Long Awaited Pictures

So that start off my 26th birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to do a 25 km road march.  For those that aren't familiar with the metric system, that's supposed to be 15.5 miles.  The actual march, however, was only 14 miles. 

At first it was only going to be me and SSG Smith (pictured below).  But after about an hour, it grew to be 40 people from our company.  And then a day later, it grew to 160 Soldiers from the entire battalion.  Safe to say that the battalion had to go to minimal manning for the day because a quarter of the battalion was gone.

The road march is actually called the Danish Contigency Road March or DANCON.  It is a Danish military tradition that started about 60 years ago.  Now, whenever there is a Danish military contingent deployed to a forward location, they will conduct this march.  It's a pretty cool opportunity that I decided to take advantage of since it will probably be the only time I will get to do or the next time I get to do it, I'd probably be to broke to be able to do it.

Anyway, it's not supposed to be a competion but as with everything else in the military, it turned into one.  SSG Smith finish first from the company coming in at 3 hrs and 14 minutes.  I finished a couple minutes behind him at 3 hrs and 16 minutes.  Not bad since neither of us had trained for it.  Probably helps that we do 12 mile road marches every quarter when we're back at Ft. Campbell though.

Anyway, thought I'd finally post some pictures.  More to follow if I can figure out why my personal computer doesn't want to burn anything to a CD.

Judging by the lack of sweat and relatively relaxed look I have, this was before the march started.  The guy on the left is SSG Jason Smith.  He was my battle buddy for all 14 miles of the march.



This picture was taken at about the three mile mark.  Most of the course was gravel or packed dirt but this particular road was about 8 inches of "moon dust."  Moon dust is dirt/rock that has been crushed and pulvarized to the point of being the consistancy of powdered sugar.  Still going strong at this point.



This is what I looked like after walking/running 14 miles in 3 hrs and 16 minutes.  My pack was only 35 pounds (including my weapon), but it still wears you down after 14 miles.

 That's it for now.

Later.