Day 16: Harness work

We did three different things Tuesday: rappelling, ratchet, and snare. As trite as it is for me to say "everything we did today was so much fun," well.... it was. Our half of the class was split into three groups of 10, based on our body type. I was in the small group. This made things a little easier for the riggers who set up the stunts, since everyone in each group weighed roughly the same amount. Each of us headed off to start the day doing one of the three disciplines. Group "Napoleon Complex" started off rappelling. This was the kind of rappelling that is typical of someone, such as a thief, to enter a building through the ceiling. We did it right side up, inverted, and fast. Then I personally decided to mix the last two, since the instructors told us we could go as fast as we were comfortable with.



Next, we headed off to ratchet, which pulled us backward (and sometimes forward) in a special harness to make us go flying through the air. This video shows my last turn, in which we could get creative. I had a fellow student sneeze, but it was so forceful I went flying back. As you can see, I decided to keep flailing about at the end, since it was so much fun.



The third and last discipline of the day was the snare. You know when you're running through a jungle, and a trap has been set where a rope will grab you by the ankle and haul you, screaming, upwards, until you're dangling helplessly from the branches of a tree? Well, you might not know the feeling first hand, but you've probably seen it in a movie or on TV (think Rousseau's trap that ensnared Sayid in the first season of LOST). That's what we did. I was a little more nervous about this one, since my back has continued to bother me a bit for the past week or so. Nothing serious, just enough to make me cautious. Surprisingly, it did not hurt my back at all, and ended up being a lot of fun. There were three variations: walking into it, running, and jumping up from standing still. Other than keeping my leg straight on those first two, I like to think I did pretty well. And as a side note, it's harder than you might think to run with that rope strapped to your leg.



That night at the hotel we had a second (albeit more brief) business meeting about the industry. Very informative, and we all took a lot of notes. That ended pretty late, so I went to bed shortly thereafter.