Sign Me UP!

Today I decided to enlist. This morning my ever versatile (and flexible!) boot camp instructors showed us what it was like to REALLY REALLY be in the army. Today, I ran in formation. While holding a rifle over my head. While singing cadences at the top of my lungs about how the Navy is for wimps and about how Army Rangers can dismantle gators with their bare hands. And while responding to commands to “FALL OUT” and drop and do 10 pushups and to “FALL IN” and reform our formation and continue running and then to sprint to the front of the pack and around the pack and back to the front all while the formation keeps moving forward. And A REAL HONEST TO GOODNESS RETIRED COLONEL ARMY RANGER GUY (Jojo’s Dad) jogged BACKWARDS next to us like it was NOTHIN!

So now I know how much FUN the army must be! And I was on such a high that I drove right over to the recruiting office!

Apparently though, I’m kinda old by army standards. And they have issues with poor eyesight and asthma. WHATEVAR!

Ok, its been a few hours. I guess I have to acknowledge that maybe it was actually a taste of Army LITE. Cause, technically speaking, we were only doing it for an hour. Not hours on end. And, if I must be honest, our rifles were really really lightweight. As in …… light as air. As in … Imaginary. And we didn’t even pretend to carry 30 lb packs on our backs. Or run through sand or jungle. Or get shot at.

But I definitely do not play enough pretend in my life and I TOTALLY need to remedy that because this morning REALLY REALLY was like the most fun I’ve had in WEEKS. (This may actually be kind of disturbing if I’d stop to think about it but I’m not going to disrupt this groove I’ve got going on!) I’ve had a stupid grin all day. Not only was my knee completely painless for the whole 3 miles but my shins and my calves were totally cool too. I hit that stride, I was keeping up with our pace setter just FINE! I was even able to encourage my formation partner who has a heart of steel and who tried her hardest to keep up. This is her first bootcamp and she reminds me a lot of me 3 months ago. And I tried my best to boost her here and there and I hope she knows how much she rocked it out! And I cracked a few jokes! And I shouted HOOAH with conviction and not a little pride.

Normally I don’t track mileage at boot camp because it doesn’t usually make sense but I did for this one because we did spend most of the hour in motion on a trackable route. If you check my training log you’ll see that our avg. pace seems slow but it included two stretching sessions, several push up breaks and a couple of side sprints that I didn’t track.

Looking forward to sharing this with my Dad tomorrow, I think he’ll really be amazed at how far his little bookworm has come!