#95: Running around the lakes (and other places)

Probably the most athletic students in the country (aside from the military academies), Notre Dame Students love to exercise.  While they certainly love playing basketball (see #76), football, and dodgeball, lifting weights in The Rock or Rolfs, and taking yoga classes, by far the most popular form of exercise for Notre Dame Students is running. 

Notre Dame Students are constantly running in different places across campus.  They run on treadmills in their dorms and at The Rock.  They run loops through the quads and fields around campus.  They run on elliptical machines in Rolfs while watching TV and reading People Magazine.  They run the roads to and through Saint Mary’s.  However, most often students run around the two lakes on campus.

Running around the lakes is the single most common form of exercise amongst Notre Dame Students.  They love to make the two-mile figure-eight around the lakes so that they can see all of the sites such as The Grotto (see #61), the reverse side of the Dome, and (of course) Carroll Hall.  Sometimes through treacherous patches of mud that destroy their pristinely clean running shoes, Notre Dame Students will run hundreds (and sometimes even thousands) of miles around these lakes over the course of their time at school; with the lakes always looking the same and the route never really becoming repetitive to Notre Dame Students.

While running is partially about exercise for Notre Dame Students, it also has other advantages.  Though Notre Dame Students like to be seen running so that they can show everybody how athletic they are, oftentimes their running is not very athletic.  If they are running inside, they will make sure to spend more time chatting with friends they meet than they do actually running. 

When they are running around the lakes, they will oftentimes make their running into a date and jog alongside their long-term relationship partner while neither really breaks a sweat (see #99).  Despite the fact that running has all of these great advantages for Notre Dame Students, they will still need to have a more concrete reason to justify all of their running and working out, and they find this purpose via charity runs. 

Charity runs like the Mara Fox Run, Finish on the 50, and the Holy Half Marathon give students the justification for working out while also making them feel better about themselves by raising money for charity (and they usually get t-shirts for running them, see #35).  These service-oriented students want to do good for the world, and these events give them a chance to put their running to a good use. 

Furthermore, in running these events, Notre Dame Students get even more excited about running and invariably start talking about how they are going to run a marathon.  Notre Dame Students love talking about running marathons because it shows their friends how much more running they are doing, and it also shows how dedicated they are to working out and raising money for charity (because Notre Dame Students prefer running marathons for charity).  However, in the end most Notre Dame Students will eschew running marathons for leisurely runs around the lakes.

#82: Thinking of Bookstore Basketball Team Names

One of the highlights of the spring semester for Notre Dame Students is the beginning of the traditional Bookstore Basketball tournament.  The single-elimination tournament is a massive affair that features roughly 700 teams playing in what the organizers claim to be the “World’s Largest 5-on-5 Outdoor Basketball Tournament” (how they can make this claim is anybody’s guess).

Because Notre Dame Students love basketball (see #76); all Notre Dame Students love Bookstore, and they love forming teams for various skill levels.  Some serious players form teams made up of the best ballers on campus (and one or two varsity Football players) in an attempt to win the tournament.  These teams will stage practices in the months leading up to the tournament, and will be ready when game-time comes.

Other teams use the tournament as a chance to do something that is SO college (see #11), and cause a malt-liquor induced ruckus while wearing spandex, clanging threes off the backboard, and coming dangerously close to sexual harassment complaints from any female opponents.  Frequently, these players will complete a halftime “boot and rally” to the delight of their ridiculously large crowds of followers, and they oftentimes have a secret stash of Keystone Light at the courts for shotgunning purposes.

Still other teams will be made up of casual basketball players that simply want to win a game or two.  These teams will be disappointed when they have to play the elite teams and they will be frustrated when they have to play the drunkard teams.  While each of these categories of teams might have different objectives on the day of their game; the one aspect of Bookstore Basketball that all teams take seriously is the naming of their team.

All Bookstore Basketball players have an innate desire to think of a clever team name that references current events and controversies while causing people that hear the name to laugh out loud.  It’s one thing to have a name that mentions Tiger “Long off the Tee” Woods or Rihanna’s lack of defense against Chris Brown, but it is a much more difficult task to make a team name stand out when 700 other teams are trying to do the same thing.

Making matters even more difficult is the fact that the tournament is run under the insanely arbitrary rules imposed by a Notre Dame Administration that takes offense to anything tangentially related to drugs, sex, alcohol, violence, or fun.  These Orwellian administrators (and their Bookstore commissioner agents) take a chainsaw to the list of team names every year and censor anything and everything that could possibly offend (except, strangely, violence against women, see #71).

Because of this, some students attempt to choose names that are clever enough and clean enough to get around the censors, while other teams just aim to make their team name a funny joke that spreads around campus like gossip.  Either way, the objective is the same: Notre Dame Students have an innate desire to show each other how smart, funny, and clever they are; and a hilarious bookstore name is the best way to achieve this goal.

#76: Any Type of Basketball that is not watching the Notre Dame Men’s Team

Notre Dame Students have a reputation (at least amongst themselves) for being incredibly athletic.  They enjoy playing intramural sports regularly, and staying in shape by working out and running constantly.  Of all the sports and activities that they like, however, basketball is the most predominant across campus.

Throughout the winter many Notre Dame Students actively participate in pick-up basketball games at The Rock or Rolfs.  Some students spend an amazing number of hours ‘balling’ in these places and sharpening their game in an attempt to get to the round of 32 in the Bookstore Tournament.  When springtime comes, nearly every student participates on a bookstore basketball team on some level.  While the serious players and teams (that usually include varsity Football players) compete to win, other players take it as an opportunity to drink during the day and engage in wild and raucous behavior (see #11).

Despite many Notre Dame Students love for playing basketball, they oddly do not enjoy supporting the Notre Dame Men’s Basketball team as much as would be expected.  The Leprechaun Legion student section is usually far from full (see picture) and it is rarely difficult to find tickets to basketball games on short notice.  The students that do go to games oftentimes come late and leave early and would rather sit down and relax than make enough noise to discomfort the opposing team (except, or course, those that live in Keough Hall).

What is even stranger about the inconsistent enthusiasm for Mike Brey’s team is that many Notre Dame Students are actually huge fans of college basketball.  Throughout the winter months, plenty of games can be seen on televisions in dorms and apartments and most students continue the great American pastime of entering into March Madness pools.  Some Notre Dame Students even remain fervent fans of teams from their home states like Louisville or Kansas even when the Irish are playing well.

Overall, most students at Notre Dame love basketball.  They love playing the sport and they love watching the sport, but when it comes to enthusiastically attending games in the Joyce Center Purcell Pavilion, most students have trouble mustering the energy to put forth the effort.