What The Hell Am I Doing? Reflecting On My GTE-49 Experience

This is part 1 of a 3 part series.

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On a warm, October evening, on a football field at St. Pius High School in Festus, Missouri, 119 men “stepped off” for GTE-49, embarking on a 15-hour overnight heavy ruck through the hills of Jefferson County. Not sure how long we’d be out there, where we were going, or even how many miles lay ahead of us, I was ready to go…as ready as anyone can be anyway. I had done all the physical preparations I could do. Trained for months, checked and rechecked my gear making sure I had everything required. Then unpacked it all and checked again…at least a dozen times. I was ready. Or so I thought.

A GTE, or Grow Ruck Training Event, is meant to test the physical, mental and emotional limits in the men who participate, to grow their leadership skills by taking them to the point of failure…and beyond. In the weeks leading up to GTE-49, I spent as much time as I could training and preparing my mind and body for what I would face, not really even knowing all that I would have thrown at me. Coming off a knee surgery just five months prior, my training regime was severely hampered, but I made the best of every opportunity.

Between the Saturday morning workout and GrowSchool, where trainers teach leadership principles that will be useful during the overnight Crucible Ruck, and stepping off that evening, we had some down time to rest and make final preparations. As much as my body wanted to catch a couple hours of sleep that I knew would help me through the sleepless night, my mind just wouldn’t allow it. It was that anxious, nervousness that just keeps you restless to the point your mind won’t slow down to let the body drift off. After trying for about an hour to sleep, I resigned myself to the reality that rest would escape me until after the event…sometime 24 hours (or more) later.

Time for final gear checks (again), grab a meal, keep drinking water and electrolytes and chattering with the group of guys in the rental cabin with me. You could feel the energy in the room as we all were in the same place mentally…wondering what truly lay ahead of us and how we would perform under the physical stress and mental pressure. We joked and laughed as we bantered back and forth, but the aura of the room and the fidgetiness of us all was palpably tense.  

 I went into GTE-49 thinking many things, the most noteworthy of which were:

“What the hell am I doing?”

“Why the hell am I doing this?”

“What the hell is the point in doing this?”

“I’m not quitting!”

• What the hell am I doing?

I’m doing unmistakably the hardest thing I’ve ever done before now. I knew that going in. I just didn’t know the full extent or the details of the physical challenges I had signed up for. I knew I would be subjecting my body to 15 hours of walking with a 50 pound backpack, carrying all sorts of additional weights (“instruments of woe”, we call them). And, I knew that I would not know where I was going, what time of night/day it was, or when it would end.

My mind was in the right place. And as I quickly came to understand, that was 99% of the battle. Did my body fail me? Oh bud, you know it. A herniated back that only hurts when I’m awake, fresh off knee surgery just 5 months prior that seriously impacted my training regime and has constant arthritis pain that is made worse with physical exercise, and then hit with my first diagnosis of plantar fasciitis three days before the event that made EVERY. SINGLE. STEP. hurt in some way.

Yes, my body failed me miserably. Multiple times, over and over again throughout the night and well into the morning. Hell, I had two guys holding me up for the last 20 minutes of the event, so I’d say, yes, my body failed me. Alongside 118 other men all night, I’m confident in saying their bodies all failed them at some point too…regardless of whether they were in top-notch shape. That’s this event in a nutshell. It’s meant to break your body down so that it can build your mind up. I truly believe it’s a mindset event more than it will ever be a physical event. For me, it’s about stepping out of my comfort zone to shatter the preconceived beliefs about what I can (and cannot) do.

• What the hell am I doing?

That question would come back to me several times throughout the night. When the body hurts in new and excruciating  ways, that’s a question that is sure to be at the forefront of the mind. It was for me on this night, anyway.

Starting with the “Welcome Party,” we were introduced to chaos and confusion as 5 Cadre and 3 Trainers barked orders that conflicted each other, punishing us when we did something wrong. It was a glimpse into the reality that this entire night was designed for us to fail. We were going to get it wrong, over and over again. The only thing to do was accept that, learn from it, pick each other up, and take the next step toward the end…together. We’re going to fail. But we’re going to fail together. And in doing so, we will succeed…together.

I was blessed to be standing beside a High Impact Man, or “HIM”, during an exercise I’ll call “The Box.” We had just been split into four platoons of 30, lined up single file side-by-side by platoon to form a square, facing the Cadre and Trainers in the middle. Challenged with holding our 40-50 pound rucks above our head in a “rifle carry” position, we were told the last man standing would win his platoon a reward that would come in handy during the next evolution. No clue what that reward would be, we were assured it would be very advantageous  to win this challenge.

I probably lasted three minutes…hard to tell with no watch or way of knowing what time it was. When my arms failed and I dropped my ruck, I looked to my left down the row of men beside me. Several had already dropped their rucks. I looked to my right, down the line to see the same. Then I saw him. His F3 name is Caribbou. Standing right beside me, I could clearly see he was in a zone. I knew it the moment my eyes met the corner of his. He was locked the hell in and was in a place that felt no pain. “This guy’s gonna win it,” I muttered to the man on my left.

Eleven minutes later, standing face-to-face with the only other man standing, Caribbou was the last man standing! He’d done it! His endurance and mindset to push through the pain (for 11 full minutes, mind you) won for our entire platoon the blessing of not carrying an additional 400-500 pounds worth of sandbags the two plus miles to the next stopping point and unknown pain that awaited us there. It would turn out to be a blessing that set our platoon up for a great night of success.

I was then blessed to walk (without additional sandbags) two-by-two alongside my teammates for over two miles on railroad tracks that looked and felt like they hadn’t been touched in this century. It would be an understatement to say that it was precarious in footing. I still question why we had our headlamps off for quite a bit of this portion…it was an accident waiting to happen. You had to be intentional about every single step on that two mile trek.

Someone in our platoon ahead of me face planted on those rickety-ass tracks and cut his chin open. That was our first injury, and it brought home the reality that one small misstep, mistake, or lapse in judgement could cause an injury that would not only take me out of the event but could be career ending. It was the first time during the actual event that I recall thinking, “Why the hell am I doing this again?”

It was here on this part of the journey I understood that life, like that railroad trek, often demands that we walk carefully, making intentional choices with every step. The path isn’t always well-lit or the footing always steady. One small misstep can have real consequences, so having guardrails in place to keep us on track is essential. But we don’t stop moving forward. We learn to trust ourselves, stay present in the moment, and lean on those beside us. When doubt creeps in and we start questioning why we chose this hard path, we remember that growth, resilience, and purpose are forged in these very moments of uncertainty.

We eventually came off those railroad tracks and walked down onto the football field for the Crystal City Hornets. It was here, I was blessed to do the PT test just to know if we’d be allowed to stay for the rest of the event. Failing this PT test meant facing the very real possibility that we would not be allowed to continue, and the pressure and anticipation of this moment was, hands down, the heaviest weight I’d been feeling for the months leading up to now.

I had trained for this PT test for months and was as ready as I would ever be…when I was fresh. We had already been physically active for several hours, and I was tired. “No one cares what you can do when you’re fresh. It’s what you can do when you’re tired that counts.” That’s the mantra we’d heard earlier in the day from Cadre and Trainers…a grim parallel to my career in the fire service. It’s not what you can do when you first arrive on the fire scene and get to work. It’s what you can do and how much you can give when you’ve been working your ass of for an hour or more…when your partner needs you the most…that matters.

My battle buddy, Chubbs, and I lined up facing each other with the rest of our platoon beside us. We had two minutes to do 40 push-ups and two minutes to do 50 sit-ups. Chubbs was first for the push-ups, and watching him crush that goal with limited use of one arm was inspiring. I knew I couldn’t fail this. I squeezed off the last pushup at the buzzer. On to the sit-ups, I likewise just barely beat the buzzer for my 50th sit-up. Four months earlier, I was barely hitting 20 of each in two minutes, a testament to what we can accomplish with time, effort and sweat equity. Now it was time for the two-mile run. With a time to beat of 19 minutes, I knew I would fall woefully short of this mark, having not had the ability to train as I would have liked to coming off the knee surgery just five months earlier.

But I wasn’t stopping. Unable to breath, let alone talk, I was blessed to have Matt “Ralph” Crossman come alongside me at some point in the second or third lap to distract me from my pain for several laps. I am continually amazed when I see men voluntarily step into pain and discomfort for the sake of nothing more than encouraging a friend. Having Ralph come alongside me and stay with me for as long as he did (even though he didn’t have to) is hands down one of the coolest and most humbling moments in my entire three F3 journey.

My feet shuffling along as the pain splintered from my foot up through my knee and into my hips and lower back, I just kept telling myself over and over again with each tortuous step, “I’m not quitting. It’ll be slow, but I’ll stop when the Cadre stop me, when I get my eight laps, or when I die…whichever comes first. If I die here tonight, what awaits me in the next life is better than this, so I could only be that blessed. Just tell my wife and kids I died happy, having given every last ounce of energy in using this body God gave me.”

I didn’t finish that two miles. Not even close. But I didn’t quit either. And that’s because Ralph was beside me for most of it. I also had Nathan “5-Hole” Feld cheering me on with words of encouragement and affirmation and a fist bump every time I passed him on the second turn. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting either of them down by giving up on myself when neither one of them would give up on me. I came up a lap and a half short when the Cadre blew the whistle and pulled me (and I learned later, another couple men) off the track and onto the next thing. This was my first recollection of having the thought, “just do the next thing. Don’t worry about what the rest of the night brings you, Jason…just do the thing right in front of you.”

That’s the life lesson in this part of my night. Don’t give up on yourself so easily. You’re worth fighting for. Don’t focus on the end, especially when the end seems so far away. Focus on what’s right in front of you. Take the next logical step. Do the next best thing. One foot forward at a time. It’s the only way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.

Turns out we only needed to pass one of the three tests, not all three. “Great! I’m in it now, baby!”

Crap! I’m in. What have I gotten myself into? What the hell am I doing?

Following the PT test, all four platoons of 30 men reported to the four corners of the football field, where a Cadre led us in what was 10-12 minutes of a kick ass workout. We then rotated to the next Cadre for a full “beatdown,” as we call it. If you weren’t already physically gassed after the heavy ruck to get here and the PT test, this 45 minutes would smoke the best of us. And it did just that.

I was no exception. It’s a rare moment when I truly adopted the mantra, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” Heeding the advice of several men who’d been through one or more GTE’s, we learned to watch the Cadre and skip a rep here and there, helping the men to our left and right do the same. It was clear early on, if you gave max effort and went all out on every single rep during every excessive and each evolution for the entire 15 hours, without finding ways to cheat conserve energy, you weren’t going to make it.

I’ll never forget doing Cadre Kramer’s low army crawl from the sideline to the hash mark. I hooked up with Jeff “Got Junk” Simpson at some point soon after we started crawling, and we just inched along. We were both in our pain cave…hurting physically in ways we never imagined possible and battling internal demons screaming to give up. Coming alongside him to encourage him out of his pain cave and keep inching forward until the next whistle blow is what brought me out of my own place of suffering.

The life lesson here is you are never hurting so much that you can’t help someone else. Everyone in this life is going through something…some struggle, adversity, trauma, pain, loss, or suffering. You may see it on their face and in their actions…and you may not. When you can take even a brief pause to set aside your own shit storm, you’ll see we’re all — every one of us — in our own shit storm in some way. Every person we meet is battling something we may never know. We find strength and encouragement in sharing adversity. We navigate those choppy waters and rough seas by locking arms and enduring those waves in the comfort of company, rather than alone. We get out of our own shit storm by helping our brother out of his.

I was then blessed as a team to pick up the extra 400-500 pounds of weights (sandbags and a concrete-filled 5-gallon bucket) that we didn’t have to carry to the football stadium and walk some unknown distance through grass taller than me. We could see the man in front of us, and that’s about it. After what seemed like miles, we eventually came to a boat ramp, where I was blessed with the opportunity to bear crawl in the cold waters of the Mighty Mississippi River under God’s canvas of a wide open, starlit night. It truly was a serene moment to come out of that grass into a clearing and see for the first time in hours the clear sky and stars above…and know that God had chosen all 119 of us for this time and place in history. Who else can say they’ve bear crawled in the Mississippi River!?

The lesson I learned here is that even in our pain, we can find peace in knowing we’re not alone. We were created for a purpose, and even in the hardest moments — when the weight is heavy, the path uncertain, and the struggle relentless — there is beauty to be found. Sometimes, it’s in the stars above. Sometimes, it’s in the brotherhood beside us. But always, it’s in the knowledge that we were placed here, in this moment, for a reason. Pain may shape us. It can move us, and it can paralyze us. But it does not define us. Purpose does. And when we embrace that reality, we can find both peace and joy within the pain, no matter how difficult the road ahead may be.

I would need to hold fast to that peace and joy for what came next.