Sunday, February 22, 2009

Another successful camping trip

This weekend saw 7 students and three adults going up to Folsom Lake to volunteer once again with Total Body Fitness. (http://www.tbfracing.com) Awesome company, awesome people.

I have to say I wasn't really ready for this trip in a few ways. I was feeling pretty drained from an exhausting week (have I mentioned how I'm ready for night school to end? 4:45-8:30pm twice a week is getting to me now that I'm coaching swimming too...) and ... dealt with more cancellations than normal because I didn't think it was a big enough of a deal to enforce the $5 a week before the trip policy. Thankfully I have a pretty large reservoir of kids to pick from as backups, so we found the kids to fill the spots no problem. I literally wrote kids names down on pieces of paper this time, and it ended up being 3 of the same kids that go on every single trip... kinda crazy. (Aaron, Albert, Billy).

Newcomers Rogelio, Michael B, and Jr. came along for the ride and volunteering too. Rogelio and Jr had only expressed an interest in triathlon stuff before, mostly water polo (rogelio did a great job his first year of water polo last year) and Jr. (I'm trying to get him to do swim team still.) Mike has expressed interest for sure but his mom hadn't let him do tri stuff before. He is on the Dive/swim team this year and played water polo last year (would have been MVP for JV but his attendance was spotty.) They did great.

Saturday probably because I was tired things weren't the best behavior-wise. I'm not used to having to really enforce things on triathlon trips - with the veterans I tend to have zero problems because they know what to expect and also what consequences will happen. So instead of me doling out pushups or other tasks I just kinda got frustrated. And took it out on meagan (girlfriend who came with me!). Whups. I recovered by nightfall and when I did walk over to their tent and told them no more talking... there was ... no more talking :-) Oh, I forgot to buy buns for the hotdogs and forks for cup-o-noodles that were donated for the trip... but i mean, it's a camping trip so I thought that just added to the camping trip charm.

And they got up and did a great job this morning cleaning up before we left. Kids and myself did everything from directing traffic to cooking to organizing and cleaning.

Afterwards we went to the obligatory Round Table pizza in old down sacramento that is cool because of two things - 1) To get in you walk down underneath the sidewalk and 2) $7 all you can eat pizza and salad bar buffett!

Some good conversations were definitely had this trip and it all worked out in the end. When I got home I took a SHOWER my first in two days after running around like crazy last night playing tag and then sleeping in the rain basically and volunteering in the rain all day... aka my suburban smells like wet dog, but it's more like teenage boy smell too which isn't a good thing. Poor Meagan!

I've typed too much; just waiting for my laundry to be done so I have something to wear tomorrow!

2 comments:

Tricia D. said...

Sounds like a fun and crazy trip (as per usual, right :-). I found a great non-profit down here that you guys should volunteer with sometime. They're called the Challenged Athletes Foundation and the website is: http://challengedathletes.org/. You could all come stay at our house and it would be wonderful and fun!

Rainmaker said...

That would be a blast - camping as part of a fitness trip. Sounds like quite a bit of fun.