Blogs : Eric Simmons

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving break could not have come at a better time. Last week, I was pretty much to the point of having some sort of emotional breakdown, which I"m sure would have resulted in the destruction of some valuable property belong to either myself or someone else. Luckily, I made it to Wednesday without snapping.

The main cause of all my problems is my senior thesis proposal. It seems like everytime I feel like I accomplished something, I turn around and the rules have changed somehow. I handed in a rough draft of the proposal last week, and among other minor things that I was aware of, the errors that they told me I made was having outdated sources and that it was too long. Personally, I don't feel sources can be outdated, because the Bible is the oldest book and it's still very relevant to the world to say the last. On the length part, I feel like what they're asking for (2 essays and an annotated bibliography of 10 sources) simply can't be done in 5 pages or less. Add to the fact that it is impossible to get anything from our sorry library and that I have to travel to other campuses to get sources that are at the least remotely related to my topic.

As far as track life is concerned, we've been doing a lot more speed endurance stuff lately. It's all been stuff like 3x600 with 5 mins rest, 3x400 with 3 minutes rest, 8 200s with only a jog between, 6x150s with walkback recovery, 500, 400, 300 with only about 6 minutes rest. One day a week, we mix in some speed work, which usually ends up being 60s, 80s, or 100s, somewhere between 4 and 6 of them. With this stuff, we mix in the usually core work and weight lifting. I was reading through my old journals and looking at some of my old papers this past sunday, and was comparing the things I was doing during this time last year, and I'm much improved over last year. It doesn't take me as long to recover between reps, and I often feel like I have an extra gear that I can shift into (not going to try that just yet and blow my hamstring out). Bottom line is, that these things are positive.

Outside of school and track, my personal life has been nonexistant as usual. This senior thesis is taking up most of my time. As I said before, completing this proposal is the difference between me taking 4 classes next semester and graduating in the summer, or taking one official class, working on my senior thesis, and graduating in May. While all this is going on, I occasionally find the time to sneak in a little sleeping and leisure time, but not very much.

For the rest of Thanksgiving break, I'm just gonna be training hard, eating good, and being engulfed in critical analysis concerning Beowulf. It's not very fun, but it's something that has to be done. The sooner I get this proposal in, the sooner I can get my regular life back and turn my attention to accomplishing a few other very important things.