BFITBDAY

Ever since I came across this site, I knew I had to do it. I began planning and worrying about my birthday back at the beginning of January. February is not a very conducive time to plan 3 hours of outside exercise.

I want to start be sharing that I'm not completely insane. I did toss around the idea of doing the platinum level, which could have been achieved by going to the 6:30pm master's class last night. But Swift had a meeting at the velodrome and since the kids could ride the mountain bike course I did that instead. But for the record, I did swim 2400 yards yesterday at noon, so I was within 2 hours of the platinum level.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I woke up at 5:30 (after some nightmares of the track running out of track bikes) to go to master's class. I seeded myself in the guppy lane as usual but today there was a real slow swimmer with me. I wasn't planning on going hard, but I spent a lot of time waiting for him to get back to the wall. Luckily he left after an hour and then I had a jam session to get to 3500 yards. Now, technically the bfitbday rules specify you only have to swim the number of yards of your decade (so, 3000) but where's the fun and symmetry in that? Anyway, the class is normally 90 minutes and that's how long it took me today.

I came home and slammed a Mix1 and then went for a 5 mile run. I felt pretty good and had an average heart rate of 155 while still maintaining a 10:20 pace. When I got home I had 10 minutes to refuel before heading over to Alex's class for my usual Friday morning volunteering gig.

Now here was the part of the day that was most problematic. I wasn't sure if I wanted to ride 35 miles outside or at the track. I finally made the call on Tuesday when the forecast was calling for possible snow to ride at the track. Jeremy said he would ride an hour with me, and my riding partner would ride the other hour. But Jeremy bailed on me (something about work??? meetings???? maybe he doesn't love me anymore????). I showed up at the track by myself. I rode about 15 minutes before the other guy out there asked if I wanted to ride a pace line. He said he was going a mellow pace, but as soon as I jumped on, my heart rate jumped from 136 to 155. He did most of the pulling, but I took some very small turns being on front. At the end he estimated we were doing about 22 mph. By then, I was getting tired and loopy and started my secret weapon Pepsi. The second hour with Erica was much more tame and I stayed in the 135 range. For comparison, if I tool around on my road bike, I'm usually in the 120s. My bike didn't have a timing chip but Erica's did and she did 209 laps. 35 miles is about 400 laps on the blue line so considering how much harder I rode the first hour, I can safely say I did at least 35. And yes, it's killing me a little that I don't actually know how many miles.

And now it's time to relax, have a few beers and enjoy my birthday weekend snowboarding extravagant. Yay!

Total workout time: 4 1/2 hours. It's a long way to Ironman.