Mrs. Orend is a gym teacher here at Seneca Valley, and while some people do sports such as football and basketball, she has her own sport.

While Mrs. Orend’s sport would still be considered a team sport, it is vastly unlike the other sports in this category. She participates in OCR, otherwise known as Obstacle Course Racing, which would be considered an extreme sport. It utilizes running, swimming, and strength-based movements, using both natural and man-made obstacles to create the course. Their distances vary in range, but the normal distance stands between six to nine miles. However, this is all based off the location of the race, and the conditions that it takes place in.

Mrs. Orend started training in 2011, and she’s been training since then. She didn’t have a training coach at the beginning, but seeing as she’s a gym teacher, she was able to train herself. She got involved in CrossFit to help with it, but eventually she got her own coach. While it would be considered much more difficult than usual sports, she stated that the consistent uncertainty of what’s next kept her going in the sport.

Her most recent competition was actually a world championship held in Belgium, in which over 150 countries competed. Both a USA Women’s and a USA Men’s team competed, but they did not score too well. “It really put how good our team is into perspective,” says Mrs. Orend. Overall, the women’s team scored better than the men’s, though it just shows how much more they have to prove. After all, the achievement of coming out on top wouldn’t be as sweet if you got it first try.