Yesterday I took part in the inline skating mass race.
I was very excited about this when I knew that I got in the race. What I was worried about was that I could have forgotten all the stuff I learned from the skating elective course last year.
Before the race, the IT Club guys went to our control room to watch an episode of Naruto. Along the way, Kuti and I kept giving spoilers of SW Ep.3 to Junqun (much to his dismay, of course).
"Oh, then Padme was Force-strangled by Anakin right?"
Haha. Now for the skating part.
When I tried skating on my rented skates, of course I couldn't get used to it, but with further test-runs, I felt that I never lost what I've learnt after all.
The boys' mass race started at about 10 am, after the girls' race. As we all got ready at the starting line, everybody darted forward as if there's no tomorrow. I wasn't surprised that I was lagging behind the pack right from the start.
Last year's course was short lah. My skills were still limited.
Some more, the race route was in such a way that the skaters had to make clockwise U-turns.
And while I could turn left easily, turning right was always my limitation to skating.
Every of my U-turn was a fall. And I was supposed to skate 10 laps.
Crap lah...
There was a part of the route which was extra bumpy... it acted as some "obstacle" for the skaters... but I didn't fall there.
There was once I lost control and skated towards a car! A parked car lah, what are you thinking?
And while doing my last lap, I heard the song "Step on" playing at the sports complex. Haha.
It wasn't really that bad for me... I'm still a noob at skating, and considering experience, I've ventured a much greater distance on my skates than anytime last year.
So at the end of it I got an aching back (I skated in that hunched position for balance), calloused toes and the experience of my life. I was just a bit sorry for the swimming team (who organised this race) because they had to wait for me to finish the race (long after the others finished it).
Of course, nothing beats the first mouthful of cool water after a long race.
Later in the day I went for a Quake 3 (some first-person-shooting LAN game which turned out to be very fun) session. There was one map we played where there's a lava pit, so... here we go again, repeating SW Ep. 3 dialogues.
And some of us did "fall" into the lava pit. Lol.
In the afternoon we went to the Squash court for Dodgeball (not to play, but to organise the game). There were a lot of screw-ups. Firstly, we couldn't begin on time because the Squash game hasn't ended yet. So the whole thing was pushed back for a full 2 hours! Most of the participants were quite pissed off because of that.
And we had to handle their wrath.
During the game there were complications too. Firstly, not all the players turned up. So we had to tell the houses to regroup their teams, and so we could not stick to that "3 guys 3 girls in a team of 6" rule.
We got lashed by some poeple who just couldn't accept that there were better players in other houses.
Then there was this problem that because the Squash game ended late and we couldn't start on time, our game got pushed into that late time slot and clashed with the Captain's ball finals. Some of the Dodgeball teams had to go for Captains' ball, and we had a hard time re-arranging the groups.
We had to do a walkover for some of the teams.
One of the teams for my own house (Beta) which could not make it because of Captains' ball came back later and was dismayed that we did a walkover. Fortunately there was some situation that caused one of the winning teams (from Gamma house) of the qualifying rounds to be without an opponent team. Hence, we decided to put that Beta house team against that Gamma team.
Problem solved.
In fact, that Beta team got into the finals. Against a Delta team.
In summary, the whole Dodgeball thing was stressful for us IT Club guys, and I'm glad it was over.
Oh, last week I took a shot on my camera phone... mimicking Darth Sidious.
