Relief!

Finally, I'm relieved to know what I'm going to be doing next year (beside of course training my butt off!). Today I received my acceptance to the UB Chemistry PhD program! I'm pretty excited, they have more professors working in inorganic chemistry than most schools, so I'll have a lot of options as to projects I can work on. One that I'm interested in is making nanoparticles for use as MRI contrast agents. I've been working on a little side project for a guy at Ceders-Sinai making some nanotubes for that use, and I've found myself wanting to dig a little deeper into it. We'll see I guess. So that's a weight lifted off my shoulders. Amanda is taking me out to dinner tonight to celebrate! Though, this means a little bit of workout shuffling. Other than that, I'm trying to make some slow progress with my thesis. Another bit of good news is that I'm going to be able to teach for the first half of the summer, so I'll still have a paycheck then! It's funny how things have a way of all coming together to work out. So now my personal life checklist consists of finding an affordable apartment in Buffalo, that's easy to get to UB from, allows dogs (Preston will be living with me), and is easy enough to run/bike from. Hopefully I can find somewhere that fulfills all those criteria. If anyone knows the Buffalo area, and good places to run/bike, I'd love to hear them!

Unfortunately school in Buffalo means that I won't be seeing Amanda every day, which sucks. She's going to be beginning her Grad program at the Warner School at U of R. She's really excited about it! What a way to start a marriage though, having to move to places an hour apart. I know that it'll be a struggle at times, but I'm sure that it'll be fine. In the end it's worth accepting a little bit of time geographically separated for us both to be able to do what we really want to do. She's trying to get a graduate assistant ship in res life so she has free housing, or otherwise she may move in with a friend of hers if she can. The other con will be limited water polo. There's a Niagara Falls Club, but they're pretty bad, and I'll have enough on my plate with tri training, and PhD studies. So I may limit my polo playing to coming back for tournaments and scrimmages.

On to training! Things have been going well! I'm loving seeing the improvements that I'm making every day. This really hit home from me on Sunday. I met some of the team in Pittsford for a group long run. We all started out kind of together, but I ended up running with Turbeau. That kid is quick. I was proud that I was able to stick with him through it. It's almost surreal running along at an endurance pace that's faster than I was running for 5ks last year. Then kicking it up a notch for the last 30 tempo sub 7min/mile. That's crazy fast to me. It just continues to excite me for the season ahead! Last week I struggled some with my bike rides, I just mentally didn't have it. I suffered through every minute, even though it wasn't anything tough. Then things turned around Thursday. I went for a short, easy ride around the block, and I felt amazing! I then rode my bike to and from school Friday, in addition to my actual bike ride workout. Those rides completely rejuvenated me, and I rocked my long ride Saturday. All along I've kind of hoped that I could do Placid in around 11 hours. This was kind of a best case wish. Sunday as we're heading back to the cars after the long run Mary tells me she thinks I can definitely go under 11. Lets hope!

After the long run Sunday the team met at Bruggers in Pittsford to hang out and get a group picture (because Mary now writes for Xtri.com, find her first official column here!) I also had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of my teammates! The ones I got to talk with the most were Mark (who has to be one of the nicest guys I've ever met, so check out his blog), and Kim (also known as pregnant Kim or kimword Kim, who is hilarious, and she and her husband, another one of the nicest guys I've ever met, are swimmers. So plus 10 cool points to them!). We also got our awesome new visors, and water bottles! We're definitely going to be representing Train-this out there with all this awesome gear!

That's all I have for now! Off to pick up Amanda and get some yummy chinese food from Bamboo House!

123 Days to go!