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

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Not too many people read my posts here too often due to most of them having facebook and seeing my notes there but I thought I'd write something for both sites.

Finals week is upon us here at the College and the students are in their usual scramble to get things done, study like mad and pass all of their classes. While I don't teach freshmen any more, my colleagues who do tell me it's been a rough semester. Our 18% enrollment increase hasn't been a completely good thing. It has meant that we've avoided layoffs and more serious cutbacks (due to increases in tuition revenue) but it seems pretty clear than many of the students in this surge are woefully unprepared for college and unwilling to exert any substantial effort to learn. I'll probably write more here in a few days on the topic but it's been a big issue for us here as I expect it has been for many of the access institutions in the state.

I'm back into the training swing of things. I've already got six weeks of work in the legs. It's hard to lose the fitness but I know I'll build to a higher peak next year. What makes it even harder is this is the first year I've really had good season over season power data (last year my PowerTap died until almost February). Seeing where I was at at the end of the season with an FTP of 310 and seeing where I'm at now with an FTP of 275-280 is pretty hard to take. I have to adjust my riding zone which has taken some doing. The focus this early season has been working on my short term power. I'm already way ahead of where I was last April and I did some short VO2Max intervals earlier this week that were really surprising in terms of how high they were. The longer term power will come around and the shorter interval numbers are very encouraging. The hardest thing has been the weather. It looks like we're on track for one of the wettest winters in recent memory here in Georgia so it means a lot of indoor time on the trainer. It's been hard to stay motivated to do long efforts at lower wattages but I need to get the miles in.

I just finished Brain McLaren's book, "Finding Our Way Again" which discusses the renewal of using ancient practices of spiritual disciplines in the life of the Christian. The book was very much of an overview so there wasn't as much specific discussion as I would have liked but I really liked his discussion of the intertwined ideas of katharsis, fotosis and theosis. I'm pretty familiar with the idea of theosis and katharsis is something I've looked at under other names but the inclusion of the practice of fotosis was new to me as was the practice of integrating them together. I'm very intrigued by the thought of intentionally including all three into my life in this integrated way and will likely build my Lenten fast and practice around such themes (strange to be thinking about Lent during Advent but I like to plan ahead sometimes). I may also work to create a series of events and activities for our GCF community to participate in together from this.

Finally, I've been giving a lot of thought to things in the sports world of late. I'll write a bit more about that soon but I'm disappointed in all of the local negative reaction to Tim Tebow's emotionalism in the SEC title game.

So with that I'll sin off for now.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |