on the ergo again

Ive been sick this entire week!  I missed 10 days of practice!  crap!  I need to get fit!  (In the American sense of the word... well, maybe in both senses of the word).  Basically Ive continued to sit around my room, reading random stuff online, and a couple of books (Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe).  While it is nice to relax and read and catch up on the news, I am definitely growing little more insane every day, like a chainsaw that loses a chain-link every day until it breaks.  Its been pretty tedious to say the least.  

That said, I do believe I am on the mend.  My body feels almost completely better, but have a nagging cough which rears it's ugly head whenever I try to excercise.  I did some light ergs over the weekend, inducing the pathetic bleatings of my pansy-ass lungs, backed up by my pansy-ass American immune system.  I hope to be full-force at practice tomorrow, though I suspect this cough may linger for some time.

This weekend the team competed in an erging competition in Birmingham.  While I was frustrated that I didnt have an opportunity to pull a score, there was a certain relief in watching my teammates suffer instead of suffering myself.  I was also encouraged with some of the scores my teammates pulled.  Deaglan, an American from Cal, went 5:53. We also had a 5:55 from Pete, and a 5:56 from Tom.  While these scores are not off the charts, I think we have more than enough juice to go fast.  There are at least 4 more guys who are a capable of going under 6 minutes for 2k, but they didnt perform at their best yesterday.  I also got to see this British "erg-monkey" named Graham Benton go 5:46, which was pretty fun to watch.  He is a big man.

I should mention that I got in trouble for writing down erg scores before in this blog before, because "there are Oxford spies everywhere, and its only a matter of time before they discover the blog".  While I tend to be less than paranoid, and I also tend to believe that it doesnt matter who knows our erg scores, out of respect for my President and coaches, I won't put scores down in this blog unless they are already publicly known (as in the case of the erg competition).