Casual Friday (Pre-Basic Training) 3 Days until Basic

Checked in with my recruiters for the last time today. I was able to sleep in and enjoy a cup of chocolate macadamia nut Kona Coffee. I just love both the chocolate and the vanilla macadamia nut coffees they make. The stuff is just plain awesome. I threw on some sweat pants and a t-shirt and then drove over to the recruiter’s office. I knew I was supposed to take a quick physical fitness test as well as get any last minute paperwork taken care of.

I arrived and to my surprise the recruiters had on jeans and some very modern-hip-graphic looking army t-shirts. Now this is a casual Friday! They said later on they were heading out to some businesses and they are much more approachable when not in full uniform. After going through a checklist to make sure I had all my forms in order the recruiter said the fitness test consists of a timed one minute push-up test, followed by a one minute sit-up test, and then finally a timed one mile run. The recruiter knows that I have been running quite a bit, so he said we were not going to do the run. Normally we would have done it outside, but it actually started snowing today….in April!! It was pretty crazy there was snow all over the place and it was continuing to fall. So he asked me what I could comfortably run a mile in and I asked what‘s the maximum? He said 8:30 for one mile. I said I’m sure I could run an 8:00 mile pretty easily, so he marked down 7:55 for my score. After that he proceeded to show me how to do a correct push-up according to Army standards. He said I would need to be able to do at least 13 in one minute. Since there was nothing given for extra credit I wasn’t going to strain myself. I quickly did 14 (just to be sure all of them counted). He then did the same for sit-ups showing me the standards and then saying I needed to do at least 17 in one minute. I quickly did 18 (again just to be sure all of them counted). So I passed my first official Army Fitness Test! LOL

Later on in the day we cleaned up the house and I finished packing my “basic training back pack” crossing off the final items on my checklist. We threw everything in the car and headed off to pick up the kids for the last visit I’ll have with the family before I leave. The drive through the Cascade Mountains was a little crazy. It was almost white out conditions and the snowplows hadn’t been out yet. Luckily I drive an all wheel drive Subaru, so we didn’t have any trouble getting through. We just had to drive a bit slower than usual. Much better than some of the other poor suckers that were on the side of the road. One car looked like it slid right over the edge of the road with its rear end sticking straight up in the air. After taking it slow and steady we made it to my sister’s house without incident.