Day 23

Day 18 of BCT

     Yeah! February is here! 29 days of February and 22 days in March to go. Today is a sprint day. After warm-up and hip stability exercises, we ran 7 30/60's (30 seconds of sprinting followed by 60 seconds of walking). We also did a 300 meter shuttle sprint. By the end, my legs were quite heavy. Hopefully, the hard work helps my run times!
     After breakfast, our DS then took us to the PT field to show us more combat security techniques and to quiz us on our knowledge to see if we are ready to phase to White Phase. I know my squad did well, and hopefully the others did well enough that we phase! If we do get to phase, we'll get a few more privileges, as well a phone call home!
     We then march to the DFAC, and our DS finally let us start learning Cadence! We were pretty horrible. LOL. He actually stopped the formation on the way back from chow to try and break it down phrase by phrase for us. It was pretty funny. Getting to march to cadence is a white phase privilege, so we're all hoping this means we'll get to phase on Saturday.
     We then spent the afternoon back on the asphalt in the company area practicing more with our rifles at transversing and grouping. It mad the afternoon go by really slow. I'm not a big fan of kneeling or laying on pavement or gravel and my body has plenty of bruises and soreness to go with it. I remind myself that in a real situation, you lay on whatever surface you have to.
      We then had a time of writing our self and peer evaluations of Red Phase. We had to rate how our platoon was doing as a whole, as well as ourselves.  We then had to list who we thought were the top 5 soldiers and bottom 5 in our platoon. Then our DS read (anonymously) the top and bottom 5's. They didn't read all of them, but I was listed on the bottom a couple of times because of my PT and I was also listed on the top several times.
     Dinner was an MRG followed by platoon time. Unfortunately, we didn't follow exact directions and our female DS decided to smoke us really good for it. It was probably only 15-20 minutes, but it felt like forever. We also lost a chunk of our personal time. The cool thing was that our DS asked everyone's hometown, so we go to learn where everyone was from.
     We then had enough personal time to shower and it was off to Hydration Formation and bedtime. No mail for me today.