To the river and back.

2003-06-23 at 5:49 p.m.

I crossed the twenty mile barrier today. I went twenty five miles. In about two hours, so no great pace-setting, but I did take a super-long break in there to have a Chocalate Malt Frappuchino Ice Blenderino or whatever they call them. So basically I took in all the calories I burnt off, but them's the breaks. I was hot, sweaty, stinky, and hot, so the when I saw the poster with the sweet chocolaty whippity goodness, I couldn't pass it up.

But in other news--my first day of classes was today! Yee ha! And I think I'm going to really groove on it. I even have homework, and as a sign of my enduring dork-itude, I'm excited about that too, Lord love a duck.

I'm doing this so I can apply to be an advanced-math teacher, and so when I met with a professor at PSU, she looked at my math curriculum from college and established I needed another math class. (Friends from college who remember what a Queen High Math Geek I was then are still astonished and amused that I need to take another math class, but in my heart of hearts, I wasn't surprised. There were whole areas of math that I avoided, so frankly, I deserved to be caught. Non-mathies might understand this better--it'd be like being a history major and having never studied any ancient culture. You are still a history major and could write fascinating papers about women's contributions in seventeenth century Germany, but all you know about ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt or China is what you studied in high school. But if you want to teach it? You probably should have some deeper knowledge than what you studied when you were sixteen.)

Anyway, my geometry class could be pretty cool. I believe that about 80% of the class is (are?) teachers-to-be, and I really liked the folks I was in class with. I felt bad, though, because I biked in this morning and girl, I was sweaty when I got there. Memo to self: bring change of shirt so as not to offend neighbors. There is much groupwork in this class, and I don't want to be Stinky McSweaty.

And then directly after that--I have ten minutes to scoot over to my intro to Psych class about four blocks away. This class is two hours a day, four days a week, for four weeks. Normally this class is ten weeks long. And can I say? Thank the good LORD I am taking this summer term when the schedule is slightly accelerated? Today we learned about "The Scientific Method." If this took more than one day, I was going to gouge my eye out with a hi-liter. I can't imagine this class going any SLOWER.

But the ride to class in the morning (besides being ass-early) is super easy. Fifteen minutes, bam. 3 3/4 miles one way. And a couple hills, which is good in the training sense. And then home. It felt good. And looking at the parking situation, I'm thinking it's WAY easier to bike there than to drive. I could take a bus, but that ten minutes between classes made me grateful for my bike.

So I got home today and started my homework and prompty fell asleep.

Whoops.

I woke up at 3:30 and decided to go out for a Big Ride like I'd been meaning to all weekend but I kept going for small errand runs instead. Today I biked north until I hit the Columbia River. There's an absolutely stunning bike path that goes along the river--I only passed one or two bikers going the other direction, so mostly it was me and my thoughts along the river. Very serene. A couple vignettes made me really wish I could paint or something--just to capture the solitude and serenity so I could take it home with me.

Only a couple hitches to my ride--I think I've detected the source of my chafed ass last year--these shorts I'm wearing SUCK. I'm fairly certain these are the culprit. Bike shorts are expensive because there's this nice cushy pad for all the delicate bits and theoretically, the seams are placed in such a way so that you aren't sitting on anything that'll chafe in a place where chafing is very very bad. Down side is that bike shorts are pricey, so when I found this pair on sale, even though they're "men's" shorts, I grabbed 'em. Now I'm thinking, not so much a good deal. Hmmm. I'll have to do my next 25-miler in my other shorts to test this hypothesis. If my ass is chafe-free, then I'll know it's these shorts, and I'll give them to Andrew (hee).

Oh, and I made my donation goal! Thank you thank you thank you, everyone and anyone who helped! You guys are ALL angels!

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