Hello again Blog-o-sphere! Today was our last FULL day in Big Bear. Today was a particularly GRUELING day for the boys! Today they went to Cougar Crest - which is a path that goes UP hill in the wilderness at high altitude (see pics!!!)... First, they jogged at a fast pace for, something like, 20 minutes UP the mountain... They then walked back down and had about 15 minutes of rest. Then they did HILL REPEATS!

So, hill repeats involve the following. Coach Dollar sprinted from the base of the trail as far as he could get in a minute and a half. Then, Coach Arie, at the bottom, launched the boys in a full out sprint to where Coach Dollar was. Once they reached Coach Dollar, they walked back down to Coach Arie... Sounds pretty crazy, right!? Well, it gets better... They had to repeat this for a total of 12 times!!! (see pics!)

Just out of curiousity, I thought I'd sprint up the hill, with Logan, on one of his repeats... Ouch! I got about half way there and that was it! So, first, MAJOR kudos to the ENTIRE team for participating in this event. They should all get shirts that say something like, "I survived Cougar Crest, 2010"... My goodness!!! Second, on the first repeat - i.e. the first ALL-OUT-SPRINT to Coach Dollar, Logan was one of the top 5 runners there. (But wait, it gets better!) Logan was the second runner to FINISH all 12 repeats!!! He was on FIRE! I have NO clue how he (or the rest of the boys) do it! They are MACHINES! Oh, and thankfully mother-nature decided to blow some sprinkling clouds over head with some cool wind while all this was going on. It really helped. Thanks God/mother-nature!

Well, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing the bean bag toss game, Corn Hole (I know, bad name, fun game)... We then cooked up hot dogs for dinner. After that we had a closing campfire with great, motivational speeches from Coach Dollar and Coach Arie - followed by SMORES and a game of 'Mafia' (something to do with cards and the boys and stories and it was pretty well narrated by one of the Chaffron brothers - the one with the blood on him from the other blog a few nights back)...

All-in-all the boys were AMAZING! It was definitely a good time for them to bond, learn, grow, set goals for the year, work out, and have a GREAT time!

Enjoy the pics and the next blog will be back to Tamara! ;-)

Todd



Keeping it clean...



Logan at bedtime last night...



The boys before running up Cougar Crest (yikes!)




And they're off! Go guys!!!



Logan Kicking BUTT on the Repeats! Hey, that trail is STEEP!




Logan with his Victory Chocolate Milk!



A bonus Raven (those birds are quite large)




A bonus Damsel fly!