Shaking Things Up A Bit

 If there are too many words for you, read the first paragraph, then skip to the end. The middle is just jokes and other stuff so you won't miss much.


So as you may or may not have heard, the Bowdoin men's cross country team is headed to Wisconsin for nationals on Thursday. I will be there, as will Nick and Greg. As a fun little thing to keep me occupied and you guys entertained, I'm probably going to be blogging about our time in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. You may be thinking, "hey that sounds really boring". You're a dick. If this trip is anything at all like my trip to indoor nationals with our DMR team and my coach, it has the potential to be absolutely hilarious. I'm taking this time to give you a taste of what nationals was for me last time, and introduce you to the members of this years trip.

Indoor nationals was in Columbus, Ohio, and we (Colin Fong, Matt Gamache, Matt Hillard, Elsa Millett, Coach Slovenski, and Coby Horowitz) managed to make it the best 3 days ever. First of all, Coach Slovenski made the great decision to not book us a hotel, but to have us stay in a water park. Did you read that right? Yes. A water park. 5 college aged people and Coach, who I believe is probably 50 in people years but 14 at heart. Anyways, the entire trip was a hilarious fiasco. First of all, we took a van to the airport to catch our plane. Unfortunately, all the school vans were taken, so Coach had to borrow his sons van. Also unfortunately....

Coach's son was in high demand.

And so we rolled to the airport in style. Once we got to the Portland airport we checked our bags in and headed to the terminal. What's that? A snowstorm at the end of winter in Maine? That sounds about right. Don't worry, even though our flight was cancelled there was another flight we got shifted to. Since we were trying to get from Portland to Columbus Ohio though, there were no direct flights, and now we encountered the problem of having only 5 minutes to catch our connecting flight once we landed. Again, don't worry: we were fast enough to make nationals, we were fast enough to catch a plane. Safely aboard our second flight, we finally were able to relax, thinking that the trip could only get smoother from here. HA.

Once we landed, we yet again realized that we were running short on time. There was an NCAA banquet for all the athletes and coaches at the track that was starting in 30 minutes, and we still hadn't picked up our luggage or gotten our rental car/van/semitruck/wereallydidn'tknowwhatweweregoingtogetatthispoint. More running, more hastening, more fun. Once in the rental car (thankfully a normal minivan), we headed on our way to the track through the great city of Columbus, Ohio.

Except Columbus hasn't really been the same since Christopher Columbus left. And "on our way" connotes that we knew where we were going, and that was the farthest thing from true since I believed it was butter. After many missed turns and Colin and I struggling to get our maps on our phones up to date, we got to the banquet just past the nick of time. The 5 runners and Coach strolled in during the ceremonies for academic athletes of the season, grabbed our food, ate it and left with the crowd 10 minutes later.

LOOK AT HOW HAPPY HE IS!!!!

We arrived 45 minutes later at the Waterpark. Did I mention that we were staying at a waterpark? I was almost too excited to sleep the first night: not because of the race, but because of the slides! We spent all of Friday perusing Columbus, hanging at the hotel playing arcade games, and generally being far too old for our environment. We turned nervous energy into childish excitement, and I attribute our success in the race to this.We ended up finishing fifth, earning All-American status and being the fastest team from New England. We're going to do even better this year. Elsa ran very well (like she always does), but unfortunately her time didn't qualify her for the finals. Trials and finals stink. The only upside of this was that she was free to play with us all day Saturday in the waterpark! WE WERE GOING TO THE WATERPARK AND I WAS SO EXCITED IT WASN'T EVEN FUNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!! (except it was funny)









Moral of the story: Waterparks are great. The trip to nationals was great. Waterparks are great. It was so much fun. And this time in Wisconsin is going to be just as fun, and it all starts Thursday at 4. So get your cowboy hats and reading glasses ready, because it's gonna be a blast! I'll introduce the squad tomorrow when I have free time, currently I'm trying to figure out how to be a sociology major without having taken a class of it yet at Bowdoin.