When Did People Start Rucking?

Listen I’ve been studying and engaging in fitness behaviours for a long time. Never did I think walking was going to become a ‘sexy’ fad. Nevermind rucking, which is effectively strapping a heavy backpack on and walking for an extended period of time. Yup…

I’m not here to criticise it either. I do it twice a week most weeks and enjoy it as a quick and easy way to work on conditioning. Do I think its going to burn 100x more calories, change my life and open life’s mysteries in front of my very eyes? No, but then again I hate fitness marketing. I do, however, like simple fitness behaviours that I can implement. Rucking ticks that box which means I now have to become historically obsessed with it.

What Is Rucking?

Put simply, rucking is walking with weight. Grab a bag, throw in something heavy, and start moving. You’ll see ruckers with cast-iron plates, sandbags, or whatever rusty gym kit they can find. It’s fitness stripped to its bones: load, legs, lungs. It fits with one of my favorite Dan John-isms that the body is one muscle.

Turns out I was something of a ‘hipster’ rucker back in the day as I used to walk 10 miles each way to school with a heavy backpack, in the rain, without shoes etc. etc. It is funny to observe how many of us lugged heavy schoolbags and complained about it as children but now as adults voluntarily spend time doing it. Nawt strange as folk and all that.

The term rucking itself comes from ‘rucksack,’ a word pinched from 19th-century Germany where Rückensack was used to describe a bag carried on the shoulders. Lets be very clear too, Rückensack sounds much cooler than rucking. In any case the word dates to c. 1866 but the practice is much older.

Rucking ‘cultures’ were tied to the military where soldiers had to travel large distances with a variety of survival and fighting equipment. Roman legionaries carried upwards of 60 pounds. More recent examples from World War One and World War Two saw American soldiers carry weights ranging from 40 to 120 pounds on their backs.  Rucking in this context was not a fitness fad obviously but rather a necessity of warfare.

Modern militaries codified the idea of rucking. In the British army, they did the loaded tab as opposed to trucking. The French Foreign Legion gave us desert marches. The U.S. Army gave had its own version and even innovation, In the 1870s Henry Merriam received patents for a number of early backpack variations for soldiers who had to wear them in training and in marching. What this tells us is that rucking, even if a different name was used,  became a gatekeeper for troop fitness.

When Did Actual ‘Rucking’ Begin?

Outside of military life, rucking existed under different names. Gamekeepers, coal miners, postal workers, plenty of people have trudged long distances with weight strapped to their backs. So when did it morph from a requirement of your job to a fitness hobby?

Enter the 2000s. Fitness culture was already knee-deep in military chic. Bootcamp classes were growing in popularity, camouflage gym shorts reigned, and CrossFit had people shouting about WODs and burpees like they were deploying. Against this backdrop came Jason McCarthy, a former Green Beret with a rucksack to sell.

In 2008, McCarthy launched GORUCK. His goal was to build a backpack tough enough for war, but market it to civilians. The GR1 backpack was its first iteration and proved to be a success, but not a sustained one. While fitness culture was, and remains receptive, to military paraphernalia, the functional fitness movement reigned supreme during this time and it oddly didn’t leave room for walking.

When sales stalled, McCarthy pivoted. If people wouldn’t buy the bag, maybe they’d buy the story. Thus began the GORUCK Challenge in 2010. It was a 12-hour parade of pain led by Special Forces veterans. Participants did push-ups in fountains, carried sandbags through city streets, and bonded through fitness. It was, quite frankly, an ingenious way of building a community around a particular product and, although McCarthy has never mentioned it publicly, probably opened a pathway for GoRuck’s eventual adoption by CrossFit communities.

When Did Rucking Become Popular?

Somewhat bizarrely my first encounter with rucking came at a confusing and poignant moment. In 2013, a group of National Guardsmen were rucking the Boston Marathon route when the bombs went off. They sprang into action, helping the injured and earning media attention in the process. That was my first passing interaction with rucking but it did not help move rucking from a pastime typically done by former or serving soldiers into one done by weekend warriors.

One of the first major pieces of popular media coverage came in 2015, when Men’s Health dubbed it ‘The Fitness Trend Men Everywhere Can’t Get Enough Of.’ According to author Michael Easter

American soldiers have been doing a simple fitness activity since the American Revolution, and it’s turned our military into the fittest, most feared fighting force in the history of the world.

It was quite the sales pitch. I say this because although Easter noted that you could just load a heavy backpack with weight, he specifically mentioned GoRuck and its products. Critically GoRuck was building in popular conscious and, when CrossFit introduced the GoRuck to its Games in 2019, the backpack grew exponentially in popularity.

How Covid Helped

The Covid pandemic, as we’ve written about elsewhere, had a profound impact on gym cultures. It is no surprise that with traditional gyms shut down, many people turned to alternative forms of training be it sandbags, clubs, stone lifting or yes, rucking.

Rucking was, in many respects, ideally made for the pandemic. It could be done inside or outside, was relatively easy to do and provided some form of training stimulus. More importantly rucking in groups was still possible because you could socially distanced as you hiked or walked. Indeed a cursory Google search of ‘Covid 19 AND rucking’ returns a slew of articles from both physicians and ordinary trainers talking about giving it a try.

This also coincided with a new challenge that became viral in 2020, the Chad 1000X, a thousand step-ups with a weighted pack. Named after Navy SEAL Chad Wilkinson, who died in Afghanistan in 2018, the workout was originally created by his fellow SEALs as a memorial. The challenge spread through social media during lockdown, with people posting completion times and dedicating their suffering to Chad’s memory. It gave rucking something CrossFit had mastered: a story that transformed physical discomfort into emotional purpose

GORUCK, sensing the shift, leaned in. They launched sandbags, boots, apparel lines. They created events like the 50-mile Star Course and the infamous Selection, a 48-hour gauntlet that almost no one finishes. And they kept selling the message to its user that this wasn’t just gear, it was identity.

Summing Up

Although the owner is very self-deprecating (he has a book entitled How Not To Start a Backpack Company), GoRuck is honestly a fascinating case study. It managed to take an activity with thousands of years of history and turn it into a bespoke brand. In many ways echoing the identity CrossFit, and now one would say Hyrox, has cultivated for its users, rucking has become its own community.

Today, rucking is everywhere. GORUCK Clubs have sprouted up globally. There are virtual challenges, competitive leagues, even ruck-and-pub events. Purists sneer, claiming it’s becoming cosplay for the tacti-cool crowd. They’re probably not wrong but as someone who actually engages in the process, I have very little bad to say about it as an activity.

It is, to my mind, a business success story and, more importantly, has gotten people moving. Aside from the cost of GoRuck materials, the latter is an absolute win in my books.

So, as always… Happy Lifting.