SNOW and SPORTS

...do not make a good combination

Saturday

We all learned that every athlete is expected to participate in the CAC's (cardinal athletic club, or something like that.) "Amazing Race" on Sunday. This means that all sorts of events are laid out for us in Olympic like fashion. I got an email that told me I was on Team 16.

The sun was setting, and all of a sudden a million birds started flying across the sky. I mean MILLIONS. They covered the whole sky, and it lasted for about half an hour. I'm pretty sure they were heading south for the winter. I didn't think anything of it until I saw the weather forecast for the next day: SNOW O.O

I didn't; couldn't believe it. It was still 60 degrees outside!

But the sun went down, and that was when the wind started. Huge gusts of wind.

Sunday

I woke up at noon and looked out the window. There were dead leaves blowing around everywhere! The beautiful yellow/orange tree outside my window had become completely bare in one night. The leaves blew up almost six feet in the air at times. did some homework until 1;30, which was when we were supposed to meet for the CAC's Amazing Race. I looked outside and it had started to sprinkle. But the drops looked a bit wrong. They seemed to kind of float around like dandelion seeds.

It was sleet. Sleet is something inbetween snow and rain. I ran outside and tried to catch some, but it would melt as soon as it touched skin. It did collect on my shirt though.

Robby came home, and gave me something from his mother. She had made me mittens. They were so warm. I decided to bring them along.

They told us to expect to get wet, and so I decided to wear shorts, as well as hide my boardshorts in the pool lockers. Did I mention the swim team has their own locker room? Yea pretty bad ass.

It started to actually snow. It didn't stay on the ground because apparently the ground has to freeze before the snow can stick.

We all collected into the basketball/ indoor track gym. There were 20 groups, all made up of different members from different sports. I had three softball players, one amazing soccer goalie named Marianna (our group leader), a Hockey player, a track player named Emily, and a baseball player.

Here were the games we played, and how we did

1 TIE (sudoku)
2 WIN (running/ hockey gear)
3 WIN (hockey rink)
4 WIN (blocks and beams)
5 WIN (Pool)
6 WIN (Pipes and Golf Balls)
7 WIN (Football kicks)
8 LOSS (battleship)
9 LOSS (handball)
10 LOSS (Cups and Hoops)


(sudoku)
They wanted at least one mind game in here. I hate sudoku hahaha. I almost finished one puzzle, but we ran out of time. It was a tie.

(running/ hockey gear)
We had to run around the track three times. There were four stations. Since we had only 8 people and all the other teams 11, I had to go twice, as did two others. You had to put on a hockey jersey, a helmet, weird thick leather pant things, socks, shin guards, and gloves before you could run to the next post. You could put anything on in any way, but you couldn't be holding anything. Much to say it was very entertaining and we won!

(hockey rink)
We played Curling on the ice. We used hockey pucks instead of those metal things but it worked just as well. Thank god we had a hockey player on our team. We won!


(blocks and beams)
This one was really cool. There were three wooden boxes spaced apart:

I```I ........................ I```I ........................ I```I
and without touching the floor, we had to get the most teammates (we both used 8 players) across. We could do this by using two wooden beams. It was so fun! The other team started copying our style, but we still won by one person! Since I weighed the second most, the hockey player and I were the weights to hold the boards down as others walked across. We won!

(Pool)
Of course this was my specialty. I went into the Varsity Locker room (it has a combination lock on it,) and borrowed a couple of goggles from other people. I hoped they wouldn't mind. Half of them had ditched the amazing race anyways. Lindquist allowed us to use goggles if we had them, and what we had to do was collect $20 and 8 cents of change off of the bottom of the pool. its stands for 2008. Get it? We then had to count the change, and we had a girl stay out to do that. We won by a landslide.

(Pipes and Golf Balls)
This one was a close race. We had two long pipes, and had to put a golfball inside the pipes. After the ball went through the first pipe into the second, the first pipe had to run around to the front so that the ball could travel. We had to go through a course, and dump the golf ball into a bucket. If you dropped the ball you had to start all over. And you couldn't put your hand over the pipe holes to hold the ball.Whoever got the ball in first won. We won.

(Football kicks)
This was out in the cold ass snow and we were still wet from the pool. It was the beginning of our downfall :( lol. We managed to punt the ball over the goal posts enough (thanks to Marianna). I was terrible. I could not even kick the ball because something got inside my contact and I was tearing up all over the place. I did warn them though that I was bad with games that included balls. We Won.

(battleship)
THis was human battleship. We had to lay down on one side of the barrier. If a ball hit us we were out, but if we caught the ball the person who threw it was out. It was very difficult because you could not see. We lost this one :( But it was a close match

(handball)
We had to go BACK out into the snow again. This was just like a soccer game, with soccer ball and goals. We had to use our hands and throw the ball, but if we caught the ball we could only take three steps. My hands were so cold, and the ball so wet, that it would slip out of my hands. I resorted to defense but we lost again.

(Cups and Hoops)
This last one was stupid. Four people were blindfolded, and I was one of them. All four of us had to get a rubberband with four strings tied to it to stretch wide enough in order to fit it onto a plastic dixie cup filled with water sitting on a chair. We could only have one person telling us instructions and no one could touch us. There were two people from the other team trying to heckle and confuse us. Since Marianna has such a distinctive voice, and she is such a good leader, we had no problem with the voice confusion. That was my idea :). We finally got the Rubberband on the cup, and tried hard not to spill. If you spilled you had to start over, but we didn't. We had to follow her voice and wind around three orange cones, and then put the cup onto a chair on the opposite side of the court. After that, one of the blindfolded people had to shoot a basket with a basketball and hoop. The minute we got the cup onto the other chair, the team had already shot the basket! We lost again.

All in all it was fun. We got a barbeque afterwards. Yumm.
I don't know what I would have done without the mittens.