of a malnourished puppy, my achievements were better than average – although on the 200m shuttle sprint, my short legs left me some way behind the quicker lads.
Finishing off, we trotted out of the camp to do a basic fitness test run: a one-and-a-half mile troop run/walk to becompleted in fifteen minutes, which to all intents and purposes was a warm-up to the return run, where we would race the same distance back to camp as individuals. Although we had eleven-and-a-half minutes to complete it, if we’d taken that long on our PRC we wouldn’t have made it there.
I was near the back, completing it in eight minutes thirty seconds, over two minutes behind the racing snakes at the front. My time was similar to that on my PRC, but then I’d completed it in comfortable footwear. Here I ran in those cardboard-thin daps, over tarmac and asphalt, where treading on anything resembling a pebble would throw you off balance in pain. Just to check we weren’t loafing, we then did it all again for good measure. No wonder many recruits suffered shin splints and stress fractures from running in those things. It was the only time as a Royal Marine we would ever do a BFT (battle fitness training) in trainers; thereafter, it would always be in those RMHCB boots designed by the Italian Mafia.
Physical training at this stage was known as IMF – initial military fitness. We dressed smartly in our pusser’s daps, stretchy socks that I’d only previously seen on schoolgirls, and thick linen shorts that could only be sufficiently ironed at the same temperature as the earth’s core. To complete our IMF kit, we had a choice of either green or white rugby-type shirt. When I first looked at myself in the mirror in this get-up, it made me look less like a commando than an extra in some Ealing comedy about a public-school sports day.
IMF was about as far removed from expected physical training as one could imagine. The gym floor, I only nownoticed, was a huge game of dot to dot where each of us would stand over our designated spot then, upon command, walk around the gym, first in a sort of stiff marching motion then with one leg tensed to slam into the floor, making us all look like we wore calipers.
Upon returning to our spots, the PTI stood proud on his dais before demonstrating arm movements to improve our coordination in the style of a tic-tac man at the races. It was beyond me how this was going to make me a commando, but it seemed that this warm-up was just a distraction from the real exercise. Around the walls stood those wooden beams that in school we called ‘apparatus’. They would be the framework upon which we would conduct countless sit-ups, press-ups and pull-ups, both in time to the PTI’s numbered calls and in our own time, where we would push out the designated number in the quickest possible time: a quick fifty here, a slow fifty there, over and over again until every sinew of muscle had been stretched, pulled and tweaked until it screamed for mercy.
Finally, my favourite, the rope climbing, would see us scale the 30ft ropes using a highly-efficient climbing method where the legs did the majority of the work, thankfully making my weedy grip of only minimal importance. We would wrap ourselves around the ropes halfway back down to make safe and then invert ourselves so we descended upside down. As I hung like a bat from the rope I smiled, knowing this was the stuff I wanted to be doing, the first time I’d done anything I considered commando-like. One thing I didn’t want to do was follow the examples of some lads who found the ropeclimbing overly difficult, one falling head first down to a sickening crash on the hard floor.
‘I said controlled descent, Lofty,’ shouted the primary PTI in the direction of the whimpering, snotty heap at the foot of the rope. ‘Once you’ve stopped making strange noises, we’ll think about getting you some help.’
‘Don’t bleed on my floor,’ added a secondary.
For some reason
Finishing off, we trotted out of the camp to do a basic fitness test run: a one-and-a-half mile troop run/walk to becompleted in fifteen minutes, which to all intents and purposes was a warm-up to the return run, where we would race the same distance back to camp as individuals. Although we had eleven-and-a-half minutes to complete it, if we’d taken that long on our PRC we wouldn’t have made it there.
I was near the back, completing it in eight minutes thirty seconds, over two minutes behind the racing snakes at the front. My time was similar to that on my PRC, but then I’d completed it in comfortable footwear. Here I ran in those cardboard-thin daps, over tarmac and asphalt, where treading on anything resembling a pebble would throw you off balance in pain. Just to check we weren’t loafing, we then did it all again for good measure. No wonder many recruits suffered shin splints and stress fractures from running in those things. It was the only time as a Royal Marine we would ever do a BFT (battle fitness training) in trainers; thereafter, it would always be in those RMHCB boots designed by the Italian Mafia.
Physical training at this stage was known as IMF – initial military fitness. We dressed smartly in our pusser’s daps, stretchy socks that I’d only previously seen on schoolgirls, and thick linen shorts that could only be sufficiently ironed at the same temperature as the earth’s core. To complete our IMF kit, we had a choice of either green or white rugby-type shirt. When I first looked at myself in the mirror in this get-up, it made me look less like a commando than an extra in some Ealing comedy about a public-school sports day.
IMF was about as far removed from expected physical training as one could imagine. The gym floor, I only nownoticed, was a huge game of dot to dot where each of us would stand over our designated spot then, upon command, walk around the gym, first in a sort of stiff marching motion then with one leg tensed to slam into the floor, making us all look like we wore calipers.
Upon returning to our spots, the PTI stood proud on his dais before demonstrating arm movements to improve our coordination in the style of a tic-tac man at the races. It was beyond me how this was going to make me a commando, but it seemed that this warm-up was just a distraction from the real exercise. Around the walls stood those wooden beams that in school we called ‘apparatus’. They would be the framework upon which we would conduct countless sit-ups, press-ups and pull-ups, both in time to the PTI’s numbered calls and in our own time, where we would push out the designated number in the quickest possible time: a quick fifty here, a slow fifty there, over and over again until every sinew of muscle had been stretched, pulled and tweaked until it screamed for mercy.
Finally, my favourite, the rope climbing, would see us scale the 30ft ropes using a highly-efficient climbing method where the legs did the majority of the work, thankfully making my weedy grip of only minimal importance. We would wrap ourselves around the ropes halfway back down to make safe and then invert ourselves so we descended upside down. As I hung like a bat from the rope I smiled, knowing this was the stuff I wanted to be doing, the first time I’d done anything I considered commando-like. One thing I didn’t want to do was follow the examples of some lads who found the ropeclimbing overly difficult, one falling head first down to a sickening crash on the hard floor.
‘I said controlled descent, Lofty,’ shouted the primary PTI in the direction of the whimpering, snotty heap at the foot of the rope. ‘Once you’ve stopped making strange noises, we’ll think about getting you some help.’
‘Don’t bleed on my floor,’ added a secondary.
For some reason
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