Bottle Discus/ Trackour

I have mentioned before in my blog that I have sixth period release. Because it is track season, a couple of other friends and I who have that period off are able to create games when we feel like not doing homework.

One of these games is Trackour. Trackour is a play off the new popular sport called parkour, also known as free running. Trackour however is exclusively for track runners only. All we basically do is jump on to the high jump mats doing flips yelling “Trackour,” extremely loud. We have done Trackour a lot this year, but we are very discreet about it. Our coaches openly oppose and discourage us from doing this new Trackour thing. They believe, for some reason, that someone will get hurt from doing it, they are probably right.

The other game we have just recently begun playing is called Bottle Discus. It originated on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon. The people who were in the gym gathered to have our first discus off of the season. We used a partially filled water bottle as the discus and the floor markings as the ring to stay in. It is a pretty popular sport within our track team, and even as I am writing this a friend of mine is bugging me to go play Bottle Discus.

Yesterday was our first out side competition for Bottle Discus and it came down to the last throw to decide the winner. Kevin edged me out with his last throw, beating me by a few inches. We don’t actually measure how far we throw, but we can eyeball it pretty darn good. Between throws we marked where the bottle landed with odd things. We used sticks, crumpled up tape and small flags that we found to show our farthest throw.

One time while “trackour”ing we helped a friend of ours move some mats under the basketball hoop and then stacked them on top of each other. Then he was able to climb over the top of the backboard and stand on the rim. Then he sat on the rim. It was the purest form of Trackour I had ever seen. Yet I couldn’t keep focus on it because I was scared that he was going to hurt himself. He is a good track runner and if he had hurt himself than that would have been the end to Trackour as I know it. Luckily the sport is still alive today, because he returned to the ground safely and without the coaches ever knowing what happened.

Night Routine

Every night for some reason I arrive home from track, take a shower, eat and do some homework. As night approaches I tell myself I will go to bed early, so I don’t hate myself the next morning. For reasons unknown to me after about 8:30 I get energy to mess around with my two younger brothers who always have energy. Messing around with them only prevents me from getting a good night’s sleep in.

Last night I was getting ready to go to bed when the computer caught my attention and before I knew it I was looking up videos on youtube. After I finally pried myself from the screen I continued to get ready for bed when my brother started causing trouble. He wouldn’t leave my parent’s room and they were trying to go to sleep so they called me in to take him out, too lazy themselves to force him to move. I enter the room to find him lying on the ground attaching him self to the bottom of their bed claiming to be scared of something. He started to flail as I grabbed his arms and yank him up to his feet, unfortunately though, I couldn’t make him stand up. He refused to stand, and I realized it was necessary to make him feel a little pain so he would stand up. To make him do this I pushed a pressure point, behind the jaw and under the ear. That made him stand up quickly and I finally got him out of the room.

Then when I thought the ordeal was done, we got into a wrestling match which I easily won, with my brother being only 12 years old. Whenever I walked away from pinning him, he chased me down only to repeat the process. With the task accomplished and the wrestling match won, I again continued to ready myself for the night and finally went to bed. These situations occur much too often for my liking.

Like the night before last while watching a youtube video, my brother and I were amazed at this break dance move that we saw. So for about 30 or so minutes we tried to learn and perform the move on my living brown room carpet. It seems that these events happen all the time, whether due to my brothers or to my spike in energy level. I do know one thing though, that it would be great if I got to bed the first time I tried.

AP Exams

With the AP exams approaching, everyone is trying to study everything they have learned, or not learned, throughout the year. I have always thought that the best preparation for the exams starts with the first day of class. If you do the reading and home work assigned throughout the year the less you need to review what you have learned. The problem is though, that many times you do the assignments just to get them done, not to learn. With three AP classes this year, I am a culprit of practicing that many times throughout the year. I had to do it because of the extreme amounts of home work that was assigned on those random nights.

I completed home work without learning many times in order to continue increasing my GPA. Unfortunately for me however, our GPA has no impact whatsoever on your exam score.

This time of the year is when the AP teachers start handing out practice exams to help prepare their students for the real deal. When I sat down this year to take some of those practice tests, fear and regret greeted me with a punch in the face. I feared that when I actually took the AP exam that I would be as clueless as I was when taking the practice test. I regretted those nights when sleep became a higher priority then learning. The nights I did the homework only to keep my grades and GPA up instead of doing it to learn and further ready myself for the AP exam.

The last two years I have only taken one exam and I passed last years one, but not the one my freshmen year. So hopefully I pass two of them this year and get to be an AP scholar. But I am worried about this year because my attention is divided between three classes. Because of this my reviewing time compared to last years is cut into thirds. I am very lucky this year that they have greatly reduced the prices of the exams. If it was the same price as last year’s exams then I would be paying around 240 dollars for the three tests. Thanks to this new scholarship program, these exams will cost around 150 dollars. Hopefully, I do well enough on the tests than I could be refunded and the tests could end up costing as little as 51 dollars.

Eating Healthy

This past week, in order to better ready myself for the Drake Relays I decided to not eat sweets. I didn’t let anyone know about it, but just politely refused to eat sweets, desserts and chips when over at other people’s house. I think it has had a lasting impact. On the way home from Des Moines, where the Drake Relays took place, we stopped to eat. I bought a big bag of chips still disgusted with my performance in the race. To me that bag was like a girl’s cookie dough, which she especially eats when feeling in the dumps. After eating the bag, I felt that I shouldn’t have eaten it. Even though I felt bad, it was a welcomed feeling. With this feeling in me I know it will be easier to eat healthier, now and down the road when my metabolism has slowed to a crawl.


My father used to be an athlete, he ran all the time and talks of his self-discipline and his 5 mile daily routine. I imagine he did those things, but that’s all I can do, is just imagine. This is because he now weighs around 250 pounds without the motivation to exercise on a regular basis. Recently I have become worried about his weight, because with it comes dangerous correlations such as heart attacks.


Because I have overall been doing a better job of taking care of my body, I have decided to try and make my dad’s body a little healthier too. I do this by occasionally making him do sit ups, which many times, he declines to do. Living at home I do not notice changes in our family like my sisters, who attend colleges out of state. Like the time my sister pointed out to me that she was worried for my dad’s health because he’s gained weight. I sized him up and I came to the same conclusion as she did.

So I started to pry into the exercise life of my parents that seemed nonexistent. My dad says that because of us kids that he isn’t able to, and I love being used as an excuse (not). The situation encourages me, because if I can control what I eat now as a kid then I believe that I won’t have a weight problem when I get older.

Post Drake

In my other post about the Drake Relays I mentioned how we had a very good chance of winning the 4 by 800 meter relay. With the members of our team we all expected to be first. Now after it is over I am going to talk about how we, or should I say I, screwed up.

My team and my coach told me to get ahead early as the first runner of the relay. I was planning on it, but when the gun went off and I started to sprint so were the other runners and faster than I was. I tried to go faster and not get trapped on the inside. They were going too fast and I thought to myself that if I wanted to run a decent race than I would need to conserve more energy than I was. All other teams had either their fastest or second fastest runners running the first leg. They did that so their team wouldn’t be going into the second leg second to last like ours. We would have done a lot better if Anthony a faster runner than I had gone first and also if he hadn’t tripped when I tried to give him the baton.

I came down the last 100 meters using energy coming from somewhere not known to me. I was within ten meters of Anthony and I saw that directly behind him was a first leg runner laying down on the blue track. The warning wouldn’t and couldn’t come out of my mouth, I was just too exhausted. He tripped and got back up adrenaline filled. After I handed him the baton, I stood there and realized because that guy was laying there we would probably not win this race. In disbelief I stood where I had handed Anthony the baton until one of the track managers came over to tell me to come to the field. Filled with adrenaline, Anthony ran the first part of his race way too fast and ran a bad time for his ability.

Overall we ran four seconds slower than our qualifying time, which was very depressing. Thinking about how if I had just run faster than that guy that Anthony had tripped over we would have done much better. Even though I am pretty upset about it, I am using it as motivation to work harder and when state comes around I am planning to place first for the 4 by 800 meter relay.

Abortion To Others

The views of famous figures and their quotes on abortion both pro life and pro choice

Abortion has always been a touchy subject, so I thought to have a combination of quotes from famous people on the subject to get a feeling of what the more intelligent or important figures in society think. The quotes are from both pro life and pro choice advocates.

Former president Ronald Reagan said, “I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.”
“Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.” ~Garrett Hardin
A Planned Parenthood advertisement pointed out how that 77 percent of the anti-abortion leaders are men, and that one hundred percent of them will never be pregnant.
“These concerns (for orphan children in India and elsewhere in the world) are very good, but often these same people are not concerned with the millions that are killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today, Abortion... For the pregnant women who don't want their children, give them to me, said Mother Teresa.
Senator John Kerry once said “Too many people in America believe that if you are pro-choice that means pro-abortion. It doesn't. I don't want abortion. Abortion should be the rarest thing in the world. I am acutally personally opposed to abortion. But I don't believe that I have the right to take what is an article of faith to me and legislate it to other people. That's not how it works in America.”
Margaret Sanger said, “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Mother Teresa said, “If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people to not kille each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.”

John Kerry’s quote brought to my attention that I had fallen under the misconception that he addressed. It helped me realize that not all democrats/pro choice people are for abortions. If I could ask one question to Margaret Sanger it would be “How is it merciful to kill someone?” As for mother Teresa, I can see how much she loved people as God’s children when she says, “… For the pregnant women who don’t want their children, give them to me.”

Drake Relays

Yesterday, our team had a meet in Waterloo. Yesterday, our track team participated in a larger than normal meet in Waterloo. This day was important for a lot of track teams because it was the last meet to get a qualifying time for the Drake Relays. The Drake Relays is the biggest track meet in the Midwest region. Located in Des Moines, it attracts professional, collegiate and high school runners. This year is the 100th year of the Drake Relays and they are celebrating it by having many famous track stars came back to watch the events. This includes Michael Johnson, four time gold medalist at the Olympics. For high school runners they take the top certain amount of relay teams and individuals with the fastest times. This year all of our relays have made it into Drake, which is quite an achievement.

I run in the four by eight hundred meter relay. I believe that we actually have a shot at winning it because we have the runners that can absolutely beast it. Kyle and Anthony are two members of the team there best times are 1:55 and 1:57 respectively. However, when we qualified for Drake, Anthony ran a 2:02, five seconds slower than what he’s capable of. If you take five seconds off of our qualifying time than we have the fastest posted time in the state. I’m not trying to be cocky, but we have a very good chance of winning. I say this for a number of reasons. First because in the last five meets my time has dropped one or two seconds every time all the way down to my best time as of now of 2:05. Second because of Anthony and the time can drop and also because Kyle said he is going to run a 1:53, which I fully believe. Third because our other runner, Spencer is also dropping his time, which now is a 2:08, he is a long distance runner and therefore doesn’t have the best foot speed. As he works on his short distance speed, he will get faster making our chances of winning very good.

It begins next Thursday with field events, the high school running events are next Friday and Saturday. Even though, I am really nervous, I think I am prepared to run to the best of my ability and let my teammates do the rest.

The Remaining Tingle

I was recently reminded of a scar on my left ring finger the other day when it was unintentionally bumped. This is because it tingles like your funny bone does, unfortunately though it is still not that funny.

The scar came to be during the summer of my transition into high school.

I had played baseball back in the day and was a pretty good out fielder and chose to try my skills at it once again. I was terrible at the game, but I was a pretty good runner. I was bewildered, and still am, of how much conditioning there is in baseball. You run ninety feet from base to base yet for conditioning you run miles on end.

I rode my bike to practice that day and after conditioning, we played a slow pitch game to get lots of practice base running and fielding. Coach had given us the option to steal whenever we decided to. I had stolen second base and was going to try for third on this next pitch. The pitch was tossed and I took off for that white square and the catcher threw it to the third baseman. I thought I had him and slid into the base and as Brenden (the third basemen) went to tag me, he stepped on my finger.

I couldn’t tell if I was out or not. My hand was throbbing and I looked at it to find blood all over the place. If you don’t know what a baseball cleats/spikes are like, they are thin, square pieces of metal on the bottom of the shoe lying on its side to “dig in” to the ground, or in this case my hand.

I was taken to Mercy Care North. There they gave me stitches, which was a painful process. The doctor had to give me three shots of Novocain and injected it into the wound, which was excruciating.

That was not the last very painful experience I had with these stitches. It was hard to sit out of soccer, which I was playing for my middle school. When the time came for my stitches to come out I was more than ready because I hated my inactiveness. At the doctors, lying down they began to cut off the stitches. Earlier they had told me this would not hurt. They were wrong, as they tugged on one of them, my whole arm started zinging. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was like she was hitting the funny bone inside my finger over and over again. I theorized that that one stitch that intensely hurt was under or through a nerve and when the nurse tugged on it then it went ballistic.

Moral of the stories, don’t get gashed and need stitches; ever. Trust me on this one.

More Frustration

In Spanish class today, we talked about some of the culture of most Spanish speaking countries in accordance to their religion, Catholicism. We were talking about this because today is Good Friday and Easter is this Sunday. My teacher, Sra. Bark, was talking about some of the rituals and celebrations they practiced, and added a side comment about how her mother was appalled that we were having school today. That led to Max saying that because of the rule separation of church and state it justifies school being in session. Sra. Bark then said that he couldn’t tell her that when there are clubs like FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) and FJA (Fellowship of Jewish Athletes) and when there are prayer sessions at the flag pole.

Reanne Mason, a student in our class, decided to pipe in at this time by saying something along the lines of “FJA contradicts itself because fellowship is a Christian thing.” I cringe as I think in my head “You have got to be kidding me.” Even Gandhi said that he liked Jesus, just not his followers. It is because those followers don’t represent Jesus as they should. They are often prideful as Reanne is here, claiming that the word “fellowship” is only Christian.

After making that statement Max and Drew, two classmates, decided to challenge that statement. She continued to defend her statement, all the while I was wincing. They disproved her pointing out that a word cannot be owned a religion, that words are used by whomever and that there aren’t restrictions on who can use them. Realizing that she had lost, she angrily says, “Just shut up and listen to her [the teacher].”


I was extremely frustrated, to say the least because I have had some talks with Max about the question of an existing God. She is a catholic and lets the world know what she believes every chance she gets. In other words she’s obnoxious. She is misrepresenting Jesus to the class and all the while confirming to Max that there is no God and even if he did exist, he wouldn’t want anything to do with him if that’s what his followers act like.

I think she means well when she does things like that, but really she is hammering away on the already battered reputation of Christians. I think I would propose one thing for her to do before speaking, and that is to think about the implications of her words.

The Blog Influences My Decisions

Blogging, I have come to realize lately, is becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life. It has been influencing my decisions. It could be a bad or good thing when you look at it.

The good part of it is that I am now more adventurous and spontaneous than before blogging. I want to be able to write about something I do during the week. I want to lead an interesting life with interesting stories, not only so I can tell friends and family about it, but also to whomever may stumble across my blog.

The down side of it is that the things I choose to do may not be the safest or smartest actions to take. If I am iffy on whether or not I want to go to a certain event my deciding question has been, “Would it make for a good blog entry?” If my answer is yes then, more times than not I attend the event, unless my parents object. They might do this because they are worried for my safety, and they probably have good reason for it too. I am after all a teenage boy without the wisdom that most adults posses.

Earlier in my blog I wrote about my experience at Hy-Vee and how Kevin decided to guard me from my own car. Well at the track meet before when they had asked me to go with them, I was reluctant, but I weighed the options. I thought that something might happen that was blog worthy, and luckily and unluckily for me it was. Unfortunately though, it was at the expense of my body because of a good form tackle from Kevin.

Blogging, yes, has been a hassle because I often get behind. On the bright side though, it has made me more adventurous person. The adventures come with the risks and the chance that I might experience a blog worthy event.

Kevin Beat Me Up

The Saturday was looking promising. The sun shining, a bit of a wind, but not that chilly because of the heat felt when standing in the sunlight. That day we had a track meet, just down the road at Xavier High School. It would have been at Kingston Stadium, but the football field is being replaced. I went there around two and found the wind was quite strong in the open area of the track, but still the sun was successfully countering it. I ended up doing all right in my races. The meet had gotten pretty cold by the end and a couple of friends and I decided to go to the Edgewood Hy-Vee to eat. I agreed to go, but decided not to eat.

We were done chilling there and decided to go home, tired from the races. We were hollering our good-byes to each other. I unlocked my car to get in and started opening the door, when suddenly Kevin sprinted over and slammed it. Kevin is a goofy fellow of sorts and for some reason unknown to me decided to not let me get in my car to drive home. I thought it was pretty funny, because it was so ridiculous. Every time I made the move to open the driver’s door he would shut it. I realized he wasn’t going to leave any time soon, so I started trying strategies to enter the guarded car.

At first I tried to turn the tables on him and go over and stand by his car. That failed because he followed me, but never gave me too much space for me to have time to sprint back to my locked car and get in. The next plan was for me to get in my car from the passenger seat and then lock the doors. That way I could just slide over and finally make my way home. It almost worked, but when he sprinted around the car when he saw me unlock it and closed it. I tried that method again, and I was literally in the car when he got there. He pulled me straight out of the car. The last method I used, which kind of worked, was I challenged him to a race. He started at the back of my car and could run as soon as I touched the door handle. I faked him out as I pretended to go for the handle. He sprints at me screaming, but I say “False start,” and thought he would stop. He apparently didn’t hear me as he tackled me to the ground.

I lay there on there ground and Kevin, standing above me asks me if I’m ok. I told him I would be in a little bit. It came to his attention that there are probably video cameras, filming the parking lot. So he thought it would be funny to act like he was beating me up as I laid there on the cement. Then two of the managers came out and asked us if everything was alright. We started laughing because we imagined that they saw us on the camera and had thought Kevin had beat me up. We told them that everything was fine. They left and Kevin finally let me go home, injured and tired.

6th Period Off

In a school day there are eight periods, zero through seven. The normal school day consists of periods one through six. This trimester I am lucky enough to have my sixth period off. With this time to spare I go to the library and try to get as much as I can done. The problem is though, that often times I get distracted. On some occasions I get lots of homework done, that way I don’t have to do as much at home that night. Other, and most times I get off task and usually end up spending my time just lackadaisically doing homework.

With this time off, I go to the mostly quiet IMC. I am the most productive there. It is because I can’t get comfortable, I know that the librarians will get on my case if I’m not doing school work. At home, however, my body tells me to rest and relax. Many times I will do that instead of getting busy with my homework like I know I should.

Some of my friends also have sixth period off and I sit next to them while working. They sometimes ask for help with a certain project they are working on, like writing poems. Because I enjoy rhyming words of course I always agree to help. Those are the kinds of distractions that stop me from getting too much accomplished before school gets out.

I also have over the time of this trimester have planned out how to get down to the locker room at the exact right time. They open up the locker rooms at 2:35, so I leave at 2:30 every day and take my time to get down there. Most of the time I get there right before they open it up, then I am able to get ready for track as soon as I get there.

Recently, I have been blogging with the time I have. It helps me stay focused because my friends are still sitting at the table and with me typing away on the computer it takes a little more to get me sidetracked.

Sixth period off also provides for some interesting stories. One time upon scribbling my name on the sign-in sheet, my friends greet me and I say hello back. The librarian, for some reason, didn’t seem to like that too much and told us to not spend so much time being friendly and more time working. That didn’t help my efficiency because instead of working on homework, we kept on joking about how we are, from now on, going to act like we hate each other.