In the following blog post I will be outlining my experience as I physically and emotionally recover from attending NIRCA nationals.

Monday

Morning: On Sunday night I decided that my extreme exhaustion warranted some extra sleep, so I made the decision to skip my first class of the day, Technical Writing, and instead get some extra sleep. In the morning I felt very lazy and was reluctant to resume my normal duties as a college student. I decided that since I needed to study for my CMSC330 exam on tuesday that it would be fine if I skipped my CMSC351 lecture so that I could have a more relaxed morning and get started on my work a little earlier. I decided to make some waffles since I had some extra time, instead of having my usual breakfast of instant oatmeal. All was well and I was cooking some excellent looking waffles. I was planning to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of my waffles as usual (Sorry Andrew), but to my surprise I didn’t have any peanut butter. I then remembered how sparse by food supplies were and that I was planning to go grocery shopping on Sunday, but decided against it. Unfortunately this left me with only putting jelly on my waffles, which was a little too traditional for my liking. The waffles were enjoyable none the less and I went on with my day.

Mid day: After taking some time to gather myself I left my apartment to find somewhere to start my studying. I tried to go somewhere in the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center, due to the high natural light, but there weren’t any good seats. I didn’t want to go to my usual study spot in McKeldin library, since it would isolate me from the beautiful weather. I decided that the best place to go would be Hornbake Plaza. After making my way there I expectedly found that there weren’t any unused tables, so I sat on a bench which wasn’t great for productivity. I perused my email and did my some standard book-keeping activities before I delved into my work. By the time that I started reviewing study materials, I was overcome with symptoms of my pollen allergy and decided that I better move to somewhere inside. Usually around that time of day I’ll go to the Yahentamitsi Dining Hall to eat lunch, but I wasn’t super hungry since I had a late large breakfast, so I went to the Adele H. Stamp Student Union instead. Inside stamp I sat in that one big room behind Maryland Dairy and opened up my laptop yet again. I looked through the practice for m CMSC330 exam and didn’t really feel like trying any of it because it seemed kind of easy and I wasn’t in the mood to do work. Instead I opted to finish watching the YouTube video that I had started during breakfast that morning. After a while watching YouTube a kid started playing the piano and it was quite enjoyable, but he seemed to have some trouble remembering what he was playing because there were some odd pauses and off rhythm notes that weren’t the most pleasant. At this point I decided that I was hungry enough to eat lunch so I headed to the Yiner.

Afternoon/Evening: When I arrived to the Yiner I was disappointed to see that none of my favorite vegetable dishes were available at the Indian Food section. I also checked for any dishes I enjoyed at the Vegan section and was also disappointed by the options there. Finally I went to the Asian Food area and got some Thai Noodles and brussels sprouts which I was content with, but wouldn’t be my first choice. After finishing up my lunch I decided that I better focus on some studying, so I made my way to the School of Public Health. I didn’t get much work done and after a while I saw some SPH faculty outside with Eclipse Glasses on. I thought about trying to get glasses at the event near Martin Hall, but I remembered that the 2017 eclipse was a little underwhelming and thought it would be fine to just experience it without using glasses to look at the sun. Almost immediately after this I received a SMS Text Message from previous webmaster Caleb Holland asking if I wanted to join him and Captain Safety Officer Andrew Cullen at Martin hall to watch the eclipse. I figured that I might as well go hang out with my buddies and watch the spectacle, especially because I wasn’t doing much studying anyway. I went to event and shortly found Caleb and Andrew among the seas of people. We were soon joined by other club members such as Adam Cullen, Andrew Scalese, and Lillian Hsu. We watched the eclipse progress and it was about how I remembered it, but still cool to see and it was fun to experience it with some friends. Later we were joined by Freshman Jared Kimibadhahsdi and Ryken Mak who definitely made the conversation more interesting. Near the end of the eclipse past president Sohan Ganatra made an appearance and we discussed the highly anticipated Terrapin Invitational. After the event was over me and Caleb walked over to SPH to get some work done. I decided to work on editing some audio clips so that I could pretend to do an interview on my radio show (Yoshi City Subway, Mondays 8-9pm on wmuc.umd.edu) so I pushed back my studying more. We were later joined by our bitcamp teammate Ben Johnson and we continued to work until practice started. At practice there were a lot of exciting announcements, especially about Hot Sauce Night which I’m looking forward to. Besides that it was a pretty standard day of doing work while people ran at practice, with some very questionable conversations about certain vernacular after everyone finished running. At this point I decided that I should probably go to the Yiner to get dinner so I wasn’t late to my radio show.

Night: I was pleased to find that the Yiner had added some Mixed Vegetable Jalfreezi to the menu since I went for lunch, so I had that for my pre-radio meal. After eating I headed to the radio station and preformed a pretty good show, even though I was a little rusty due to my post-nationals exhaustion. After this I went home and started uploading the radio show to YouTube. I decided that I would study after this had finished, but when it finally concluded I was too tired to do anything else. I went to sleep shortly after this and was on track to get a very solid 8 hours.

Tuesday

Morning: I woke up on Tuesday morning feeling very well rested. I had some very strange dreams that I would rather not explain in detail, but they involved my being in both the game show Survivor and the video game Minecraft. I got ready for the day much more swiftly than I had on Monday, but once again my breakfast plans were thwarted by a lack of food. I usually have instant oatmeal with sliced banana and peanut butter, but since I didn’t have either I instead put some frozen cherries in to add flavor. This was actually very satisfying and I was happy with my decision. I finished getting ready, took a moment to appreciate how my sun burn was resolving nicely, and headed to class. I arrived at class only a minute or so late and began to learn all about statistics. I didn’t get much out of the lecture, but that was to be expected since I spent so much time on my phone.

Afternoon: After my stat class ended I made my way to the Yiner once again for an early lunch. Once again there was a disappointing lack of vegetable dishes at the Indian Food section, so instead I got something that I forget the name of from the Vegan section that was pretty good. Once my lunch concluded I headed to the Brendan Iribe Center for my CMSC330 exam. I had studied very little but at this point I was content with that and was just ready to get the exam over with. While waiting for the exam I decided to plan my radio show for next week and I picked a pretty exciting theme (follow @yoshicitysubway on instagram to see what it is). Then in due time I went to the exam room. I took the exam and felt pretty good about it especially considered how little I studied. I left the room with around 20 minutes left due to my intense need to use the restroom, but after that I waited outside to correspond with my colleagues Caleb and Ben to find out what they thought about it. After some discussion I then headed to my beloved home in Leonardtown so that I could get some much needed groceries. To my pleasant surprise there was some Facilities employees inside my apartment preforming the spring cleaning of the Leonardtown apartments. I dropped off my bag and grabbed my keys so that I could drive to Trader Joes. I had a pretty uneventful trip to Trader Joes, but I did get some of the highly coveted Kimbap frozen sushi. Once I arrived back to my apartment the Facilities workers had finished their cleaning and I was very grateful to see how spotless my apartment now was. After this I rode my bike to reconnect with Caleb and Ben at SPH to do some work before practice. After applying to some internships I realized that now that I had taken my CMSC330 exam I actually had quite little work to do this week. My allergies were much better than monday, I didn’t have much work to catch up on, my sunburn was fading, and I think that I was official fully recovered from my trip to NIRCA Nationals.

Thank you so much for reading this blog post. If you would like to show gratitude towards me because you enjoyed reading this, then I would recommend that you do so by writing a blog post of your own so that we can continue to grow the team culture of UMD Club Running.