On she went, obstacle by obstacle, like Griffin had taught her, pacing herself and resting her upper body whenever she could. About halfway through the course, at the rope bridge, she passed the loudmouth, who was sucking wind now. Her balance was excellent, and she moved quickly across the single walking rope, using the two handhold ropes for balance.

Time for the tower of terror. To climb its four platforms each stacked about seven feet apart, a person turned with their back to the platform overhead, reached up and grabbed the edge, and then kicked their feet up hard, doing a 270-degree flip and landing on their stomach flat on the floor of the next level.

Lily, a gymnast, had gone up this thing like a monkey. She’d worked with Sherri to teach her how to throw her hips out and then up, making the maneuver more about momentum and less about brute strength.

Reach. Pull. Kick. Flop.

Reach. Pull. Kick. Flop.

One more time, and she was some thirty feet up on the top level. Time to shimmy down the long rope slanting away from the tower. She lay on top of it on her belly, letting her right knee hang down but hooking her right foot over the rope behind her for balance. She started pulling herself hand over hand down the long slope, letting gravity do much of the work. She was dismayed to see Grundy leering up at her from the bottom of her rope. He reached out, grabbed it, and gave it a hard shake.

Sure enough, she flipped underneath the damned rope, hanging by her ankles and hands.

Jerk.

She let go with her feet, swung her feet up and over the rope again, and laboriously reset herself on her belly on top of the rope before continuing down. It cost her a lot of time, but this way her arms would get the absolutely necessary break they needed.

“You’re slowing down my course!” an instructor yelled up at her. No way had the guy missed Grundy’s stunt.

She saved her breath and merely continued downward doggedly. She finished the rest of the course without incident and slogged through the sand to cross the finish line in just under nine minutes. Off her best time by nearly a minute. But nine minutes was the cutoff to pass the evaluation today.

As the other guys got more familiar with the course, their times would come down, and she would fall out of the middle of the pack into the bottom quarter with a time like today’s.

“Problem out there, Tate?” one of the senior instructors strolled over to ask her as she caught her breath.

“No, Chief.”

The guy looked surprised. He must’ve expected her to whine about Grundy shaking her off the rope. If Griffin had told her once, he’d told her a hundred times, SEAL training wasn’t fair.