Back on the Right Track

Thursday brought another day of teacher meetings. I generally have nothing useful to input in these meetings and Thursday was no exception. Usually, I try to stay awake and look interested, although more than one person has told me I look angry/in pain during meetings. Fortunately for me, there were some funny discussions to keep me amused. The two favorite moments of the meetings were:
1. When discussing how to align the curriculum so that all classes that teach about The Holocaust could cover the topic concurrently, it was suggested that we could connect it to science by investigating the gas used in the gas chambers. I think we are going to shelve that one for now.
2. Somehow a field trip to New York for the 5th graders was brought up. It was pretty clear from the conversation that there was no way the trip would happen, yet the idea kept resurfacing over and over somehow. One of my coworkers suggested that the kids could take a tour of Central Park with this guy who knows all of the edible plants and "medicinal herbs" in the park. Mrs. Daly quickly moved the discussion on to a new topic, saying "I'm sure there are plenty of people with medicinal herb in Central Park but let's talk about ..."
I ran 30 minutes before the meeting and 100 minutes that evening. On Friday, we had a final short meeting and then I turned in my grades to officially be done with my first year of teaching. I definitely need the break this summer will offer but, at the same time, I am excited for next year. I will teach 8th grade science again and pick up a section of 8th grade math, which should be a good experience. I had a basketball game on Saturday and the plan was to run 30 minutes before the game and 60 minutes in the evening. I ended up not running before the game, going for a 45 minute bike ride, and running 30 minutes in the evening. Today, I had my first race since the Groton 10k: the 5k at the USATF New England Championships. In the morning, I ran 30 minutes at home to begin warming up for the race and then hopped on the train to go to MIT, where I ran another 20 minute warm up. I hadn't run on the track since the 2006 UAA Championships and was somewhat unsure of what to expect. The race played out as well as I could have hoped for, as I was able to clip off 75 second laps the entire race. There was a pack of three runners ahead of me for the first half of the race, but they came back to me at around the 3k mark. One of the guys fell off the pace immediately, leaving me and my teammate Kibrom up front with some guy who was doing tai chi or pilates or some crap at the starting line. Kibrom took off and gapped us by about 20 meters and it was me and yoga man fighting it out for second with 1200 to go. I was able to keep my even splits and dropped the other guy with 600 to go. I noticed that Kibrom was coming back to me and I started to make a move to catch him. In all fairness, he was only slowing because he didn't know where the finish line was (he is Ethiopian and his English is still shaky) but I wanted the win bad. I ended up reeling him in and was a half step behind him on the home stretch. He was able to just barely hold me off by half a second. I finished in 15:30 and I figure my last lap was around 68. I cooled down for 55 minutes to give me 120 minutes total for the day. I had never been to MIT before and I was expecting some nerdiness, but they made the engineering school at WashU look like a frat house. They have this huge window that looks down into their pool area and there are equations and derivations written all over. I couldn't help but think about the scene from Good Will Hunting, "So this is a Hahvad bah?" They also sell Stephen Hawking shirts in their book store. I ended up totaling 650 minutes for the week on 11 runs. The good thing is that I doubled four days. The bad thing is that two of the days I didn't double, I only ran 30 minutes. One exciting development for the week was breaking $3,500 in donations for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Thank you again to everyone who has helped me so far to reach my goal of $5,000. This post is getting long. I am going to eat a big bowl of ice cream and hit the hay.