Last week, I was away for several days to attend a STEMTEC writing retreat. I wrote a paper on using a wiki to teach my section of Writing in Biology. I attended the workshop with a colleague and it was wonderful to be able to focus on something without distractions for several days. I'm not used to being away from a network connection for so long, but it helped me realize just how often I shy away from doing difficult tasks by surfing the web. The paper is still rough and I need to flesh out the literature review more, but I think I could submit it within a week or two, depending on how other tasks go at work.
I checked out several books from the library, but didn't do much reading this weekend. I've been spending more time exercising. Yesterday, I took a long walk on campus and today I took the boys swimming. It is the third time in January that I've tried to seriously swim laps. The only times I had tried to swim laps before, I found it difficult to swim even one or two. Even the first time I went in January, I was able to swim fairly well and today I probably swam a total of 500 yards (in 25 yard chunks). The weight lifting that I've done over the past couple of years had greatly improved my overall strength. Over the past few days, I have been feeling some cramps, which I had initially put down to to the rich food at the retreat. While I was swimming today, I realized it's actually probably just muscles I had never realized I have. Weight lifting has strengthened some of my abdominal muscles, but not the oblique abdominals.
My goal in improving fitness is to get into good enough shape to do some serious bike-riding this summer. I feel like I'm off to a good start.