Marathon Weekend

It's been years since I felt the effects of sleep deprivation.
I've had 3 hours sleep in just as many days... side job.
Remind me again why I do this?
Woof.
When I was in the Navy, part of the 6 months of training was an entire week of ... no kidding... NO SLEEP.
It was Sunday evening... we'd been awake all day of course... the anticipation of the coming HELL WEEK kept all of us from falling asleep in the tents pitched on the sand. We had no clue what was about to be asked of us... and we had no clue what we were about to ask of ourselves. An entire week of psychological and physical warfare.
Too much to tell ya, so I'll just talk about the lack of sleep.
First couple of days were actually easy... constant [no kidding] contests/races/timed events... end to end to end to end.
The instructors came at regular intervals... all well rested.
They fed us 3 meals a day and then another at midnight... we ate like pigs and filled our pockets as well.
You couldn't sit for long at the table or the fatigue ebbed in.
Pain helped. We all had some sort of gash or abrasion, even cellulitus for some... me... I only had a broken metatarsal. Three actually.
The pain was intense but lasted only a few seconds... excruciating went to ludicrous which slipped to numbness as we picked up the rubber boats, put them on our heads and trotted off toward another 'event'.
On the 6th day... they put us in a dim room with Mozart playing... could have been Led Zeplin... we were tired.
They told us to write an essay about our experiences of the week.
I wrote about some extremely vivid hallucinations I had seen... I still marvel at the power of the mind.
Anyway... I made it... so did a bunch of other men I'd fight to the death for.
A week of NO SLEEP. [AND the hardest Military Training on the Planet... but you can see that on TV/movies.]
:)
Oh... I couldn't get to sleep the night Hell Week was over.
Go figure.