Army Camp training

Last weekend the Women’s 27's and Men’s 30's had the privilege of experiencing life as an army recruit at the Winchester Army Recruit Training Centre. We fell in, got our briefing and dressed off towards the high ropes course to start. The aim was to get four members to balance upright on a 20m high pole whilst being held on ropes by bilayers below. It sounds easy but 20m is a lot higher than you think and the support and trust to get everyone up was great to experience.

An amazing indoor obstacle course and boot-camp outdoor fitness session were next, in which a lot sweat, a bit of blood (from scrapes on the heaviest tyres in the world* that had to be flipped), and cheers supporting team mates through was felt. The ringing of the phrase “pain is just weakness leaving the body” from Sergeant Rana was heard repeatedly by all and met by a lot of grunts in return. In the afternoon as we were all feeling fresh as a daisy, we headed off to the swimming pool. The highlight of this event was when everyone donned army attire (trousers and a jacket) to then swim, in teams, 4 lengths of the pool (1 with a paddle!). It is not easy to fully imagine the effort that it took to do this whilst being weighed down by the clothing, not to mention the incredibly non-buoyant paddle. There was a mix in ability of swimmers but everyone persevered through with team members helping others to make it to the end.

Other highlights included taking on a climbing wall, a low rope team building course that had several people nearly wetting themselves with laughter at people wobbling away on the tightrope section (in a completely supportive manner of course). Oh, and we played some Touch too! There was of course time for some drills within the individual teams as led by Sammie Phillips for the women and Nathan Bourke for the men, as well as a head to head between the two teams. Everyone continued to gel together and maintain positive vibes and motivation with the view of heading to Australia next year to “neutralise the enemy” as our briefing for the weekend dictated.

A final note to say a big thank you to everyone who enabled this weekend to take place: Major Amie Powley-Williams (without whom the weekend would not have been possible), Corporal Bitcon, Sergeant Rana and Sergeant Seb. I think we all have a much greater appreciation of what our troops have to go through, and we have all walked/ hobbled away having learnt about how we can push our boundaries and find strength by working together as a team.