Science Olympiad. So much damn work, so much fun. Four friends and I started an initiative to cover every event we could, and not many people complied. The five of us averaged 5 events throughout the 6-hour competition, with each event taking 50 minutes. I sprinted across the entire campus of the host college dozens of times, but in the end we made it through alive. So alive that we qualified for the State level competition. My team hasn't done so in more than a decade, and I'm proud to say that I led the team in points-scoring. I got...
1st place in Technical Problem Solving - This is actually an event I won last year, making me the first person to win this one more than one year in a row. It consists of rapidly doing 5 experiments as quickly and accurately as possible. Thirty minutes, 100% accuracy. Easiest of the day.
1st place in Dynamic Planet - Oh hot damn this one's my favorite. I got second in this last year, but they changed the theme from 'geology' to 'water'. The event sheet recommended that you bring 6-7 pages of notes, a graphing calculator, and three partners to help do the test. I heard about the event halfway through my lunch break and volunteered just so that our team wouldn't completely forfeit it. I walked in alone with no paper, no calculator, and no idea what the theme was. I walked out with a gold medal.
2nd place in Sounds of Music - A friend of mine that was actually signed up for this one had to drop out at the last minute, and yesterday I was tasked with replacing him. In 24 hours I created a perfectly tuned PVC-gutter xylophone that could play an entire G major scale. I learned both pieces of music ten minutes before the competition, and ended up losing only to the team that spent $250 on buying fancy wood blocks to use for their percussion instrument.
5th in Ornithology - I volunteered for this one just so that we could get the score for last place instead of the score for forfeiture. I didn't even have a field guide, but I did so well (alone) on the anatomy section that I actually beat three full teams that had field guides. No medal, but points nonetheless.