Posted on 10/08/2006 4:52:47 PM PDT by radar101
Staff Sgt. Anthony Loftus, a drill instructor at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, shared some MCRD discipline with one of yesterday's participants in the fifth annual Boot Camp Challenge. This year's turnout to run the three-mile obstacle course was the largest yet at 3,000.
60 drill instructors motivate runners
At the Marine Corps Recruit Depot yesterday morning, a man with a long, gray ponytail ran toward the obstacle course, and into a drill instructor's line of sight.
“HEY, WILLIE NELSON!” the drill instructor screamed. “YOU'RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT, WILLIE NELSOOOOON!”
The ponytailed man ran off, and the screeching abuse rained down on others who followed in the Boot Camp Challenge. The race gives civilians a taste of a Marine recruit's life, with a three-mile course filled with obstacles and 60 menacing drill instructors to encourage them. It was the fifth annual running of the event, and the largest crowd yet at 3,000. Runners must pass through trenches, foxholes and tunnels, and crawl under netting.
More than a mile into the race, runners pass through a series of log obstacles, some 5 feet high and others 8 feet.
At a row of 5-foot logs, a woman fell backward, but sprang back up, saying to a nearby drill instructor she thought was concerned, “I'm all right.”
“I KNOW YOU'RE ALL RIGHT. I DIDN'T ASK IF YOU WERE ALL RIGHT!”
As runners pawed the logs, searching for something to grip so they could swing a leg over, another drill instructor stood over them.
“LET'S GO! LET'S GO! IT AIN'T FREAKIN' 14 FEET HIGH!”
Each drill instructor is red-faced and sweating through his shirt. Their veins swell, their eyes bulge, their voices go scratchy.
When Gunnery Sgt. Tracy Reddish yells, his whole body vibrates, and he bounces like he's on a pogo stick doing double time.
“WHAT IS THE HOLD-UP OVER HERE?” he screamed to a group floundering on the logs. “TAKE YOUR TIME! YOU'RE JUST SLOWING EVERYONE DOWN!”
The log obstacles behind them, exhausted runners slowed to walk. But not for long.
Staff Sgt. Jesse Saltzman was on them.
“OH, WE'RE NOT WALKING, 253, WE'RE RUNNING!” Saltzman screamed at a woman wearing that number. She looked up in surprise and got going.
All the while, the public-address system blared the classic cadences used by the Marines while marching and running – among them, “Mama, Mama, can't you see, what the Marine Corps' done for me?”
Bringing up the rear was a group of four women, wives of the drill instructors, and they got extra-special attention.
When Judy Hornsby dropped at a push-up station, drill instructors swarmed over her, shouting over each other.
Jamie Bowens had never heard her husband yell like that.
“His face was red, dripping,” Bowens said. “It was kinda scary.”
After the race, Lou Briones, 58, of Los Angeles stretched out on the grass, bare-chested and shoes off. He rested his ankle on a bag of ice.
“I landed real hard on my heel,” Briones said. “Everyone got some cuts and bruises. There's no way to avoid getting scraped up.”
With his time of 23 minutes, 13 seconds, Briones was second in his age group, the same place he took last year. The men who came in first and third were the same guys, too.
For training, Briones ran and did push-ups. He knew what to expect, since he had been a Marine recruit at MCRD in 1966.
“It's a lot harder now,” Briones said. “I'm about 40 pounds heavier than I was then.”
Amy Crawford, 29, of Murrieta brought her husband and two children to cheer for her at the finish line, which she crossed after about 39 minutes.
“It was a lot harder than I expected,” Crawford said.
And there were the drill instructors: “They were not nice.”
Crawford was yelled at for not saying “Yes, sir” and for going too slow, she said. But then she got used to it.
“Definitely towards the end, it got me going,” she said.
And that's just what the drill instructors like to hear – when they're not busy screaming at someone, of course.
All that yelling and carrying on can be tiring. But the payoff is huge.
“You dig a little deeper when you know someone is relying on you to accomplish something,” Reddish said.
Yesterday, runners got an authentic taste of boot camp, he said, adding that the only difference with the civilians was that “they don't have to listen to us.”
I bet people pay money for this sort of motivation, and it doesn't even come with knee-high high heels and a leather whip...except it does require a "leather neck".
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