Brady's Cross Country Training Camp

Guest Post by Brady about Cross Country Training Camp, July 13 - 17th

After High Adventure, I had about 3 days to settle down, and then I was off to Cross Country Camp. Since my mom's car is defective and can't travel extra long distances, I got a ride with Rusty and another kid who also needed a ride. When we were almost there, the height from the mountains seemed to set in and I started getting a little car sick, but after walking around once we got there, I started getting used to the altitude.
After we set up a little, others started slowly showing up. There were 18 kids total, our team coaches Rusty, Liz, and Brice, a few graduated students, and two guys from NNU.

I wasn't going to the summer practices, so I was pretty much completely fresh into running again. The first run we went on, I felt pretty dehydrated. At the end of the run, I felt like I was about to get a Charley Horse in my calf at any second. After stretching and baby sitting the sink, it went away, and I slowly started to build my endurance throughout the rest of camp.

During the first night, the leaders had Brice dressed up like a wizard from Hogwarts (sort of). That night, we each took turns going up in front of the living room and stepping in to the sorting shoes. There were three teams that divided us up into groups of six. The teams were Griffendor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. I was on Hufflepuff. During the rest of camp, we would have small activities that earned us house points. The team with the most house points at the end got awards.

That is Brice. He didn't look this ridiculous to us because the lights were off. The following pictures were taken with a blinding flash by Sora.

There I am putting on the sorting shoes.

(Good picture of the living room of the cabin)

A few days after, we got wife beaters and drew team logos on them. It was also optional to change the name of your team. Griffendor changed their team name to Slytherin, or the Death Eaters... it was a small mix of the two. Go figure. They did it because, "We couldn't do anything with Griffendor". Yes, we also had to come up with a team cheer and a skit.

That was mine. I tried to draw a badger, even though no one really knew what they looked like. I tried my best, even though everyone else's looked like stick figures, or Tasmanian devils, mine probably got made fun of the most *eyes roll*

I tried to do uniform letters at the beginning, but it didn't really work out, but it works. We got our idea from the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, only the house part is supposed to be like the house in The House Cup.

The competitions included several things like a string and nut game, a water balloon fight called civil war, an Oreo eating contest, a jello hose blowing contest, and egg toss, a head banging contest, a blindfolded obstacle, and much more, ending with a relay race.

 In the pictures, you see us doing a game where they froze a wife beater shirt with water. It practically was a block of ice, and our goal was to come up with any way to unfreeze our wife beater and put it on one of our team members. However, we couldn't use the hose, or go into the house. I was trying to stretch the rules and found a water bottle by a car outside. Technically, I wasn't breaking any of the rules, didn't use the house or the hose. However, when I was running over back to my team, Cindy, Rusty's wife, said that I couldn't use water. LAME! One team was banging theirs against a rock, while we were pounding ours with a brick. The other team... Lets say that a guy named Ryan peed on their teams wife beater hopping to unfreeze it... It didn't work, all it did was make the rest of the team not want to touch it. They were last by a long shot.

That's us blowing on the shirt, trying to breath heat it

.

That's us pulling it apart, you can see the brick we used at the bottom.

And that is our brick beaten wife beater.

Then it was time for the skits and the relay. There was a Dance performed by Slytherin, our team did a Candy Shop skit where we borrowed people and used them as furniture because there was nothing in the candy shop, then the last thing they needed was candy and the punch line was, "What do I need candy for, I got all the suckers I need." (I stole the idea from High Adventure the week earlier.)

Then the winning team did a Lord of the Rings based skit, only instead of a ring, it was a pair of dirty underpants, and they had to take it to some kind of giant washing machine where it could be destroyed. It was funny because they were traveling over the mountains and they said the underwear froze. Ryan said something like, "I think I can unfreeze them, I hear peeing on them really helps" Then when they were almost at the washing machine, Ryan (Frodo) said they were getting heavier, then Sean (Sam) said, "That's because you peed on them." It was really funny.

Then the relay came, even if we won (which we got dead last on) we still would have gotten last place. =(

Along with the team games we also had Sock Wars, which you throw socks at the other team (not house teams, just 9v9) last man standing, or who ever turns on the TV in the enemy teams base won. My team won all the matches we played. Then we played a game called Fugitive. We went to another cabin about 1 mile away from the cabin we were staying at, and we were trying to get back to our home cabin and ring the bell outside our cabin in order to win, but we had to do that without getting caught. It was high schoolers vs everyone else. At first, the teams seemed pretty even, but they picked us off slowly, and by the time it was 2 high schoolers vs about 8-10 helpers, it just wasn't that much fun anymore. We all got our fair share of battle wounds but only one of us came close to ringing the bell (as in he was on the porch, but didn't get the bell.)

And that was pretty much that week in a nut shell.

 and Brady