Successful Weekend

The weekend starts off with some good football Friday night. The local team where we live moved to 7-0 and #3 in the district and #5 in Pennsylvania at the AAA level (2nd biggest). Where I teach, they won their first game last weekend (think I forgot to mention that previously). But, despite nearly doubling their season point output as they scored 28 pts, came up short and lost 35-28. However, Saturday football was the highlight!

WORKOUTS
Before I get to Penn State and company, Saturday morning brought about a crazy 12-16 (depending on group) by 400m workout in the morning. They were broken up into sets of four. In the first set, the goal was to drop 2 seconds each time (87-85-83-81) with 65 seconds rest and about 3 min rest in between sets. The next three sets was a second faster (79-78-77-76, 75-74-73-72) with 5 seconds more rest in between quarters and the same rest between sets. All but the varsity 7 or 8 remained after set 3.

I tried one in set 4 (quarter #13), but my quads became jelly as I was going down the home stretch and greatly struggled but still finished my 70-second quarter. Fortunately, a few of the guys finished a bit behind me (75-ish), so coach told them to hit the road for 3 miles. I "sacrificed" my finaly 3 quarters to join them on the road (yeah right, I couldn't have run faster than an 80 on that next one, and that's being generous!!!). The big boys ended up with a 65 on quarter #16. Yikes! I think they're ready for districts NEXT Thursday (Oct 23). There's a tune-up this Thursday.

FOOTBALL MANIA
It's days like this that I'm glad I follow a sport that the multimedia empires chooses to broadcast on six different stations and also via internet streaming video. I felt bad for Beth trying to follow on the internet the live Ironman coverage that kept getting bogged down (since everybody in the WORLD--except most of the US--was trying to find out results).

Where to start? There were so many great games. Michigan lost to TOLEDO (but I'm still worried for next week), UNC over ND on a late game touchdown, the BIG GAME with Texas winning a shootout over Oklahoma, Vandy losing to Mississippi State, OSU looking ugly against Pur-don't (although PSU looked ugly last week, too), Kansas beating Colorado, Arkansas upsetting Auburn, Michigan State out-physical-ing undefeated Northwestern (Ringer looks tough), and Minnesota upsetting Illinois.

Then, we cleaned and ate dinner and got ready for the prime time events:
PSU vs Wisconsin
Tampa Bay vs Boston
Florida vs LSU
Missouri vs Oklahoma State
Penguins home opener
Following the KONA Ironman results
#1 PSU women's volleyball at #12 Minnesota on the Big Ten Network (PSU swept!!)

...I'm glad I've got a remote control and a computer with ESPN360 to be able to follow all of these games.

The end result:
PSU is now #3 in the national polls. They played a solid game and won 48-7. They look tough, but they've got their evil nemesis Meeee-chigan coming to Happy Valley in next week. Hopefully they can beat them for the first time in like 9 or 10 years and not be caught looking ahead. I will, though--after that it's at Ohio State. We'll find out what they're made of with these two games.

IRONMAN

BIG congrats to Kim (9th place in 25-29F) and the many other triathletes connected to Beth who were out at Kona. What a crazy day to do a race for anywhere from 9 to 12 (or more) hours. That's bordering on insane. Beth told me how 42 year old former Florida Marlins baseball player Jeff Conine was there and competed.

SUNDAY
We followed our normal Sunday routine: Trail run (60 min. today), church, lunch, nap, now. I'll leave you with a picture of our dog, Roxy the Ham, as I finally caught her with my laptop webcam sleeping on her back. She usually rolls over by the time I open up the webcam and position the laptop to get the best picture.