Obstacle course run teaches Rockford football team to never quit, no matter what

No cell phones. No electronics of any kind. Camping for 2 ½ days at the Pecatonica Wetlands is not normally a high school football player’s idea of fun.

It is at Lutheran, during its annual Camp Courage .

“I look forward to it every year — 80 percent to 20 percent,” senior receiver/defensive back David Ballard said.

That 20 percent doesn’t come from sleeping on the ground. It’s the annual obstacle course that exhausts players like nothing else they have ever done.

Ethan Bird, a junior fullback/linebacker, collapsed face-first at the finish line. After a couple of minutes, he rolled to his back and lay motionless, like a dying flounder.

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“It’s harder than you think,” Bird said. “My legs were giving out. I almost threw up.”

Bird was far from the only one dead on his feet at the end. Or, sometimes, struggling to move even halfway through. But all kept going, remembering head coach Jeff Luedke’s instructions: “I don’t care what it takes to finish — even if you puke your guts out — finish.”

“You want to laugh,” said Ballard, who finished in a team-best 4 minutes and 1 second. “But you’ve got to cheer them on.

“It tests your will. You want to stop so bad, but our coaches are always saying, ‘Keep going, keep going.’ "

The course doesn’t look that hard, but its combination of cardio and weight exercises sapped almost everyone. The course, which gets altered slightly every year, went like this:

Players pair up and race 2-by-2. They started with two rope ladders, high-stepping through the first, then side-stepping two feet in, two feet out through the second. A short run to pick up a 20-pound medicine ball, then carry it 30 yards. Drop and do 10 burpees. Carry a 135-pound barbell 50 yards. Do 15 sit-ups. Bear crawl 20 yards up a hill. Carry a tackling dummy 30 yards. Tackle a dummy and roll down a hill. Pick up a football and high step over each section of a three-pronged divider counterclockwise, then reverse and do it in the opposite direction. Carry the football under a crossbar, race uphill 10 yards and duck under another crossbar. Drop the football. Race to a set of truck tires and flip your tire 10 times. Race to the pond, grab a cone on top of a pole in three feet of water and race 20 yards to the finish line.

“I like the team bonding,” Ballard said of the camp, where players often stay up to 4 a.m. talking around the campfire and carry a team spirit log through the woods, making nine stops — one for each regular-season game — where the coach recites a short poem about that week’s schedule opponent. “The team bonding is the best thing, coming together, getting to know our teammates outside of football and creating a brotherhood.

“But the obstacle course is tiring.”

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And that’s coming from the winner.

Coach Luedke invited this reporter and Illinois state senator Steve Stadelman to participate this year. Stadelman, despite asking “What’s a burpee?” before the start, Stadelman never trailed after doing his burpees. He finished in 5:24 seconds to this writer’s 5:50. The 1982 Wisconsin graduate had the fastest time in the early going — players ranged from Ballard’s 4:01 to 9:05 for the slowest time.

Stadelman, like many of the players, said flipping the tires was the hardest part.

“You get to the end of the course and you have to lift these tires when you are exhausted,” said Stadelman, who stays in shape by playing basketball at the YMCA with and against players half his age. “You have to lift and push with all your body. I struggled with that one.”

The obstacle course, even for those who are best at it, is not something to look forward to. But, in many ways, it stands for football. Or at least preparing your best for football. This is not going to be easy. This was never meant to be easy.

“I’m tired just watching it," one player said after the first two groups struggled to break eight minutes. "Coach, this is a lot."

But if they do it right, everything is better afterward.

“You get so gassed,” said senior tight end/outside linebacker Jack Behmer, who ran one of the faster times at 4:22. “But you have to realize everyone is dying. You push past that and keep working. I play both ways, so by the fourth quarter you are tired but have to keep going. You have to play for your brothers and teammates.

“This helps so much,” Behmer said of Camp Courage, which featured a pig roast Thursday night before the team packed up and left camp Friday morning. “You can tell, by the time you get here and the time you leave, everyone is so much closer. It’s such a bonding moment.”

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Obstacle course run teaches Rockford football team to never quit, no matter what