The Help We Need Part 3: The Light at the End

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 third in a three-part series about GTE-42: The Hills, the first international GrowRuck Training Event. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

GUILDFORD, ENGLAND—Michael “Axel” Rose, loud and boisterous, one of the funniest and by far the shit-talkingest participant in GTE-42, took one look at the log—15 feet long and a handwidth across—and thought surely the cadre did not mean for them to pick that thing up, let alone carry it. Axel the Great, as he jokingly calls himself when the Gloom gets tough, had met his match. “That log absolutely savaged my mind,” he said. “Internally, I died.”

And yet he tucked his shoulder under it, bearing its weight, step after excruciating step down a treacherous trail that runs near his home. The familiarity added to the savaging of his mind because he knew the terrain and dreaded traversing it under the log.

The trail, thick with rocks and roots, was wide enough for men to carry a log, one on each side, but barely. On the left was a hedge taller than a man, on the right a forest. It was hard enough to walk there, never mind carry a log when you’re physically depleted, as Axel and the 38 other participants in this GrowRuck Training Event were.

F3 Nation Inc. is a free men’s fitness and leadership organization with more than 4,000 outdoor workout locations across the world, and GTE is F3’s flagship leadership training exercise. 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 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.

All GTEs are highly anticipated, this one (GTE 42: The Hills) especially so because it was in Guildford, England, just south of London, the first one outside of the United States. With that anticipation comes a tick of anxiety—could the men weather the storm GTE would unleash on them?  

The men of GTE-42 had already endured nearly unbearable cold after being soaked at the local fire department. Now came the log carry, and, as Axel said, the savaging of their minds. 

But if GTE was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. 

Danny “Linus” Stokes, the director of the GTE Department, says often men need pain and struggles to learn. Indeed, he crafts this phase of GTE to provoke failure. In a typical event, John "Slaughter" Lambert, the CEO of F3 and one of three cadre (leaders) of GTE-42, sees the failure coming, waits for the men's performance to reach its nadir, then delivers the "Slaughter Speech," a rousing call to action, to build the men back up.

GTE-42 followed that script precisely … the log was as brutal as Axel thought … the men struggled … except The Slaughter Speech bombed, for the first time ever.

For a combination of reasons—residual exhaustion from the water, over-exertion carrying sandbags, the log being too big, the trail being too narrow, the savaging of their minds—Blue Platoon found itself mired in defeat. They were going nowhere. After his speech prompted no change, Slaughter thought the only option left was to ditch the log.

“Not every log can be carried,” is a valuable lesson, but it’s not one GTE cadre aspire to teach.

In the end, they didn’t have to.

Instead, they taught a far more powerful lesson.

Linus used a walkie-talkie to call for reinforcements, summoning all able-bodied F3 men working the event—including cadre, trainers, support team, and even me—to help Blue Platoon—the first time he’s ever done that in leading dozens of GTEs and similar events.

The incredible details of how he made that decision, and how the men of the support team, under the leadership of Howard “Squaddie” Paine, overcame myriad complications to respond to it, will be shared in a future story. Suffice to say Linus was stunned at what happened.

The lesson baked into that is that it’s OK to ask for help. That’s exactly what joining and sticking with F3 is about—asking for help, again and again and again, day after day, beatdown after beatdown—whether it’s for better fitness, more fellowship, deeper faith or all three.

Eventually that seeking of help becomes the providing of help. F3 brothers in the gloom are there waiting for whatever man shows up asking for help. In this case, they didn’t wait in the gloom for their F3 brothers to show up. They ran through the night to find them.

Here came Glenn “K9” Ayala, who had spent the night as the trainer for Red Platoon, teaching the men to rotate out from under the log before they got exhausted, not after.

Here came John “Dovetail” Padilla, a hydraulic lift of a man in a bright orange “Support Team” t-shirt, positioning himself at the front of the log, embracing the weight, taking off like a whipped horse and pulling the rest of the team along for the ride.

Here came Chris “Rotor” Byrne, a Royal Air Force veteran who had been there all along, taking advantage of the new enthusiasm to shout out cadence that created rhythm and pace the men had lacked all night.

All of this unleashed a stunning feat of strength. “I’m talking a mother lifting a car off their child sort of stuff,” Slaughter said. “They suddenly made that log look like a stick.”

Finally, Blue Platoon arrived in a park and dropped the log.

“If that wasn’t a case study in teamwork, I don’t know what is,” Linus said.

To the east, the graying sky signaled the sun’s imminent arrival.

A few hours later, as the men of GTE-42 arrived at the end point carrying some of its members—echoing Linus, if that’s not an apt metaphor I don’t know what is—dozens of their loved ones formed lines on both sides, welcoming their dads and husbands and sons into their rest. Wives cheered. Children carried handmade signs. Dogs barked and ran in circles. One mom said she traveled all the way from Zimbabwe to see her son, Jamie “Faucet” Thomson, cross the finish line.

ZIMBABWE!

That alone might have made this the most incredible ending in GTE history, but there was much more. The individual parts—the men, the route, the water, the cold, the logs—were all big, but they didn’t add up to the ending. All of those great parts were multiplied, and when the men of GTE-42: The Hills arrived at the park, they were doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Hugs and tears, jokes and laughter, limps and groans, great failure and greater triumph—this was a celebration and a catharsis and a confirmation of all that GTE stands for all at once.

Linus says years from now, when F3 SE UK has grown and grown and grown, and GrowRuck-Europe has changed countless lives across that continent after spring-boarding from this event’s massive success, we’ll all look back with pride and say, “I was there at GTE-42.”

There was Alex “Strings” Skipp, whose incandescent personality made the night’s blackest moments less so, smiling alongside his equally incandescent wife. There was Axel the Great, back from the dead, wise-cracking about how the Americans hadn’t bothered to make GTE-42 difficult. There was Antoine “Ratchet” Du Baret the (seemingly) 8-foot-tall Frenchman who speaks the King’s English and is so skinny he has to run around in the shower to get wet and yet powered that slight frame through 15-plus hours of hell.

There was Steven “Hoops” Mortimer, exulting in the destruction of his emotional barriers and limiting self-beliefs and promising “not to leave this gift you’ve given me gathering dust on the bookshelf but use it any way I can to be a better father, husband and man.”

There was James “Bunker” Brady, who duct-taped his ripped-in-half shoes back together hours earlier. There was Artur “Ergo” Furdey and Werner “H20” Delport and Attila “Ata” Mille and more, glowing in disbelief at all that had happened and growing because of it.

“It’s pretty powerful,” Slaughter said. “Lives were changed before our very eyes.”

Just then Hoops’s wife joined the conversation. “Thank you for breaking my husband,” she said.

“He’ll be put back together even stronger,” Slaughter replied.

I looked for Kieron “Prop” Urben. I had not seen him in several hours. He decided to join the event only 2 hours, 16 minutes before it started because he had to make sure care was provided for his son. He made it, right? His shoulders were still attached to his body, right? Ah hell, screw his shoulders, I hope he made it with or without them.

I walked a lap around his formation, and there he was, standing tall, strong, powerful, a Jenga tower made of forged steel. Since I last saw him, he had excelled as the assistant platoon leader. In one alternately black and beautiful night, he had grown from not even being registered for the event to being one of its key leaders.

His cheeks red and damp, his eyes moist and closed, Prop hugged his 17-month-old son, Noah.

He opened his eyes, smiled at me, closed them again and squeezed Noah tighter.

Jake—beautiful Jake! nine-day-old Jake!—slept quietly in his beaming mother’s arms.