Soreness from Lifting Weights

This semester, someone decided that my squad in ROTC was going to exercise an additional time in the week separately from the rest of the battalion. (In reality, each of us is supposed to do additional exercise on our own throughout the week.) Yesterday was the first of these supplemental exercise sessions. My squad went to the Mueller Center, which is just off the Armory here at Rensselaer. We went to the lower floor where the weight room is. We were instructed and shown what we were supposed to do.

In doing the exercises, I could feel that my right arm is much stronger than my left arm. For some of the exercises, I couldn't complete all the repetitions. After the weight workout, we jogged a few miles, which was pretty easy. After finishing, my arms were only slightly sore, and I thought nothing of it for the rest of the day.

This morning when I got up, my arms were in pain -- it hurt to even lift them. My left arm, is especially sore, and the regular yawning-stretch thing I do when I'm slightly sore does little to nothing to help. It is slightly painful to make my left arm go all the way straight, and the inside of the elbow feels somewhat like it does after having blood drawn. After doing the lifting exercises yesterday, we were told that we would be sore the following several days since we weren't used to doing the exercises. Hopefully getting used to these exercises doesn't take too long as I'm not thrilled to feel consistently sore.

I experienced similar soreness when I first started track and cross-country in high school. In that case, it took about two weeks to get used to the routine, and not be sore after practice.

Swim Meet Against Colonial Forge (the school I previously attended)

I just got back from swimming in a meet. I went to physics class then to the meet. My best stroke is breaststroke. I can swim butterfly and freestyle if I need to, but if I am put in backstroke, I do very poorly. I have never in my life gotten first place, be it running or swimming. This year, I have gotten several second places in breaststroke, however. I did so again tonight. After the meet (my team lost again), when we were congratulating the other team, Coach O. who was my coach when I was at Colonial Forge congratulated me on my fast time in breaststroke. I was happy that she remembered me. She is the best swimming coach that I have had.

Life lately

I've been busy lately. The National Honor Society site that I've been working on is almost ready for prime time. My injured leg still bothers me sometimes when I am swimming. I did get a Varsity Letter for Cross Country, though I never ran another race after I got injured. My Calculus class is almost over for this semester. I have my final exam tomorrow, or rather today considering that it's after midnight. Physics is almost over also, though I have a few more classes.

Life Since School Started

Well, school has started, and I have been going to my classes at NOVA and Germanna. My schedule worked out pretty nicely. My school has block scheduling. There are four blocks in the day, each lasting 85 minutes. Some classes are a semester long, and other classes are year-long. The year-long classes meet every other day. The days are divided up into X-days and Y-days. On X-days, I have Dual Enrollment English first block and AP Statistics second block. On Y-days, I have my internship with the Technology Department of the school system. I have Introduction to Engineering third block, and I have Principles of Technology fourth block every day for the first semester. After school, I have Cross Country practice. I then have Physics or Calculus in the evenings, depending on the day.

My internship is going well, and as far as I can tell, I'm doing a good job. Since school started, my job has changed slightly from doing some large task to helping people out with their individual computer problems. I have been able to fix most of the problems I have come across.

Cross Country is fun as always, but unfortunately I'm not as fast as I was last year. This is because I had been working in the last few weeks of summer, and didn't go to the practices that were held, as I had done last summer. As an example, yesterday, I ran 9:22 in a race that I ran in 9 minutes flat last year. I hope that I can work up to where I was last year. I'm considering doing winter track, and not swimming because I don't want to have to start all over when spring track comes around.

I have begun work on a web site for my school's National Honor Society. I bought two domains: mvnhs.us and mvnhs.net, as .com and .org were already taken. For now, I'm using the design of my site, as I don't yet have one for the NHS site. This will be my first web site for an organization, and I hope that they will like it, and use it, even after I am graduated and gone from the school. I'm going to try a CSS-powered pop-up navigation implementation developed by Steve Gibson, author of SpinRite software. It does work in Internet Explorer; something that few or no other CSS menus do. The current NHS design is destroyed by Internet Explorer, but that will have to be fixed, as it is the prominent browser.

18th Birthday

Monday was my 18th birthday. Now, I can do lots of stuff that I couldn't before such as voting, getting a Google Adsense account, being out after midnight, and other such privileges. Monday, I played paintball from around 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. I had a blast. The first game my team won "capture the flag", and I fired off a few rounds. The second game, my team won again, though I didn't fire a single shot. The third game, my friend Jaren and I and one other person stuck together and went into enemy territory. We were discovered, and were holding off at least 5 people when I ran out of paint. I had to surrender. The final game, we played what they call "downed pilot". In this game, one person who is the pilot goes into the woods, and hides. There are about 8 people on the special ops team, and everyone else is the indigenous population. The object is for the special ops to rescue the pilot before the indigenous population captures or kills him. Since it was my birthday, I got to be the pilot. My team rescued me, and got me back to the base. We decided to let the game continue with the indigenous population hunting my team down. We held them off pretty well, and only 1 or 2 of our guys got shot. The others who got out did so because they ran out of ammo or CO₂. There were 4 or 5 of us left, and we made our way to an easily defendable position, but we each only had about 75 rounds left. At that point, it was declared that the game would end in 5 minutes. All we had to do was to keep off the enemy for that long. In the end we did so. Afterwards, I found out from Jaren that even though his team had more than 25 people, they weren't good at following orders. When they would say "Charge!", only about 7 of them did so, and therefore were killed. If the indigenous population were organized, the special ops team wouldn't have a chance. That is my story of my 18th birthday