College Graduation and The Comeback Begins

Two big things happened in the past couple days: I graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a bachelors degree in aerospace engineering and I took the first steps in my post-collegiate running career.

Graduation was awesome.  I spent the whole weekend surrounded by friends and family and received a diploma symbolizing all of the hard work I've put into my education.  For me, it represents not only the work I put in the past four years, but also the work that went into the previous 13 years of schooling to put me in the position I found myself in freshman year.

The ceremony itself was nice but nothing out of the ordinary for a graduation.  Speeches were given and the diplomas were handed out.  Everything went smoothly and I can't wait to see the pictures.  I was somewhat apprehensive as there had been some controversy regarding the speaker, Rex Tillerson.  Mr. Tillerson is an accomplished businessman (he's the CEO of ExxonMobile) and the President of the Boy Scouts of America and delivered a speech that was good, if somewhat clichéd.  A small but very vocal minority was upset that the CEO of a giant oil company was being brought in to speak and initially intended to disrupt the ceremony.  After negotiation with the administration, a compromise was reached: the students would be allowed to walk out before the keynote speech and then return after and receive their diplomas in a way that would not distract from the pomp and circumstance.  As it turns out, I couldn't even tell that anyone left (even though I looked) and only eight students left.

The rest of the weekend was spent hanging around the apartment with my family, friends, and their families as well as eating at some of Worcester's best restaurants.  Over the weekend, we ate at 111 Chophouse and Bocado.  They were both delicious and I ate to extreme fullness both times.  The best part of the weekend, though, was seeing family I don't get to see nearly enough.

Today, the great comeback began!  After the end of my scholastic running career, I took about three weeks off from running.  I found that without running, I feel somewhat hyper-active and require several hours less sleep to feel rested.  My guess is that this is an adjustable thing that wouldn't last if I continued not running.  In any case, I ran 3 miles with my roommate, Alex in 22:36 which is a very easy effort for me. I have thought a lot about the next step over the past couple weeks and I think that in the next couple months I'll be focusing on trying to put some solid, non-specific training in and building a strong base.  This will require more steady and tempo runs and less interval work than I am used to, though I will be trying to incorporate regular strides into my running.

-Lane