I like Thursdays. It's the first time I've come close to 'no friggen way!', but it was hard, full of comaraderie and rewarding.
After lunch was the power training we'd heard so much about (in the scary rumour type way), here's what we did:
We walked over to the national park behind the school.
It started with a run up some steep stone steps (not bad you think, given all the running in New Zealand), unfortunately that was only to get us to the top.
Next we had to crawl down the stupidly steep stone steps head first on our hands and feet, which was tricky to say the least. Sam wasn't given anymore confidence when someone came hurtling past on their belly having lost their grip. A few of those made our arms wobbly, but as we were with all the older students in our group there was lots of encouragement. [sidebar: we newbies are described as the Noobs, and by 'older', we mean been at school longer. The one and two week noobs have largely been trained on our own until today].
Next we had to piggy back each other up another set of steps a few times, where pleasing Sam did better than some of the lads in our group.
Next came a humumgous slide, which we had to run up (so long it took almost 5 minutes to get up). Pleasingly, once everyone had got up (some rather worse for wear), we were allowed to slide down...weeeeeeee!!!!! True to form our Shi Fu came down on his feet 'surf style'. One of our friends took his camera down with him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T98dNjbTrkE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rUOT5MYvmo
Finally we were taken to a near vertical rock face and told to run up it 3 times...the sort of thing you'd think impossible if you didn't just see the person in front do it. It was actually really fun.
From there we took the 15 minute walk back to school on wobbly legs, with huge smiles, where we chatted with the older students and there was a clear sense of achievement.
So, in conclusion, Thursdays are hard, but Thursdays are also deeply satisfying, and that slide was awesome :)
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