Training and whatnot

The past three days have been kind of intense, long training days in various topics. Monday we had a lot of little courses, yesterday was first aid and CPR training, and today was disaster relief training. The first aid course was good, I really learned a lot, but the woman teaching it was very strange. At one point while pretending to be unconscious victims she wandered about checking shoe size, so, you know, if we died she could have a new pair. Other than that the material was good, I'm actually a little surprised I never had the chance to receive CPR training previously. Today's presenters were better, although the overview of the Red Cross seemed to go a little longer than necessary. The rest of the session focused on mass relief and shelter setup, which was good information. It's strange to think that we're going to be likely to need this information; it wasn't something that popped up in everyday thought for me before.

Backing up a bit, on Sunday most of the people in my pod (temporary teams, I'm on pod 2) and a few of our other friends went to Sacramento to explore. We wandered around midtown, went to this great mall outside of the city, and went to Old Sacramento for a little bit. We walked for miles and miles and got on the wrong light rail train twice, but it was a good way to learn the city and figure out what's around to see. I highly recommend Old Sacramento, it's cool old fashioned touristy stuff, I wanna go back there to explore some more. It's only $6 for an all day rail/bus pass, which isn't bad for public transportation.

Our physical fitness baselines were this morning, which made today really exhausting. I had to get up at 5:20 and do two minutes of pushups, situps, a 1.5 mile run, and a sit and reach test. I got 45 pushups, 50 situps, 11 minutes 44 seconds for the run, and 12.5 inches for the sit and reach. I'm really happy about all of those aside from the flexibility, which is kind of crap. The only way I got the running time I did is because I was following Mae. I decided to just keep pace with her, and we both ended up tying for the top time in our pod. However, one guy got 9 minutes 2 seconds for the run, which I think is a little ridiculous. Not sure that I could ever do that, but it's a nice goal to reach for. I'm a little annoyed that they made us do warmups and the first two tests in the grass, it was very wet and my pants got covered in dirt. Ah well, I'll get used to it, and it's not like I'll need them for Aikido any time soon.