Tribute to National Champion Shockers

Wu-Shock

Before I post what everyone is waiting to read about (my running), I find it necessary to pay a brief tribute to my alma mater, Wichita State University from the mid-major Missouri Valley Conference.  Yesterday, they won the Championship of the NIT basketball tournament in dominating fashion.  WSU defeated five opponents over 16 days, including four from BCS power conferences: the Big 12 (Nebraska), ACC (Virginia Tech), PAC-10 (Washington State) and the SEC (Alabama). The victories, including one over College of Charleston, were by an average of 15.4 points.  They played their best basketball of the season in the NIT.  I have to wonder, since they lost by a combined 5 points to 2 teams playing in the NCAA Final 4 this weekend, how well they might have faired had they played in the NCAA tournament.

This is the first national tournament Wichita State has won, and although not as prestigious as the NCAA tournament, we still had to knock off teams who came in first place in their conference and who beat other top ranked teams throughout the year like Duke, Texas, and Kentucky.

Our mascot is Wu-Shock, and our team name is the Shockers.  A few years back, we adopted a little unofficial hand gesture, called "The Shocker", that independently became popular in some subculture out there.  Every time we beat a team, we say that we gave them The Shocker.  If you really want to know what The Shocker is and are in the mood for something rated R, then listen to one of these songs for an explanation: The Shocker Song, or The Shocker Song 2

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Now, back to my running.  It feels like I've been kind of a blog slacker these last couple weeks, not writing any posts, but I either had writer's block, or I just didn't have anything interesting to pass on.  Some might argue, that's always the case with me.

I haven't run any races lately, and I won't run another until April 23rd when I tow the line for a local 2 miler that is sure to be painful while it lasts.  The weekend after that, I will run the Wichita Half Marathon which I should PR in.  To get ready for both these races, I have cut back from my marathon training mileage, and tried to add in some quality speed work.  I also was able to get in about 40 minutes on the stationary bike this week, which is fewer than planned, but it was due to sleeping in too much.

Weekly Mileage
3/26	15	8 min/mi
3/27	0	rest day
3/28	7	intervals 4 x 1M @ 6:36 pace
3/29	7	8.5 min/mi
3/30	7	8.75 min/mi
3/31	8	tempo 4M @ 7:00 pace, 3M @ 7:54 pace
4/1	5	8.75 min/mi
TOTAL	49

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I leave you with a Friday Funny from the World Wide Web.  If all my crunches don't pay off soon, I've now got a backup plan: