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You come back from lunch and you see this:
There are about 15 pages of printouts spread on the ground. These are open records requests the paper made of the campus safety department. They are looking for stories.
There are three or four good stories there. A prominent member of campus got a citation for doing something very … not smart. There’s an assault and a few petty things. Hopefully some of them make print.
Mostly, I love the verb in the note. Progress.
Sure, I have a corner office. It overlooks the recycling dumpsters and some parking. But it gets a really nice flat early morning light and some charming and golden rays, like this, in the evening.
I see both a lot.
Tuesdays are an all day and all night affair. Wednesdays have a slightly later start and still runs until 9 p.m. Then back to it all again on Thursdays. But, hey, you can’t beat that view.
After work, I hit the gym. Meanwhile, the football team was hard at practice:
You see that view from the old fieldhouse, between the locker room and the pool.
You know, you think you’re doing something and then you realize: those guys were out there before you started, and they’re still out there when you’re done. But, hey, I swam 2,000 yards and ran two miles.
At the pool there’s a coach. He’s not my coach. He wouldn’t take me on as a client if I asked, I’m sure. I told him about my race and my slow recovery. Something like 10 days later and I’m still complaining about it. He wasn’t particularly surprised. More carbs, he said. Meanwhile, I’ve decided if I don’t feel better this week I’m just going to will myself into feeling better.
But, hey, I did get a two mile jog in, so there’s that.
At Publix, ’tis the season:
A friend told me about making French toast with sweet rolls. He says it can change your world view. Now I can’t see these things without thinking about it.
One day, we’ll give it a shot.
Got out and rode a bit this weekend, putting in 40 easy miles and still trying to figure out where I left my legs. Maybe everything will come back this week, I figure. If not I’ll have to drive over to Georgia and see if I dropped them somewhere.
This is one of the big sprints in town.
My app says I only got up to 27.4 miles per hour. So I’m still tired and sore and slow. Or, normal.
I found a new piece of scenery. Turns out there is a pond at town creek. You have to go behind the park and down some paths to find it. But the view is worth it, even as the sun was going down. This was just to add a few turns to the crankset while running an errand.
You go down this hill, it bends a little to the left and then straightens out and turns back to the right and then you take the hard right into another hill. When there’s a car behind you you can actually handle this little stretch and create some distance between you, which is pretty neat.
The same hill, just looking up the other way.
I got to run an errand on my bike. I never get to do that, because I’m never here for it. Doing it felt good, comforting, somehow. Of course it was up the big hill.
At lunch today I was reading a forum about race recovery. (And, I promise, I’ll stop talking about this just as soon as the novelty of something I did last Saturday still leaves me feeling wiped out wears off.) The general consensus was that we don’t always know why recovery can take this long or that long. There are things you can do to help speed the process along.
Of course I’m doing very few of those things, it turns out. Maybe next time.
The other consensus was that the duration of your recovery has to do with your overall general fitness. When you think about it, that seems both logically true and annoyingly insulting. I just swam a mile and rode 56 and ran 13. Let’s say I’m in pretty decent shape. Except it is going to take me more days than the average bear to recover.
I did ride for a bit this evening, just plodding along at a slow speed. I think I managed to get into the 20s about four times. So it was a nice, easy 20-mile ride through town. I went up one of the parking decks, just for the view:
That’s Comer Hall, where I spent a lot of my time in undergrad. It is named after Braxton Bragg Comer, the 33rd governor of Alabama, and, later, an appointed senator. Serving in the first quarter of the 20th century he would be considered a progressive. He lowered railroad rates, came out for child labor laws, was a prohibitionist and, also was a big proponent of education, health improvements and conservation. Of course he also served in a time of poll taxes and other segregationist strategies. He went into the governor’s office just six years after blacks were disenfranchised and the Republican party was effectively tamped out in Alabama, something which would take roughly 80 years for the GOP to overcome. Like so many other people and things in the south, the industrialist Comer’s is a tricky legacy.
At home, he and his wife had nine children. They’re all buried in Elmwood, near their parents. One of the sons, Donald, also became an industrialist in his father’s footsteps and would run Avondale Mills while Braxton was in public service. To be of a certain age and from a certain swath of the south and to hear Avondale Mills is to understand the impact of the Comer family on the region. But, then, history is funny like that. When textiles moved away and the economy shifted and commercial impact took on another face, who would know of the legacy of the Comers or their mills or mines? Ans when you think of that you have to wonder, what have we unknowingly forgotten?
Allie, by the way, is very interested in reading some of Comer’s speeches:
