As I sat on a cramped Macalester locker room bench Saturday, sweating through smeared eye black and staring down at my cleats before taking the field, I began to register that this would be my last season opener I ever played in. My mind began to race back to everything I’d done since May. It was certainly an eventful summer.

After heading back to Boulder for a brief period between school and work (and my 21st birthday), I shipped off to Connecticut to begin my summer internship at ESPN. The folks at the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network have a rather murky social media policy that I preferred not to violate, so I kept tweets about working there to a minimum during the summer.

When people ask, “How was ESPN?” I genuinely reply that it was an amazing learning experience. I was blessed to be put on projects where my help was needed; it resulted in quite a few hours, but I enjoyed every minute of it. I especially enjoyed chilling with my awesome roommates Erik, Derek and Naji (blog shoutout = successful). Working in the live event division of TV production was new to me, and I really enjoyed working with College Football, the NBA Draft, the Women’s World Cup and X Games 17. I actually got to go to the NBA Draft and X Games, so I can say without a doubt this summer was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

However, I wasn’t just working on my professional career this summer; I still had a football career to take care of. With a ton of extra work on the side, I got much stronger and faster. Yet what I’m most proud of football-wise this summer was my ability to work hard and work smart. I worked tirelessly on little things like posture, breathing, and contracting the right ab muscles to maximize power during football movements. So far this season I feel like it already helped me.

I said goodbye to the wonderful employees and fellow interns at ESPN on August 5th, and the following Monday I started driving back to Iowa for camp. I was overjoyed to see my teammates again, since they are what makes the game of football truly fun. Once again, camp was incredibly difficult on my body and mind. After four years of doing it, I guess I never really got the hang of college training camp. Of all the things I’ll miss about football, camp might rank dead last on the list.

After wrapping up camp, we officially started a new semester and a new season. I gave myself a pretty easy schedule (Poetry writing seminar = score) in order to focus on enjoying every minute I’m on the field with these guys. We got off to a great start on Saturday, storming out of the locker room ready to take on the world and drubbing Macalester 31-6. My parents made it up for the game, as they hopefully will for every game this season, so it was wonderful to share the win with them.

This week, it’s back to business again. We’re facing an incredibly tough opponent in Monmouth, against whom we eked out a win last year after losing to them for 10 years straight. The Scots are obviously out for blood this time around, so it will be an incredibly intense game for both sides. As with every game this season, I can’t wait. If we can climb to 2-0, we’ll have a good-looking season on our hands.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris [at] thed3experience.com. All original material copyright © 2008-2011 Chris Jarmon.

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Seeing as I’ve finished all my finals of junior year, it’s officially time to start making jokes about being old and whatnot. Specifically, my favorite is to throw out “I’m getting to old for this sh**”, and although I’ve been doing it since freshman year, it will finally be somewhat relevant to my age. I’m turning 21 on Sunday, so I suppose it makes sense that the religious nutjobs believe Rapture will occur the day before. I’ve always assumed that the world would end before I could legally drink.

This is my first legitimate instance of posting since Spring Break ‘11 (I am a firm believer that the phrase “Spring Break” must be capitalized and followed by a year in all official use). And though it’s been my longest hiatus from the blog to date, it’s also been my most productive. I’ve been busy finishing the semester with hard work in school and football, as well as generally carpe-ing diems.

Specifically, we made it through a great few weeks of spring practice as a team, although for some reason it was nearly impossible to make it through a rain-less practice. If this spring’s football weather is any indication of how the season will be, I’m wearing a poncho over my pads (scarlet, obviously).

We’ve also been working hard in Coach Martinez’s great strength program, and as a result I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. I was able to hang clean 315, bench 315 and squat 560 with a 25.5″ vertical jump (notably .5″ higher than quarterback Jimmy Borasso). My focus this offseason will be continuing to develop that

I’m also getting ready to start a summer internship at ESPN on June 8. They’ve given me little indication as to what I’ll be doing apart from working with their live events this summer (i.e. baseball, softball and whatever random sports you see on ESPN when there’s no football or basketball to broadcast). It’s definitely an opportunity I’m looking forward to, as I’ve never been to Bristol.

This is looking to be a great summer for everything but my social life. As it turns out, working a full-time job and training for football leaves little room for anything other than sleep. I’m fine with it, though; this is my last summer to really push it in the weight room so that I can blow up Kevin Hwang any time he tries to blitz in practice.

In the meantime I’m attempting to cram my belongings in storage bins so that I can get moved out so that I can stuff my face with pig meat at block party on Friday and fly home on Saturday. When I return to Grinnell next fall, it will be for my last season of college football. I always assumed I would be more stressed out about my senior year arriving, but I’m excited. It’ll be another year of playing football with my brothers, which is one more year than most people get.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris [at] thed3experience.com. All original material copyright © 2008-2011 Chris Jarmon.

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Typically I have a difficult time deciding whether my lack of consistent posts is a byproduct of age-induced world weariness, an inhuman daily schedule or a general lack of interesting occurrences in my life. I’m tempted to blame a combination of the three, but I saw someone get pegged in the head with a lime last weekend so I know the third choice is impossible.

This time, however, I have valid excuses. Since my last post, I’ve faced a ridiculous streak of sickness that has kept me below 100% for the last 3 weeks. I woke up on Super Bowl Sunday with what would later be diagnosed as strep throat, and watched the game bundled with more layers than the kid from “A Christmas Story,” all the while shivering profusely. I’ve been sick lots of different ways, and strep sucks. One of the chief ways I derive pleasure in life is from eating and drinking. Strip me of those two activities and I am a shell of a man.

Upon recovering with the help of antibiotics and inhuman levels of ibuprofen, I was immediately struck with a congestion/cough/lifedrain that’s been going around Grinnell for the past couple of weeks. I’m usually pretty good at staying well, but this February flipped the script on me. February is now my least favorite month of all time, and not just because I have to hear my Packer fan friends gloat endlessly while my team enjoys the draft pick allotted to the NFL’s second-worst team.

The same day I got strep throat, my computer’s hard drive decided to phone it in. I’ve gone to Grinnell College’s help desk with several problems in the past two years, and this was the first time I was met with a quizzical look and the admission that “I’ve never seen this before.” I decided it was high time I got a netbook. I did my research and ordered a sweet Samsung model through Amazon. The key word here is through, since I apparently did business with a third world outfit named “Gizmos for Life” that decided on a whim to cancel my order, a diabolical act that kept me computerless for nearly two weeks. My profanity-laced email to this company said something to the effect of, “I hope you die. In a fire.”

Now I have a netbook which I received from a company that understands the basics of customer service and inventory. I can also post on the site again, since I don’t like blogging in campus computer labs (I have a sixth sense that feels judgment from others).

My weekly routine doesn’t make being sick any easier; academic commitments eat up time while marathon workouts eat up my energy. Typically, if I’m not actively in class, studying, working out or eating, I am most certainly sleeping or watching ESPN’s Tim Tebow documentary for the 15th time (dude is unreal). In fact, the only reason I’m writing on this site right now is because I’m procrastinating on a paper. The only reason I’m up this late is that Wednesday is our midweek day off from workouts. Most other days of the week I’m required to get up at 6.

Weekends include less partying and more sleeping — my new go-to move is to say “I’ll be right back” at a party and go crash for 12 hours (because saying “I’m going to put a Breathe Right strip on my nose and go comatose for awhile” doesn’t sound very cool).

Our new speed and conditioning workouts are partly to blame, since apparently there is a direct ratio of distance run in February to points scored during the season. Running at 6 AM on Tuesday morning after a leg-intensive Monday afternoon lifting session is akin to running with firecrackers strapped to your knees. 275-pound males tend to limit their activity to World of Warcraft and Nutty Bars instead of 300-yard shuttles and power cleans, so I suppose joint pain is to be expected. It doesn’t help that I spend some of my free time playing racquetball in an attempt to become somewhat athletic while releasing ungodly amounts of aggression; my inability to stop on a dime also results in frequent collisions with walls.

As much as I like to complain about running (I am a lineman, after all), our offseason workouts have given me some significant strength gains. My squat and clean numbers are similar to what I had going into camp, so Coach Martinez’s program is definitely working. Based on what I’m seeing from my teammates, I’m not the only one enjoying some serious gains. If we can keep beasting these workouts through spring ball, we’ll have some great momentum heading into the summer. And, who knows? Maybe I’ll become agile by osmosis in the meantime.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris [at] thed3experience.com. All original material copyright © 2008-2011 Chris Jarmon.

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I quite literally did nothing of value over winter break.

Perhaps that’s somewhat of a hyperbole, but from the day I finished finals in December to my first class of 2011, I most certainly contributed nothing to society. I’m sure that can be said for most of the time I’ve spent in college as well (especially the time I’ve spent blogging), but apart from working out for football, reading, and attempting to log over two full days playing Fallout:New Vegas on my Xbox, there wasn’t really much going on over break. I would have updated the site, but there honestly wasn’t much I could have talked about except for how difficult of a game NBA 2k11 is. I was in a deep state of recharging, and it was awesome.

Now a new semester has begun, and with it comes exciting new challenges. I’m attempting to do 4 things in the near future:

1) Publish a book through the college, as well as online

2) Start a sports talk show on our radio station, KDIC 88.5

3) Obtain some form of job/internship this summer

4) Get our dining hall to start offering Waffle Crisp cereal

At the moment, item number four is my most serious endeavor. The first three may or may not actually occur, but if I graduate from this institution and do not leave Waffle Crisp in the dining hall as one of my many legacies, my time here will have been an ultimate failure.

For those who do not know, Waffle Crisp is the greatest breakfast cereal of all time. The Grinnell College dining hall has one of the best cereal selections I have ever seen, with a star-studded cast including Cocoa Puffs and the always delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but Waffle Crisp has always been a notable absence. The task with which I have burdened myself is not an easy one, seeing as the cereal has nearly been completely discontinued and now costs over four dollars a box online. In the years since its fade into obscurity, I’ve chased the dragon by eating somewhat similar-tasting cereals, the best of which is the new Cinnabon cereal. Facsimiles are no longer enough, and I have taken it upon myself to provide this wholesome syrupy goodness to the college at large. In addition to creating a successful student initiative for my cereal, the job will most likely require negotiating with manufacturers and monitoring the index price of syrup. It will be difficult to convince the college to carry such an expensive cereal when I plan on consuming two bowls per day at the very least.

That’s my important work at hand; behind the scenes I’m going to class and working out for football. I’m in some interesting classes such as “The Craft of Poetry”, where I’ll attempt to create (or “craft”, apparently) something more substantial than my high school output of limericks dealing with bodily functions. This semester should be a good one once the average temperature returns to double digits, but in the meantime I’m attempting to better myself in the area of sports foreign to my skillset (namely, basketball). As much as I need to focus on strength and power for my upcoming senior season, things like “agility” and “not falling over all the time” are also evidently necessary, so spending time out of my comfort zone helps make me a more well-rounded athlete (if “athlete” is the term you ascribe to a 275-pound football player who spends more time blogging about Waffle Crisp than football).

But school and football (not to mention breakfast cereal) are not the only goog things going on in my college life right now. While it was certainly fun spending winter break not studying, exploring my meathead side at 24-Hour Fitness and dreaming about waffle crisp, I missed my friends and my teammates here at Grinnell. It’s good to be back in the swing of things, hanging out with people and simply enjoying the time between my various other collegiate commitments. The spring semester has always been one of my favorite times in college, because you spend more time bonding with your teammates off the field. I’m enjoying this offseason as much as I can, because the time I spend with my team is starting to run out.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris [at] thed3experience.com. All original material copyright © 2008-2011 Chris Jarmon.

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I’ve been pretty silent in this space recently, and I suppose it’s because I don’t know exactly what to say.

Usually this time of year I write an end-of-season wrap up post, then move on to my offseason blogging activities of fart jokes and taunting Mel Kiper. This year, however, I’ve put it off for way too long since I don’t really know how to sum up this season.

It was a great season as a whole. I enjoy winning even more than I enjoy a good romantic comedy (everybody loves rom-coms, right?) and we did significantly more of that this season than we did in past years, finishing with a record of 6-4 and one win away from earning a share of this year’s conference championship. It was my first winning season since 8th grade, when the Centennial Cyclones cruised to a 4-2 record and were subsequently rewarded with ice cream sandwiches. Our seniors equaled their win total from their last 3 seasons here, and Coach Pedersen was rightfully named MWC Coach of the Year after his maiden voyage at the helm of Pioneer Football.

Although I truly enjoyed our success as a team, I struggled individually. I injured my left knee during the first drive of our Week 7 win against Lawrence, and an MRI revealed a sprained PCL (an injury which my mom discovered only occurs in football players and victims of car accidents). I didn’t want to say anything about it on the blog, partly because I didn’t want other teams to know about it and try to exploit it. Although I managed to play with the injury for the remainder of the season, it made my position considerably more difficult. I felt like I was only playing on one leg, and anytime I tried to accelerate and make a block downfield my leg would buckle.

Even with the knee injury, I still hoped that I might get some form of all-conference recognition. While the reason I play football is because I love it and because it’s the best way I know how to honor God, I still have goals. Every season these goals essentially boil down to 2: win the MWC Championship, and be named all-conference. Those goals for this last season were in the back of my mind since the day we got stomped by Beloit to end the ‘09 season; every weight I lifted and every sprint I ran was with the intent of becoming a first team all-conference offensive lineman. I had been named honorable mention the previous 2 seasons in 2 different conferences, so I considered it a feasable task.

I knew at the end of the season that my injury might hurt my all-conference status, so I tried to prepare myself to be disappointed. Yet I couldn’t even fathom at the time how devastated I would be when the list came out 2 weeks ago and I couldn’t find my name anywhere on it. Football is my life, and it occupies most of my waking thoughts. So it was a crushing blow to discover in one moment that - despite all my hard work - the conference’s coaches as a whole thought I played worse than I did last year (or at least that’s how I processed it).

Although it sounds stupid to say that I let outside influence affect my self-confidence, I play a position that is highly subjective and mostly unsubstantiated by statistics. A lineman’s level of play is difficult to judge, so the all-conference list is one of the few sources of feedback I do get about my skills. My true goal is to be the best football player I can possibly be, and the all-conference list lets me know how I’m doing on that goal. So when I learned that the consensus among coaches was worse than last year, my initial response was to withdraw completely. To put it mildly, I was embarrassed. With the exceptions of class and workouts, I avoided everything. I didn’t go to the dining hall for days, and I spent Thanksgiving eating canned spaghetti and watching TV in my room.

I’ve only recently begun to enter the mainstream world again, and it’s mostly because I’m done being pissed off at myself. Marquis sat down with me at dinner and told me that he had the same reaction last year when he only got second team. His resolution then was the same as mine is now: I’m going to work so hard that they have to make me first team. Any time I’m struggling in the weight room, I’ll be able to get that extra rep when I think about how I’m nothing in the eyes of the rest of the conference. It’s an extra bit of motivation that I believe will push me to greatness.

So overall, this was definitely an OK season. We won some games and we feel good about ourselves. But we as a team have unfinished business, and I do too. I’m going to do everything in my power to help lead this team to a conference championship, and I’m going to do everything I can to play as well as I am physically able. It’s time to sell out. I only have one more chance, and if I don’t give every last ounce of energy in pursuit of excellence I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.

Questions? Comments? E-mail me at chris [at] thed3experience.com. All original material copyright © 2008-2010 Chris Jarmon.

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