Hurry, Hurry Hard! Curling Cross Training I call it.

Last Saturday evening, 19 more or less civil engineering students cleverly dropped their pencils and calculators for a moment and ‘hurried hard’ their way onto the curling sheet at Marpole Curling Club to throw some stones and to sweep like a madman.

A bunch of super cool curlers!

Brian and I had arrived there a few minutes fashionably late due to a small oversight – initially heading in the opposite direction...opps. This curling rink certainly was well hidden from civilization, which was located inside a mysterious gloomy, windowless warehouse.

Eventually, with practice for nearly an hour, we were ready to rock and roll and started playing a game.

Brian and I were on the cool red team, thus for justification of sporting this awesome red toque.

Brian whipping out the big guns and big take-outs.

My first two shots came shortly after my teammate, Marcel who had just missed both of his shots. The pressure was on me to put something or anything in play with 3 blue stones looming the house. My first shot, heavy! My second, light! Having mastered the draw weight and launch from the hack in practice, I totally choked with everybody watching me. Man, the pressure. Luckily our girl Skip bailed us out and made an awesome takeout to prevent the blue team from scoring more than one point after the first end.

Me blowing the shot.

Money shot, oh I mean the photograph!

Joel Atwater showing us how it's suppose to be done.

I got to call the shots in the second end as Skip. It was fun playing the Skip, as I had no idea what my hand signals really meant, and I got some funny looks for my gesturing too. When it was my turn to shoot, the left side was wide opened. My nerves settled from the first end and I curled my stone behind a guard. Perhaps it was the magic of sweeping? Jeff, the blue Skip, hits one of our stone out, however we still had one closest to the button. This was my chance to score two points and redeem myself for the first end. With barely a 3mm gap, my second shot stuck around a centre guard and was enough to take two points for second end (granted I actually had the entire left side open to make the shot). Success!

Sweeping was harder than scrubbing grime off concrete. Joel was yelling "hard" and "off" unexpectedly, and at one point Liliana on the blue team jumped to all the excitement (left)!

We ended up exchanging one point for the remaining third and fourth ends. All in all, it was a lot of fun! Not too bad, considering this was my first time curling.

Final Score: Red 3 - Blue 2