This past Tuesday we had the distinct honor of welcoming Jason McCarthy (the owner of GORUCK) at a TRVLSQD get-together. I’d like to start this post off by thanking Fergus (the leader of TRVLSQD) for organizing this event because opportunities like this don’t come around too often. The plan for the night was to drink some beers, give Jason a chance to talk, and just relax. The place we choose to have the event at is called Schooner Exact and is one of the better breweries in Seattle. It’s a little off the beaten path but there’s plenty of parking and a nice, big room which were the two things on our requirements list.
Jason’s Talk
The talk that Jason gave was awesome. He gave the detailed story of how GORUCK came to be and where he saw it going in the future. That story is long and detailed and can mostly be found on the GORUCK website if you’re interested. After that he detailed the meaning of the 3 rules and how they’re much more important than they may sound. Finally, He mentioned some dates and a location for the West Coast Nasty and hinted that maybe there will be another GORUCK store in the future. Throughout the entire event Jason kept having Schooner deliver pitchers to the table… I don’t think there was a minute that beer was not present.
After Jason finished he opened up the floor for questions. This is about the time that one of our good friends took over and pitched his new capstone plan idea which is essentially a combat dive event. It sounded both amazing and insane and we’ll see what GORUCK ends up doing with the idea.
I believe the entire talk and Q/A session were video taped and as soon as those are uploaded to YouTube somewhere I’ll try and get links in here.
Hanging Out
After all of the questions we were just able to hang out and talk with each other. I spoke with Jason about the much whispered about “GORUCK Wallet” and he promptly took it out of his pocket and showed it to me. He told me what about it he liked and what needed to be fixed and why it wasn’t being produced yet. He made it seem like the wallet will be a long time off but we will see. GORUCK seems to be constantly releasing things on their site and not letting anyone know about it “officially” for a few days after.
Meeting with Jason was a great experience and one I’m glad that I was able to have. If you’d like to read another account of this gathering you can check out the post on the TRVLSQD website.
It begs a cartoon of the overly GoRuck-geared newb, showing up for GR Light with a Special Edition GR2 and the shower shoes. :P
Re: the $1,200 corn hole board, it makes me think of that Jack in the Box commercial with the college kid at a convention in a lawn chair with no other booth and a cardboard sign that says “Business consulting $130,000”
Jack says “Any takers?” And the kid says “At that price, it only takes one.”
That commercial kills me still to this day. I feel like selling some of those “other” items aka shower shoes could be worse for their brand then the money they make off of them. Here’s a quote form the article GR1 Explained by Jason.
Precisely. And much of the product that doesn’t make sense (the hydration carrier for instance. EVERYONE’S in that market) seems to have come out around Nasty 001.
Nasty itself seems an odd bit. If it were closer to TX, I might be more willing to give it a shot, but where’s the real differentiation between Nasty and any other mud run on Groupon?
It will be interesting to watch GoRuck evolve.
Sounds like you had a good time! I would have loved to be there. I think GoRuck is fantastic, love their events, and I think it’s great that they are doing well. What I do question though is if they are going overboard with the lifestyle stuff. Flip flops and Corn hole sets? I hate to say it cheapens the brand a bit, but I can’t help but feeling like GoRuck is loosing some of it’s credibility as a hardcore company. I get that they are a business, but part of me wants them to stick to products that are related to the challenges and things that help you train for challenges. Might must be me though.
You’re not the only one… there was a huge GRT thread making fun of the flip flops when they dropped. I hope they go back to producing mainly challenge gear as well and leave those other items to Skymall.