How about six years' worth of being in ACJC Canoeing and Dragonboat...(J1 path)

I feel i keep repeating myself here but here goes:

For me there is no 'why' when i joined ACJC canoeing and dragonboat. Its the only ECA(we dun need it back then so its called Extra CA..) i signed up for during the ECA fair on the first week of school. I've long heard of the club back in acs(i). I was in UYO and most of my seniors in it joined when they went ACJC. You would hear stories like this senior who carries a fellow teammate piggy back and do a couple of pullups. Or stuff like they do hell lot of pushups and still could go run. Ok maybe now i can come up with a 'why'.

First training was easy for me since we did crazy things in ACS(i) NCC. Cant remember how many pushups i did but it was quite a lot. Saw some fellow j1s dying. Pullups was simple; 3 sets of 12. Did circuits as well. The difficulty of it all was to do everything without a single water break. I remembered showing my friends my really dry mouth. Cldnt spit a single saliva at all. After the training came the debrief, all of us remembered the one and only Nicholas Wong aka the SIALAN treasurer. Dun be deceived by his looks now. He was an ultra A**. Have a story later on how we(j1s) made him like our angel. YUp like what you have encountered, i did too or even worse. Imagine 10 seniors the size of tiw or bigger. Average size of my seniors were around tiw's size. Maybe 5 bigger than tiw. 1 smallfart(glenn =) but he is crazier than tim). 3 around the height of alex with the bulk of auggy.

No one like the regimentation; many quit and we were down to 10. But what this sialan-ness taught me was having this total humbility no matter what you hear or see. But i dun tink it is a tradition to do so but it is a very quick way in filtering the best of characters. The club believes in humility, humbility and above all the search of ongoing self improvement. I dun remember having much scolding from seniors; maybe the only ones was when i wasnt rowing properly or hanging properly with my injured wrist. I was the junior with the injured wrist. Sometimes you think its crazy, but its better than seeing yourself lagging behind and seeing your teammates die. Which is why even though i had flu, headache, injuries, twisted ankles , i still trained. I wanted to be part of it and contribute to the effort for the betterment of our club.

I think some of you might hear of the KFC story. Thats one of the most memorable time of my j1 times. Basically we wanted to get funds for the school den. How much we got? Wont say it here... Alright.. what we did was row dboat for 3 consecutive days. Whatever the director wanted, we rowed. Once in a while, we would do sprints with the other teams. Thats the time too that i got to know more about my seniors. They were opening up a little and cldnt find fault with my batch. We were nice juniors =p. Taking dips, doing sprints, row together, play laserquest 3-4 times in a row pretty much summarise that event. That was around march-april.

My mind's a little messy at this point of time. So i just say what comes into my mind. Ok.. Lets talk about canoeing trg... We had it in macritchie for the first three months. It was crazy there. Ran X-country everytime. Did 6-strokes with hanging for around 2mins at each point. Circuits was very long. All that before rowing.. we did an average of 12 laps. As usual , the seniors would be monitoring us while we row in the tubboats with conventional paddles(expedition ones). It was still hell when your arms were soft by the land. Dats macritchie trg. Though it was hard, i loved it there. Another memorable thing we did there was running to coronation plaza after running the x-country route. Only 4-5 out of 10 juniors stuck with the seniors. The pace was my normal pace back when i took chua's seniors. Around 10:30 for 2.4.

Now for Dboat... (To be cont'd)