Winter hit relatively hard in DC this year. Two snowstorms within a week of each other shut down federal offices for several days. It was beautiful, even if it was a little convenient. Rock Creek park was especially serene, transformed into a snowscape and seemingly complete remote from the rest of the city, the cars and quotidian bustle muffled by the snow. Snow tends to slow things down, even when life demands that one picks up the pace.
The snow and ice definitely made keeping up with my running hard. Which wasn’t ideal, sure, but it happens. Treadmills exist and, even if they are boring, they get the job done. Time spent inside lead to me doing a little more work than normal on my two Computer Science classes, and some good progress was made working on the Intel8080 emulator for Capstone.
Then I came down with Covid and lost about 5 days to aches, tiredness, and general brain fog. Everything just took ages to do! Especially bitwise operations for the emulator – I’ll be the first to admit that bitwise operators aren’t my strong suit on a good day, and I certainly had a string of less-than-good days! I’m sure (or rather, I hope) that is a more-or-less universal feeling for people who are less experienced in C/C++ or are coming from a place of more experience in Python or JavaScript. But I think all the practice paid off and things are clicking more now.
Now that I think I’m mostly caught up with classes and work, I’m looking forward to diving into the hardware emulation aspect of the emulator project. We’ve just about finished all of the software emulation aspects and now get to start the exciting work of debugging and building the hardware emulation and i/o files. I’m sure I’ll have more to share on that for my next post once we make a little headway and I have a solid chunk of time where I feel like a functioning human!
As you can imagine, it is not advisable to go on tempo runs (or runs at all) when you’re sick with Covid. With that and the hamstring that was bothering me from the last post, I’m not where I’d like to be in my training. I’ve been able to keep up with most of the tempo work, but easy and volume-building work during the week really took a hit while I was digging out of the Covid hole. There’s still plenty of time, but going forward I need to spend more time focusing on stretching and practicing yoga more seriously.
I’m of the firm belief that body and mind are intertwined, and the last several weeks I’ve had to neglect some of the practices I enjoy for taking care of my body. It’s difficult to cultivate one without giving attention to the other. Or maybe that’s just me because I can’t sit still. It’s not an original idea and I certainly won’t bore you with a manifesto on the topic. But getting to a more confident place in my running will only help my coursework and day job.
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