BTR, RTB!

What an intense week.

We left Wednesday for BTR, City Year's Basic Training Retreat. It was pretty much great. We did lots of team building stuff--most interesting to note is the challenge course... We had to get our whole team through a tire suspended above my head between two trees. And we did! We build bunkers and forts in the paintball course at the camp, and did lots of training stuff too. The talent show was amazing. When I get the pictures on my computer I'll post some of the best ones. My team made a new Putting Idealism To Work quip about how to better do our work: "Don't be that guy." Then we were "that team" by doing interpretive dance to our Up the River founding story in the talent show. The pictures may or may not clear up the meaning of the last two sentences... But just trust me when I say it was a good time.

Today we worked at Reach the Beach, which is a 200 mile, 24 hour relay race from the mountains in northern New Hampshire to Hampton Beach. I worked from 7:30 this morning until 7:30 this evening, the last two hours of which were motivated by the promise of a free dinner, and later inspired by a huge box of free Emergen-C packets. My roommate Mary spent the whole day cheering on the runners by doing jumping jacks and chanting "Reach The Beach! Reach The Beach!" Other great moments of the day included a chat with an older man who had Type 1 Diabetes and runs marathons and this relay race every year. He was awesome. When I was cleaning up the finish line area after dinner, these great kids jumped in and started helping me pick up trash off the beach, and were genuinely sad when they had to stop. They were amazing.

I snatched these pictures of my team off the internet:


We found out our teams by putting together puzzle pieces.




Seabrook Up the River team CYNH 07
Back row: Eric (team buddy), Will, and Timona
Middle row: Kristine, Mike (team buddy), Sara (my awesome team leader), me, Stephen, Matt
Front: Haroula