Rudders Rangers will hold the Rangers Gauntlet CrossFit games at Veterans Memorial Park on April 20 for the Wounded Warrior Project to raise awareness and enlist the publics aid for the needs of injured service members.
Rudders Rangers, an organization that has been at Texas A&M for about 50 years, is designed to educate and ready students for Army Ranger School.
Along with teaching students military tactics, we also teach them physical fitness, said Christopher Kostoff, senior international studies major and commanding officer of Rudders Rangers. We also go on field training exercises, where we put into action everything that we teach them.
The Rangers have been raising money for various groups for the past 10 years, but this years fundraising comes with a twist.
In the past years weve built a house for wounded veterans to stay in, along with other things, Valentine said. Usually we do a 5k, but this year we wanted to do something different. We decided to do a CrossFit. A lot of the workouts you do in CrossFit are the same as what we do in Rudders Rangers.
The CrossFit workout program, adopted by the military, consists of a variety of exercises that simultaneously exercise muscular and cardiovascular endurance.
The event is open to students of all athletic backgrounds, with exercises tailored to males and females. Students will have the option of participating in either the elite or scale CrossFit exercises.
The elite class is for people who have been doing CrossFit for a while, said Tyler Valentine, senior construction science major and public relations officer for Rudders Rangers. The scale class will be similar to elite but scaled down. For example the first elite exercise is to squat 225 pounds. However, the scale class will just use the 60 pound dumbbell.
Lee Alexander, senior international studies major and member of Rudders Rangers, said he believes it is only fitting for their organization to give back to such a project.
We are a student organization with military focus, Alexander said. It raises awareness for A&M students about the fact that we still have veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with disabilities, and its the least we can do to show our gratitude for them and to come and support a good cause.