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May. 19th, 2012 10:06 pmI drove down to Medford yesterday with my Grand National Teammates, Chris and Laurie. Well, Chris drove. Five hours. Ick. The three of us have been rotating as partners, while David and Don anchor at the other table. Only three teams entered the event this year, but it's a two-day qualifier, so today we played a 56-board three-way KO to get it down to two teams for tomorrow's 56-board head-to-head final. We won both of our matches, and will have a 10-imp carryover for tomorrow's final. Not huge, but not completely insignificant.
The bridge is good -- no major disasters, and it's nice to play in a strong field after the mindfuck that was Richland. Chris is my most regular Portland partner, and I like him and we tend to score very well together, but our fundamental philosophies are so different. He is a very strong player, and almost undoubtedly better than I am, but I feel very, very strongly that my methods are better...by a lot. And he disagrees. We play a card that is a compromise of our favorite things, and it's all fine and dandy, but it's not the card I want to take into battle with me in major events. So I don't know if our partnership has much of a future beyond local events. But that may be completely moot anyway, because I don't know how much of a future I myself have beyond local events now that I'm taking on basically full-time work.
I've started my training with WW -- the first little bit is all online (but it's paid!), and it's actually a really well-done training program. I was prepared for it to be dull and hokey and full of information I already know, but while I am familiar with almost all of the information, it's presented very well, and I'm actually learning a lot already. Yay for that :) I start on Monday at the claims office. I think I have a pretty good handle on what my responsibilities will be, but obviously I'll know more once I've actually done a little bit of it. I think the main piece is data entry, but it's not like there's so much of it that I'll just be typing numbers into the computer all day -- there's filing and processing and administrative gophering, but I think I'll also get to try my hand at writing and editing mediations, which could be cool. That's basically when instead of going to court and having a trial over an insurance case, both sides just present written statements to a judge...I think. I'm sure I'll learn more about the process soon enough.
I went for a run today after bridge. It was only OK. There's a great trail along a creek here, and I went out about 1.5 miles before turning around. Basically as soon as I started, I was feeling pretty shitty...there was no bounce in my step and my pace was much slower than normal. I told myself to run for at least a mile, then reassess. My goal was to do 3 miles, since I have a 5K next weekend, but as soon as I started, I knew that wasn't happening. I turned around after 13 minutes, having gone not quite a mile and a half, but something between 1.2 and 1.4 miles. At that point, it was just a matter of pushing myself to keep running for two more minutes, over and over again until I was back where I started. I just felt so slow, though. I wasn't fatigued, but my feet hurt, and I had a stitch in my side. I'm way overdue for a new pair of running shoes. I've been putting off buying them, though, because I do have a connection at the Nike employee store, where I can get 50% off, it's just a matter of lining up our schedules, and that hasn't worked out yet. But I don't think I'm going to enjoy next week's race if I have to run it in these worn out kicks, so if I can't make it to the Nike store this week, I'll just suck it up and pay full price like everyone else.
It sucks to have a bad run, though. Like...I know I worked hard and got decent exercise and I should feel good about that, but overall it's just really disappointing how not athletic I felt while I was doing it. And I feel like a 2.5-mile run should be easy for me now, especially if I'm not pushing myself for speed. Bleh. And how much of that can I blame on the shoes? New shoes before the race, for sure...
The bridge is good -- no major disasters, and it's nice to play in a strong field after the mindfuck that was Richland. Chris is my most regular Portland partner, and I like him and we tend to score very well together, but our fundamental philosophies are so different. He is a very strong player, and almost undoubtedly better than I am, but I feel very, very strongly that my methods are better...by a lot. And he disagrees. We play a card that is a compromise of our favorite things, and it's all fine and dandy, but it's not the card I want to take into battle with me in major events. So I don't know if our partnership has much of a future beyond local events. But that may be completely moot anyway, because I don't know how much of a future I myself have beyond local events now that I'm taking on basically full-time work.
I've started my training with WW -- the first little bit is all online (but it's paid!), and it's actually a really well-done training program. I was prepared for it to be dull and hokey and full of information I already know, but while I am familiar with almost all of the information, it's presented very well, and I'm actually learning a lot already. Yay for that :) I start on Monday at the claims office. I think I have a pretty good handle on what my responsibilities will be, but obviously I'll know more once I've actually done a little bit of it. I think the main piece is data entry, but it's not like there's so much of it that I'll just be typing numbers into the computer all day -- there's filing and processing and administrative gophering, but I think I'll also get to try my hand at writing and editing mediations, which could be cool. That's basically when instead of going to court and having a trial over an insurance case, both sides just present written statements to a judge...I think. I'm sure I'll learn more about the process soon enough.
I went for a run today after bridge. It was only OK. There's a great trail along a creek here, and I went out about 1.5 miles before turning around. Basically as soon as I started, I was feeling pretty shitty...there was no bounce in my step and my pace was much slower than normal. I told myself to run for at least a mile, then reassess. My goal was to do 3 miles, since I have a 5K next weekend, but as soon as I started, I knew that wasn't happening. I turned around after 13 minutes, having gone not quite a mile and a half, but something between 1.2 and 1.4 miles. At that point, it was just a matter of pushing myself to keep running for two more minutes, over and over again until I was back where I started. I just felt so slow, though. I wasn't fatigued, but my feet hurt, and I had a stitch in my side. I'm way overdue for a new pair of running shoes. I've been putting off buying them, though, because I do have a connection at the Nike employee store, where I can get 50% off, it's just a matter of lining up our schedules, and that hasn't worked out yet. But I don't think I'm going to enjoy next week's race if I have to run it in these worn out kicks, so if I can't make it to the Nike store this week, I'll just suck it up and pay full price like everyone else.
It sucks to have a bad run, though. Like...I know I worked hard and got decent exercise and I should feel good about that, but overall it's just really disappointing how not athletic I felt while I was doing it. And I feel like a 2.5-mile run should be easy for me now, especially if I'm not pushing myself for speed. Bleh. And how much of that can I blame on the shoes? New shoes before the race, for sure...
