I missed my Saturday training session - again. Not good for the marathon plan since I spent most of this week in San Francisco and I didn't do so well on honoring my workout schedule. Let's call this a sub-stellar week of training.
At least I had a good reason to skip Saturday. I'm taking some courses at the University of California, San Diego. Saturday was our first class. This session was a team building exercise at Challenge-U on a ropes course. If you've never done one of these ropes course, you do all these team activities that for some reason involve rope - tightropes, knots, webs.
Honestly, I've had bad ropes course experiences including one at Adventureworks in Tennessee. At that one our team banded together and quit the day early. In our defense, it was a blisteringly hot and disgustingly humid August day. There was a Lyme disease outbreak that summer and everyone had to wear long pants and long sleeves. We were incredibly smelly, sticky and uncomfortable. Also, the instructor was a jerk of epic proportion. The best decision our team made was to quit and go sit on the air conditioned bus and wait to go home.
I was approaching this Saturday with a mixture of dread and peevishness. Dread over the fact that I don't want to relive middle school gym class and peevishness that I had to drive an HOUR and get there at 8:30 in the morning. What is with everyone conspiring to hijack my Saturday morning snooze time?
It was much better than I'd hoped. Just like my horrible day at Adventureworks, I did screw up the go through the web thing - twice. It completely frustrated me since the entire team was penalized for my ineptitude. (If you scroll down the Challenge-U page, the picture in the middle is the *@!#*%$ pass through the web game.)
Now the good part! The second half of the day is the "high course". I climbed a 50 foot pole. Then I left the relative safety of that pole and walked on a tightrope. Yeah, I was wearing a helmet and a safety harness, but I'm telling you that you aren't thinking safety harness when you're up there. You're thinking "Please, please let me get across this wobbly, shaking rope without falling.". (Now scroll all the way down the Challenge-U page to see a pic of the high wire stuff.)
The other thing is that while I was up there I somehow managed to get an incredible bruise on the underside of my arm from the guide rope. It didn't hurt at the the time because I was hyped up on adrenaline. The bruise is so angry that I can't bear to have anything touch it including sleeves. Other than a hip pointer that I got in high school, I've never had a bruise that hurt with this intensity. It's enormous and spectacularly bright purple. I am, of course, ridiculously proud of that bruise.
I'm hoping that someone in my class is posting photos of everyone on the high wire....if they do I'll add a link.
Next week, I promise to go to my marathon training session. I promise, I promise, I promise.
