Blogs : Eric Simmons

The south doesn't see snow very often, and they go insane when they do.

After the first meet of the season, the coaches decided that we need to go back to some conditioning type stuff as some people were not in the level of conditioning that they wanted to see. Last monday, I did a 3 mile fartlek run in about 21 minutes or so on the treadmill (we were supposed to have the day off but I felt the need to run the 8 hour van ride off) and I hit the weights pretty hard. On tuesday, we did stadium steps. We start at the track starting line, run the curve, do 5 reps, go straight into the other curve, run 5 reps. We did 2 sets of those. On Wednesday, we did 8 200s with 2 min rest. My times were 28, 27, 27, 26, 27, 26 26 27. On Thursday, we did blocks and some 100s and Friday we did hills and weights. I also lifted legs on Wednesday and Friday and upper body on Tuesday and Thursday.

On Saturday, our team had to get up at 7 a.m. to work the Freedom Run road race that our coach organizes on campus. When I started up my car that morning, the display told me that it was 29 degrees. Nevertheless, the race had pretty good numbers and a fair share of people who ran in shorts or very little clothing who probably have some sort of sickness (pneumonia?) at this current time. I worked the clock at this finish line because my seniority allowed me to get a job where I could sit in the gym for a while and emerge for about 15 minutes to work, and I still managed to lose feelings in my thumb from having to push that button to record the times of everyone who finished. The thought crossed my mind that while I was getting up to stand outside in the freezing cold, there were others who had another 4 hours of sleep to get. Better yet, there were others who were waking up to begin a day of competing in the sport all of us on here love oh so much. Needless to say, I was not in a very good mood.

As I was leaving the road race, it began to snow. This made me angry because, number 1, people in the South go absolutely crazy when it snows. The driving becomes 10x worse, all the canned foods, bread, and water disappear from the shelves, gas prices go up, and the crime rate skyrockets (not really, but I typed that to exaggerate to get the full effect of the shenanigans that take place). Anyway, on to number 2, I realized it would be too cold and the roads would freeze over, meaning that my weekend was rendered null and void. I went home and realized I had no sort of breakfast food, which meant that I had to go to Kroger. I got to Kroger, and looked inside to find that there was not one shopping cart or basket. The polite lady at the door who looked nearly frozen told me that I could wait around for about 10 minutes before I could get anything to put my groceries in. I decided to enter the store and just carry a few breakfast items to the register but I saw that the lines were so far back that they extended to the ends of aisles, an in some cases all the way back to the meat section. Needless to say I left the store and went to Wal-Mart, which surprisingly was normal. I got back to my apartment around noon and did not leave it until Monday.

To start off this week, we did 5x300s in 40 the blazing temperature of 33 degrees.  We only got 4 minutes rest between reps. I ran 41.0 (Don't know how), 38.8, 40.1, 39.7, and 40.4. The air was dry as hell and cold and after practice the track looked like a deserted backfield littered with people who were moaning and wondering aloud why they ever decided to run track in the first place.

In looking forward to the remainder of the week, we are supposed to see the temperatures warm up a bit towards thursday and friday, which hopefully means we can get some quality training in. Other than that, I'll be getting some reading and research done for my Beowulf thesis which I probably should be getting serious about sometime soon, and getting ready for my next meet, which is the Indiana Relays on Feb. 2nd. Speaking of that weekend, the Patriots are going to bust the Giants up, so I look forward to seeing that.