My hair is in dire need of assistance! Gah. Well, I suppose I can wait a little while longer. Haha. It's been dreadfully uncooperative recently- either it's pancake-flat against my head, or it stands up in a thousand directions at once, both of which are mildly disturbing especially when I wake up in the morning and have more pressing things to do besides fussing over my hair, like getting to practice on time.

The snow has started falling again- it started this afternoon, just when one of my teammates and I were returning from our 6.5 mile run for cross-training today. I know it probably strikes you as insane that we'd choose to run outside in sub-zero temperatures; but actually it's a blast. It was a great run and definitely a nice change from erging (since when do we ever do anything else besides erging). I'd initially planned on nailing my back with lifting today, but for some reason my back was shot today, and anyway we have team lifting sessions on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so I figured I'd take a day off. Gotta listen to my body sometimes, I've discovered! It's so hard to find a happy medium between pushing yourself hard and overtraining. You've got to be careful not to overtrain.

This has been a pretty busy week for me, so I'm glad it's finally over (well, almost)! At least classes are done for the week, so now all that's left is the final draft of my anthropology paper which is due tomorrow, the argument-evidence page (you know how much I detest doing outlines for essays- I'd much rather just knock something out straightaway instead of doing a detailed plan. But whatever, as long as it helps me get a better grade in the end! I've got an 8-10 page political science paper due Monday as well, so I believe that's what tomorrow and perhaps a little of tonight will be primarily devoted to.

And to top it all off with the proverbial cherry on top, our coach wants us to finish our week off with a bang; which means that it's a Level 1 workout tomorrow, which is absolutely awesome/ awful, depending on how you want to look at it. Philip, if you're reading this (I know you are, you gym freak, haha), this might be really useful to incorporate into your program. This is the definition of a Level 1 workout: Level 1 workouts are the backbone of our training. These workouts are performed at intensities of 95-105% of competitive 2k pace. They are extremely demanding (pfffffft! Understatement of the Century!) and require significant recovery to realize their full benefits. Thus, we will only perform Level 1 workouts once a week/ once every other week. The basic format is to row short intervals with active recovery (vs. passive recovery= complete inactivity). Typical Level 1 workouts include 8 x 500m; 4 x 1k.

Tomorrow's workout is 4 x 1k on 10 minute centers @ 2k pace; which essentially means that we're given a total of 10 minutes to row a 1km piece at our 2k pace, and take the remainder of whatever time's left to recover actively (which often means just tugging half-heartedly at the chain since you're already rather bushed from the earlier sprint), and you repeat this 3 more times. It doesn't seem all that bad when you think about it now, because it's only 4km, which is really short compared to the mileage we normally clock per erg session (around 12km or so every afternoon practice), so inclusive of warmup (which I estimate will be around 20 minutes ~ 4km), it'll be only 8km for tomorrow. But 8km at 2k pace is insane- my 2k split is 2:01min/500m. I hope I don't turn a startling shade of blue from the duress of tomorrow's workout. No wonder my coach adds a cryptic "ROW BLUE" at the end of some of the training material she gives us. I should've known it implied something more than just a display of school loyalty through the college colors.

Well, folks, if you need some inspiration, read the words in the picture below. It's a portion of a handout titled "Introduction to Novice Training Plan", given to us by our coach. This specific part is called "Qualities of a Champion". Doesn't the title alone psyche you up? Haha! This is the quintessential guide to Clean Living! And when I say Clean Living, I don't mean living in a state of depravity either- though life right now personally demands a lot from me, sometimes almost more than what I'd readily give, it's the rewards in the end, the ultimate outcome, that makes everything worthwhile. So there you go.



(and did you notice the "ROW BLUE" at the end?) -groan-