Harvard football player Carl Ehrlich shares what training is like for the "summer dogs."

1. Early workouts will make old men of us all. No one personifies this "coming of age" quite like my summer roommate, Liam O'Hagan. In all honesty, Liam comes home from work, eats his dinner, stretches, drinks a V8 and is in bed by eight o'clock. Drying paint gets bored watching Liam.
2. No one wants to chat at 5:30 in the morning. Except Mike Lawler and myself. Every once in a while we'll draw a couple people into our morning conversations, but for the most part it's a quiet locker room while people get ready to start the running. Steve Sheehan is routinely ready to kill me for talking on the car ride down to the field house.
3. We're hungry (figuratively). It would be a mistake for anyone to think that we're fat and happy after winning the league last year. I haven't heard a single person mention last season since Christmas and I've never trained with a hungrier group of people. If there is a school in the country squatting heavier than we are, they're lying.
4. We're hot (literally). The vast majority of the summer dogs all stay in the same dorm in the summer (aka "The Kennel"). In case our superintendent is reading this, we're anxiously awaiting the return of the AC.
5. Tuesday night is "Wing Night." Ryan Pilconis aka "Big Pilc" aka "The Lobster Roll Connoisseur" aka "The Moose" puts on a wing clinic every Tuesday in his room. Because we don't have workouts on Wednesday morning, it's a great chance to kick back with a lot of the summer dogs, watch some TV and enjoy Pilc Daddy's fine cuisine. He'll tell you it's the Frank's hot sauce that does the trick, but we all know how those Pennsylvanians are about their cooking secrets...
6. Cheng Ho is a budding real-estate mogul. No jokes here. The kid could sell a sun room to a vampire.
7. We're fighting the "meathead" reputation at work. But losing the battle. On my first day at work, I realized while trying to pull off a discreet hamstring stretch that half of the office was looking at me. Pete Ajayi was blending in nicely at his banking job before his stash of protein powder was discovered under his desk. And although the stair-well seemed to be a tempting place to crank out a set of pull-ups, Ryan Barnes had to be politely reminded that the office building was not a jungle gym.
8. We're all afraid for Matt Luft. Inside sources at In-n-Out Burger of California report that the large and athletic receiver is not so slowly approaching 300 pounds. This, if true, will make finishing our new conditioning test nearly impossible. Those receiver times are awfully fast, Matt ...