Air Assault School: The "O" Course

The Obstacle Course (or "O" course) is the first thing you do at Air Assault School. Well, actually it's not at Air Assault School because the O course is Day Zero and Air Assault officially begins on Day One.

The O Course is pretty grueling. There are 9 obstacles altogether, 2 of which are mandatory. The first mandatory obstacle is the "Tough One" (seen right.) which consists of a rope climb, walking across wooden planks, climbing up a log ladder and then climbing down a cargo net. This one is non-negotiable. You have to pass this or you go home. Learn how to climb a rope before you go or you're wasting your time. Also, if you just man your way up the rope using upper body strength, learn proper rope climbing technique with your legs. You will be smoked before the obstacles so you can't just use raw stength.

Now, my experience at Air Assault varies with one of my friends who went the year prior. I had the Warrior Training Center conduct my school and my friend had the 101st Airborne conduct his. During the O Course for the 101st, he had to say "Air Assault!" everytime his left foot hit the ground. When I was there, we didn't have to do that. We just got smoked in between obstacles.

"Alright Air Assault, good job on the Tough One, now bear crawl over to the Weaver." After the weaver it was "Now do the Steam Engine all the way to the Confidence Climb" and so on and so forth.

The other mandatory obstacle is the Confidence Climb. Basically, it's a 60 foot ladder that you have to stretch your entire body to climb each rung. It wasn't that difficult for me since I'm not afraid of heights, but if you are, perhaps Air Assault really isn't the place for you to be. When you rappel out of that UH-60, you will be 100 feet up in the air with nothing to break your fall except your face.

Aside from that there are some pretty standard obstacles, like a low crawl through a mud pit and a horizontal log jump (jump over each log without touching it with your legs), but the toughest non-mandatory obstacle is the Weaver. (pictured below)

You have to weave your body under one log and then over the other in succession.

You're only allowed to fail one non-mandatory obstacle, but try not to fail any at all.

After the O Course, you're drenched in sweat, mud and victory but you're going to need to complete an 18 minute 2 miler afterwards. The faster you finish the O Course the more time you have in between the run and the time you finished.

18 minutes doesn't seem like much, but you will be smoked so it's going to suck a lot harder than you think, but still, if you can pass an APFT there is no way you should fail it.