Fartlek-inspired Thinking Fever

http://connect.garmin.com:80/activity/embed/141373794

I certainly overdid it today, no doubt about it.  Having done hills on Wednesday and planning a long one for Sunday, today was obviously easy day.  Nope, not for Neil.  I decided to do some fartleks, which as far as I’m concerned means running fast for a short period of time and then running very easy in between.  I ended up doing a km easy, 4 x 400m at about 90% speed (probably my target 5km race pace?) with 100m ridiculously easy (but not walking) in between, 1km very easy, 4x400m again, but not so quick since I’d already outdone myself (proabably at about 70% speed?) and then after 100m walking a very easy almost 2km back home again.  

I survived and even enjoyed it, but could feel many a twinge as I hobbled back up Santa Fe to the flat.  Lots of ice now and let’s hope it feels good tomorrow with lots of swimming.  There wasn’t much time for thinking with all that change of pace going on, but I had a few random thoughts as the blood pulsed through my brain:

I could try writing a workshop called ‘Being a Dogme DoS’ about how to encourage student-centred, materials-light and emergent language-aware classes from your staff, without smothering them in course books and assessment etc. 

and

Polls! I’d forgotten about polls.  I should have stuck some polls in the Who needs Dogme blog post to see who thinks they do.  Is it worth adding one now?  Or should I do a whole new post based on different polls? 

and

I’m going to do a Dogme-stylie Delta session next week on classroom management – they’ve all managed classrooms for a couple of years at least so they should be well aware of the issues.  Let’s just have a clinic to fine tune our weaknesses once we’ve celebrated our strengths.  My experimental practice as a trainer…

and 

My Delta IT session is going to take place completely online, with the instructions and tasks going out through twitter…Could be lots of fun or it could be a shambles, but learn through doing and all that.  Time for my PLN (do I actually have one?) to stand up and be counted…

So quite a lot of thinking in the end really.  

My first fartlek

http://connect.garmin.com:80/activity/embed/98982581

Yesterday the wife made me go for a fartlek session – wasn’t sure I was ready for such stress on the body while recovering from injury.

But in the end I managed to run quite fast during our 200m sprints, I was happy to hold a good sprinting pace throughout the 200m and not flag before the end.  The knees and foot held up, although the hammies and achilles were sore enough during the slow warm down lap.  So much sprinting and the wife’s company meant not much time for thinking, but the following occured:

This Blog will serve as a means of sharing what I already have and do and hopefully encouraging others to share too.

Is launching a blog during a major EFL conference a good thing or a bad thing?  Am I competing for attention or will it be easier to get the blog out there?

#eltchat this afternoon was excellent – Promoting Critical Thinking in the classroom, I’m glad I proposed the topic, that it won and that I made sure I could attend.  You definitely need to prepare yourself to have something worth saying to say.  I definitely should become a regular for a while, until I more connected.  And should I publish it here in Printing Press?

I need to organise my life so I can go to LABCI next year – why aren’t I there now? Ignorance? Laziness? Lack of contacts?

I need to improve my talk ‘Professionally Developing’ for the ABS conference in August here in Buenos Aires – can’t rely just on how I did it last year in Veracruz and Cuernavaca, Mexico.   Include more concrete examples, links, suggestions, not just the idea itself.

Running Roads

BA10K 2009

Random updates on my runs, especially the races and the ones that help me think.