HIT THE BRICKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today is Hit the Bricks, one of my all-time favorite days on campus. I have been joking that we ought to call it Hot the Bricks, because it is a steamy 87 degrees.

It is tough to get a really good look at the events from the Quad Cam, because you can really only see people as they are passing in front of the steps of Wait Chapel. But if you think of this picture of Wait Chapel as a clock face, with Wait Chapel being the 12 on the dial, you can see some white tents poking out of the trees around the 2:00, 7:00, and 9:00 marks on the clock.  At the 6:00 mark on the clock face (which you can’t see from the Quad Cam), there is the tent where the walkers/runners have to scan their batons.

To give you a better look at Hit the Bricks, I took a few videos while I was up there. These won’t capture fully the camaraderie, the fun, the music, and the sense of community, but it will give you a couple of peeks into the day.  There are also some pictures at the end of the blog post.

Here’s a 360 degree view of Hit the Bricks from mid-Quad.

If you want to know what it is like to walk a lap, walk it with me. I’d like to tell you that I was just walking this slowly for the sake of video quality, but the truth is I am 47 and it is hot as blue blazes today, so slower was better.  The tents you see in the video are put up by student organizations and offices on campus.  They give runners a place to sit and stay cool, or to give members of the organization a place to congregate to watch.

This is the close up of the scan station. If you are wearing a backpack with sand in it, you get to scan twice.

And this was right after the scan station, so you can see people as they walk or run past. (Ok, it was so I could take a break because my leg was cramping.)

There is other news today besides Hit the Bricks. The following message went out to students about off campus security issues. As with all emails I receive that have gone to students, I post them on the Family News section of our website. You can read it here.

PS – While I won’t be on campus for the silent lap, today I am walking for my P’92 mom, who beat a rare and particularly gnarly form of cancer, for my young niece who has a [thankfully high cure rate] form of cancer now, for one of my Wake friends from college who had to beat his while still in high school, and for my former colleague Chip Patterson, who passed away in November 2015 but is missed in Alumni Hall every day. Congrats to my colleagues who ran their butts off for our ‘Chip On Our Shoulders’ team 🙂