Why I Ruck When Nobody Makes Me

It’s 0300 on a Thursday at Camp Rogers, Fort Benning. Day 4 of Ranger School, RAP week, and we’re about to start the 12-mile ruck. Our bodies are more broken than any RAP week class before us, and there’s a reason for that.

My class was the guinea pig. The Army rolled out the new RPA 2.0 on April 21, 2025, and nobody had dialed it in yet. Too much time was given to complete it, and a test meant to thin the herd on Day 1 cut only 10 or so Rangers. We walked into RAP week over 300 strong, more bodies than there were beds in the barracks. The cadre had a math problem, and they chose the ruck to solve it. The smoke sessions ran longer. The sleep ran shorter. They had to break us before the ruck, because the ruck was going to do the counting. And they added a new rule for it: every mile checkpoint would be cut off at 15 minutes flat. Fall behind the pace at any single mile and you were done.

We stepped off into the pitch black, 260-plus Rangers deep, with me at the very back of the last company, Charlie. I spent the first mile fighting through the column, weaving past bodies on that dark road. Coming up on the first checkpoint at the one-mile mark, I glanced at my watch: 14:00, maybe 20 meters to go. Then my stomach dropped.

Three Rangers back from the checkpoint, an RI stepped in front of it and bellowed at us to turn around, grabbing anyone who tried to run past. I looked down: 14:15. Forty-five seconds under the time hack, and I was being turned around anyway. I stood there in disbelief while he kept yelling, and that’s when I noticed the lane to the right of the checkpoint. At 0315, it was dark enough to disappear in. I edged right, waited for his attention to swing to other Rangers, and took off running as hard as a body four days into RAP week can run. Another RI caught me out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t yell. He didn’t even look mad. He watched me weave back into the formation and turned away, because he knew, and I knew, this was never about the time hack. It was the only way they could cut the class as aggressively as they needed to.

I finished the 12 miles in 2:40 with time to spare, and I hated rucking with everything I had left.

That’s how the Army introduces you to the ruck: as a weapon. You go in tired, you go in dead, because the ruck isn’t there to build you. It’s there to find out what’s left of you. I earned two tabs carrying one, and if you’d asked me at graduation whether I’d ever put a pack on for fun, I’d have laughed at you.

Then I got home. At some point, with no cadre trying to make me fail, I put weight on my back and went for a walk. My load, my pace, my route. And it finally hit me: rucking might be the best piece of fitness the military ever gave me. There’s a calmness under load that’s hard to explain until you’ve felt it. The pack settles, the stride finds its rhythm, and 30 minutes later your head is clear and your body has done real work. What they used to break me down, I now use to build my body up.

So here’s why you should ruck, military or not.

Twenty pounds on your back turns a boring walk into 400 to 500 calories an hour, roughly two to three times the calorie burn of unweighted walking. That tracks with the Army’s own USARIEM load-carriage research, updated in 2024 for exactly this kind of loaded walking. Running, by comparison, results in injuries among 40% to 50% of runners every year. Walking keeps one foot on the ground, so the impact stays low even under load. Every year I meet people whose knees quit running. Almost none of them have ever tried putting the intensity in a backpack instead.

Rucking also has gears. The flat walk is your everyday gear, low impact and conversational. The hike is the middle gear, where the hills do the programming for you. When you want your heart rate up, there’s the airborne shuffle every paratrooper knows: short, quick steps, feet barely off the ground, around a 12-minute mile. Adding a few one-minute shuffles to a walk is real cardio without the pounding.

As for the risks of rucking, the way Ranger School uses the ruck is exactly how you shouldn’t. A 2021 review on soldier load carriage recommends spacing hard rucks 10 to 14 days apart, and a 2023 study of 670 Ranger School candidates found that non-graduates had rucked slightly more often each week before the course, while faster 2-mile run times predicted graduation. Start at 10% to 15% of your body weight. Walk before you shuffle. Cap it around 35 pounds and lighten the load. Nobody is grading you. That’s the difference between the ruck that breaks you and the ruck that builds you. Same pack, different purpose.

Rucking is the oldest movement pattern there is: carry a load, cover ground. You don’t need a contract to benefit. Any backpack, any weight that doesn’t shift, 30 minutes. If you’re looking for a ruck, check out my list of the best rucking backpacks.

Grab the load and go for a walk. I promise the checkpoint is unmanned.

Sources

• “Demographic, psychosocial, and physical fitness predictors of successful graduation from U.S. Army Ranger School,” by T.M. Benedict, T.L. Grier, T.C. Roy, M.N. Toussaint and B.H. Jones (Military Psychology, 2023). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37133490/
• “Prevention of Running Injuries,” by K.B. Fields, J.C. Sykes, K.M. Walker and J.C. Jackson (Current Sports Medicine Reports, 2010). https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2010/05000/prevention_of_running_injuries.14.aspx
• “Metabolic Costs of Walking with Weighted Vests,” by D.P. Looney et al. (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2024).
• “Soldier Load Carriage, Injuries, Rehabilitation and Physical Conditioning: An International Approach,” by R. Orr et al. (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021).

---

_____________________________

James B. is a National Guard infantryman and ROTC cadet who is projected to commission as an officer in 2028. He is a graduate of Ranger School and the Sapper Leader Course and earned his Ranger Tab as a private first class through the Ranger Team Leader Initiative. For The Havok Journal, he writes about Ranger School, junior enlisted service, leadership, and the National Guard and ROTC path to commissioning, drawing primarily from his experience as a young soldier and cadet. He also writes at warfighterforged.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.