Oct. 14, 2010
As many of you may know, this past summer I had an internship with a sports blogging website that required me to write a new blog about tennis every week for six months (that's a lot of blogs). At the end of the internship I vowed to never write another blog about tennis until, of course, it came time for the newest edition of Advantage Annie. So here I am, and boy do I have a lot to tell you about.
Seven weeks have gone by since school has started, or as I like to say, seven weeks have gone by since the whole team passed the world's hardest fitness test. That's right, this year, instead of our beloved timed mile fitness test, our lovely assistant Georgia Rose decided to have a little fun of her own by creating a new fitness test consisting of eight 400-meter sprints. A 400 is one lap around a track and four laps is a mile, so that means two miles of sprinting. Sounds like fun right? So she could sit back and watch us all die a little bit. We ran the eight 400s once near the end of the fall last year so the coaches could get our times and then subtract a lot of seconds off of it and make that our new goal. Somehow, and I don't think I actually know how because it's all a little blurry to me, I was able to beat my time on the first try by some crazy amount like 40 seconds and on top of that, everyone on the team beat their time by at least 10 seconds when they passed.
Since that lovely day, we have experienced some of the most amazing conditioning sessions you could ever imagine, but I will spare you the details, I don't want anyone getting too jealous of all the fun we have while running. The good news is all of our running has really paid off as we have taken two very successful trips so far this semester.
On the first trip, four of my team members headed to Duke University for a very successful weekend, including four out of four wins over their Northwestern Wildcats opponent (who just so happen to be ranked #2 in the nation as a team...no big deal). Oh and did I mention that one of those wins was Rachael White defeating the #6-ranked player in the nation? Like I said before, no big deal.
After that successful weekend, four more of us, including myself, headed to a little place you might have heard of before called Las Vegas. I am literally so excited to tell you about this trip because from the moment we got to the airplane terminal, I knew this was going to be unlike any other trip I had taken in my four years at school. I told our coach, Michelle, that this would probably be the first, and only time that our team was not going to be the loudest group of people in the terminal or on the plane itself.
I don't think I can even properly explain the plane ride there, but heck, I might as well try. Before take off, we were serenaded by our flight attendant, who belted out a tune for us and during take off, one of the passengers and an older gentleman, played a few tunes for us on his harmonica. Once we were in the air, it's fair to say that there were probably more people standing up than sitting down. It was like one huge party. I even witnessed and spent most of my time eavesdropping on a possible love interest that was blooming between the harmonica player (who was looking for his fourth wife) and a younger blonde woman (who was looking for her second husband).
Once on the ground, we had a great time discussing the characters that we all sat next to since none of us were able to sit next to each other on the flight. After that, the interesting characters were non-stop. There was the waitress at the Hard Rock Café who added "ies" to the end of every word, like "drinksies" and "strawsies" and who had drawn-on eyebrows that connected to her eyeliner making one large circle around each eye. Then there was the shuttle driver who asked us what we bought at the mall and when Michelle told him she bought a fake gerbil for her nephew he responded saying, "GERBILLLLLL!!!!" Then finally, there was our own teammate Rachael, whose only words at eight in the morning were to convince us that she was a 13-pound baby. And we all believed it until later that afternoon when her mom tried to go along with it, but failed when she said "Oh yeah, I don't really remember," because obviously you would remember having a 13-pound baby!
Well there are so many more interesting and fun details about our semester, such as our new sticker reward system and our uber-competitive intrasquad competition. But I don't want to keep you too long so maybe, if you're lucky, I'll send another Advantage Annie your way after our first full team trip to regionals next weekend. Until then,
Here we go Illini!!
-Annie Mac
