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.