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

Friday, August 08, 2008

For this blog I decided to hi-jack the term the Packers and Favre have been using all week. I have to say that I'm really glad that the situation there is resolved so that I can here about something, anything else on SportsCenter. So, moving forward, here's what's going on here:

Cycling: Last weekend was the Elberton race and it was a tough weekend for me. For the second time in a row, I flatted during the TTT. This time it seems like my tube just failed. I've decided that for my 20 mm tires, I'm going to go with heavier duty tubes to see if I can lower the incidence rate on flats. Still the team ended up winning the state championship on the work of Bill and Ron so I can be proud to be a part of that. I died in the crit and then worked for the team in the road race. My teammate Robert "DHo" Jordan got away in a break to Ron and I sat on the front and kept tempo. An unexpected benefit of racing with my power meter was that I knew Robert could hold 300 watts for about an hour so I rode at 250. It allowed the break to get four minutes and stay away. More interesting to me was the number of people just riding at that level put into trouble. We killed about half the field just riding tempo on the front and only once did anyone try to force the pace. We just sat on their wheels until they cracked (which wasn't very long) and then got back on the front. For all my work, I got dropped from the main field about 4 miles from the end of the race and ended up finishing about 15th. Not the weekend I have hoped for but it is what it is.

School: We start back on Monday for faculty back week. I can't really decide where I'm at with things attitudewise. I want to be fired up and I have a lower work load this semester but I'm just not quite feeling it. Still, this week I've managed to get some extra work done to get ready for classes including setting up to try a news teaching strategy to hopefully get students to look more closely at some of the misconceptions inherent in the physics they do. I'm kind of excited about that and I'm hoping it goes really well. I'd like to give a paper on the practice at a Georgia Academy of Sciences meeting early next year if it seems to work.

Weather: God it's been hot. That's part of what made this last weekend's racing so hard. Heat levels well over 100 degrees on both Saturday's crit and at the end of Sunday's road race. That combined with a Tuesday Night Word's ride that was over 100 degrees and I've been wrung out all week. That's probably part of the reason I'm feeling ambivalent about school starting I'm sure but I've done almost no good training this week due to my legs feeling so empty. Hopefully it'll break this weekend and I'll be able to do some riding in the morning.

More Later. Thanks for Reading.

Grace and Peace.

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