Weekly Update

I realize that I have been somewhat remiss in my duties as a blogger. I am endeavoring to do better.

This week was quite busy, and this upcoming week is not looking any better as far as workload.

The classroom presentations were so extensive that they actually broke us up into our platoons and had us all rotate through most of the material.

However, one entertaining event was an obstacle course that we tackled on Friday. Yours truly was on a medical profile for tendinitis in his right elbow and so I did not get to participate in much of it, but the road march in body armor and kevlar helmet was fun. I am including some pics.

The other great thing is that the weather has REALLY warmed up. This weekend we hit 70! Of course I was inside for most of it trying to get a leg up on our homework. No complaints though. I did step outside a couple of times and got some good workouts in, in spite of the workload.

Blessings

The End of CIMT

Well, we have completed Phase 0.

No, that is not a typo. The first portion of the chaplain school, which is known as CIMT (I think it stands for "Chaplain Initial Military Training"), is also called "Phase zero."

No matter what it is called, we're done! We are now onto Phase 1!

The final few days of CIMT were fairly busy. We all still find ourselves losing track of how long ago something occurred. For example, we will have conversations about the victory tower, and we cannot remember if it was one week or two weeks ago.

On the 28th I went to see a physical therapist about my right elbow. Since the victory tower it has been "popping" every so often. The therapist thought that it might be tendinitis. I've been following his instructions but it has not improved, so I will probably go to sick call on Tuesday.

We have started sharing our "sacred communication labs." These are basically practice labs in which a student puts together a church service according to a specific scenario, and with an assigned text. The scenario is that you are with a battalion deployed to Iraq and you are halfway through the 12 months that you are scheduled to be there. Everyone has done a really good job thus far.

We also covered using the Myers Briggs Temperament Indicator. I am an ESTJ which means according to some of the leaders of this program, that I am perfectly happy in my "list-laden life." I have to say that I agree with that because I generally have at least one list going all of the time.

Thursday we focused on pluralism and chaplain regulations. Although some may get nervous around the term "pluralism," what it means in the Army is that we as chaplains we work to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to worship in their style and tradition, as much as possible. One of our instructors put it this way, part of why we are here is to prohibit people from prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

Finally, on Friday we had a bit of a graduation ceremony that including the donning of our berets. The black beret is standard headwear when you are at a garrison. We have been wearing patrol caps until now. I kind of prefer the patrol caps, but the berets do look nice.

So, with the beginning of Phase 1 we lose some students who were here just for CIMT (keep in touch everyone), and gain a few new students. We also launch into a lot of new projects, classroom work, and papers. Should be a great learning environment.

Blessings.

The Alpha Group

This is just a, "that is kind of funny" type of update.

Lately, we have been doing PT twice a day, everyday. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are run days (or something like that).

We had previously completed a one mile run as a type of assessment to see where we were all at in our running ability and speed, as well as push-ups and sit-ups.

Now, I am not much of a natural runner, but I had been working on this prior to coming to CH-BOLC. For my age group I need to do the 2-mile run in at least 18 minutes, 18 seconds. It took me a while, but I felt pretty good when I got myself to where I could do the 2-miles in about 17 to 17.5 minutes.

So, I was really excited when we did the one mile and I completed it in 7 minutes, 58 sec! I thought that was pretty good. However, I had no lofty thoughts that this then meant that I was a speed-demon.

So you can imagine my surprise this last Monday, when we were broken into running teams based on speed, and I was put in the ALPHA group. These were all of the really fast people who had been passing me in the one mile run (I might have even been lapped a couple times).

I explained to the Alpha-group leader that I thought that I might be in the wrong group and he just told me to try to keep up and to drop out if I needed to do so. Well, I stayed with them for about a 1/4 mile, and then I was looking for the oxygen tank (why do the "professional" athletes have oxygen tanks?).

I walked, jogged, sprinted, coughed, and sputtered my way through the run and got back to our starting point. When it was all said and done I spoke to our NCO in charge about my situation. He looked at his records and said that his records showed that I ran the 1-mile in 5 minutes, 5 seconds! I told him that I have never run that fast, and shared my ACTUAL time. He smiled and said that I should have been in the CHARLIE company, which is where I will be tomorrow. Hopefully I will not be looking for the oxygen tank; at least not as needfully.