The Help We Need Part 2: The Night Turns Black

This story was written by Matt “Ralph” Crossman, a freelance magazine writer and member of F3 Nation. Subscribe to his newsletter at  https://mattcrossman.substack.com/. This is the second in a three-part series about GTE-42: The Hills, the first international GrowRuck Training Event. Read Part 1 here.

GUILDFORD, ENGLAND—Marcus “Homer” Wilcock is a human suspension cable—connective, strong, seamless, able to bear weight. Of all the men I wanted to talk to during GrowRuck Training Event 42, he ranked No. 1, not least because he led the planning for the 15-hour sufferfest. 

Before that cold Saturday night in October, we traded dozens of texts, met for lunch on Thursday and spent hours Friday riding mountain bikes over his proposed GTE route with the event’s leaders, Danny “Linus” Stokes, John “Slaughter” Lambert and Brent “Yodel” Mathany.

I considered Homer a friend already, and I wanted the event to kick ass for his sake—and for him to kick its ass, if such a thing were possible, which it isn’t.

All GTEs are highly anticipated, this one especially so because it was the first one outside of the United States. GTE is F3’s flagship leadership training exercise. F3 Nation Inc. is a free men’s fitness and leadership organization with more than 4,000 outdoor workout locations across the world. F3’s mission is to plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership.

The highlight of the Friday through Sunday GTE festivities is the Crucible Ruck, an overnight hike combining fitness and leadership training in which participants carry backpacks weighted with 30-pound plates plus food, water, gear, extra clothes, etc. They also must haul “implements of woe” for hours on end. In this case, the men lugged logs, sandbags, and water jugs across forests, alongside ancient rivers, through city streets and deep into country fields.

Before Homer joined F3 (fitness, fellowship, faith), he was outwardly successful. He was athletic and active and had a great job and a wife and kids who love him. But he lacked close friends, and loneliness gnawed at him. Then his wife showed him a Facebook post about F3. He attended a workout two days later and was hooked immediately on the culture of camaraderie and companionship.

He is a big-thinking, cheerleading Pied Piper whose passion for F3 runs deep because of the joy it has brought him. He wanted to share that joy with the men of Guildford and Surrey County and all of England by making them temporarily miserable.

Early in this GTE, I asked him how it was going, and his answer stunned me. “Bad,” he said. He had aggravated a calf injury that has plagued him for years. He looked like a boy who asked for a Corvette for Christmas and was surprised to open a plastic toy instead of the actual car.

“Shit, man, I’m in trouble,” he said. “This is going to be the hardest night of my life.”

And then it got worse … so much worse … as he and the other 38 men of GTE-42 arrived at the Guildford Fire Station, dropped to their hands and knees, and bear-crawled across the driveway.

One hose blasted water through a sprinkler, and it shot up into the air like the feathers on a peacock. Two firefighters used hoses as if they were playing a video game and scored points for direct hits on men, the longer the better. A third firefighter sat in the cab of a firetruck using a joystick to control a nozzle on the roof. He looked down from his seat, saw me watching him, and smiled so big I envied it.

The men bear-crawled around and around and around, getting wetter and colder with each lap. Then Linus, the director of F3’s GrowRuck Department, made them do exercises, barking orders as if shouting over a hurricane, getting soaked himself in the process, and they got wetter, wetter, wetter, colder, colder, colder. “My body made noises I didn’t know it could make,” said Duncan “Harvester” Hicks.

Finally the deluge ended, and the men trudged to a park for The Welcome Party, typically a long and mentally taxing beatdown. The temperature hit 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 Celsius) and dropped, and the men’s performance cratered. Yodel, the leader of one of two platoons the men were separated into, shot me a “what the hell?!?” look as the men repeatedly struggled to move and count in cadence.

Homer shivered uncontrollably for an hour, and the faces of some men startled him. They turned gray, sodden, inward, nearly but not quite defeated. Pain like he had never felt before tore through him. 

Yet he never thought about quitting. He thought about home, his wife, his kids, how amazing it would feel to get the GTE patch at the end. When the pain reached its zenith, he imagined it was not his own but his kids’, and he was bearing it for them. “I will crawl on my hands and knees if I have to,” he said. “Quitting is not an option. I drill that into my kids. I can’t quit and tell them not to.”

The turning point came when Slaughter, the leader of the other platoon, allowed the men to change clothes … well, that was the turning point for men who had dry clothes in their rucksacks. Later, as Homer climbed a steep hill, one end of an 80-pound sandbag draped over his shoulders, he admitted that the pain was his own damn fault because he designed the route and suggested the visit to the fire house in the first place.

“I stopped thinking about my calf though,” he said.

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The ruck march took the men within sight of a nearly 1,000-year-old castle, through downtown Guildford and past a gaggle of college students celebrating a birthday party. They chose the moment GTE-42 rucked by to sing the Star-Spangled Banner—yes, college women in England sang the United States national anthem.

They might have been drunk.

The Wey River slices through Guildford, an undulating brown ribbon along which humanity has walked, worked and as of GTE-42, rucked overnight, for thousands of years. The men of Blue (Slaughter) and Red (Yodel) platoons paused briefly beside it. Suddenly, a loud splash broke the dark silence when an apparently drunk man who was “stark bollock naked” (as Mark “Strictly” Parton put it) jumped off a footbridge and belly-flopped into the river. Someone joked that belly flops were going to be the next water challenge of the event.

Slaughter had other plans. He gathered the men at the river’s edge. He told them they could take off two layers of clothes and hold them over their heads to keep them dry as they waded across the river. You’ve got to be kidding me. More water?!? thought Duncan “Safari” Micklem, the man who brought F3 to the UK after he was active in the organization in Houston.

Slaughter was indeed kidding. Yodel similarly yanked his platoon’s chain. They walked across the bridge instead. On the other side, the men began a steep ascent—the first sign that GTE 42: The Hills would earn that moniker. A few days earlier, biking the route left me smoked. When I told Homer that, he said, “I might have overcooked it.”

Now we learned that might have turned to definitely did.

During a break at the top, Kieron “Prop” Urben sat with body language like a teetering Jenga stack. He had signed up for this event a scant 2 hours 16 minutes before it began. Touch him in the wrong spot, and he would fall apart. “It’s all up here now,” he said, pointing to his head. He waved his hand over his body. “All this is finished.”

Dustin "Italian Job" Jordan read aloud a Facebook post from Prop’s wife that appeared under a live video feed. “Please tell Prop his wife, son, Noah, and his 8-day old baby Jacob are so proud of him.”

“How are you going to keep going?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “Dig deep.”

All around Prop, the men of GTE-42 sucked down water and scarfed down food. Already the black misery of the fire department was morphing from a memory they shuddered at into one they celebrated. The water had knocked them down. But they had gotten back up.

Owls screeched in the distance. To Prop’s left, the trail descended to the Wey River. To his right the trees gave way to rolling hills, though darkness cloaked their beauty. In front of Prop a stone wall encircled an ancient church and cemetery. Italian Job wondered what years were engraved on those headstones. I could have hopped over the wall, read one and found out, but that would have required me to walk in a cemetery in inky blackness and um, hell to the no.

It was a beautiful night—well, morning, technically—in a beautiful English countryside, and the men of GTE-42 were crushing it.

And then they arrived at the logs, and their night turned black again.