Lasers:
I had two more sessions under the laser this week. One was Tuesday for my back, back of my neck, and other areas while the other was Wednesday morning for my upper & lower legs and my feet. Both of them were actually a lot of fun chatting and joking around with the laser technicians at Smooth Solutions where the manager actually said I was the harriest person she’s seen or treated in four years of working there.  I asked them how many pulses it took to treat me and they couldn’t say because they would have had to add up all the body parts but some they did know were that my back took something like 1,600 pulses of the laser on Tuesday and back in August my lower legs took over 4,000 pulses to treat with my upper legs taking another 2,000 plus pulses of the laser.  Wow.  They want to give me an award when I’m all done or get T-shirts made that we can all wear showing the before and after pictures or something.

Now that I’m done with round three of treatment the roots of my hair still in the now permanently damaged hair follicles will slowly push out over the course of the next few weeks until I am almost competely hair free.  I will remain hair free for anywhere from 2 week to 6 weeks while a new cycle of hair growth slowly starts to activate and grow but this new cycle of hair growth will be much less hair than ever before!  A few weeks after the hair grows back – probably early February – I’ll go in for my fourth round of treatment.

Running:
As I said last week I bought a pair of running shoes and am starting to do that to mix it up in my off season training and especially to add bone density since cycling is no impact (except for a few crashes.)  I ran another 20 minutes on the treadmill this past Monday for a total of about 2.3 miles then today (Wednesday) I ran at the track at the school I teach at (Jesuit College Prep. in Dallas) and did 4 miles…I’m not sure how long it took as I didn’t have a watch or clock but I’m guessing more than 30 minutes and less than 40.  It hurt.  A lot.  I’ll be sore for a few days… hopefully not too many though.  I can’t wait until I feel like a runner again.

Papers:
The worst thing about being a teacher, or at least one of them, is grading papers.  At the start of this week I had over 650 pages to grade all made up of 1-2 page journal entries, 2-4 page essay test answers, and 3-5 page half-term papers.  At this point I have about half of the journals and all the term papers remaining.  So that’s about 400 pages left…more or less.  Oh the joys of teaching!!!  But hey, at least I have my job and really like or love most other aspects of it.

Thanks for reading,  I’ll be reading for a while too…

-andrew-