He was off to the side, observing from a distance.
#Ascension shift massive activation july 3rd 2017 full#
“He definitely got full rotation,” Leo chimes in, “so I would count it as a flip.”įull flip or not, on the afternoon in question there were no acrobatics for Brosnan. “ Unsuccessful attempts, but I think he started to get it towards the end.” “There were a couple…” He pauses a moment, searching for the most charitable word. His success is still up for debate among certain members of the team.
“It was actually kind of scary,” Brosnan recalls, “I hadn’t done one in like 20 years.” “I think we had almost every single person on the team at least try one,” Lex says, “even if they just belly-flopped or something.” In the last few years, encouraged largely by junior twins Leo Young and Lex Young, it’s become something of a team tradition that everyone will attempt a flip off the rocks into the water below. “Twenty-foot cliffs, 30-foot…depends on the year with the water level,” Brosnan says. Known to the team colloquially as “The Rocks,” it’s a frequent afternoon destination during what has become Newbury Park’s annual month at the high-altitude lake. They were merely gathered at an outcropping of boulders that juts from the western end of the lake. None of the expected ways that Brosnan would typically measure his team’s progress. Spoken at length about the importance of taking care of the small things - sleep, stretching, hydration, activation exercises.īut on this afternoon, he was watching them jump off rocks. Seen them set off on long runs up trails with 1,000-foot ascents. He’d watched them hammer jaw-dropping tempo efforts along sun-baked dirt roads at 7,000 feet of elevation. Their coach, Sean Brosnan, had been observing his team for several weeks at their make-shift altitude camp at a lake high in the San Bernardino National Forest. Was it the mixture of laughter and splashing? The easy way they joked and cajoled and encouraged each other? Was it the impressive sight of bodies in flight? Teenagers untethered, one by one, from the rocks where they were jumping?Īll lanky and loose-limbed, tan and cavalier. Was it the angle of the sun off the shimmering water?ĭid the light suddenly catch them differently? It’s hard to say what was different that afternoon.ĭifficult to discern how that July day was distinct from any of the others that the Newbury Park cross country team had spent along the edge of southern California’s Big Bear Lake. Moments of clarity, exhilaration, trepidation and resolve have fed Newbury Park's ascension to becoming the best American high school cross country team of all time
0 kommentar(er)
