Bulldog Challenge

I don’t post too much about the fact that I live and work on the campus of a military college, but every now and then something strikes me as rather unique about this place.

This morning, for instance, not long after I rolled out of bed to greet the stacks of research papers I’m grading this weekend, the whole house was rattled by a cannon echo. Boom! One gets a bit familiar with these reverberations of detonation here — weekly parades are punctuated by them, as are home football games — but it is rather odd to hear one Saturday morning in Spring.

Even so, I didn’t give it any thought.

Just now, grading papers in the oakshade of our front porch, I began to see a sequence of folks in camoflage running in various states of exhaustion. Many of them were carrying what appear to be sandbags on their shoulders.

This, too, didn’t give me much pause, which I think is a fair description of how odd this place can be.

That said, as I write this I seem to recall that what might be going on is the Bulldog Challenge, a grueling physical race (to survive and finish, I think) that brings folks from around the country to prove themselves here at The Citadel.

Or maybe it’s just Saturday.