Day 3: Dinner, the Breakfast of Champions
Today is Wednesday, and you know what that means.....yesterday was Tuesday.
Today started off normal enough, quick breakfast at the hotel before morning practice. Now that the Lady Reds are here with us, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to work together. The Sprinters started off in the short course pool while the distance and middle distance folks started with a rigorous dryland routine. After about an hour, the long course lanes opened up and we (the distance folks) got started on practice, while the sprinters finished their workout in the short course pool and moved on to dryland.
Because of the number of teams down here, everyone has very strict practice times. Carthage is no different, and our times are from 10:00-12:00 in the morning and 6:00-8:00 at night. Now, as great as that sounds I have started to notice a drawback to practicing outdoors in the middle of the day: the sun. Doing our main sets with the sun right over our heads can be brutal. It saps your energy, it blinds you, it sits in the sky and cruelly mocks you. It looks down, and says, "hey you! yeah you! the ones working hard. Aren't you hot? shouldn't you be out having fun and not swimming up and down the same narrow, 50 meter rectangle?" And there's nothing you can do, because the Sun doesn't have ears and it can't hear you no matter how loud you yell.
ANYWAY, environmental handicaps aside, practice this morning was pretty draining and a lot of guys looked pretty tired. If I was able to observe this, you know Greg noticed it to and it was because of that that he gave us the afternoon off! We were told to take some time off to recharge so we could get after it again tomorrow morning. With this in mind, it was with much relish that we left the pool this morning.
We spent our free afternoon a number of different ways. Some guys hit the beach and floated in the surf, other guys lazed around the hotel watching TV, and a lot of guys took naps. Me? well, I can say that I accomplished all of the above.
As a final treat, Greg took the 9 seniors out to dinner at the Oasis Cafe. Lots of laughs, lots of stories. It's weird being one of the old guys. I still remember Bryan Pelka asking me before every practice Freshman year: "Are you ready?" and my response every time: "Born ready"
And climbing the Mountains in Arizona, and messing with Guy, and kayaking through the mangroves, the bowl games, Blake's songs, Manny making Chris Steenrod cry, Glover and Alex Van Huis playing basketball, Truckin' around Mesa, The Big Show, Clinton stealing cleaning supplies, and so many more. I've gotten to do so much with this team.
It's weird being one of the old guys.
-E. Ross
If you got training problems, I feel bad for ya, son,
I got 99 problems, but a TRIP ain't one