Try To Keep Up
The Syracuse University men's basketball team thought they were in pretty good shape. So they were all ready to do the days workout that the coaching staff had planned for them. They figured it would be just another day of training and just to keep it fun, they would be practicing with the host team.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Matt Gorman struggled off the muddy trail gasping for air. "We come out of the woods, and you think you're done," said Gorman, a senior forward on Syracuse's men's basketball team. "There were a bunch of sergeants standing there waiting by two Humvees, and one sergeant says, 'Get those bodies on those Humvees,'
"And I'm thinking, oh, I'm going to climb in this thing," Gorman said with a smile. "I'm starting to climb in and he says, 'Get out and push it.' "
Up a hill, no less.
And Gorman thought coach Jim Boeheim's workouts were tough.
….
"Some of them didn't want to go to bed (the night before) because they didn't want to miss their wakeup," Hibbs said. "You could tell they were not used to getting up that early to sit through a lecture, but as a whole they seemed pretty excited."
After a briefing, everybody stretched, warmed up, and dropped into formation for a jog. Even though his dad was behind the whole thing, Matt Gorman was surprised at what unfolded. His father had told him he'd probably have to slow down so the Army guys could keep up.
"We started off with a real casual jog," Gorman said. "We'd all been running in preseason, so a little jog to us ain't nothing. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't know it was going to be 4.5 miles."
And that along the way they'd have to run about three-quarters of a mile carrying heavy weapons, then take turns lugging stretchers laden with 200 pounds of water another mile.
Fatigue set in fast.
"It doesn't take very long to smoke somebody," Hibbs said.
More duress ensued when the trail turned muddy.
"When you're running on terrain that's not very stable carrying a stretcher, it gets a little tough," Gorman said.
In the end, the Orangemen learned a bit about teamwork. The Humvees had to be kept rolling or they would never make it up the hill.
"You could only go 30 seconds as hard as you could go before you were dead, so someone else had to be ready to go," Forcier said. "If that thing stopped rolling, it was over, no way you could get it started again."
The push has left a lasting impression.
"The greatest thing we saw was there were guys fresh back from Iraq, guys that had been shot, had shrapnel in their bodies as we were running with them," Forcier said. "There was a guy pushing the Humvee in front of us who had knee braces on. He still had pieces of metal in his legs and body, and he was out there working."
Read the whole thing. The writer, John Kekis, did a really nice job with the story.
