rodzik@www

For the first time in my life (not counting middle school basketball tryouts), I'm worried about making the cut, and it couldn't come at a worse time. I missed all of last week of track, aside from Friday, due to a high fever. I knew that not only did the strain on my body of being sick hurt me, but missing the workouts from that week hurt me as well, and this has made itself more and more evident every day I practiced this week. Monday was bad enough, with me struggling to keep up with the rest of the group on our 45 minute run (at around a 6:45 mile pace), but Tuesday really showed how out of it I was, when we had to do 4x600M in 1:41 and I was coming in a good 5-10 seconds behind the pack I normally ran with, and I could only do 3 of them.

Here I am, wondering what kind of an effect this will have on my last season of track ever, and then I realize that our only home meets left are the one this weekend (which I almost certainly won't run well at due to the close proximity of my illness and lack of training) and our home finale on April 20th. In between we have a few away meets, and those are pretty much my only chance to improve up until my last chance to break 2:00, or even break my PR, at our last home meet.

Of course, with away meets coach can't enter our tightly competitive squad of 6 800M runners, all of which were top 8 in our conference during the indoor season. So the travel roster is limited, and unfortunately for me, I found out today that whether or not I'm going to the away meets depends entirely on my performance at the meet we have in two days.

About a month ago I had the unique opportunity to travel to the nearby Indiana University for the inspection of the colony of Pi Kappa Alpha there in their petition to be chartered, thus making them a full-blown Pike chapter. Myself, an advisor from Indiana State's chapter, and the director of expansion from Pike Headquarters served as the three member panel to evaluate their petition. Despite some issues we told them to work on, we unanimously agreed that they should be chartered.

On Friday myself, along with about 14 other members of my chapter and a number of men from the Purdue and ISU chapters of Pike initiated the men of the IU colony, thus making them brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha. I acted as SMC (President) for the initiation of 9 men, and was involved in other parts for another 8 men. We also had the honor of taking part in other matters for the entire chapter the next morning as well as being involved in the actual chartering itself.

It was great to see the smiles on so many of the guy's faces, as some of them have been working for 2.5 years to get initiated and have their colony become a chapter. Hopefully their chartering and initiation will kindle ambition and vigor in their chapter so they can continue to improve and become a dominant and respected Fraternity on the IU campus.

While there I got to meet and speak with an alumnus of our own chapter, who is IU chapter's advisor now, a past International President of Pike, our Regional President, and others. It's always great meeting new people, especially those higher up in our Fraternity. It was even better to be thanked and praised for the job we did and how well we did it. I'm thankful that I've had the chance (and seized it) to install two brand new chapters of Pike (Beta Xi at U of Wisconsin-Madison and Delta Xi of IU) in my relatively short tenure as a Brother. I doubt, however, that I'll have another chance before I graduate.