Od Shack Narrative

Sunday afternoon, and the sun shone down on the seemingly peaceful lake. But quickly, ripples appeared on the surface of the water, and I turned my head to see the leading group of girls scramble onto the raft-like boat, held in place by a few counselors. The swimmer from their team raced through the water, finishing up to be pulled by her teammates into the raft. The last girl to climb on gave the boat a shove off the shore before jumping in to help the others paddle. The raft, propelled by ten girls’ cupped hands, moved slowly but steadily along the coastline. Wheet! The sound of a whistle cut through the cheers and murmurs throughout the crowd. The girls poured out of their boats and ran out up the hill and towards the basketball court,

“Okay so first, we have to run up this steep hill. Make sure you sprint, because we can rest at the trampoline. So when we get to the trampoline, take off your shoes, but keep your socks on. Each person has to do a knee drop on the mat, and there should be ten in total. Then you’ll put your shoes on, and we’ll run the pull up bars next to the OD Shack.” I briefly talked about the beginning of the meet. Since this was an octathlon meet, I had yet to finish explaining all of the eight events. Laura nodded, showing she understood, and motioned for me to go on. “We all have to do a pull up at the bars, and a total of ten again. Once we’re done with that, we’ll run into the barn [a basketball court with a red roof] and shoot hockey balls into the goals with the sticks they give us. The idea is the same as the pull ups and the hockey balls - so we need ten goals to move on.” I took a breath before continuing. “So we run down the hill by the dining hall, along the cones. By then, our swimmer should have finished, so we’ll link arms and once we’re all there, we’ll jump into the boats.” Just as I was about to continue, the announcer told us to get ready to go. We quickly lined up at the starting line, and got in a position ready to blast off up the

Still in the lead, we sprinted down the hill, only slowing down to avoid the random patches of mud from the previous night’s rain. We linked arms and readily awaited our swimmer to finish up. Two more events of the meet remained despite our exhaustion. As the swimmer started to near, the rest of our team got onto the boat, ready to pull them into our boat and start paddling. All was just as I had explained to Laura just five minutes before, and everything was going just like the group of girls before us.

Until the gusts of wind brought us out towards the center of the lake. Because of our smaller physiques, the wind easily blew us and our boat filled with air, farther and farther away from the shore. Eventually, we drifted off into the middle of the lake, while still moving forward. The whistle blew, telling us that we had passed the imaginary line that allowed us to move onto the next event, and the girls on my boat hopped out without a second thought, and started swimming to back. Laura also jumped out and turned back to look at me as if she was asking me what I was doing, being the last one left in the