Worst idea I've ever had.
It started off Monday morning at PT when our BN commander asked if any of us wanted to participate in an event this Saturday. The event in question was the Norwegian 30k Road March. I decided, against my better judgment, to go ahead and give it a shot. After all, it would be good exercise, a chance to win a foreign military badge, a way for me to see just how fit I really am, and an excuse to go home since it was to be held in my hometown. Come Saturday morning, I woke up, taped up my feet to try to prevent blisters, got my Camelbak full of Gatorade, loaded up my ruck with 32lbs of weight and went to the starting point. I started off just fine. No fatigue, about 20minutes ahead of the pace i needed in order to win the badge, 4 hours, 30 minutes. At about the 9k mark, shit really went down hill. I was still feeling fine as far as muscle fatigue goes, but i began to develop several very painful blisters on my feet. I walked/ran the next 6k on the outside edge of my left foot until I got to the halfway point where I was told would be first aid and moleskin. When I got there they had already run out of moleskin and all the medic had was gauze and tape. I took off my boot, popped my blisters, taped them up, and turned around to go back to the finish line.
The second half was terrible. I managed to make it to the halfway point within 2 hours, still ahead of the needed pace. Now, however, my feet were absolutely screaming. I was still moving on the side of my foot which was really starting to tear the hell out of my ankle and knee. I met an older SGT who was having some bad cramps and just walked the rest of the way with him. We chatted about the military, family, music, politics pretty much anything to pass the miles. The only thing that kept the both of us moving was the fact that we had already gone more than 15k (9+ miles) and it would have been a shame to give up then. People who were still somehow behind us continued to fall out of the march and ride past us in vans. It was very tempting to join them and just call it a day.
When we finally finished, all I could think about was going inside and sitting down. With a time of 5 hours, 40 minutes, 18 seconds, then only thing i won was respect from myself as well as from others who after saw my blisters and heard that i continued on despite the fact that the time limit was already up. In fact of those who actually finished the march, SGT Andrews and myself came in dead last. After I had sat down to eat a provided lunch of bare subway ham sandwich, I could barely move. If you have ever seen a man with a full body cast walk, I imagine it would look similar. I could barely shift gears to drive myself back home, and getting out of the car was a whole other story. and stairs? forget about it.
On the bright side, now I know exactly what I need to do in order to be successful for next year's events. And I also managed to burn off somewhere around 3000 calories (according to a couple of websites) during that nearly 6 hour time period.
Now that we've got a relatively warm day today, I can't wait to get outside and enjoy a nice long smoke to try and relax a little bit.
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