Running in Place...Sorta

   When my dad taught and coached at a small high school in Oklahoma City, they didn't have a very big budget for things, and he decided to get creative with what he had.  A previous blog post mentioned the sports drink experiment, which didn't go over very well with my sister and me.  But sometimes his inventions were brilliant and successful.

   One time, after a trip to an Army surplus store, he came home with some thick stretchy rope (I don't know if it was called "bungee cord" then, but it seemed to be at least a half inch thick), and a bunch of wide straps.  He fashioned a harness out of the straps and attached it to the cord, then fashioned the whole rig to our swing set in our back yard.

   Our swing set wasn't one of those thin metal things you buy at Wal Mart.  I'm not sure that it was originally intended to be a swing set but the owner of the house before we lived there.  This thing was made of thick heavy pipe and was essentially two pipes about ten feet long embedded in the ground with concrete, with a thick pipe as a connecting piece at the top - the connections being large metal L-joints.  This thing was sturdy.  I wouldn't be surprised if the people who owned the house previously had hooked a pulley to the top and used it to hoist a motor out of a car.  That's how sturdy it was.

  The neighborhood guinea pigs (my sister, my friend Doug, and me, plus any other kids we could round up) took turns getting into the harness and stretching the bungee rope out, then we were instructed to keep low and run as hard as we could.  This contraption worked great!  We would run as hard as we could, trying to stretch the rope as far as it would go.
   It was an exhausting workout.  My dad would have us "run" for 30 seconds to a minute.  When time was up, he told us to keep leaning forward and back up slowly.  Good advice that, of course, we didn't all follow the first time. 
   We found out what happened if you stood up straight - you got pulled backwards and inevitably into a tumble of kid, harness and bungee rope.  We found out what happened if you decided to sit down instead of back up - sliding rapidly backwards on your rear (if you were lucky) until the rope slacked.
   This invention of my dad was pretty awesome for working the legs, and for improving coordination and agility.  He took two of these harnesses up to the school where he coached.  He would hook them up to the goal post and have his players go out in a V so they wouldn't be too close together.  I think for "fun" he sometimes hooked the harness/rope things together and have his players do a one-on-one tug-of-war.
   Yeah, this was one of his more successful inventions.  I know that since then there have been things like this on the market, but as far as I know (because I was a kid at the time), his was the first.
   My dad is awesome!