Month of March: Wowee

Hello world. Holy cow, I've had a doozy of a last month. But I'm glad I'm through it now, and into April! Hopefully it goes better! For those who care, the Air Force Institute of Technology (of which I'm a student) breaks their terms up into four quarters, with some short week long breaks in-between each. This is because they want to not only allow us to cram as many credits (72 for my program) in an 18 month period as possible, and also because they can't really justify giving a bunch of full-time salaried military officers a "summer break". This means that each quarter is crammed into 10 or 11 weeks, and this last quarter was very very VERY VERY academically intense. If my first term was a sucker punch, this one was a body slam. It ran from January through most of March, and the below chart is pretty much how my training suffered at the hands of school... (and yes... my wife already found the typo of "flu" in the diagram... dang autocorrect.)

One of the upsides to Florida was that we were able to sleep.... a LOT. Which was sorely needed after the term was over. (And of course, we needed to anticipate our repeated trips to the emergency room and getting sick. That sure does take a lot our of you.) And we got SUNSHINE!! Oh my gosh! We'd almost forgotten what the sun WAS.

Here is a picture of one of the paths I ran on while we were visiting McDill Air Force Base.

It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to get out a stretch my legs a bit. After warming up, I decided that I'd like to see where a comfortable 10k tempo run would take me. Winter training had taken a toll on the number of 10k's I'd been doing recently, and I thought it would be good to get a casual one logged. I was pleased with the results of a moderate effort... especially at this stage of the season.



The bummer was it just wasn't that warm. Normally the weather this time of year is great for going to the beach; but a cold windy storm system landed right on the eastern seaboard when we were down there, and so we really only had one good day on the beach... =( That was a bummer for Marian. She'd really wanted more beach time, especially after how gloomy things had been in Ohio these past few months.

And then, as shown above, the dreaded flu virus came a-knockin on our door... Marian got it first, and then Rianna, and then me. I missed the first few days of school... thanks to a fever over 103, nights of nausea and vomitting for all of us, and a headache that could kill a cow. So 3 trips to ER,  5 IV's, a billion milligrams of Zofran, Benydryl, Tylonol, Reglen, and Ibuprofen, and a week spent quarantining ourselves, we're just now getting back on our feet. (Oh and now I'm going through mild withdrawl because of all the drugs I was hopped up on. Heh... details.) I'm pretty sure the doctors who saw us probably were doing this after we left:

But I'm pretty sure this is how we were all feeling about it:

Anyways... tomorrow, I will be able to train for the first time in a week, and I'm definitely feeling twitchy to get to it. I'm not really looking forward to swim practice on Tuesday, because of the pain. But in another way, I'm feeling kind of twitchy to get back to it.

As far as races go, I've put my application into the Air Force team, and we'll see what comes of it! I'm also thinking of trying a bike race this month. We'll see how the training and school is going in another couple weeks. Here's to a better month of April!