Monday, July 19, 2010

Working in Indy

Like I mentioned on Friday, my coworker & I drove to Indianapolis late Thursday night for a training course on the Functional Movement Screen. We checked into the hotel, the Crowne Plaza at Historic Union Station, around 11:00 PM and I crashed right away. Not only had I been up since 3:00 AM (remember, I worked at 4:00 AM that morning?) but we also had to be up early on Friday morning to grab breakfast before the training started.

Friday morning came a little bit too early and after a quick (and expensive) breakfast at the hotel restaurant, my coworker & I headed up to the ballroom where the training was to be held. The first part of the day was a lot of lecture and explanation & philosophy behind the functional movement screen. It was interesting but after only 10 hours of sleep in the past 2 nights, I was struggling to stay awake. My coworker & I kept saying we felt like we were in college again trying to stay awake in class. After our lunch break, we were able to do hands-on training and actually put the knowledge we learned before lunch into use.

Our training ended around 5:00 PM for the day. While waiting for my coworker to finish working out and get ready so we could go to dinner, I was hoping to take a short nap but unfortunately my plan failed when there were a bunch of kids swimming in the indoor pool. Normally this wouldn't matter since the pool is usually tucked away somewhere or in its own room but not at this hotel. In fact, the pool was literally right outside my room so I had the pleasure of hearing kids screaming while I tried to take a nap.

This was the view from my hotel window and that is the pool right there
Since I had a couple hours to kill and I couldn't nap, I wandered around the hotel for a bit. The hotel is actually on the National Register of Historic Places because it is housed in America's first "union station." Because the hotel is in an old train station, the set up was a bit different than your typical hotel, which is part of the reason why the pool was out in the open right across from hotel rooms. One neat feature of the hotel though was that they had authentic trains on the second floor with hotel rooms actually on the train.

The hotel rooms on the train....you can see the steps to get into the rooms on the very left hand side

My coworker & I finally headed out around 7:30 PM. We ended up walking a couple blocks to Ram Restaurant & Brewery for dinner. Since we were expensing all of our meals, we really weren't concerned with the price of our meals. I ended up getting fish tacos and my coworker got a steak. Of course, I couldn't resist getting dessert too....and it was HUGE! It was funnel cake layered with scoops of ice cream, in fact, 6 big scoops of ice cream in total. I probably only actually ate 1/4 of it. Afterwards, we headed to the oldest bar in Indiana, Slippery Noodle, which is known for playing live blues.

The Slippery Noodle was established in 1850

They had a lot of Blues Brothers stuff throughout the restaurant and bar area

We got there right before the band was coming on and had great seats. After listening to the band for about an hour or so, we were both getting pretty tired so we headed back to the hotel for the night.

I woke up at 5:15 AM on Saturday morning and headed to the hotel fitness center for 6 mi on the treadmill. Despite the lack of sleep, I felt really good and was glad I actually got up early to run. My coworker & I headed to Einstein Bagels for breakfast before sitting through another long morning of lecture. Thankfully, I was anticipating hitting a wall & getting tired, so I actually had my very first iced coffee to drink during the lecture. It was delicious!

Caramel Macchiato Iced Coffee


Our training ended around 3:00 PM and we quickly loaded up the car and drove back to Columbus. My coworker dropped me off at Todd's around 6:00 PM and I was glad to be back. I'm really happy we were given the chance to go to this training because now we will be certified to do this specific testing with some of the fire departments we already train and do fitness testing with.

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