How Geoguesser Ruined My Life

The other day after training I was talking to some of the guys on my ski team. We were talking about geography and they asked me if my teacher had us play a game called "Geoguesser" yet. I said no and asked them what it was. They told me it was a game that dropped you in a random place in the world and then you had to guess where you were on a map. You are able to spin around and see a full 360˚ view of where you are and sometimes it will let you move forward and backwards. You can choose if you want to be dropped anywhere in the world (this option will literally drop you in the middle of nowhere) or only famous places (Rome, London, New York, etc.) or even just the US. It also gives you the ability to challenge other people to see who can get closer to the exact location. I thought it sounded interesting and I said I was going to go home and try it.

A picture of their home screen. Photo courtesy of me from the geoguesser website

A picture of the actual game... Leave a comment if you know where this is. Photo courtesy of me from the Geoguesser website

I forgot about it until the next day when my friend (Victoria) came in to Pre-engineering telling me about how addicting it was. So, naturally I had to play it. Now I would just like to state that I am not usually the kind of person who plays games during class or games in general. Anyway I decided to try it. I was instantly addicted. We played it for the first fifteen minutes of class, until the sub came over and chewed us out for playing games during class. We had had two assignments that we were supposed to do, one was a project proposal and the other was to design something in SketchUp. Victoria and I really wanted to get back to playing the game, but we knew we couldn't until we finished all of our work. So, we decided to race to see who could finish the assignments (the best) first. We ended up finishing quickly and went back to the game. The sub came over again and chewed us out for playing the game again, but we told him we finished all our work and he left us alone.  About ten minutes later the sub came back over to watch us play and give "advice". His advice was terrible. I was dropped in stonehenge for one round of the game. I thought it was in Scotland, but the sub kept telling me it was in Southeast Asia. *Side note, Stonehenge is in England. Then, I was dropped in the Vatican. I was like "I think I'm in the Vatican" and the sub told me "Um that's definitely not the Vatican". I didn't really believe him, so I guessed the Vatican anyway. Low and behold I was right, I was in the Vatican. 

Then came next period. We had to take a test on our computers and we could do whatever we wanted after. That's right you guessed it... I played more geoguesser. While I was playing the kids behind me started asking what I was doing. I told them I was playing geoguesser and it was like the most addicting game ever. Then they started playing too. This was when I realized I liked the game so much, I started spreading it. 

I didn't get a chance to play it again until I got home. When I got home I realized that you could challenge people to games, but you had to create an account. I hate creating accounts for things, like if I download an app, but you have to create an account for it. I usually just delete the app. For some reason this was different, I wanted to challenge people, so I created an account. That night, I challenged two of my friends, my dad, my brother and my mom. I ended up spending the whole night competing with my friends and dad. It got super intense my friend and I ended up creating rules like no using google, no getting help and even time limits. The same friend and I even ended up competing to see how close we could get to the exact location. You might be thinking "Isn't that the point of the game". Yes it is, but this was different we were trying to as close as possible down to the nearest meter. I also ended up face timing with one of my other friends and playing with her for over an hour. By this point I was literally putting off homework to play this game. 

My record: 7.5 meters from the location on the map... I'm pretty impressed with myself :) Photo courtesy of moi

The next morning my friend Laisa, texted me asking if I had looked at canvas for our french class yet. I responded no and went to check it. She asked me if I saw "it" yet and even though I didn't see "it" I responded with oh my gosh anyway because I was clearly missing something. She text me back saying "I was sitting there reading it and I was like I wonder if Mrs. Hurner (our teacher) even told Claire". I was sitting there like wait, did she even tell me what? I went back and looked at canvas and it said "Claire is responsible for coordinating this effort". If you were wondering, no she did not tell me this. I got into class and the sub asked me if I was Claire O. I replied and yes and he started going over the lesson with me and I was like hold on what's happening. Apparently I was supposed to help the sub. I honestly tried for the first ten minutes of class, but then I kept getting sassed by these 8th graders, so I gave up. 

That was when I got an email for a geoguesser challenge. So, I accepted. That was a terrible mistake. My teacher tells the sub that I am supposed to help him and I just sat there playing geoguesser all period. It got to a point where there was a big geoguesser challenge going between half the class. This was the point where I officially accepted the fact that geoguesser has ruined my life. 

That is the story of how geoguesser ruined my life. I have the game linked in multiple places including here, so you should really give it a try. Or actually maybe not, just warning you it's addicting. 

- Claire 

Going up

My Roller skis

You remember when I said that Agony Hill was the hardest time trial ever. I stand corrected. This skate roller ski time trial was actually the hardest thing ever. EVER.

Last week, my coach told us that we were doing a skate roller ski time trial on Friday. I didn't think much of it when I first heard about it. Then again when I first heard about it, I didn't actually know what it was like. The next day at training I started asking around to see if anyone on the team had done it before. I knew the kids in my grade hadn't done it yet, so I started by asking the tenth graders. They said they hadn't done it either. Then I asked the 11th graders and they hadn't done it either. I then thought that this was probably a new time trial that he just came up with, but just to be sure I asked the seniors. Only two of the seniors on my team remember doing this... three years ago. One of them said that it was all uphill, 5k long and really hard. The other one told me that it was short and easy.

When Friday finally rolled around I had no idea what to expect. I kept getting mixed responses, some people said it was all uphill and really long and others said it was fairly flat and short. I decided to prepare myself for a mostly uphill, medium length time trial. My team met at a park near the place we were starting. Our coach told us where to go during the time trial or what the course was. I'm 98% sure that he said something along the lines of "Ok, so you're going to go up on this road and then take a right, then the road will curve left, but stay straight and then take a left, a right, and another right"... I did not have the mental capacity to memorize that and surprise, surprise I was going first. Oh well, I guess I was just going to have to go with it.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, GO! And I just began the time trial. I started off on a slight uphill section and started going a little too fast. I thought to myself this isn't too bad. That was because that was the flatest (or most flat) section of the entire course. It got very steep, very quickly. I felt like it was never going to end. Ever. It was so steep and so hard that I couldn't feel my arms anymore and I was only six minutes in. Somehow I kept going and hallelujah I saw my coach. He told me before I started that when I saw him that meant I was almost done. I got a sudden burst of energy and skied really fast (actually I was still going pretty slow, but it felt fast), until he shouted "Nice job, you're almost a third of the way done". I slowed back down to my normal pace and thought "what the heck, you said I would be done when I saw you".

Anyway I kept going up. I just sat there thinking about how I didn't even know it was possible for there to be this much uphill. I thought they were exaggerating when they said it was all uphill. The next time I saw my coach I didn't speed up because I just assumed I wasn't anywhere near finishing. At that point I kind of thought it was just going to go on forever. I was right, I was only about halfway through. I kept skiing (in an immense amount of pain) for another ten minutes until I saw my coach again. As I got closer, I realized that two of my teammates were stopped next to him. That meant one of two things, they either died (meaning injured themselves) or that was the finish. It turned out to be the finish! I used all of my remaining energy to speed up to get to the finish. Once we all finished we piled into the van and drove down to the bottom. It was only 3.5 kilometers, but it was still the hardest 3.5 kilometers of my life. And yes this time trial was even harder than agony hill in my opinion and I wasn't the only one who thought so.

As I was trying to come up with a title for this blog post, I remembered what my blog was called and realized that I probably should have seen an all uphill time trial coming.

Pain Is Only Temporary

Your lungs will be burning, you won't be able to move your legs anymore and you will be dying of heat, but remember that pain is only temporary. That is what I will tell anyone before doing agony hill. Let me start off by saying that agony hill is the hardest time trial we do on my cross-country ski team. It is not a long time trial distance-wise, but it feels like forever. It is only one mile long, but it has over 1,000 feet of elevation gain. When I first heard about this time trial three thoughts came to mind: what the **** is that, do we really have to do that and this is going to suck.

The first time we did this time trial was in June. It was over 90 degrees in Salt Lake. I was sweating before we even started. I was starting first and I didn't know where I was going because I had never done it before. One of my teammates told me not to worry about where to go because I would probably get passed and I could just follow that person. She meant for it to be encouraging, but you could take it either way. I asked her where the finish was and she replied that it was just at the top of that hill *points to the top of the first of four hills*. Another one of the senior girls gave me a pep talk before starting the time trial... Although now that I think of it she might have been giving herself a pep talk and I was just standing near her... She told me or herself "pain is only temporary and it will go away once you reach the top, you can do it". I found that really encouraging and thought of it multiple times during the time trial.

 I don't really remember most of what happened the first time because I have tried really hard suppress that memory. However, I do remember thinking that I was done at the top of the first hill, which was really only about 1/4 of the way to the actual finish. Also, that I was chanting in my head pain is only temporary for the first two minutes, after that I gave up and was cursing the person who came up with this time trial and my coach for making us do this and the girl who told me where the *top* was and pretty much everything else in existence. I also remember how I felt when I finished... my lungs were burning, I couldn't move my legs and I was dying of heat, but my teammate was right in the fact that pain is only temporary. It might be a long temporary, but it still goes away eventually. 

At the end of September my coach informed us that we were going to be doing Agony Hill again on Halloween. Everyone groaned and complained about doing it on Halloween, but at least it wasn’t the day after Halloween (which apparently it was last year). Flash forward to 7:00 am Halloween morning. Before our coach got to the spot where he was supposed to pick us up, we were sitting there talking about how absolutely terrible it was going to be. Also about how we were not going to be able to walk later that night on Halloween. When our coach arrived with the van, we all piled in and drove down to Salt Lake. On the way down there we listened to some interesting music... It was everything from EDM music to Ed Sheeran to Eminem. When we got down there, I was determined to beat my time from last time (26 minutes). I felt more prepared this time because I got a better warm up and actually knew where the top was. I'm not going to bore you with the details of the actual time trial because my thoughts didn't change that much compared to last time. Other than the fact I skipped chanting pain is only temporary and went straight to cursing everything. Once I finished and got over the fact that my lungs were burning, I couldn't move my legs anymore and I was dying of heat (I way overestimated how cold it would be and wore pants), I realized I beat my time from last time by over a minute!

I was proud of myself for improving by so much. My advice for anyone doing this time trial is remember that your lungs are going to be burning, you won't be able to move your legs and you will be dying of heat, but pain is only temporary and the pain will end when you finish (even if it is 24 hours after you finish).

Trust me it's a lot steeper in real life. Photo courtesy of me

- Claire