Friday, February 29, 2008

News From The Other Side of The World

I arrived in Kuwait today at 2300/08FEB29 (their time), and will soon find myself in Djibouti. My training was done on the 27th. Since I haven't posted in a while, a little catch up this will be.

On January 25, I weighed in for the PRT at 228 in the morning, no clothes and nothing extraordinary done other than not to eat the day before - - - good for a temporary 5 lbs loss. My bodyfat finally dipped below 20% for the first time in almost a decade. Of course, I'll credit the workout: it paid off for me to do more repetition work than speed work, and have the other day be a heavy day. But not having to go in the sauna or overdo the aerobics was the trick for me. And on the 29th, I passed the actual PRT with a good medium and reenlisted the next day.

On February 9th, I sadly kissed my family "good-bye" (I always tell my wife it's really a "see ya later") and headed off to Fort Jackson in South Carolina to begin training for my deployment to Djibouti. My days were so busy and spoken for that I did not touch a weight the entire 3 weeks I was there. Actually, that's not really true: with full body armor, M16, Kevlar helmet, and Camelback I was probably walking around with 60-70 extra lbs most of the week which wears on you in a whole different way (Good thing I was not big enough for the extra large body armor!!!). We did PT 3 days a week sans gear, too, shot around a lot (I qualified Sharpshooter), and learned urban warfare, IED detection, and other things. Then we ran a convoy scenario complete with ambushes along the way and fighting our way through a city house to house, on our last day.

As soon as I get to Djibouti, I'll start to train again. That's all for now.