September 21

The past few days I've been sore from my downhill run, and aside from going back for tests every day, I've been keeping busy with the school routine. This morning I got up early once again to go to the AIS for my 72-hour checkup following my downhill run. The leg strength test revealed that my legs are back to full strength, and with one of the vertical jumps I was able to jump higher even than yesterday. My legs are hardly sore at all today, which is what is expected. Only one more day of being tested until I get my free AIS stuff!


Kate dropped me back off at my class again this morning. I only had one class today, my exercise science class, at 8:30. I’ve been learning tons of really interesting and helpful information about the science behind exercise in that class this semester, and today we were taught about the some of the principles of training, including overload, recovery, overtraining, undertraining, the requirements of optimal training, the job of a coach in training, the signs of overtraining, etc. It was really interesting to learn about all that stuff today, and I noticed with some of the slides that my last year on the XC team I showed every sign of overtraining, but for some reason, my coach never noticed the signs and didn’t do anything about it except blame me for my performance breakdown. It’s unfortunate that he wasn’t as knowledgeable about such things as I feel he should have been – it would have helped me enormously that last year on the team if he had followed some of the “principles of coaching and training” I learned about today. Oh well, that’s all history now, and at least I’ve learned a lot from my past experiences on the team, and now after taking this class I know a lot more. It might be cool to someday actually be a coach or something, but in the time being I think I’m just going to try to coach myself and get back into running again in the next couple of days (I took some time off over my spring break and during the sore muscle stage of my experimental role this week. :))

This afternoon I spent a lot of time doing nothing, and just enjoying being done with class. I thought about going for a run, but instead decided to go for a walk. I took along my camera and my binoculars, and hoped to encounter some birds or beautiful scenery to take photographs of. I especially wanted to encounter some Eastern Rosellas, one of my favorite parrots, and one that I have not yet photographed. Needless to say (but obviously, I’m going to say it anyway) I was thrilled when after only a few minutes of walking I spotted a pair of eastern rosellas foraging on the ground! I got out my binoculars and camera, and for about 5 minutes worked on getting closer to them, focusing my binoculars, and holding my camera up to my binoculars in hopes of getting some decent pictures. I got a half a dozen or so pictures of varying quality, but I was particularly pleased with one photo that turned out to be the most in focus of them all. After several minutes the rosellas decided to fly off to a more distant location, and I continued my walk.

The rest of my walk found me taking photos of several other birds, including dusky moorhens, a lone crested pigeon, and a male superb fairy-wren! I was hoping I would eventually get pictures of the fairy-wren and good pictures of crested pigeons -- today was my lucky day. I hope you enjoy viewing the pictures as much as I enjoy sharing them. :-D