Well, I have had possibly the most hectic two weeks of my life and so haven't had a chance to update the blog until now!Well since I last wrote, I have started term and am well into the work (It is now Tuesday of 3rd Week and there are 8 weeks in total each term here at Oxford).
In first week I didn't really get a chance to do any running because suddenly I had a lot of work to do! This year has really stepped up a gear and from having one or two problem sheets a week last year I suddenly have 3 every week and they are a huge step up in terms of difficulty. I have already had to pull 2 relative all-nighters (i.e. staying up till about 4 doing work then only getting 3 hours sleep). That said, I am really enjoying the work, even if it is difficult, and I am managing to do some stuff that I really enjoy too.
After coming back to Uni determined not to row (so much so that I didn't bring any lycra with me) I succumbed before the end of first week! I got a phone call from Andy Brown the men's captain asking if I could row on Saturday morning for an outing. I agreed and he informed me that the outing would be to Abingdon and back - a good three hours on the water. That meant about 13 miles of rowing, of which a good 7 or 8 would be at racing pace! I got up at 7am on Saturday morning ready to face the music and found I actually really enjoyed it. I realised how much I miss rowing - after all it has been a major part of my life for the last 3 years. There is nothing quite the same as being in a really fast boat on a crisp morning sweating like crazy and generally killing yourself to try and make the boat go just that tiny fraction faster. As it turned out I ended up subbing in this last weekend to, and have volunteered to do so next weekend too. At the end of the day, all it means is missing a Saturday morning during which I would probably have jsut sat in bed, and the outings are really good exercise and make me feel less bad about the lack of running recently. Unfortunately, the coach seems to think I have also volunteered to do Wallingford head in 5 weeks time - a 5km head race in usuallyfreezing conditions! Although I would quite like to finally compete in this race (the last two years I have been entered and the race has been cancelled due to high stream) I don't want to appear too keen!
Unfortunately the only run I've managed in these last two weeks was on Friday night (rather stupidly the night before the rowing outing...). Hazel, one of my flatmates, needed to go to the train station to pick up some tickets so she could go visit her boyfriend and so decided to run there instead of cycling. I immediately said I'd come and before I knew it we were off on a 6.25km run. We did it in two halves (as we had to stop at the train station to pick up the tickets) and our average pace was 6"01/km on the way there and 6"03/km on the way back. I was really pleased we managed to keep the pace up on the way back as we were both pretty knackered by that point. As it turns out we are both pretty similar in terms of pacing which is good and means neither of us was running away from the other.
In other news, I've decided on my applications for America. My ranking of universities
is as follows:1st Choice - MIT
2nd Choice - CalTech
3rd Choice - Cornell
4th Choice - Brown
5th Choice - Chicago
6th Choice - Rutgers
So fingers crossed I'll end up in Boston! Another reason why the past couple of weeks have been so stressful is that I had my GRE general exam on last Thursday. After stressing out about it, it ended up being pretty ok, and I got 620/800 for my verbal and 800/800 on my math which I was really pleased about. I've got my subject GRE in December so hopefully that will go OK too.
I'm planning on doing a few runs this week to try and clear my head - these past couple of weeks I've been getting really stressed and a bit depressed to the point where yesterday I nearly started crying in the middle of the street for no apparent reason (and the last time I cried was at my Granny's funeral four years ago). I think hopefully running will help me get away from it all - Oxford life can be pretty heavy going a lot of the time, so hopefully running might help.
Anyways, I better stop seeing as this post is slowly becoming huge, and will probably post again after my row this weekend.
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