Stagtine, 9. Moldy Blisters

Section 1, Chapter 6

I was often occupied by sports. Truth be told, I spent more time playing sports than I did doing schoolwork. There is something peculiar about extending the body athletically that, I think, echoes modern man back into an earlier state of our existence—when we ran for food and not for fun and when we were fit for defense and not for fashion.

My ardent passion for pushing my body athletically culminated in the seventh grade when I attended the Navy Seal Wrestling Camp in Annapolis, Maryland. We had to lie on my entrance application, as this was a high school camp and I was twelve. It was the hardest and most intense athletic summer camp in the country. When we arrived and before we were shown our bunks, a team of doctors immediately weighed us in and completed a physical. A Navy Seal then sat us down and said that the next fourteen days would be the hardest of our lives. Giving up was okay, just raise your hand at any time and they would escort you back to your mommy.

Van after van unloaded eager, expecting kids—some kissed and hugged their parents goodbye and some, it seemed, were thrown out of the car altogether.

“Remember, honey,” my dad reminded me as I turned to walk away. “You are in high school. Do your best. That’s it, that’s all you can do.”

They undersold it all. While nearly four hundred and fifty of the top high school athletes in the country were dropped off by their parents, only forty-seven were picked up fourteen days later. The others, the unlucky rest, either quit early, left unexplained, or ended up hospitalized. One of my roommates fractured their tibia on an obstacle course and another was forced to leave because his daily weight check-ins were too low—he had lost too much body mass in too short of a period.

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