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

Monday, July 03, 2006

I thought I'd post on something different this morning. I've been back on the bike for the last couple of days. I've done a couple of hours each day since Saturday and that's been good. I've been trying to do the CTS "Do the Tour, Stay at Home" series which meant I did a TT prologue on Saturday. It was a ten minute all out effort and I did suffer. I haven't felt like puking in a while and I did for about the last two minutes of the effort. The sad thing was that my heart rate was only 172/173. I guess two weeks off really does take something out of your legs. Imagine that. Sunday was a more relaxed base miles ride with a set of high cadence intervals and one legged pedaling sets. My legs definitely felt the effort from the previous day but I got through things. Today I'd like to do some TT bike work I think as well as whatever CTS has me do. Of course, the CTS website seems to be down struggling so I might have to make it up for today.

The temps here in Georgia have turned scorching yet again. We'll be over 100 again today in terms of heat index. We may even hit that temp on the pavement or more. Makes for rather yucky afternoons. I think I may take the opportunity for a long nap. The nice thing about teaching an online course is that I have a lot of flexibility with my schedule. I have a bunch of work to do for that course as well as another that'll start in a week but it's mostly prep stuff and grading. The thing that's hard about teaching online to freshmen and sophomores is that they just seem to be incapable of doing the math about the amount of time they need to spent. Normally, my ASTR1020 course would meet for 20 hours per week during a summer session and then there'd be the time to spend on homework and preparation. Because we don't meet, the students think that all they have to do is put in the homework time. A lot of them were confused about a somewhat difficult concept, spectra, but part of their confusion is that they didn't put in enough time. Part of the problem is that most of them have absolutely no idea on how to actually teach themselves anything. Maybe that's the most important thing we teach in the first two years.

Well, I need to get on the bike and on with the day. More tonight after stage 2 is over. A break got away but it didn't contain any of the guys I expected. Go figure.

By the way, OLN did a top ten signs you've got "Tour Fever". I had about 6. More disturbingly, they don't change when the Tour isn't on. My favorite: you're legs are smoother than Uncle Fester's head. I guess I should go see my health care professional. Of course, he'd just tell me to stop breaking things.

Thanks for reading.

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