Obstacle Course: Abilene’s O-course, “The Beast” is really a challenging course, but I have to say spending almost all of a day watching teams disappear into the cacti forest and re-emerge 23 minutes to an hour later is just plain boring.
Give me a day at the Houston or Dallas facilities any day. In Houston and Dallas the whole obstacle course is within easy view of the stands and pits and it just makes for a more enjoyable day. My ever-so-humble opinion of course.
Our fabulous crew of tactical medics, Hockey-Puck and P², had Face taped up and ready to rumble so I took up a support role (Okay, I was the water-boy).
This might be a good time to thank the Austin/Travis County Tactical Medics for all their support. Those guys were great. They were a joy to have around and helped us and a bunch of other teams immensely. It’s hard to start a tactical medic program, it takes a lot of time and money to train and equip a team of medics for something that might never happen. But I think now that people have seen how helpful they can be at competitions we’ll be seeing programs spring up all over. Our guys are breaking ground for tactical medics of the future and I’m proud of them. Even Hockey-Puck.
Our game plan was for two of our speedsters, Face and Lou Can-do, to support each other with two-man lifts/pulls and get out of the way of the other guys. The other three used their cumulative strengths to get around, Big Bad with his experience and mastery of the vertical, Slamma’s monster strength and Supa’s ability to speed ahead to the next obstacle and be set up to assist the other two. Oh, did I mention I carried the water?
Well, it went smooth and fast, no real problems for team APD. Except, of course, Team San Antonio. They saw that we were calling Face up from the injured list and knew the heat was getting turned up. Mark was along for the trip, but had been on injured reserve all week due to something with his foot (sorry, I can’t understand a word that dude says). Seeing that Face was in the game, Mark stubbed out his cigarette (I’m not kidding, that guy is my hero) and laced up his koala-skin boots to run. Well to make a long story a little shorter, those S.A. guys ran off into the woods and made it back in record time. I find it a little hard to believe that they actually completed the obstacles, but no one disputed it so another trophy was added to San Antonio’s big box of trophies.
So for one full week I will be sporting my San Antonio SWAT hat, and when people ask me why I’ll say it’s because those guys are my heros.