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Rucking: Walking while carrying weight in a backpack.

Rucking is in Your Blood

Rucking is in your genome.

Your body is the result of 300,000 years (!!) of evolution to be really good at two things.

Evolutionary Talent #1: Covering long distances in the heat

We can walk further in a day than any other animal going at whatever pace it pleases.

By walking five kilometers (three miles) per hour we could cover 70 kilometers per day. That includes eight hours of sleep and two hours of rest throughout the day.

Historically, we used this unique advantage to hunt on hot days. Four-legged animals aren’t good at cooling themselves, so we would chase them down until they collapsed from heat exhaustion then spear them.

(Don’t worry, you can ruck without killing anything.)

Bottom line: We’re really good at slowly covering long distances. If you add the heat, there’s no other animal that can go as far as us in one day.

Evolutionary Talent #2: Carrying stuff

We’re one of the few animals, the only if you exclude things like ants, that can carry stuff.

In pre-modern times, and still now if you’re a hunter, we needed to carry animals back to camp after killing them. A moderately fit person could hold around 33% of their body weight and still be better at covering long distances than most other primates carrying nothing.