This year I participated in the Big Game, which is basically getting as many people as possible to run around in a forest with paintball markers. This is Canada’s biggest big game, last year they had 1,500 people and this year it was over 2,200.

I think there are some people in the military that go to this, and some people who just take it way too seriously. I was in the 1% that didn’t wear camouflage, and some people’s camo was 3D so it was designed to look like a pile of leaves. There was at least one person who showed up in a Ghillie Suit, which he apparently had to remove due to the heat. There were a lot of fancy lightweight markers, some of which looked like military replicas, I had to use a rental which was made of steel and was about 15 kg. I noticed a lot of teams from all over the country with their names stitched on their backs and they had radios, which actually would have been handy since I kept losing track of the people I went with.

The worst part about the whole experience was that shortly after I left the house, I noticed the rubber sole of my work boots were deteriorating, but I didn’t realize how badly until I got to the event and saw that I had no sole left at all on my boots; It was clean to the metal. The metal tang was of course slipping on everything so I decided to pull them off, hoping there was at least a thin layer of rubber underneath. No such luck, it was the fabric bottom of the insole showing. Unfortunately I had not brought any backup shoes and wore the boots anyway all day long, feeling every small pebble I stepped on and at the end of the day when I ended up in mud about 5 cm deep it all got inside. By the end of the day the top was nearly coming off and the toe had split like some old cartoon, so I just decided to drive all the way home in sock feet.

• Ghillie Suit
• Paintball
• Wasaga Beach