Monday, January 14, 2013

I Live in Iowa: Week 90


Honestly, not a good week. I feel bad writing that, but not every week can be a good week. And, in the context of bad weeks, this wasn’t that bad. On the other hand, manure makes the flower grow.

For starters I wasted a fair amount of time at work. I spent days trying to pick up an analysis where someone else had started. Days spent spinning my wheels. I’m not happy with myself. However, I did learn some things about connector elements, which is something which is really a big opportunity for me to learn more. I would like to take some time and focus on learning more about connectors, but then again, when do I have free time?

Fortunately, the problem was resolved when I actually started over, from the beginning. I took a very different approach and within an hour started to have results. Never the less, it was mostly an emotionally frustrating week. Another interesting opportunity this week happened when one of our test units came back for an inspection. It is always interesting to see how wear and tear accumulates compared to what we expect. For the most part, our expectations were rather close. To see expectations happen is a pretty rewarding experience.

The week in coaching went really well. Well, more or less it went well. There was at least one unfortunate injury and some sickness still on the team. We also had our first indoor track meet on Saturday. More on that in a minute. Along the lines of the difficult times, a runner on a relay classically over-lived this week. He is going to Spain as we speak, it was his first college meet, and he is working on finding a place to live next year as well as a couple other things. He basically fell apart in the middle of his race and the relay team did not finish. We had a brief chat after and I told him about the same thing I just wrote, he was over-living. It is okay, this happened to our star runner a year and a half ago in cross country. It will happen to more kids. It happened to me a couple times in college. When a person tries to do everything, something has to give and physical ability, like running a race, is an easy thing for the mind and body to decide is optional. Basically a psychosomatic incident.

My own running went somewhat poorly. As I often say, when life is going well, running is going well. Due to the work frustrations and the lingering virus I had that still had me coughing and hacking in the early part of the week, I didn’t get in the quality work that I wanted. However, that is life, and I did run every day, I did run a nice moderate 3 x mile workout Monday evening and I ran a race Saturday. 9:18 for an indoor 3000 meter race, run roughly 3:00, 3:00 and 3:18 for each kilometer. I got out in 3-5th place and we ran 71 for the first 400, 2:24 for the 800, and at the point I decided we were too slow since I was stepping on several people’s heels and I took the lead and ran a few 35s to bring the pace down. However, after five or so laps at about 1800 meters I was slowing down.  The other runners spit me out the back end of the pack and I struggled home full of lactic acid. A race run like an African, with the lead until I can no longer run that pace.

On top of all of this, I was quite sick at the beginning of the week. I was coughing and spitting up phlegm most of the week. My body revolted and I slept 10.5 hours Tuesday night, 10 hours Thursday night, and another nine hours Saturday. I don’t get a solid nine hours as often as I would like and to do that solidly three times this week, was needed. 

Like manure grows flowers difficult times in life seem to lead to better times. Saturday was one of those days. My own race aside, our track team set at least five school records that I know about this past weekend. The men’s and women’s 4x800, the women’s weight, the women’s pole vault, and the women’s 4x400. Some of the other races were also awful close to school records. In part that doesn’t say much about our weak records, but every little barrier is a barrier that we haven’t been through yet. 

Finally, it was an interesting day Saturday in the world of relationships. In one respect it is incredibly interesting to watch my generation redefine relationships. It seems to be unfortunate the ways that we are redefining relationships. I worry about our emotions and wellbeing in the future. On a different note, I was totally sideswiped mentally by a person this week. My expectation was in one place and all of a sudden a few sentences later the relationship was a few levels deeper. Mind boggling.

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