Night was falling. We're both
tired. We're limping.
Hips hurt. Back hurts.
And we keep going.
My name is Zdravko Ivankovic
and I'm a sailor third class
at HMCS Star in Hamilton.
Matthew Pinczak and I, we had
a somewhat inauspicious start.
We were doing PT at the unit.
We're playing soccer.
And all of sudden, somebody
runs up and bumps into me.
That was Matt.
Once we got passed that
initial collision of ours,
it was definitely something
that we could bond over.
He was involved
in everything at our unit.
Where he could do something
and it felt passionate about it,
he would do that.
In him, I saw the best
we hope to see in people.
When I heard Matt passed,
I felt shock.
The last time I'd seen
him before that, he seemed fine.
I felt this void
and we all did at our unit.
Rucking is a fundamental aspect
of militaries worldwide.
It's just the simple idea of
you put this weight on your back
and you carry it
from point A to point B.
We decided to remember
him in a way
and I happened
to talk to Chris Bonnell
who's a Naval Warfare
Officer at our unit,
and he goes:
"Yeah! It would be cool,
so we're gonna do it and
we're gonna do it this summer."
Matt would have
been 31 this year,
so we decided to carry 31 pounds
of weight plus the other stuff.
And it was gonna
be 70 kilometres
from HMCS York in Toronto
to HMCS Star in Hamilton.
And in the spirit of Matt,
we wanted to give back.
97% of the money
that Soldier On raises,
they send to the causes
that they support.
So initially, it would have
been just Chris and myself.
Chris' good friend Joe
saw what we were doing.
He was really excited about it.
He's a former service member as
well. And then, my friend Phil.
At the 20 K mark, old injuries
started to act up,
so Joe's legs were
in a significant amount of pain
and Chris' knees were
really acting up.
We got to about
the 40 kilometres mark
and that's when Phil and I said:
"Chris, Joe, we can't have you
go any further."
So Chris and I's initial
goal was 2000$.
A thousand from each of us.
And then, in the end,
we were able to raise 3200$.
Night was falling. We're both
tired. We're limping.
The tears start flowing.
Everything that...
that my friend Matt had been
and all these goals
that we set out
for ourselves in this ruck,
they were coming to fruition.
At 11:09 PM,
some 19 hours and 97 000 steps,
we finally reached
our finish line at Star.
I miss my friend.
Our unit misses him.
But hopefully, because of who
he was and what he stood for,
we're all inspired to make more
of the time that we have here.
So one quote by Beckett
that stuck with me
throughout a lot of things and
through many things in my life,
it's the simple one:
"I can't go on. I'll go on."