Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, January 06, 2006

Wow...long time no post. Lots to talk about but not too much of great importance. I'll probably break it up over a couple of posts if I can motivate myself to get it done.

Cycling: Last month was a good training month. Over 1300 miles and almost 60 hours with a strong average. Got a lot of good efforts in at the tempo riding level. It felt good to go harder than I did in Base 1. Near the end of the month I swapped my 39 front ring for a 42. When I first started riding I had a triple front ring with a 30/42/52 set on the front and got to pushing the 42 around a lot. I think that's what made me a good time trialist so when I upgraded to a double ring set for racing I kept the 42 and paired it with a 53. Anyways, about 14 months ago I was going to do the Six Gap Century and swapped the 42 for a standard 39 small ring for the climbs. All last year I rode with that and never really felt like I had the punch I wanted so I swapped back. It's made a huge difference. I feel so much better riding right now. I'm guessing that since I first started riding hard with a lot of time on the 42 my body got used to the gear ratios and efforts. This month is Base 3 which means I get to start climbing now. Lots of 4-6% grades while staying seated. I don't get to do uphill attack intervals until next month but I'm glad to be able to push my heart rate up to LT again.

Health: As a matter of fact, on my last climbing interval set I got caught in the rain and got chilled doing some descending. So now I have a really annoying cold. I'm managing the symptoms but I hate how I feel. I've taken two days off the bike and the symptom remedies mess up my sleep cycles so I'm struggling. I'm going to spend a little time on the rollers tonight while I watch NUMB3RS (you had to know I'd be geek enough to think that the show's cool, even if the professor type knows just a little bit too much about too many fields of mathematics) to see if I can break the pattern.

School: We start back again this coming Monday. I'm not ready; at least not mentally. I'm still tired and a bit cynical from last semester so I'm not really enthused about being back in the classroom. For the first time ever, I feel like there are more important things than teaching students in the classroom environment. This isn't to say I don't want to teach but I think I'm beginning to lean more towards the mentoring/coaching side of things. I'm really tired of trying to reach students who don't seem to care. I wonder how much of this has to do with getting close to my 40th birthday. More on that later I think. I like the idea of working in people's lives on a personal, one-on-one level right now. I want to partner with people to help them reach their goals. It's been kind of odd that over the break I got several emails from former students saying thanks for how much I helped them. It has been very encouraging but it also makes me resent the time I have to spend with students who just can't seem to be bothered to take an interest in their own lives. I find myself much more interested in being an academic advisor than I do in being a professor sometimes. Some of this has to do with being energized by someone else's enthusiasm and the fact that for a lot of the students I taught last semester, that enthusiasm was completely lacking. Part of me wants to contact someone like Franklin/Covey to see if they're hiring but the other part of me sees that what I do in a setting like this is really, really important. I was going to retire as a college professor after 20 years and go teach high school. With the way high schools are right now I think I'd rather go and work with the Covey people as a second career. I know that I'd have a lot to offer a company like that with the diverse skills, talents and life experiences I have.

Anyways, that's enough for now. More soon on MTB race series, thoughts as I approach mid-life and New Year's resolutions.

Thanks for Reading.

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