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

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Things are busy here...very busy. Between faculty teaching responsibilities, faculty leadership commitments, being a club advisor/campus minister and training for the new season set to start in just a few days I've been nearly overwhelmed for the last two weeks. For the most part, things have been good but I could definitely use a little more rest than I've been getting.

My classes this semester are really pretty good. You always have a couple of students who aren't doing well but this semester's groups have been really good. My drop, withdraw, fail rate right now is well below the typical 25% mark for the fist time in over a year. I'm feeling pretty good about a couple of small curricular changes that I've made and I'm contemplating a couple of others.

Training seems like it's really up and down. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I keep comparing my progress to last year which isn't a good idea. I was flying at this time last year because I didn't really take my typical October/November break and so I really blew up during the summer. This year I've taken the break and so I'm well behind in terms of fitness from last year. The good thing is that I won't be exhausted and burned out by June and so I'll have a better season. Still, when I go to do hill repeats and I such badly, it's hard to remember that. I am racking up lots of miles: 1150 in January and 480 so far this month which is really good.

Our new dogs (they seem too big to be puppies anymore) are going through the ups and downs for growing into our pack. One day their great and the next they're chewing the belt on my rollers in half. It's more frustrating in a way because you actually know that they can be good but they sometimes don't seem to want to be good. One of them, when he gets bored, chews on everything he can find. The other just randomly barks at stuff: bones, the other dogs, the wall, the TV, the floor, his feet, whatever. It gets old after about a half an hour of trying to relax to some mindless TV that you can't hear most of because he barks in all the soft-spoken bits. Maybe that's why they're so cute. If they weren't I think I would've made soup and mittens out of them.

Anyways, thanks for reading.

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