Boy oh boy. Yesterday was an absolute mental drain. A full day of recursion really messed with my head. Coming in, I felt I was fairly comfortable with recursion, at least when it came to easy to intermediate problems, but looking and trying to solve the more involved and difficult problems proved to be incredibly frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the challenge, but the longer I went at it, the more it felt like my mental state deteriorated.

My partner and I worked well together. We cranked out the recursion problems relatively quick and finished our second project of the day, minus the bonus. He was pretty fun to work with, and given the challenges of recursion, mutually celebrated with high fives and cheers whenever we broke through problems.

The practice assessment was released today, and let me tell you, I definitely need practice. If I had been taking that assessment for real, I would have failed that assessment. Granted, I tried to force it after a long day of recursion, but still, a lot of the concepts were stuff I knew, but blanked when it came to down to answering the questions under pressured environments.

That wasn’t even the best part. After waking up consistently at 5 AM to commute and workout, as well as to make time to journal and blog, I felt pretty burnt out in the sense that I’ve been getting between 5-6 hours of sleep a night. That’s normally fine, but I haven’t had to engage and keep my mind focused for that long in awhile. All I wanted to do was finish up homework, quizzes and project readings and get home to sleep a bit earlier, but nope, fate decided, “Not today!” As I began biking home, about 2-3 blocks out, the pedal on my bike just fell off. The screw connecting the pedal arm to the rotating gears came loose and I was unable to screw it back in. I had a bike tool, but not for that particular screw, so I ended up walking my bike back to a/A and calling a Lyft home.

That’s pretty much my day in a nutshell. Though it sounds bad, it was mostly a great day. I ended up waking up at 5 AM and was able to bike and workout in the morning, which I loved. I also got a great kick out of the recursion challenges! The day just to proved to be a mental drain, but given the intensity of the program, that’s expected.

That’s it! Talk to you guys tomorrow!