And a Word About Pain

I am sitting on Amtrak train 600 in the middle of my 2-hour-each-way commute to Philadelphia. Yesterday someone asked me about pain. I thought it was obvious that a guy my age exercising an average of two hours each day would be sore somewhere most of the time. This person was surprised to find my exercise program is designed around training that will get me stronger without pushing to the point of injury. I try to run one day and ride the next so I won't run on consecutive days and hurt myself. It doesn't always work. I ran a 5k race and Monday morning and did a fast 4-mile run on Tuesday. My left knee started hurting on Wednesday. I ran three miles slow last night and this morning I am moving my feet every couple of minutes to keep my knee from hurting.
The change in my push ups bothers my right shoulder, so I added a couple of exercises every other day to strengthen my shoulders. On some days I skip the sit ups because my lower back hurts. On some running days I ride and walk because my ankles hurt.
I am not complaining. I know that various pains are part of any serious training. My main goal is not to get an overuse injury that will have me otherwise healthy and sitting on my butt. Worse still, I do not want an Army profile--a paper that excuses a soldier from duty. When we are assigned training, I do not want to be sitting on a log with a profile.

Nature Update

And following my last post, here's Katharine Sanderson's view of running in Philadelphia on the blog at Nature magazine.

You're Going Where?

I haven't been home since my last post. I am in Philadelphia for a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Almost 20,000 chemists from all over the world are here for several days. Even though I live just 70 miles away, I have meetings as early as 0630 and dinners that run as late as midnight so I just stayed in town. In fact, I just finished running across the Ben Franklin Bridge and back with a Katharine Sanderson, a science writer from the UK. She is here reporting on the Convention for Nature magazine and writing about Trees That Eat Pollution among other things.
We covered the 4-mile distance from where I work across the bridge and back in 35 minutes. Katharine actually ran six miles, because her hotel in on the other side of Center City so she ran a mile each way to and from the run.

Several times during this meeting events on next year's calendar came up and I said I would be gone from work in 2009. When I said where I would be I going I got stunned looks and versions of "You're going where?!" After they recover from the initial shock, they are supportive, but there are just not that many people who work in my field that take a year off for an all-expense paid trip to Iraq. Tomorrow night I go home for the evening, then back to work on Thursday.

Promotion Picture

Here's a picture of Lisa, my youngest daughter, pinning on my sergeant stripes. This is a simulated photo since we did not take one from the actual ceremony. The twisted collar is just to simulate an action shot!
Photo by Lauren Auster-Gussman

PT Reality Check

At drill this weekend one of the guys on my parking lot detail was a specialist in line for sergeant who just completed the Warrior Leadership Course. The PT is part of that course and I expected this very fit soldier to tell me he maxed the test. He didn't. He ran 2 miles in 13 minutes, 76 situps in 2 minutes and 75 pushups which should have put this 35-year-old Greek God at 300 points. But he said you have to do all exercises in correct form. They did not count five of his pushups and he scored 295.
My form is right for the situps but wrong for the pushups. I either need to keep my head up or drop my body a lot lower. In either case when I do the pushups right I can't get near 56 in 2 minutes. But I have till November, so I will practice a lot more. When I do the correct pushups, it's clear I did not entirely work out all the kinks from the crash last year, so these pushups should work out the last problems in my right shoulder.

First Job as a Sergeant

On Sunday morning our platoon sergeant said I should go and see the first sergeant after formation--he had a special job for me. From the smirk, I expected something ugly. As it turned out, my first official job as a sergeant was to be in charge of four soldiers directing cars to parking spaces at the ceremony for the new battalion sergeant's major. That made me HMFIC of the parking lot (Head MF In Charge--a very old Army acronym, maybe as old as FUBAR). The ceremony was at 1400 Sunday.

Before going to the motor pool that morning, I got 20 orange traffic cones from supply and marked 20 spaces for the ceremony. Then the first sergeant decided the parking lot "looked ragged" because of a half dozen pallets in a crooked line which had not been picked up by the line companies. So I sent the two biggest guys on the detail to get a pallet jack and straighten up the unclaimed freight. Then we went to the motor pool.

Later in the the morning, my three men and I left the motor pool to go to a briefing for everyone involved in the ceremony. My fourth soldier was getting his wisdom teeth pulled.

As is the Army way, we joined the color guard and the men who were in the parade for each company for a briefing and practice at 1100--we didn't have anything to do, but we were part of the event so we showed up.

At 1230 I made sure each soldier had water and sent them to their parking lot posts. For the next 90 minutes I walked from the parking lot out to the entrances on either side of the building to make jokes with the three soldiers.

Seven cars showed up for the ceremony 90 minutes. After the ceremony started, we picked up the cones, returned them to supply and went back to the motor pool.

In my day job I am supposed to make every moment count. When I was a consultant, I had to account for my time and bill for what I did. The Army works on a completely different system. Four of us waiting 90 minutes to direct seven cars to parking spaces is not the way to make money if you are paying by the hour. But we are paid by the day so as long as we are where we are supposed to be we are doing our jobs--directing (on average) one car every 15 minutes to a parking space.

Promotion Ceremony

After we got our sergeant stripes, the two of us who got promoted read the NCO Creed passing a framed copy back and forth. I had never read it out loud before. Last drill I read the Declaration of Independence before morning formation. It's not very long and it makes clear how strange the whole idea of starting this country was. It also make clear how much compromise there was. America should have been the first country to free the slaves, not be the last western country to free the slaves, then add to the shame with a century of Jim Crow laws. Despite all the problems--like the British Army--America became a country that never had a monarch and always had peaceful transitions from one government to the next. No country bigger than Switzerland can say that.