Sam Pankey – USA Rugby Eagle, Day 2, The “Calming-Long-Pulse-Sounding” Test and More

Schedule for today: 7am breakfast, 8:30am-12pm meeting into beep test into morning session 1 into reflection into morning session 2, 12pm lunch, 1pm-5:30pm meeting into evening games into evening session, 5:30-7:30 ice baths into shower into dinner, 7:30-8:45 meeting…and done. Twas a busy day, but a very productive one.

The beep test turned out to be more like the “soothing-voice-even-tone” test, which was difficult to hear sometimes. I would have preferred some cacophonous noise that would have disrupted the air quality and perhaps have given the test an urgent quality. The CD that we had seemed to be saying, “Good job, you’re on level 2.4. Now it’s okay to run again.” I would have preferred something like, “You ain’t even halfway done, now get your butt to that line!” However, we all got through it and all agreed that it wasn’t as bad as our anxiousness and the wait made it seem. And, a big cheers to Kit Kat, who made the “semi-audible-tonally-pleasing” test her bi&ch.

The morning sessions involved a good amount of contact. I think my right knee absorbed the majority of my share of the contact. I promise I’m not whining (rugby players never whine). We worked on our rucking, defense and offense, and though we worked right up until lunch, we never dropped in our intensity levels. Lunch was short and sweet…sweet as in Sweet Baby Ray’s. Yeah, that’s right, we had BBQ smothered in Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce. Though I would have liked a little more time for finger licking, we had a nutrition meeting at 1pm, so we all had to slam our food and rush off.

In our nutrition meeting, we learned that we could be a Nutrition Kung Fu Panda, a Nutrition Ninja or a Nutrition Chuck Norris and we were all given some of the information and tools that would help us achieve Chuck Norris status. We then took to trying to improve our rugby game to the level of Chuck Norrisism.

The evenings have been the best part of our days thus far, mostly because they start with games. This evening some of the 7’s players switched with some of our players. In our games this evening, the field was shortened, so that we could work a lot on ball in contact skills and rucking and because the 7’s players specially requested more contact (kidding).

The long day concluded with ice baths, dinner and a meeting on Life Management, which emphasized the point I made in an earlier blog about USA rugby players literally paying for their chance to represent their country. Ladies and gentlemen, these are special women. These women (and there are many more, who aren’t at this camp) aren’t the millions arguing with the billions for thousands more, like our pro athletes. These women are the epitome of dedication and the purity of sport. They play and are dedicated, despite the cost (the literal cost and the physical cost). I suppose that’s what love is—that sometimes irrational, sometimes painful, always beautiful emotion that most of us hold as one of our supreme life goals.

Enough grandstanding. I was informed today, during our 9-minute lunch break that my story of Tigertown’s history may not be entirely true. There is another, far more bawdy, legend of Tigertown’s origins. As most of you history buffs know, Georgia was originally established as a debtor’s colony—a place where the “worthy poor” of Britain could work their way back into good financial standing. One such debtor, Wadsworth Tiggreson, found that the work was too demanding for the pittance he received at the day’s end. Feeling the excitement of the untethered possibilities that came with moving to a new place, he decided that dirt-under-the-nails work was not for him and slipped away one cloudless night.

For months he foraged along the gulf until, one day, he emerged in what seemed to be a clearing, but what he soon found to be a nearly deserted town. The only inhabitants were descendants of marooned sailors from the crew of the fountain-of-youth-seeking Ponce de Leon. No one really knows what exactly happened next or how he did it, but Tiggreson and the de Leon descendants managed to revive the town, with the help of one establishment in particular. The employees of this ill-reputed establishment became well known in nearby towns as Wadsworth’s Tigers and later as just the Tigers. Eventually, folks began calling the thriving town Tigertown, after the establishment that had given it economic CPR.