Nott What You'd Expected...

Geography, Crosscountry, and Peppermint Tea

Another day, another confusing trip to campus, another frustrating registration moment....
Thank god it's over.

Sitting here with my cup-o-tea, tired from my first day of Athletics, at least I can look back and say "It's all starting to fit together". Today was supposed to be a relaxed day of visiting the Castle (for Luther class), visiting Hyson Greene (Luther Class), shopping downtown at H&M, and practice at 17:30. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans.

Brandon and I (being signed up for the same classes, we have a lot of free time), headed to Jubilee campus to sign up for our Woodland Ecology class and drop English, Communications and Society. Wouldn't you know, they cancelled Woodland Ecology (the only class that could possibly work for us). We wandered around the ultra-modern campus for an hour, getting lost in the maze that was the Ed building (in a fire, they'd all roast) before deciding on saying 'screw it' to a Continuing Ed class and headed to main campus.

We looked up classes in Classics, English, American Studies, Biology, Education, and Geography/Geology before settling on a (cross fingers) gen-ed killing no lab science class entitled "Physical Geography of Britain"- which, unfortunatley met at 10 today for two hours....
We were able to sign up and actually meet the prof, who had studied in Canada for her undergrad. She was AWESOME. She went over the detailed syllabus, explained a field trip that we'll take later this year, and simplified the readings list for us (it was about 20 books long)- she told us "buy this book, eat it up, digest it, learn it, and you'll be fine without the others.

Awesome. so now we're good to go.

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Cross practice. Athletics in the UK are very different. The high schools are completly unsupportive and if you'd like to participate, you join a club team. The team here at UNott runs in relays, meets, and open invites. Relays (one this weekend that i'll be in Wales for) consists of 6 guys on each team running 2 miles crosscountry style. It's the wierdest thing ever. Today's practice was 5 miles long, but they set out at a gruelling pace. It reminded me of the first run of the Luther season, in Decorah before heading to CO, when all of the new freshman size up the team and try to bust ass to look good. Only everyone here was trying to look good.

It was painfully awkward when we arrived infront of the Sportscentre (Hil and I)... people were standing around in the strangest getups... what looked like swimtrunks, ratty sneakers, mid-calf scrunched socks- some black, some blue.... just very un-runnerlike. Except one kid- Tom. I was embarassed to take of my warmup pants for fear that my short shorts (2.5in inseam) would be a little revealing. We put our bags in a locked room, and seeing Tom (American from Dickinson College in PA) now wearing what i'll consider from hereon out to be 'acceptable running shorts'- I said "Thank god someone else is wearing normal shorts" and thus began a decent conversation that lasted about 5 hell-bent miles through Beeston and Wallaton to the north of campus. Turns out he's a 800/1500 guy, here for a semester, living in dorms... hopefully this is one of many decent people that I'll meet through the club.

My impression of the club is mixed- some people are good-- long runs of 20+ miles, others suck. I'm in between. A chest cold this past week coupled with very weak training left me gasping. I'm surprised at the training in general- tomorrow I will miss out on trackwork because of Paideia, but we have more intervals on thursday. Friday is always off, and Saturday is either a race or workout, followed by long runs on Sundays. Everything is student-run, so i'm interested how anyone used to professional or collegiate coaching (myself included here) will react to fairly amateur involvement.

Wednesday is a very informal race 'fresher's relay' followed by a social at the Ark Bar and then downtown at Isis. Hazing, hopefully. I'm dissapointed that we will miss out on a lot of socials because of traveling, but it's a difficult thing to measure at this point- what's more important? Friends or travel at this point? Time will tell.

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Lots to do tomorrow- read for class, clean the house to impress guests (we have a very Third Reich-esque cleaning program here.... don't really want to get into it), go to Castle and Hyson in order to write essays about each, and then find a newspaper article to write on as well.
The muggli's are killing me.

class on wednesday, followed by relays and social.

things are looking up

kevin

posted by Kevin @ 8:20 PM