@Arnyn
Recruit
Trastion Leithor
Blinking, Trastion listened to the lengthy list of corrections she had. He didn't know there was a right or wrong way to run, but nodded, trying to remember the various things she told him. "Right, a straight line. Thanks," He was trying not to get overwhelmed with all the information coming at him. It seemed like a lot to take in, but he knew that with practice, he would get it right. Eventually. He'd had a feeling he was doing the push-ups somewhat wrong, but at least she hadn't demanded that he do them over again. He'd get it better next time. Hopefully. And he planned to practice that in his dorm before bed, assuming he wasn't too exhausted by the time he was finished with the day.
Watching Hyandaner Arnyn go through the course, Trastion walked along so that he could better see how she was doing things, nodding in understanding as he came to understand how some of the equipment was used. Some looked rather strange, but now that he saw it in use, things made sense. "Alright, my turn," He was quite impressed how she could go through all that while wearing a sword, and it didn't get caught or slide out of the sheath or anything. He knew well enough how difficult it could be to do things with a sword, and how easily they could end up sliding out of the sheath.
Studying the first obstacle now with understanding, he smiled. It shouldn't be much different than climbing out on a tree limb, he thought, jumping up to grab onto the beam. Trastion was very familiar with tree climbing, and figured it shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish the obstacle, given his experience with trees and climbing in general. Much to his surprise, he nearly slipped off a few times, partway across. He didn't say anything, not wanting to call attention to it, and hoped that she didn't notice. It was more difficult to hold on with his upper arms aching from the push-ups he'd done earlier, and the muscles were slightly burning as he pushed them to do more work.
The hurdles gave him still more trouble, as he wasn't very used to trying to slide under low-hanging branches. He'd normally have jumped over those, and ducked under the high ones, but here he had to do the opposite. He ended up half-crawling under, not sure what else to do, and looked a bit skeptically at the taller ones. Still, leaping over things all through his childhood and teens had earned a great deal of scolding from his mother, and he grinned slightly to himself as he recalled how he and his brother used to jump diagonally off the porch of the manor, over the flower beds, landing on the lawn. And get scolded by not only their mother, but the gardener as well, for knocking off flowers or scuffing up the lawn. His boots hit the dirt now, instead of the neatly clipped lawn of his family estate, after a few failed attempts at swinging himself over the upper beam, much like he had done before in the stable yard, jumping over the fence, with one hand gripping the beam to help propel him up and over, although it didn't occur to him to ask whether it was actually acceptable to use his hands to help.
Not expecting the balance beam to give him much trouble, Trastion jumped up onto it. With all the times, growing up, that he would walk across fallen logs, sometimes using those as a bridge across the river, or balancing along the top of fences, he figured this was hardly a challenge. This was barely off the ground, although it was a bit narrower than some things he chose to balance on, and it didn't have any bark on it to provide grip. He started off about as fast as she had done it, but after a few steps he swayed, holding his arms out to either side as he came close to toppling off. Still, he remained stubbornly on the beam as if there were molten lava underneath, and finished it without too much difficulty, though at a slower pace. Who would've thought his childish games that he still continued with would actually be of help, for something like this?
Smiling slightly at that thought, he finished the beam and hopped down as if leaping into a safe zone, then paused at the monkey bars, and grabbed hole of the first. This was not something he had ever seen before, but he knew that he had plenty of arm strength. However, his arms again protested this action, reminding him with fiercer burning that he had recently done some push ups which he wasn't used to doing. And trying to swing from one bar to the next made them hurt even more so. He gritted his teeth, hanging for a little bit, both hands gripping the same bar.
The bars felt a bit slippery, though it might have been his hands being sweaty by now. His forehead grew more sweaty, making his hair stick to his forehead, and he wanted to brush it back but his hands were occupied. He had to keep moving, he reminded himself, or he'd be stuck here forever. Moving slowly and carefully across, his arms burning a little bit more with each swing forward, Trastion soon grew worried that he was going to slip off, and tried to hurry up. In his haste he actually missed the bar he was reaching for, gasping as he closed his eyes as he struggled to maintain a tight grip on the one he had. He imagined he was suspended from a high cliff, and reached forward, fumbling a bit as he searched for the next bar and grabbed onto it with his fingertips, before adjusting his grip to fully wrap around the bar. Then, opening his eyes again, he swung forward to the next one, until he reached the end and dropped down with a quiet sigh of relief.
Next was the ladder, and he went up that without too much trouble, using his legs more than his arms. "Climbing is my favorite thing to do, by the way," he called out to Arnyn with a grin, trying to keep from letting on how much his arms were hurting, before swinging around to the other side, and climbed down again. The stumps certainly looked easy enough, and he couldn't help a little grin. Not only had he worked as a lumberjack for some time before working at the quarry, he had actually
grown up around lumber yards dotted with tree stumps, and had used to play on the stumps since the time he could walk. Climbing up onto the first stump, Trastion thought back to the games he and his brother used to play, with a slight pang of sorrow. They used to see who could go the furthest from stump to stump without having to touch the ground, and eventually as he got older, he realized that it took a bit of planning ahead to not get yourself trapped at a place where it was too far to jump from one to the next stump. He remembered that, and studied the stumps before him now, trying to gauge the distances. It had been a while since he actually did this, so he hoped he hadn't misjudged his abilities. Of course, there was an added challenge here; some of them were only wide enough for one foot, so he'd have to jump and balance on the same foot he landed on.
Taking a breath, he leaped, and thankfully it was a wider one. The next one wasn't, however, and he swayed and windmilled his arms until he got his balance under control, then hopped to the next, and so on until he made it to the end, with a sigh of relief. He was definitely 'rusty' with that activity, but he hadn't fallen into the 'lava' as the childhood game would have made the ground. Still, he hadn't done it nearly as effortlessly as Arnyn had done. The following few obstacles were of varying levels of challenge for Trastion, until he reached the rope going up to the platform. He smiled as he looked up at it, and imagined a nice, tall cliff face he wanted to climb up. Jumping up, he grabbed the rope as high as he could reach it, wrapping the dangling end around one leg, and trapped it with the other. He held back a groan as he realized that this would also involve his arms. Unless he could put use his legs for most of the work, he thought. Using his feet to help push himself upward as much as he could, he tried to use his arms as little as possible, though this made his climb far slower than he would normally have done. The top of the platform was the top of his imaginary cliff, and eventually, he was pulling himself over the edge, safely at the top, with a slight wince as his arm muscles protested. It wasn't as satisfying as climbing up a real cliff, but it was fun to pretend, at least. And he definitely would not want to try climbing a real cliff right now, with his arms burning like this. He waved down to his trainer with a smile, keeping up the act that he wasn't in pain.
Jumping back down, unphased by however high it was, Trastion's landing wasn't as graceful as hers, falling down onto his hands and knees. He quickly jumped up, though, and gave a quick brush at his knee area to get the dust off before jogging back to where he had started. "Did I do alright?" He asked, with a hopeful smile at the ranger who had been assigned to train him. "That was actually fun. Challenging... but fun." He decided, if his arms weren't hurting too badly, he might come every day to run through the course even if she didn't instruct him to do so. That way, he could improve at the things he'd had difficulty with, and get even better at doing the things he didn't.