[pl_video type=”youtube” id=”a43eOPDM4-Y”]
DENVER, CO – This morning was the capper of the two-day experience on this roller coaster ride that none of us were looking forward to: the fitness testing. Last night’s rules exam being over was one thing, but a lot of folks went to bed early knowing that we had to be on the bus at 7:15 a.m. I was among them.
Before I get to the actual testing itself, let’s give you some of the fringe info: we made the short trip by bus to the University of Denver, home of the Pioneers and former Princeton head lacrosse coach Bill Tierney.
(btw, if you’re interested in what all of what I’m talking about actually looks like, I have everything posted on Facebook)
I got a chance to walk around a bit, and let me tell you this: there is a reason Coach T is able to recruit the heck out of the entire country, because those facilities are awesome. The Ritchie Center is the main athletic hub for the Pioneers. When you walk in you come upon the gymnasium where we did part of the testing. If you walk just to your left, you head right into the ice hockey rink, which is MASSIVE.
From there, you can walk another little ways to the pool. If you head through the back of the gym and hang a right, you walk down a hallway where all the teams have their individual locker rooms. The lacrosse fields are outside to the right. If you pass by the exit doors to get out to the field, you come to the Pat Bowlen weight room, aptly named after the owner of the Denver Broncos.
The weight room is a sight to be seen. It’s long and narrow. Really long. When you come in, you walk down a ramp. Immediately on your right is cardio equipment – ellipticals, bikes, treadmills. If you’re getting fatigued, just grab a Muscle Milk out of the huge Muscle Milk refrigerator which is stacked to the gills with their product, free for all DU Pioneer Athletes.
When you actually make your way into the weight room, there is a 70-yard long strip of turf about five yards wide. It looks like it might just be paint running up the center of the weight room. But no, it’s actual turf. That’s’ where we did a portion of our fitness testing. Beyond that are huge monster truck tires and some sledgehammers for that out-of-the-ordinary crossfit workout. Flip the tire, hit the tire, who knows.
Definitely impressive.
On to the testing itself. We begin with a dynamic warmup for 10 minutes which was probably more intense than it needed to be. Some guys were looking around a bit going, “this is the warmup?” There were a lot of air-squats and jumping squats and jogging and butt-kicking and lunging, and foot-over lunging and high knees and sprinting.
The first station you hit is called the Illinois cone drill. There must be some Illini who invented it. You basically run up and back and weave through some cones. Everyone in my group (yay Group 3) all scored good or better on our first try. You only need fair (a level below good) to “pass.” Several guys elected to run it again because they didn’t like their time. I wasn’t one of them.
The next test was simple: the T-test. You sprint up about 15 yards to a cone, shuffle left and touch a cone, shuffle all the way back to the right, then back left to the middle, then backpedal to where you started. That was the easiest of the testing.
Now things get ramped up. You go over to the 40-yard dash. It’s actually just shy of 40-yards because of the metric conversion (we are officiating international lacrosse after all), but there’s not a huge difference. You have to run that twice and they average your times. I’ll spare you my time, but needless to say I wasn’t thrilled. But it was in the “good” range, so you move on.
Next we headed into the weight room for penultimate test. You have to do six 40-yard dashes, and you get a 10-second break when you get to the end of each one. But the catch is it isn’t how fast you run these, it’s how consistent you are. So you can’t really sprint it the whole time or you’ll die. You just want your last one to be within a second of your first one.
I was shockingly consistent on this one. My first sprint was 6.15. My second was 6.43 which scared me a bit. I guess the internal clock figured it out because I ran three consecutive 6.18s and a 6.15. I was pretty happy with that result and happy to move on.
The final test was the beep test. You have to run from the middle of the paint on a basketball court to the middle of the paint on the other side. There’s a recording that beeps that you need to beat to the other side. When it beeps, that’s your signal to take off again.
Here’s the catch: there’s specific goals that you have to hit based on your age. Each “level” consists of a certain amount of “shuttles.” Most levels were 11 shuttles each. I think one of them was six shuttles. Bottom line is I needed to make it to Level 7, shuttle 8. Chris Clark and I decided that we were going to go to Level 8 and stop, just to make sure. He’s been through all this before so his advice was not to be a hero, but get what you need to get and save yourself for the real lacrosse that we have to actually officiate.
It was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. I was winded at the end and could have gone another round or so, but that would’ve been really pushing. Had I done that I would have been really tired. I got to level 8 and called it quits. And so endeth the fitness test.
Whew.
Now we get to some of the fun times of the trip. The local lacrosse high school chapter here bought us all tickets to the Rockies/Padres game tonight, so we are heading over there about 5:30 p.m. Tomorrow is just some mechanics meetings and a free afternoon. Thursday is the opening ceremony and then USA vs Canada at night. That’s the only game of the first day of the Championships.
Friday is when all the (on field) fun begins!
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
OK so wow. What a night. Our intention was to go to the Rockies game and I wasn’t planning on writing anything else, but I have to now.
We were walking from our place to the field, and we stopped at the first local watering hole we could find en masse. There were probably 35 of us there. About 20 minutes into our stay the secret service came in and started ordering people around. Then the joke became that President Obama was going to show up.
The crazy part is PRESIDENT OBAMA SHOWED UP!!!!
What are the chances that of all the gin joints in all the world, the PRESIDENT would pick the one we randomly stopped in to on the way to a Rockies game?????
I got a chance to shake his hand and we explained why we were there. It was freaking awesome. It is something I will never forget and I don’t honestly know if anything else that happens on this trip can top that. It was just such a quiet small moment with the President, I don’t know how we would ever re-create it.
Simply amazing!!!
