June 25, 1997 - Pushing My Limits

970625 - Today we had PT. It consisted of a 2-mile ability group run. Normally, I run with the medium group, but today I decided to run with the fastest group and, amazingly enough, I made it fine!!!!! The rest of the day was pretty normal, with another History class. Feel great. Not sore at all. It's already been almost 1 month! After next week, we start Phase II. 65 more days (9 more Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays; 10 more Thursdays and Fridays).
This morning, when the series (my platoon plus two others on the same training schedule) was gathered for PT, we were told to break up into ability groups. The first time they told us to do this, they just broke us up based on our run-time for the 1.5-mile-run during our Initial Strength Test.  Based on that, I was grouped in the middle group. On this particular morning, we broke up into the same groups as usual, with the majority of our platoon going to the middle group again. The SDI was not happy when he saw only 4 recruits from our platoon in the fast group. He came storming over to the middle group (and just happened to end up directly in front of me), looked at the group and yelled, "What, no one from my platoon actually wants to push themselves?!? You just want to do the bare minimum, huh?" He then stood there. glaring at us. So I guess, when I say "I decided to run with the fastest group," it might be more accurate to say that I was shamed into running with the fast group (along with about 6 others from my platoon). The fact remains, though, that I did succeed and felt a significant sense of accomplishment as a result of it. This was the first sign that we were slowly moving out of the "breaking down" phase of boot camp (at least physically) and into the "building up" phase.

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