C-Squad Campsite – Photo by Ethan Beatty
Hello friends and family!! I am writing from training camp in Gainesville, Georgia! I want to start off by giving a big thank you to everyone who contributed to getting me here! I am so happy to say that I am now fully funded! Praise God! I cannot express how grateful I am for everyone’s verbal, spiritual, and financial support these past few months. Thank you thank you thank you!
I’ve been here for a week now and so much as already happened in my heart and from everything the Lord has been moving and preparing us for. I cannot wait to share all about it! Before I get into more on what I’ve been learning and seeing from God, I want to give you an idea of what daily life is like at training camp through this blog post. Stay tuned for a part 2!
For the whole 3-4 weeks of training camp, everyone, all 120 racers, are in tents! All 6 squads have their own campsite with a water jug, trash can, and a fire pit! When you walk into the campsite, all our tents are in rows and it looks like a little neighborhood! We are partially in the woods and in the grass too! It has been strange sleeping in a tent for all these days but it’s actually very comfortable and nice to have my own separate space!
For showering, we have scheduled days for the nice showers. Our showers are in a storage container with separate stalls and sinks for brushing teeth! On non scheduled days, there are bucket showers! For laundry, we do it all by hand and hang it up on a clothes line. I’ve never done a whole load of laundry by hand, but it was such a gratifying experience to do it myself!
On a day-to-day basis, we have a schedule that changes daily but has a similar structure. Some days, we have 7am workouts as an entire squad. Our bodies are temples and we don’t just prioritize our spiritual well being, but our physical health as well. After that, we head to the dining deck for morning devotionals with the squad. Then breakfast! In my opinion, the best part about meals is doing dishes after! All the squads take turns every meal to wash dishes. We have an assembly line on tables from washing to rinsing off, to drying! But the drying process is a little different than I’m used too… we don’t have towels, so we air dry them! We wave them in the air and get all the water off! It’s a great way to bond as a squad and just be silly and have fun together!
After breakfast, we head to worship and sessions. I’ll go more in depth about all that stuff in a later blog post. Then, we have team prayer for 30 minutes, and then free time! My favorite way so far to spend my free time is laying in my hammock playing my ukulele and talking with my new friends! Some other ways I’ve spent my free time includes doing laundry, cleaning my tent, playing card games, taking a nap, or having dance parties with other members from my squad!
Every night, we also have dinner and then campus clean up! Examples include sweeping the dining deck, wiping down showers, and cleaning the port-a-potties! Yes, I said port-a-potty! We use port-a-potties every day, no indoor bathrooms! Definitely an adjustment! With that said, I’ve noticed a lot of things that I have taken for granted back home, such as plumbing, a bed, family, access to other luxury items that you wouldn’t even think of, and not having a caterpillar eating a hole in your tent (this actually happened to a teammate of mine!) Being here has really made a lot of us appreciate what we have back home, especially when it comes to just being comfortable.
Even through training comes with a lot of learning and new things to process, its been so amazing getting to know different people in my squad and just having fun with them.
Hope this blog could give some more insight to what life it looking for my team and I at the moment, I will be blogging about how I’ve seen God move this past week as well!
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