Boy, I am glad to be back from Little Rock!!! It's hotter there than it is here...and Susan, this humidity is nothing compared to what I sucked in the past 5 days.
Luckily, I didn't have to sleep under the stars like they had told us we were. We got to stay in open-bay barracks (like on the movies when they depict bootcamp, everyone sleeps on double-rack bunks with wall-lockers in between) Hadn't slept in one of those in a while. Ah, the memories.
Anyway, after eating MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, I am on a crash course to clean out my system again. One MRE literally plugs me up for a week, which is what they are designed to do. Each package can come with several elements consisting of the main meal, snacks, desserts and drink mixes. They average about 1200 calories a package. Yes, 1200 cal a meal! We are issued three of these a day. I had packed small easy-to-open cans of veggies and pork'n'beans along with more healthful snacks. I only ate two hole MREs for the five days. The other ladies ate theirs heartliy. When it was time to leave, they noticed that the jeans they had on when they arrived seemed to have shrunk. One rationalized that the humidity just made her thighs swell. Unfortunately, I can't use that one in the winter. And so, it is now veggies and fruits until this Saturday. Mostly, anyway.
I havent' run since last Tuesday. I take that back, I ran for about 2/3 the length of a football field when I was in Little Rock. Torrential (sp?) down pours were occurring every 5 to 30 minutes. At one point there was a break, and I had to make it back to the barracks. You guessed it, I decided to book it back to the squadbay. An easy trot along side a fellow Seabee down the center line of the road. The steam rising from the asphalt felt like I was killing two birds with one stone: Exercise and cleansing my pores. At about the 50 yard mark I noticed a slight burning sensation... in my legs. Particularly my shins. My shins don't usually hurt on my weekly or long runs. A few more steps revealed that I was panting like a dog. 'What is going on? I haven't even gone that far or that fast!' A few more steps and I understood why I was struggling to jog. Running in boots is much harder to do than running in sneakers. Furthermore, running in Steel-Toe boots is twice as hard to do than running in regular boots. On average, the sneaker can weigh .5 lbs. A boot can weigh approx. 1 lbs. A steel-toe boot averages about 2 lbs + or - some ounces. My ego told me that the"' barracks were just up the road'". My body said...well it would have said "Stop it!", it was too out of breath to even fight. Needlesstosay, I motioned for the other girl to save herself and that I would hold off the snipers for as long as I could. Her pity slowed to a stop and shadowed me the rest of the way as I quietly tried to catch my breath. Do you know how hard that is to do without grimacing or doubling over to search for your composure that most surely had sunken down near your ankles? I fought the urge to just curl up in fetal position in the middle of the hot street until the depletion of oxygen had been restored. Shame? Not at all - she didn't have steel-toes on...and I'm sure my thighs had swelled from all the rising steam.
Tomorrow I shall return to my weekly runs with the Rockettes. I missed not being able to run on Thursday and Saturday. Hopefully it's not too humid!
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