Well it’s been a crazy last month that is for sure. I’ve been in Portland for a wedding Atlanta for a World Race training and now I am back home for another month before I head to Chicago for launch.
First off let me say that training was awesome! 7 days with 65 people that I am going to spend the next year of my life with, doing some very intense training. Here are the highlights from 10 down.
10- A total of a 22 hour travel day.- let me just say everything that probably could have gone wrong as far as getting out to Atlanta from my friends wedding in Salem Oregon did.
9-Sleeping two guys in a two man tent- one of our training excersizes was acting as if half of our bags got lost and then making sleeping arrangements as such. My bag was ‘lost’ and so I bunked with my teammate Justin without my sleeping bag pillow or pad.
8- making a KU chant a K-squad chant- So during the week we did some competitions against other squads and since we were K-squad I changed the KU fight song from “rock chalk Jayhawks K U” to “lets say who rocks K Squad” it was great both for my fellow KU fans and the Mizzou fans in our squad who refused to participate.
7-finding out wrong impressions about each other– with 65 people at training camp most if not all of which I had only met via facebook it is no surprise that we had some wrong impressions about each other. My favorite was finding out a few people thought I was short and slightly overweight.
6-crazy dancing- I am as white as they come as far as dancing is concerned but I really embraced my dancing at training during a dance off and here is a video of my teams dance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEeakVgAuxQ&feature=youtu.be
5- sleeping on the bus- to give us the best feel of what it was going to be like during the race one night we were assigned the two school buses as our sleeping quarters for the night. We made the most of it though and set up some hammocks inside the bus. 
4- Showers in the rain-
course.
3- mock market- one of our training exercises was to buy food at a market that the staff had set up on the street, with street vendors, pickpockets, blaring music and honking cars. Myself and two other members of the squad were put in charge of dividing up the ‘money’, and I’ll admit it was quite stressful but we got the job done.
2- Currahee- if any of you have seen or read the Band of Brothers you will remember that the WWII unit really became a strong family when they had to run a mountain 6 miles up and 6 miles down almost every day. Although we didn’t do the full 12 miles the guys did about 2 ½ and had ‘injured’ and ‘paralized’ people we had to carry up the mountain. I could tell as we hiked up that this was a time of bonding for us as well.
1-healing- I am not just talking about nice healing of the heart here, though we did have plenty of that too. Real healing we had two guys in our squad one with a shoulder problem another with back problems they have dealt with foryears. By the end of the week lets just say that wasn’t a problem anymore! G-d is a healer!
Overall Training was AWESOME!
