The Madness Has Begun

Hope everyone had a good weekend. This weekend was a preview of what the next few weekends will be like - all basketball, all the time. There is nothing like college basketball in March. I love the excitement the NCAA tournament generates, the filling out my brackets, the endless discussion of which Mid Major will be this year's Cinderella team. Last year was quite the ride as I live not far from George Mason University. The area was more than a little excited about their run to the Final Four. As the president of George Mason said that to get the kind of publicity that their basketball team generated would have cost millions. I was glad to see it happen. One of the benefits of living in Virginia is the excellent college system here. Whether it be our so called Ivy League school - University of Virginia or our cow college Virginia Tech to the numerous smaller schools that have excellent academic reputations- William and Mary, James Madison University, University of Mary Washington, Virginia Military Institute and a host of others. Now George Mason is not a small school. It enrolls about 30,000 students. But its still has that commuter school feel to it. So their run to the Final Four gave the student body something to rally around and come together. Who knows if they'll make a similar run this year? They're playing in their conference title came tonight against a very good Virginia Commonwealth team. Considering GMU has already beaten the number 2 and 3 seeds, they have a chance. But anyway back to my point, even though the tournament hasn't even started, I found myself totally immersed in basketball this weekend. I caught GMU playing Hofstra and Old Dominion and some of the VCU-Drexel game. I watched UMD play NC State. I was watching the Northeast Conference game between Mount Saint Mary and Central Connecticut State and the Metro Atlantic semi-finals between Marist and Siena. Toward the end, it felt like my eyeballs were going to fall out. Yes, its a fine time of year. Have you signed up to watched all the tournament games on your PC? You haven't? How are you going to keep up with your brackets while you are at work? Not that I would. I'm just saying. Go here.

Winter played a bit of a cruel joke on us over the weekend. Giving us gorgeous weather on Friday with warm sunshine only to pull it back with a cold windy weekend. Just the taste of it on Friday has me wanting the warmth of spring. It can't come early enough. A few diehard rowers tried to convince me to go out on the water in a Quad, but to tell you the truth, I'm more of a fair weather rower. I don't want to go out when its barely above freezing and I don't want to go out when the water is just short of having white caps, especially when the water temperature is barely above freezing. Lets not forget the reservoir was frozen over this time last week. I'll wait till its a bit more pleasant out.

Speaking of rowing, my 30 minute row on Friday went well. I set a personal best in terms of meters rowed. Only by 4 meters, but hey, a personal record is a personal record. I manged to move past a gentleman from Great Britain on the Concept2 Rankings List. There's a guy from Michigan I'm shooting for next. He's only 4 meters ahead. Something to shoot for. My Sunday erg class was its usual fun torture that I got to share with 19 others. Four minutes at 3/4 pressure with 3 minute rest. Repeat 7 times. Good times.