It’s been four weeks since I’ve left home and three since I’ve started my job. Everything has settled into a routine at this point. Mostly, it isn’t that much different than previous summers. I get up, run, eat something, go to work. I do some work and go to some meetings and then go home. I eat dinner and by that point I’m pretty much beat, so I either watch TV, read, or screw around on the internet until I go to bed.
The whole place reminds me of being at school. The lodge isn’t that much different than the dorms, with everyone running around being loud and then staring in your window as they walk by. There’s the usual mob of grounds keeping workers weed-whacking grass in my face every morning as I run by. There’s the dumpster truck that comes at 3 AM (I’m not kidding) and slams the dumpster into the concrete ten times right outside my door.
The whole food thing is what really sets this apart. There is a cafeteria at Ames, but it’s only open for lunch. I haven’t been there, but I heard it’s just regular cafeteria food and it isn’t exactly cheap, either. I’ve also heard they have beer there, which is weird. I remember discussing one day at school if the school cafeterias had beer alongside the soda fountains. Google, I’ve heard, has an excellent cafeteria that is open all day and is free. Too bad I don’t work there. I run by there in the morning sometimes and I can smell their food cooking.
I started off eating a lot of canned and frozen stuff, but most of it is too much and I have to eat the same thing for two days in a row. I’ve tried mixing in some fresh stuff, which makes things more tolerable. The stoves in the kitchen don’t get hot enough to bring water to a rolling boil, so it took forever to make pasta one night. I made a steak one night this week which was good and I also got some fresh peaches from the grocery store. The peaches have probably been the best thing I’ve eaten in the past four weeks. I’ll probably get some more fresh fruit this weekend and maybe some fresh seafood or something. I also had some barbecue pork that was in the refrigerated section and a baked potato I nuked up in the microwave. If I had a full kitchen in my room like at school, it wouldn’t be bad at all. Especially if the stove worked correctly. So far I’ve been well under my $100/week estimate for food. At school, the regular meal plan basically works out to $100/week, so if I don’t get a meal plan next year I can definitely save money.
Last weekend I went to Huddart County Park, since I had heard so many good things about it from Keith and a few other guys on the team who had run there after racing at Stanford. It was a good 20 minute drive from Moffett. As soon as I got off 280, I recognized where I was. The park was only a mile or so from where I had done a long run with some of the Nike farm team guys last year. We didn’t make it into the park, though, and it was probably a good idea we didn’t. I knew it was going to be tough with the mountains, but it was much worse than I expected.
My goal was to make it to the top of the mountains and then run along Skyline Blvd and then come back. It’s what I did, but my watch told me I did just under 12 miles in an hour and a half. After looking at some maps I picked the longest trail to the top since the park wasn’t that big, but the trail ended up being some kind of horse trail with more poop on it than I’ve ever seen in Colonial Williamsburg. As is the case with horse poop on trails, there is always tons of it but never any horses. Anyways, the trail I decided to take went straight up the mountain. No switchbacks or anything. It was steeper than a staircase in parts. Occasionally, a trail would branch off to the side and I would take that for some relief, since the side trails mostly traversed the mountain and had switchbacks as they climbed. It was only about two or three miles from the start to the top but I think it took me almost 30 minutes. It was insane. The temperature also went from about 70 and sun at the base to about 50 at the summit with fog and rain. I found a long trail that went along the ridge of the mountains, took that for awhile, and then came back on the other side of the park.
Going back down was even worse than going up. Each step I took was about a three or four inch drop. The trail I took back down went straight down just as the other one went up. With each step, my insides mushed against each other and after a few minutes, my guts were killing me. I nearly fell a few times, so I just walked down at one point until I saw a road. Then I took the road back to the entrance where the car was. There were a lot of suffering cyclists heading up the road as I went down.
The park was a lot different than anything I’ve experienced at home. I don’t think I’ve been on any terrain like that on a run. Even some of the stuff I’ve done in western VA doesn’t compare to that. I was thinking of going to another park nearby this weekend, but I’ll probably hold off on that since my quad has been killing me this week thanks to all the mountain climbing. I do notice the talent pool of people here is greater. There was a guy last week that kept up with me for awhile, and then this week there was someone else. Heading back to Moffett I passed some guy at a light who turned the last quarter mile over the 101 into a near sprint. I’m not sure why he was going where I was, since once you cross over the 101 you can only go into Moffett. I didn’t hear him anymore when I got close to the checkpoint and must have turned around. I should probably start doing some light workouts, maybe next week, so that I won’t have too much trouble running with everyone in the fall.
Work hasn’t been too bad but there is still a lot to learn. A lot of the meetings and teleconferences I go to are a bit over my head. It was like this before when I started at BMH, but eventually I picked up on everything. It’s all stuff that doesn’t apply to me directly. The work on the simulation visualization module has progressed well, but I’m really only prototyping at this point until everyone has more defined requirements.
Last night I was on the internet and stumbled on to something I had long forgotten about: ham radio. My grandfather was big into ham radio and I know that both my parents had licenses for a time. It sounds like something that would be interesting to get into. There are three classes of license, all of which have separate multiple choice exams that don’t cost that much. They don’t require morse code either. The only downside is that the equipment can be expensive, much like photography. It seems that since the advent of the internet, ham radio has fallen by the wayside, but it would still be cool to be able to talk with people all over the world.
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