Obstacle or “Confidence” courses can be and endless source of fun. You encounter things there that are rarely like any obstacle that you run across in real life. No organization is immune to this; picture the endless AL-Quaeda and ISIL videos that show their own recruits doing monkey bars  or running through short sections of pipes. It’s as if the people who come up with training get all their ideas from playing Tomb Raider or Super Mario all day. In all my years in the Army I never carried out an attack via monkey bars, nor do I know of any attacks that were foiled because of them.

Of course, Drill Sergeants and other instructors will say that it’s not necessarily the point; the idea is to give you “something” to overcome. And indeed, some of the obstacles we encountered were actually useful in combat– like lifting a fully-laden fellow soldier over a high, flat wall, then having that high-perches soldier help up the next person, and so on. That actually was applicable in Baghdad, for example. But the weird net-ladder thing that was loosely anchored? Kind of like the net-ladders that were used for troops to climb into landing boats, clinging to the sides of ships pitching in the high seas, preparing for a beach landing? No way– you know if anyone ever even came up with something like that in real life, climbing on it for unit training would be nixed as “unsafe”.

Just thinking about it means you have to wear a reflective PT belt for the rest of the day.