the opposite. Information, past a certain age, is mostly a reason to stay home.

The seven-mile night ruck was easier than the seven-mile night ruck I would have rehearsed for two weeks. Andrew's understated pitch wasn't dishonest. It was effective. It got me out the door, and once I was out the door, I was in. The mile after a mile is just another mile. The next round is just the next round. You don't have to want to be there. You just have to be there.

I'd like to think I've learned to spot when not knowing is the gift, and to walk in anyway.

Type Two Fun is real, and it might be the best kind

I'd never heard the term until Andrew explained it to me somewhere after the 4x100 flutter kicks.

Type One fun is fun while you're doing it — a great dinner, a powder day, a perfect sunset. Type Two fun is fun only in the rearview. Miserable in the moment. Hilarious by Tuesday. The kind of fun that earns its place in the highlight reel by being deeply not-fun the day it happens.

When I look back at the moments of my life I actually tell people about, almost all of them are Type Two. The training rucks that turned into bonk-fests. The startup years that felt like drowning. Parenting three girls under age three. None of it was fun at the time. All of it is what I tell stories about now.

The trick of getting older, I'm finding, is that Type One fun gets easier to buy into and Type Two fun gets harder to choose. You have to opt in. You have to leave the comfortable thing. You have to let your nephews convince you the math works out, even when you quietly suspect it doesn't. The reward is that twenty years from now, you have something to remember besides good restaurants.

The fellowship I had more of when I was younger — and now have to fight for

There was a moment around dawn, sitting in a folding chair, watching Andrew and Adam and Parker fart and laugh about something I was too tired to follow, when I realized what I had actually come to Ruckapalooza for. It wasn't the patches. It wasn't the cardio. It was the specific kind of closeness that only shows up when you've suffered through something stupid together with people you love.

I had a lot of that in my twenties. Long drives. Bad ideas. Group misery that became group memory. I have less of it now, and not because the people aren't around — because the structure of adult life quietly removes the conditions that produce it. Calendars get tight. Nobody has twenty-four hours to do something pointless together. You stop bumping into the kind of shared challenge that creates the kind of shared bond you can't manufacture in a steakhouse.

You have to put it on the calendar on purpose now. You have to protect it. You have to be willing to look a little ridiculous and let people half your age set the pace.

That's most of what Peak Adventures is about, when I really sit with it. Not the workouts. Not the views. The fellowship that only shows up when you're doing something hard with people who matter to you.

Run it back

GORUCK is doing this again November 19–21 in Jax Beach. Same HQ, same backyard, same chance to find out what your feet really think of you. General admission is thirty bucks. Andrew, Adam, Parker and I will be there.

If any of the above lands, come do it with us. I'm going in better-trained this time and just as poorly informed about the actual schedule.

That part I'm leaving alone on purpose.