The Bloomington Report

Well Jason and I are back in good old Chicago. We had a wonderful couple of days in Bloomington, IN full of physics, running, drinking and seeing of old friends.

We decided to push our runs back a day, after again not sleeping much on Monday night because we were at work for a ridiculous amount of hours, I think I was correct in my prediction in being there for 13 hours and I needed every minute of the time to get ready for the talk which was at about 8:30am. The talk went fine but it's really hard to give a talk via video because I kept getting feedback and it was really disorienting. We napped for about an hour before taking off for Bloomington and we had to take turns driving because we were both falling asleep.

We had a great evening with beers and burgers at Nicks and then back to our friend's house for some good conversations. We got up early on Wednesday and after hitting our favorite breakfast place we headed over to the physics building (as seen on the right hand side). Smiled at the DOE reviewers and then headed out to walk around campus and pick up a Windows CD (very exciting because it's XP with Service Pack 2 which means now I can try Boot Camp on my iMAC although I am a little nervous about infecting my Mac with that PC garbage....but I would like to be able to use the Garmin software and other programs that i have heard about that you have to have Windows for....) Anyways, we ended the day at the physics building around 3:30 and headed back to get ready for an 8 mile run.

I was really worried about this run because last year when we went to Bloomington for the DOE review and we had a 6 mile run to do or something and Jason and I could barely make it a couple miles because of the heat and HILLS! Bloomington is Hilly. Chicago is Flat. It makes a difference. We headed out around 4pm so we still had the heat, but the run went really well. We ran by our old apartment and by our advisors house and through that old big house neighborhood and then we made our way after many hilly loops over to campus to look at all the teeny freshman moving in to the dorms. Then we went back to our friends house and finished up 8 miles paces 9:15 miles which I was thrilled with.

The picture on the left is one of my favorite locations on campus.

On Wednesday night we went to a reception at one of the proffessors house which was an amazing house out a bit aways from campus. We met one of the DOE review people that is actually a professor at the University of Michigan who I noticed was wearing a dress shirt, jeans and running shoes....which always means that they are a pretty serious runner. We found out that he's training for the Detroit marathon and has run a total of 7 marathon and has done Boston a couple of times....in fact when he first qualified for Boston he did it in 2:54!!!! Now that is fast! He was a super nice guy and I told him in his report to mention that Jason and Leah are the two best grad students he has ever met. He said he would include a line that mentions we need time to train for the marathon and so to leave us alone for the next few months....I somehow think that won't fly with our advisor though :-) (Jason come on....get on that quark diagram. I mean really how stupid are you? i love you :-))

After the reception we went to Yogi's to meet up with our friends Aaron and Karen with whom we were staying, and had a super good time. We split a pitcher of beer with Aaron and then when that was done we noticed that mini pitchers of Long Islands were $3.5o so we each ordered one of those.....and holy ASS were they strong. There was little or no coke in those puppies...and I must say they were De-licious! After Yogi's we headed to a billiard hall on the square and Ms. Leah was unstoppable. I made everything. I beat the boys and everyone is always happy when Leah wins....as most of you that read this blog regularly know.

Needless to say we had a slight hangover on Thursday morning and I was really worried about our VO2 Max workout. It was 8 miles with 5x600m with 90s in between those. We didn't find a real track to do them on, but we did find a gravel track that was near the workout building on campus. Turns out that the loops was 0.4 miles long so just slightly shorter than the 0.38 which is 600m which was nice....the gravel wa a little loose in a couple places so that made it a bit harder. The track was about 1.7 miles away from our friends house, so we did that as a warmup and then I programmed in a workout to take care of the VO2 Max part. Run for 0.38 recover for 90s and repeat 5 times. Unfortunatly I wasn't too on the ball with these and was a little jumpy with the pace. They are as follows :

1. 6:28 min/mile = 2:27.28
2. 7:02 min/mile = 2:40.16
3. 6:55 min/mile = 2:37.59
4. 7:14 min/mile = 2:44.39
5. 7:07 min/mile = 2:42.20

I think I would have liked to have been able to stick to about 7 min/mile and perhaps it will be easier if we can find a track for the next set of these guys so we are sure that it is exactly flat. And I have to say for the way we treated our bodies the night before and the heat and not being in our own rhythms and schedules.

The repeats ended up being a total of 2.5 miles. Jason had some serious serious leg pain after this run (I guess he would have a pain in his ankle but it would move all the way up to his lower back, and not on every step....just every third or every other which was kind of weird). So we ran for about 0.8 more miles and we were both dying of thirst and Jason was in a whole bunch of pain, so we decided just to walk back (though the University entrace gates) to our friends house and just be ok with only running a total of 5 miles instead of 8. Next time I will do more miles before the repeats.....or something.

Thursday night we went out to dinner and then came back to watch a movie (A History of Violence...which was really good). We chatted for a bit more and then it was off to bed.

We got back to Chicago around 1pm and relaxed a bit at the house and then headed out for a 5 mile recovery which went really well with no crazy leg pain from Jason which was nice. Jason is working the midnight shift tonight and I went out to dinner with Evin, Lisa and Matt at Goose Island. Jason and I gave Evin and Lisa the 3rd season of Scrubs on DVD for an engagement present and they loved it...there was almost tears of happiness.

Thus ending our 4 days of travel...although Jason will be up for the next 12 hours...but I'm done, so I'm off to read my book and watch some Sex and the City on DVD.