General Jackassery

GRUELING! Today, I registered for this ride! It is perhaps going to be the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done! And then after that, sometime in June, Rodney told me that he’s putting a group of riders together to go to the Blueridge Parkway to ride for 4 days. That goes from Grueling to Brutal, since Rodney was talking about 95 miles a day AND riding up and over Mt. Mitchell two days in a row. For those who don’t know Mt. Mitchell is one of/if not the highest Mountain in North Carolina. Anyway, it’s shaping up to be an intersting summer and if I do all of this stuff I should be in the best shape of my life when it’s all over. Honestly, it should be a pretty good launch pad for me to the the 24 hour time trial up in Iowa in September. SO, you’re now asking yourself, why?

The answer to the question is a belief that I have. I don’t believe that anyone can ever attain perfection, but that said I do beleive that everyone should continously be trying to improve themselves. The reason that professors give tests when they teach classes is to see where their students stand and how well they’ve done their jobs to that point. The cycling events that I plan on doing are a test of physical as well as mental strength and they are designed so that I can see what I’m made out of. Should I fail miserably it will be back to the drawing boards and I’ll continue to work hard to better myself. In this case there’s no one but me telling me how good or bad I’m doing. However, you can rest assured that I will not be telling myself that just because I’m on the bike that’s good enough. I’ll be pushing myself to go beyond what I think I’m capable of because that’s what it’s going to take to ride 300+ miles in 4 days over the blueridge mountains.

This brings me to what’s really eating me of late.

There are a lot of Student Organizations that are formed around the idea of getting students together and just having fun. Unfortunately the ASCE is not one of them. The ASCE has been built around the idea that we could win if we worked hard enough. Of late there have been people in the club that are not willing to put forth the effort that it takes to win and because of that there is a small cluster of people that have fought to carry the load of those people who aren’t carrying their own weight. Now there’s one officer who has it in her head that we should not be trying to win, that we should be encouraging everyone for whatever they submit as their part and accept that as good enough. I couldn’t disagree more. You’ll never know how good you CAN be if you don’t have someone pushing you to do it better! And to be honest, no one ever submits their best work on the first try. It’s not necessarily because they didn’t try hard, it’s because they need an outside perspective to help them make it better. If it’s your work you miss things because you know the intent and you might think it’s good enough. However, when someone else looks at it, they are able to see what you missed because they DON’T know the intent. Anyway, to me it doesn’t do any justice to the person doing the work to tell them that something is good when it’s not, for the plain and simple reason that you are fostering bad habits and in the future those habits will harm them. Part of the club’s mission is not just to have fun, not just to win the competition, but to help students develop skills that will help them in their professional careers.

To make a long story short you can help someone more by pushing them to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do on their own, 99% of people are not self motivated!

Oh well, I’m too old for this stuff anyway!