Hi-Tec Boot Camp at SSISA Week 5

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Friday, 15 April 2011 14:10

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Passing out from Boot Camp

by Ian Little

Today was the last Hi-Tec Boot Camp session, after six weeks of three times a week, hour-long, 6am starts. As we moved from summer to autumn to winter, the dawn got gradually later and by the last session, the sun was no longer hitting the mountain during the sessions. Instead, today, I stretched out on the grass looking up at a sky full of stars, what a pleasure! However, it IS so much easier to exercise when it’s light! Staying in bed when it’s dark seems natural, running around a field very unnatural. So it’s with admiration that I watched my fellow boot campers arrive day after day, week after week. Very few absentees (I guess in the army you can’t choose to stay in bed) and always buckets of enthusiasm.

The last week saw the platoon being retested for cholesterol, body fat, weight, speed (the dreaded 12 minute test where you try and destroy your left quad by running anti-clockwise around a 140m track as many times as you can, as fast as you can) and strength. There were some impressive improvements, the most pronounced from Nelle du Toit of Sports Trader magazine who improved every measure by considerable margins! She ended the programme faster, stronger, lighter and healthier, well done Nelle. Some of us managed to get faster but still put on weight. Maybe a try out for the Stormers is called for!

So what has 6 weeks of Boot Camp taught me?

1. I’m still not a morning person however hard to try to motivate me
2. I now have another run I love. Post boot camp, from the Sports Science Institute up Jamie steps, to Rhodes Mems and back past all the queuing traffic to SSI again. Seeing students shuffling towards UCT is uplifting, the view from the top of Rhodes Mem stunning, the autumnal trees and foraging squirrels a joy to behold and the town bound traffic a reminder of what I could be doing if I hadn’t made it up for Boot Camp
3. You can make friends even at 6am in the morning
4. Our instructors were too nice to ever make it in the military and ‘punishments’ too fair to make us hate them
5. An hour goes very quickly if you don’t wear a watch and very slowly if you do
6. That you see a lot of people running BEFORE 6am in the morning, in the dark, in winter

So I said goodbye to Boot Camp, rejuvenated by the experience and happy to have meet a great bunch of people who complained seldom and laughed a lot. Thank you Sports Science, my company Hi-Tec for sponsoring the programme and my fellow Boot Campers for a great 6 weeks.