Two Months!

It’s very difficult for me to believe that I’ve been out here for over two months, but there we go. Overall, I’m extremely happy with how things have been going so far. I’ve seen plenty of steady improvement in my races – of which I’ve already done five! My latest race, the second meet at Bethel this season, was probably my best. The racing conditions were really great all things considered; it was pretty windy but I’d prefer that to boiling heat any day. I’ve actually only got two races left now. I’ve got one this coming weekend, which will hopefully be a fast run, and then we’ve got the Conference Meet. Conference is what we train for throughout the Autumn – the selections for the National Cross Country are made off this event, and the rankings are decided within the Kansas State league as well. There’s a little under a month until the race so we’re going to be training pretty hard. Unfortunately, the National Final itself has been postponed until April due to the coronavirus, so this Conference meet will basically make or break this College term for the team. Obviously, I’d rather that there wasn’t so much pressure on the race, but I’m still growing increasingly confident about it. Our team has moved forward a ridiculous amount over the past two months, Coach has done a fantastic job and most of the guys and girls have knocked minutes off their times.

Up the Finishing strait - got our new vests!

It has admittedly been quite a while since my last instalment, but I do have a good excuse, which is all of the work that I’ve been handed recently. My professors, in what I suspect to be a dastardly conspiracy, have chosen this past week to hand me an awful lot of work. All of my work is basically split under two types, and I suspect that this rule applies to English universities as well. The first type is the bog-standard stuff which increases in its importance the more you do it. Professors might give you assignments for one week which account for one of two percent of your grade, which doesn’t initially sound like much. However, once you’ve been given ten or so such assignments you quickly realize that you’ve just boxed off a fifth of your overall grade over two months or so, without really realizing it. It’s very easy to get complacent with this stuff – and it’s this complacency with the small stuff that is more likely to affect your grade than your actual tests and exams. Complacency is a big problem in College – I’ve got to keep reminding myself to put as much effort into the small assignments as I would into the big ones. Speaking of the big assignments, these make up the second ‘type’ or work that you get in College. In some classes it’s just regular tests, which you make notes and study for, but in other’s you’re required to carry out extensive research into subjects and topics, and then you’ll have to present this in class. Most of these projects stretch over a couple of weeks, though the main assignment for my Social Work class has been going on for a month. This is all to prepare you for your final couple of years at College, where you’re expected to carry out ongoing work on dissertations etc.

Our front three at the race.

It is, at last, starting to feel a bit more like Autumn in Kansas. Apparently the weather that we’ve had isn’t normal – it usually gets a lot colder a lot sooner. Mid – September is usually where the weather starts to turn, but we’ve had to wait until mid – October. The weather has been really unusual as well, I’ve been getting weather notifications informing me of the possibilities of strong winds (they don’t call Wichita ‘Twister City’ for nothing) and ‘haze'. There’s also been an unusually small number of tornados this summer as well, which I guess is a good thing. ‘Haze’ is exactly what it sounds like. It’s basically smoke and ash in the atmosphere, from the fires in California, which obscures the sun. It was really bad the other day – there were tiny wood chips flying in your eyes and everything. Thankfully we had beautiful weather for my ultra-long run last Monday. It was our Chilean Mauro’s 26^th birthday, which meant that he wanted to run 26 kilometres. Crazily I agreed to join him on this venture. We ran 13 k out along the straight dirt road, turned around and ran it back. It wasn’t actually that bad, maybe I’ll persuade Sarah to keep the group on the Wirral Way for their long runs in the future.