This morning I felt okay for the first 7 miles or so of my 12 mile run, but the last 5 were slow torture again, and I can't even count how many times I was dragging the soles of my shoes on the pavement. I'm surprised I didn't do a face plant.
Last night Shannon and I went out for our tempo run, we usually do 10 miles or so together, but we only did about 9 and a half this time. I cut it short, my whole body has been hurting on the left side for over a week now. My left hip, left hamstring, left IT band, left ankle, I can feel everything.
I'm sure it's due to my spill on the bike the week before last. I was riding and came to a concrete barrier across the path and was stopped, turned around briefly to say something to Troy who was right behind me, and I tipped over on the bike before I could pull my cleats off the pedals. I wasn't moving when I crashed, and nothing hurt at the time, but now I'm feeling a lot of stuff on the side I crashed on, and it all makes sense. The bruises are gone but I think I'm all out of alignment.
When Shannon and I ran, we both were feeling like crap. He's at the tail end of his Wasatch training, I know he's ready to taper now, and he's tired. I felt like crap even though I took a nap in the afternoon. It was 93 degrees when we left on our run, not exactly ideal conditions for a hard effort. Lots of F-bomb dropping on our run. We both were in the same place. The brain wants to go, but the legs won't respond.
So we took it easy and stayed around 9 minute pace and that was challenging enough. Plus we almost got smacked with a golf ball running by the Southridge golf course down there off the Power Trail. We heard it whiz by and over our heads by maybe a foot. It hit hard in the bushes off the bike path.
WTF?!!!
We were lucky. That was one of the closest calls I've had with a golf ball, and I run near a lot of golf courses. It would have been bad if one of us got hit. I told Shannon those guys better lay off the bloody marys before they go out golfing, they better get moving or they'll have to contend with this RPB.
As we ran by, they apologized, but I put my thumb and finger up to show them how close it was. No, not that finger. I wanted to, but I held myself back.
So I've put in 22 miles over the past 24 hours and I feel a bit tired. I guess that's okay. I just need to figure out how to re-align myself so everything won't hurt. I still feel cranky. Time for a rant or two.
Reading the local paper this morning was cause for another WTF. The ongoing local controversy over the building of a new on-campus football stadium for Colorado State University. (We already have a stadium 3 miles off campus.)
I love how these administrators talk so nonchalantly over taking on several hundred million more dollars in debt, since the interest rates are so low and they're only already $616 million in the hole. When the football program hasn't even proven itself, we have a new coach Jim McElwain from Alabama, a new athletic director Jack Graham, and University President Tony Frank hasn't even been in his position all that long.
The thing is, these guys are already all overcompensated compared to most people and have their comfortable salary contracts which will sustain them even if they fail. And any debt they leave behind will be on the shoulders of future generations of students, parents, taxpayers, and the community long after they have all retired and croaked. Somebody will have to pay for it. The estimated cost of the stadium is 246 million dollars.
Oh, is that all?
And I just about puked when they quoted Jack Graham as saying he doesn't want to have anything to do with debt incurred by the athletic department falling back onto the university. "I will do everything in my power to ensure that doesn't happen", he says.
And monkeys might fly out of my butt! Maybe you should try a career in politics, Jack. I heard there's a job opening in the White House in 2016.
They have $700,000 raised so far and they say that is enough to start what they call Phase I, or the feasibility part of the work- just preliminary design. Excuse me, but according to my calculations that is only 1/351 or 0.0028 of the amount it will cost to build this stadium. And that's only the building part. They really think that people are going to buy into this to the tune of a quarter billion dollars? They must have a reason to believe that.
They also have excuses for everything, we've heard it all, from big football programs attracting alumni dollars and research dollars and students, whining that the alumni who don't pay into the alumni funds shouldn't have a say in the decision to build a stadium, that student tuition and costs won't be affected by the cost of the stadium, to whining that lack of a stadium keeps them forever mediocre?
Mediocre in what? Athletics? Academics? Research? Costs? Debt? You're admitting to some sort of mediocrity. What defines mediocrity? And you need $246 million dollars to buy your way out of it?
WTF!
Is football worth it? Do we really need to perpetuate the culture of overspending and overvaluing sports at this level? Don't we have things that are a bit more important on which to spend that kind of money? (Yeah, like election campaigns!) Do we always have to incur more debt?
Meanwhile faculty members don't get raises, more and more adjunct faculty are hired to teach courses because they are cheap labor, and the costs of school keep going up and up and students have to take on more debt.
I don't buy any of their bullshit. I've long since been fed and digested it. Don't even get me started on the whole athletics and academics discussion, we'll be here for a long time.
Furthermore, a new on-campus stadium is certainly not going to influence my spending practices with regards to my CSU alumni status. It took me bloody forever to pay off my student loans from that institution, I think I've contributed enough of my hide.
And I get the feeling that a lot of future alumni will feel the same way once they graduate and those monthly student loan statements start arriving. Unless they get nice jobs like Tony Frank and Jack Graham have. But Jack, how long do you think Jim McElwain will stay in his job?
University Presidents and head coaches don't usually stick around in their positions too long. I don't know about athletic director tenure. I do know that $300,000 or so a year as an athletic director is a bit more than the average CSU grad makes. Assuming I'm just average. Mediocre, that is.
Not everyone has the privilege of having a job like that, which of course gives them the right to be this arrogant in their decisions that will affect everyone else in the community for years after they have moved on...
WTF, CSU?
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