Day of the Snake
by Ian Little
This morning’s Hi-Tec Boot Camp was session three, and sent us to the light and the dark side of doing anything that involves open eyes at 6am in the morning.
To experience dawn and the sun rise and hit Table Mountain is truly an awesome moment and makes that 5.15am early worth it. As we did laps of Westerford cricket field the darkness faded away and we were left with one of those perfect CT mornings, especially if you aren’t stuck in traffic but rather burning the calories.
Of course the sunrise is just there to sidetrack the recruits from the pain inflicted by Sergeant Shredder and her trusty sidekick, Willie the Whistle as I’ll call him. After ‘complaints’ that we spent too much time not moving (ie about 10 seconds between 10 minute exercises), we now had to jog on the spot and do sprints between exercise stations! I’d complained we hadn’t spent enough time lying down, but that comment apparently went unnoticed.
So the dark side, an exercise which was surely invented by the Americans as a torture method for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Unoriginally named the snake, it involved lining up the troop with the strongest at the front and so on. He or she then assumes the press up position and the person behind him takes his legs on his shoulders and also assumes the press up position and so on up the line (here a picture tells the story much better than words).
No boot camper had seen this torture method and the first attempt almost killed the strongest guy. It soon dawned on everyone that it was a case of ‘touch, pause, engage’ without very much pausing. Apparently by the end of the six week programme we should be able to walk around the field in the snake position, yeah right!
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