Marathon Results

On April 14, I completed the ToughRuck Marathon in Concord MA, a fundraiser for fallen soldiers and first responders. This was my goal for the first half of 2024. I finished 346 out of 883 overall, and 82 out of 162 in the civilian heavy male category. I averaged 17:30 per mile, including stops. I was pleasantly surprised at how well my body held up. The pads on my feet hurt, but I only got one blister. I had some discomfort in my quads and lower back, but my joints/shoulders/hamstrings/ calves all felt ok. I was sore from head to toe the next day, but not as bad as I had feared, and two days later I feel less sore than I typically would 48 hours after a high volume leg day. All in all it was an awesome experience. It was a really well run event, there was great community support, and it was a lot more fun than I’d anticipated.

Game Day Review:

Week Leading Up: On Friday 4/5 we took our kids to LegoLand in New York, and then on to see the eclipse in Burlington VT. By the time we rolled into my in-laws house on Tuesday, I felt terrible. Many, many hours in the car, lots of fast food, no exercise, poor sleep. Tuesday night I went to Planet Fitness just to move my body (there were actually a lot of really jacked guys working out there), walked a mile on the treadmill, and did some pulling machines. Wednesday I did an easy six mile ruck. Thursday I did some yoga. Friday and Saturday I didn’t do anything but go for some easy walks. Overall, I felt like I showed up on race day having done enough the previous week to not feel stiff and detrained, but without any residual fatigue.

Pack Weight: The minimal pack weight for the heavy division was 35 pounds. I had 20 and 10 pound plates, plus a 2.5 pound vest insert. I weighed in at 38 pounds at the start, having removed all my water and food. At the end of the race, I weighed in at just over 40 pounds. The main difference being I had a little bit of water in my camelback, some uneaten food, and had accumulated some trash. For almost all of my training I was carrying 2 x 20 pound plates, plus a full 2 liters of water. I’m guessing my training rucks were 50+pounds, when you figure in how much weight was actually on my back.

Foot Care: As with all of my long rucks, I wore darn tough merino wool socks. Before starting, I lubed my feet up with vaseline. I’ve also been rucking in the same boots since 2022. This was the first time I’ve had a blister, and it was only a small blister on one of my toes that didn’t really affect the hike.

Hydration: For most of my training rucks, I carried 2 full liters of water. I only ran out of water once, on the 18 miler. For the race, I drank a lot of water the day before, and then tried to polish off most of a gatorade the morning of the hike. I carried one liter of water at the start of the ruck, which I finished around mile 7 or 8. After that, I mostly carried bottles of water, gatorade, or mineral water, stopping to add water to my camel back around mile 20 or 21. I drank a ton of fluid, though I didn’t pee from about 9 am until we arrived home after the race (around 4 or 5).

Food: The day before the race, I had an egg and ham sandwich for breakfast, a reuben sandwich for lunch, steak tips/chicken/potatoes for dinner, and lasagna for a late night snack. I woke up early on Sunday and ate more lasagna for breakfast. During the race I ate a few peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, and 4 or 5 pickles. I’ve read that pickles have salt which can help with cramping. I don’t know if that is true, but I love pickles, and I didn’t cramp, so no harm done. Along the route there were a lot of people offering food. I ate pretty much continuously from mile 10-18 - chips, bananas, oranges, various bars. I felt tired, but I never “hit the wall.”

Apparel: For all of the long hikes, I wore a long sleeve polyester shirt I got from REI, sweat pants, Under Armour biking underwear, a hat, and rubbed body glide generously all over my groin and butt. Never had any chafing problems.

Training Review:

These are some of the considerations that I accounted for when coming up with a rucking plan:

Knowledge: Compared to running or biking, there are far fewer resources for how to ruck a marathon. There is simply no tried and true couch-to-marathon equivalent for rucking a marathon. Most rucking information is targeted at military members, not middle aged weekend warriors.

Time: Rucking is obviously a lot slower than running, and therefore much more time consuming to get anywhere near the same volume as on a typical long distance running or cycling program.

Specificity: Most marathon running programs focus on running, usually 3-4x per week. Rucking that much (especially if you were to keep the distances the same as in the running program) would be both prohibitively time consuming (due to the slower pace) and likely lead to injury.

Strength: You need to have a strong back, shoulders, legs, to carry 35 pounds for 26 miles, which benefit from training other than just rucking.

Recovery: Long rucks make it hard to recover from strength training, and itself requires a huge amount of recovery. Rucking long distances makes it harder to get stronger from lifting, yet getting stronger from lifting is important to being able to ruck long distances.

I balanced these considerations by focusing in equal measure on rucking, sled work, and lifting.

Rucking: For most of the last few months, I rucked every other week. In December I rucked with a 30 pound pack up to 10 miles. Starting in January I used 40 pounds (likely 50+ when accounting for water, etc..), going roughly every other week (weather dependent) and increasing mileage by 2 miles. I credit training heavier than the event as critical to why I felt good on race day.

There are some articles on this site suggesting you can be proficient at rucking just by lifting (usually in the context of effective military training). I’m not sure I agree because 1) doing at least some ruck-specific training is necessary to toughen your feet and joints, and 2) as a practical matter, I found that each ruck I got tired at a later point, even though I wasn’t appreciably stronger from one week to the next (and so there must have been some value to rucking that I didn’t get from just lifting). That said, I don’t see any reason to ruck long distances (10+ miles) more than 2-3x per month, especially given its recovery toll. And even that should probably be limited to the months leading up to the event.

Sled Work: I found that the more I pushed a sled, the better I felt rucking. Pushing or dragging a sled mirrors the lower body stress of rucking, but you can load it heavier and thereby stress the same systems in a lot less time. It also is easier to recover from. The one thing I would have done differently was to add more sled dragging, at least once per week. If I do another marathon, I’ll probably do sled work of some kind at the end of every workout.

Lifting: The last few months focused on back strength (deadlift, rows, lat pulldowns, shrugs). I did little lifting for leg strength, and essentially dropped squats in January. I couldn’t recover from long rucks, sled work, deadlifts, and squats each week. I find squats harder to recover from than deadlifts, and generally my back recovers quicker than my legs. If I were to prepare for another spring rucking marathon (Bataan, or doing the Tough Ruck again), I would do a ton of squats and RDLs in the Fall, and then gradually reduce squats and other barbell leg work in favor of rucking and sleds over the winter and leading up to the race (this is more or less what I did, if not exactly deliberately).

In the end, this was great to train for, and something I’d like to do again in the future.