Mark Woods: Going for a ruck in Jacksonville Beach with the couple behind GORUCK
Jason and Emily McCarthy agreed to meet to tell me some of their story — how they went from high school classmates at Bolles, to being married while Jason was in Army Special Forces and Emily was in the CIA, to starting a business that has taken off in the last decade and now, after being featured in a best-selling book, is being embraced and touted by health influencers.
My only request for the interview: Let’s talk while walking. Or to be more specific, while rucking.
Jason and Emily founded GORUCK, a company that started out selling backpacks — or, at the very start, not being able to sell any — but has evolved to the point where it has organized more than 10,000 events, has hundreds of clubs around the world, and now sells tens of thousands of packs (and more) in a year.
They suggested we meet at their headquarters in Jacksonville Beach, across the street from History Park.
It was one of those perfect spring mornings, sunny with still a hint of chill in the air. Jason put on a pack with a 45-pound plate in it. Emily put on one with a 20-pound plate. They handed me one with a 20-pound weight. And along with their 10-year-old chocolate lab, Monster, we headed out the door, down a side street, and began rucking.
Rucking
“I didn’t even know what rucking was until I was in the Army,” Jason said.
He explained that rucking is another word for marching or, for the Brits, “tabbing.”
All of the above are basically just walking with extra weight.
During our ruck, Jason and Emily emphasized several times that while they’re certainly proud of their products and events, they didn’t invent something new. To the contrary, that is the beauty of it. They’re trying to get more people to do one of the simplest, oldest activities.
Jason said: “So many fads come about because someone just created some gizmo or some widget. ‘Buy this machine and all your hopes and dreams are going to come true.’ And it never works. There's a boneyard of life hacks that are just rotting to death. And this is something that humans have been doing since literally the beginning of time.”
Emily said, “We figured out early on that it's something people are already doing. It’s not a big change. There's not a big learning curve. Most people have rucked before. They just don't call it that, or know it, or realize it's a form of exercise.”
Before rucking
They’re both in their mid-40s now. Emily grew up in Jacksonville. Jason was born in Ohio. His mother, who had him when she was 18, ended up going to the University of Florida, where she played tennis for the Gators in the 1980s and Jason was, he says, the team’s unofficial mascot.
They met at Bolles. They both played tennis. He would go on to play for Emory University. Emily ran for Georgetown University. But some of their toughest challenges at Bolles came in honors English.
When Jason recently was on the “Peter Attia Drive,” consistently one of the most downloaded health and wellness podcasts these days, he mentioned high school in Jacksonville — and said he’d rather go back to the Special Forces qualification course than repeat a year of English at Bolles.
I asked about that as we rucked north through Jacksonville Beach.
“That was just a gauntlet” Jason said, adding with a laugh: “Both Emily and I put a lot of pressure on ourselves, but at that point, it was it was externally applied.”
“They give you like 300 pages to read of Dante's Inferno at night and then you have to write essays,” Emily said, saying to Jason. “But it was good, right?”
Yes, he agreed, sounding like he’d still prefer the idea of repeating Special Forces training.
At the time, neither had visions of the Green Berets or CIA. And they weren’t dating yet.
“We were just friends,” Emily said. “Jason likes to say he was shy.”
They both graduated from Bolles in 1997. After college, Emily ended up doing a year of volunteer service in Ecuador. She remembers getting a call from Jason out of the blue. He said he was thinking about doing some service, too.
“I thought he was joining the Peace Corps,” she said. “He had just enlisted in the Army.”
Green Beret and CIA
Jason says he didn’t grow up thinking about the military, but that changed on 9/11. He had graduated from college in 2001 and was working for a marketing firm in Daytona Beach, across the street from the speedway, when he saw the news.
He says he knew immediately that he wanted to serve his country, but he wasn’t sure how. He ended up joining the Army, bypassing the officer route, to be on the path to becoming a Green Beret.
Shortly before he headed to basic training, he left a note on the windshield of Emily’s Toyota Corolla, telling her all the things he’d been afraid to say.
“He was leaving and I was like, ‘I don't want any part of this,’” Emily said. “But he wrote me a lot of letters from boot camp. And we started dating once he graduated boot camp.”
She was teaching Spanish at Bolles when she applied to the CIA, hoping to maybe get a language instructor in D.C. That didn’t happen. But she was put in the pipeline to become a case officer — a role that likely involved living abroad.
She graduated from the Farm, the CIA’s training center in Virginia, a week before Jason became a Green Beret.
“And then we both got posted to different places,” she said. “That was for the first five years of our first marriage.”
Yes, first marriage. After those challenging beginnings, they eventually got divorced. And then got remarried. But first — before they ended up back in Jacksonville, raising three children, running a thriving business — they both were in West Africa. That’s where GORUCK started.
GORUCK beginnings
Jason served in the Special Forces from 2003 to 2008, including in Iraq in 2007. When he visited Emily, who had been posted in war-torn West Africa, he worried about her safety.
“He said, ‘I have to make you a ‘go bag,’ or a ‘go ruck,’” she said.
He had her gather a bunch of supplies. An extra pair of shoes, water, money, food, dog food for their first chocolate lab, Java. He made one “go ruck” for her office, one for her vehicle. When some of her embassy co-workers heard about this, they wanted similar bags.
They didn’t know it at the time, but that was the start.
When Jason left the military, he was struggling to find purpose and direction. That’s when Emily said, “Hey, why don't you do this ‘go ruck’ thing?”
He moved back to the states and eventually GORUCK became a key part of his purpose and direction. It took him more than two years to develop the first pack. It was simple, durable and expensive. At this point, it was being sold as a high-end, everyday backpack, not a fitness tool. Or, to be more accurate, that’s how he attempted to sell it.
In the summer of 2010, Jason put a rack on the top of his Ford Expedition and drove around the country, going to stores in all 48 states. He estimates that he’d had about 2,000 backpacks made — and didn’t sell one on that trip.
“We sold a couple off the website,” he said.
“He remembers the guy who bought the first,” Emily said.
That could have been the end of the business. But that same year he and some buddies entered one of the early Tough Mudder competitions. They didn’t just do the event. They filled some of his rucksacks with bricks, held together with duct tape, and did it.
That sparked another idea. Soon they began holding GORUCK Challenges that, instead of being built around obstacle courses, made the rucking the challenge.
“Fight Club with backpacks,” Jason said of the roots. “Meet me on the street corner a 1 a.m., details not forthcoming. Here's your slab of bricks, or your pavers wrapped in a hotel towel.”
The focus on fitness led GORUCK to morph into what it is today: A company that runs events near and far — this June there will be a series in Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day — and sells backpacks, footwear and more.
“It happened almost accidentally,” Jason said of the evolution.
“Accidentally we say,” Emily said, “but also with some intention, because what he really excelled at in the military, and what he calls the foundation of Special Forces training, was rucking. So he kind of went deep into that world.”
'The Comfort Crisis'
I recently read Michael Easter’s book, “The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.” I was deep into the book, being taken around the world on Easter’s journey, when to my surprise the story led to Jacksonville Beach, Jason and rucking.
When I mentioned this, Jason laughed and said a local friend sent him a note and asked, “Have you read ‘The Comfort Crisis?”
“I said, ‘You’re not done yet, are you?’” Jason said. “He said he was about halfway through and thought I’d like it. ….And I said, ‘OK, keep reading.’”
Emily tells the backstory of how Jason became a key part of the book. In about 2015, Jason saw an article that Easter had written for “Men’s Health” magazine about rucking. He contacted Easter. They traded notes. And that led to Easter coming here years later, spending a week going rucking and talking rucking.
When the book came out in 2021 — Easter told Jason’s story and described him as sort of a “rucking-obsessed lay-scientist” — it took off, sparking more interest in rucking.
When I ask if the book led to a spike in business, Jason says not necessarily something so direct. But it did have a dramatic effect.
“It’s a very influential book and it has influenced a lot of influential people,” he said.
Like Peter Attia. A doctor known for his work in longevity medicine, Attia wrote the book, “Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity,” described by the New York Times as “a runaway best seller.” The McCarthys’ friendship and rucking relationship with Michael Easter led to a friendship and rucking relationship with Attia. And on a recent trip to Austin, where Attia lives, that led to a ruck with Lance Armstrong.
Afterward, Armstrong posted a picture of himself with Jason and wrote, “A ruck with Mr. Ruck himself!”
A good walk and more
I wanted to write about Jason and Emily partly for selfish reasons. It gave me an excuse to again combine working and walking. And it didn't take any arm-twisting to get them to combine the two.
Jason talks about how their goal isn’t to get people to do what he used to do in Special Forces training, where the ultimate test involved carrying a ruck that weighed 125 pounds, or to do one of their toughest GORUCK challenges. It’s simply to get people to be more active.
“This, quote, meeting is a perfect example,” Jason said as we neared the end of a 90-minute ruck, done at a pace that made it easy to carry on a conversation. “We could be sitting down at a conference table.”
“Or worse,” Emily said, “over Zoom.”
“Well, if we were on Zoom,” Jason said, “I’d be rucking.”
I’ve written quite a bit about walking Jacksonville and making it more walkable. Some of that involves what the city does as far as infrastructure. But some of it involves what Jason and Emily are doing — in their own way, serving as ambassadors for something that goes beyond their company.
Of course, they want to sell GoRuck products and events. But as we walked, more than anything, what they were selling was rucking. And while Jason can go deeply and passionately into the science and psychology of it, he keeps coming back to fairly simple ideas.
“It’s how do you put this into your life?” he said as we returned to their office. “Walking is really good for you. Walking outside is even better. And adding a little bit of weight is even better.”
mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Rucking in Jacksonville Beach with couple behind GoRuck
