“A simple black bag, comfortable in any and every environment imaginable. And while I started GORUCK to be so much more than a gear company, we’re proud to build the best, and to do it right here in the USA with American workers and American materials. GR1 took us a year and a half of prototyping and field-testing to get right, and we started selling it when it was ready and not a day sooner. My background is not in sewing or even in product design; my background is as a Green Beret well versed in how gear holds up, and more importantly, how and why it fails in the harshest of conditions. A few of us started work on GR1 in 2008 (yes, including sewers and product designers), and our focus was to take the best features of the different military rucks I had in Special Forces (SF), but to simplify everything to the essentials and let people customize it from there. Because buddies of mine now use our rucks in war, I’m constantly reminded in the most personal of ways that the gear will be used, and abused, and that it better hold up. So as I hope to show below, no detail is too small to consider, and the end result is a highly functional yet simple bag that only gets better with time.”
So begins the original “GR1 Explained” blog written by Jason 15 years ago. Back when GORUCK had only a handful of products and our MOLLE was waiting for Field Pockets that existed only as prototypes. Product photos were taken by him on a porch with the beach in the background, no studio shots with white backgrounds, and duct tape-wrapped bricks were the official weight of the GORUCK Challenge. Just like everything else, the GR1 was the same but different back then (show your kids the photo with an iPod in the internal zip pocket and tell them about the before-times when songs cost 99 cents each).
The GR1’s story began a few years earlier. GORUCK was born from an appreciation of quality gear within Special Forces, because when you’re walking around Baghdad circa 2007 a little sand can’t destroy your zippers.
All GORUCK bags are designed to lay flat. That design element comes from Special Forces medical bags (the one shown above was repurposed as Emily’s go-bag in West Africa). The last thing you want to be doing in an emergency is rummaging through your bag trying to find the one thing that just might save a life. Features tend to be developed for those who use things to the extreme, and our bags are no different. It’s why the Special Forces will always be in GORUCK’s DNA. But just because something was developed for grabbing a tourniquet as quickly as possible doesn’t mean it won’t be useful for a million other things. Opening flat is one of the things that makes a GR1 (or any of our other bags) so good for travel.
Designing a bag that can handle anything requires learning from the people who have experienced everything and the Green Berets as an organization fit the bill. But GORUCK needed a way to constantly test the bags and the GORUCK Challenge was born. 12+ hours of GORUCK-style fun coming to a city near you, bricks not provided. Turns out there are a lot of people who will crawl through mud on a Saturday night and thank you for the experience. Building better Americans through teamwork and pain was added to the mission and GR1s carried the pain. The constant trial by fire led to design changes over the years. The back used to be 1000D Cordura like the rest of the bag, now it’s a more skin-friendly 210D. The internal sleeve was once mesh, now it’s Cordura. GORUCK started making ruck plates and then we purpose-built the Rucker 1.0 to carry them.
But the GR1 was the Rucker before the Rucker. Built with a hydration port for your bladder, rucking was at the heart of GR1’s design from the beginning. Because if you’re going to make a bag you can take anywhere, that includes supporting you along the way. The GR1’s original design was more than a little influenced by hotter than hell days under the Iraqi sun carrying a full load of gear.
Since 2010, the GR1 has taken us a lot of places. Events, the rucking world, apparel, and shoes wouldn’t have happened without it. So the GR1’s origins are also the origins of everything that’s come since. The bag that launched a thousand events, and quite possibly millions of rucks, is just as tough, just as no-frills as it has been since day one.
