Into the thick of it

Wow, class is going to be intense! Two sessions in and the reading assignments are quite extensive. The topic of the class is Shakespeare for Teachers, which is a very useful topic. The professor is less of a jackass than my first impression of him might have given but it's still early. The idea is to give us useful ways to teach the Bard in our own classrooms. Most of my classmates are already teachers so we'll see if that serves as any sort of disadvantage as we proceed. Anyhow, reading is eating up almost all of my time, especially on the days between the Tuesday and Thursday afternoon class. On the upside, this is looking like one of the classes that will prove most valuable when I begin teaching as many of the things we'll do will be directly portable to my class. And I'm getting to read a few plays I've not read before, I am enjoying that so far. Death to the boring linguistics classes, bring on the literature!

Also this weekend, I decided I wasn't hot enough in this scorching weather so I decided to run in a 5k in my town's summer festival. It was not as early as I would have liked, starting at 8:30 am. It was flipping humid so I fully expected it to be a tough go. I was planning to try and beat the 10 minute mile mark, which is essentially what I ran in my race earlier this spring. Instead of fighting 18,000+ runners, this one was only 448 people strong.

I set off and did my first mile way too fast, clocking at about 9:23. I decided I needed to slow it down a little so I didn't find myself dying in the last half of the race. I was able to find some people to keep pace with, which was very helpful. That stretch from 1.5 to 2 miles seemed to take forever! I get to the mile marker where the dude calling out the times yelled something around 17 minutes and 50 seconds or so. What???? I thought I slowed down, not dramatically sped up? This was not going to be good.

I started to feel it and definitely slowed down significantly in the last mile. The last 1.2 miles took about another 11 minutes, so I did slow down, but not too bad from my pace I was hoping to keep. Final time came in at 28:57, or 9 min 20 second miles. I think that's a personal record so I'm happy about that. I've set a nice high bar for me to try and surpass in my future races, awesome! Hopefully I can get under 9 minute miles by the end of the summer, we'll see. I'll need to be much more diligent about running between races if I want to do that. My next race is in late July in the early evening, hopefully it won't be outrageously hot. It has a Grateful Dead theme and while I'm not a big Deadhead, the tie dye shirts with the dancing skeleton are just too cool to pass up. More to report on this in the future!

Song lyric of the day "And I ran / I ran so far away" A Flock Of Seagulls

Until next time.

Ace