Day Four

I started off a little off balance because I ran late getting to work and then got caught up reading the web. (Phillip Jose Farmer died yesterday.) The upshot was that I showed up to the gym still burping from the Chik-Fil-A chicken biscuit I wouldn't normally have been anywhere near.

PE. So we have our little group on the treadmills, as expected, and suddenly I'm being expected to maintain an 11:20/mile pace—my "slow jog" at 5.2 mph—indefinitely, with sustained boosts of speeds up to 1.5 mph faster. Okay, so that's not exactly Olympic class running, but if I could already do that much, I wouldn't need the class. I tried for as long as I could, then just dropped back to finish my current baseline 50 minutes walking 3 1/2 to 4 mph at 3 degrees. (Typically it's 4 unless I'm stumbly, in which case I'll usually drop back to 3.8.) I did throw a few more jogs in there because I could and ended up covering almost a half mile more than Tuesday's workout.

I did talk to the instructor afterward, and now that she understands I'm a walker trying to move up, she'll have a slightly different approach. I don't expect it to be any less draining—I'm wiped out—but it should mean that I can keep up enough to move on to the exercises and things everyone else was doing while I finished.

Penmanship. I wanted to play hooky after what the gym did to me, but I pushed on. I got a page of lines in, just to be sure, and then messed wtih Ms for a while. I wish I could figure out why my hand wants to draw the top half of a hexagon instead of a curve. Ugly.

Spanish. A few more paragraphs, and there were even a few sentences I could figure out without help. I have found a few words that I can't find in my translator. Work, of course, has all online translations blocked. (Don't get me started on the company's web policy.) Anyway, it's going well, and I'm continually inspired by my son's first reading of the first Harry Potter: The reading level was way over his head by the time he started it, but he grew into it by the end.

I skipped History.

Extra Credit. I have finally taken the time to finish my friend Tab's YA biography of Joan of Arc: Joan of Arc: Heavenly Warrior. Definitely a good read.