For already riding 15 days this years, we've managed to have a whole lot of mediocre ski days. I try to put a positive spin and say we are just keeping in shape so when it snows, we are fit and ready to fully enjoy the day. Like today. Sarah and Devon joined us at Keystone for some legendary skiing and riding.
After an ungodly long wait in for the Outback lift, we had another wait to ride the snow cat:
For only $5 a person, you can avoid a 30 minute hike to the top of South bowl. Jeremy felt very vindicated when after a 25 minute wait, we passed people hiking that started when we got in line:
And here's the top of South Bowl with Breckenridge in the background:
I've heard of that Breckenridge place:
Getting strapped in to make fresh tracks in some serious powder:
Fresh, soft, deep powder!
Devon and Sarah:
We only made about 10 turn before we hit a serious tree run. There were pits of powder so deep, than when I fell, my arms sunk in up to my shoulder when I tried to put my hand down to get up. And then, a mellow run out:
And the day kept getting even better. After killing our legs on a couple of serious bump runs, I headed over to the NASTAR course. I'm not sure if it was because of less icy conditions due to actual snowfall or my freshly sharpened edges, but I managed to shave a few seconds off my time and get not one but TWO bronze medals. Alex's ski instructor registered him today and Alex got a bronze medal too. Is it too early to start grooming Alex for 2022?
Actually, I was thinking something slightly more profane for about 30 minutes this morning while swimming. D3 is setting up a women's triathlon team and in honor of the occasion, I swam with them this morning. Optimistically, I'll be swimming them with them every Friday morning, if I recover from today.
Clearly, I have been slacking at masters. Sure, I've been bitching about my pace slowing down since Christmas break and actually this week was the first week I felt back to where I was. But in general, when I swim I'm not praying for lighting strikes or heart attacks. (Digression - on my birthday swim, I was telling the coach that I could probably move up a lane but I'd have to draft like crazy and work really hard. And plus, there were 5 people over there and only 2 in my lane. And he told me he just went to a talk by an elite runner who was talking about suffering - how he prayed for lighting strikes and heart attacks during hard sessions. How the human body can tolerate a whole lot of pain. And I said, "Is this supposed to be a pep talk???")
And today, I was kind hoping for a big brown floater or something to close the pool. The workout was HARD. Our main set was 9x150 on 2:30. Just 2 weeks ago, I was doing 150's on 2:27. Today my first ones were 1:18-ish but they got progressively slower until they were 2:30 and there was no rest. Our total workout was 3000 yards, which is on average 500 more than I usually swim in an hour. And I'm not sure how I feel about all this.
For one thing, the D3 coach was telling me I need to breath every other stroke instead of every 3 when I'm doing fast sets. I've worked my ass off this winter getting comfortable swimming 3. I'm pretty proud of myself. I see the argument for both cases and I'm confused. On one hand, you get more oxygen breathing every 2. But on the other, you end up with muscle imbalances and symmetry issues. I fully plan on racing every 2, but should I revert back in practice too? Just for the speed work? It feels like cheating. This is what you get when you work with 3-4 coaches, which is what I'm effectively doing with my Rally master's classes.
The D3 women's team officially starts in mid-March and then there will be group runs again, in addition to the weekly swim. I'm super excited to explore my pain tolerance some more.
We had a record smashing track class today, and alas, I did not smash any records. We first worked on "hot laps" just 1 lap all out. I made 9.473 seconds, and did not break the 9.23 record. We made 4 attempts (it's amazing how much recovery you need in between 10 second all out efforts) and then moved on to the kilometer - 7 laps. I made a personal best of 1:18.5 but was still 8 second over the 70 minute record.
My class buddy Janet kicked butt. Her birthday is the day before mine and I would have sworn she had just turned 45, but no, she's 55. She broke her age group record in both events. Her lap time was 10.082 (she strong, but is a bit more cautious than me, something about not wanting to break bones) and her kilo time was 1:18.9. And now, glory on the white board:
And after careful inspection, there is NOBODY to beat in the how-many-laps-in-an-hour category for our age groups. I'm tempted to ride it. Sure, I'd get on with 200 laps, but all the male records are 300 laps and above. Which means you have to be moving at a pretty fast clip for 60 minutes. Aside from the fear that I'd get severe motion sickness, what could go wrong?
And since it was record breaking day, I ran after class instead of before. That meant after class, I had an Adam. Rather than go all the way to Rally's for daycare I put him on his bike and he kept me company, rather like a slightly untrained dog:
My workout was a 10 minute warm up, 8 x 30 second efforts and a 10 minute cool down. I did the efforts back and forth on a less crowded part of the bike path and it worked out perfectly. If only Adam would stop talking so much, I'd consider doing this more often.
It's what I've been anticipating for 2 weeks. What I dedicated my last two snowboarding days too. What I've poured my heart and soul into. And yet, it's a bittersweet day. Yes, I qualified for NASTAR nationals in the female 30-34 snowboarding division. So did, as far as I can tell, anyone else who completed a race, but that's not the point. I qualified. Me. But the big downer? The national race entry is $199 PLUS lift tickets. And as awesome as I am, I don't have $300+ for this endeavor. (Although, I've looked at and not bought 2 track bikes, which kinda makes me feel like I've already saved $500...)
But I'm doing to put a positive spin on this. I'm not giving up (Olympics 2014???). I'm going to race a few more days and try to shave down my time enough to win a time-based medal. All the OCD at a fraction of the price.
Our family has an age old tradition (which we foolishly broke last December) of not skiing on holidays. And as luck would have it, it snowed 22" this week in Breckenridge, and about 12" of those in the last 2 days. We must keep reminding ourselves it was worth missing the snow to avoid the confluence of President's Day/Valentines Day/Mardi Gras. It will snow again, right?
So instead, we headed over to the Broomfield Rec Center for some swimming this morning. Unfortunately, we were not the only ones in the metro Denver area to have that idea. It was our first trip there and it's a really nice rec center and the pool is pretty cool. It looked like this, only with people packed in like sardines:
There were also two big slides, a body slide and an inter-tube slide. Ariel conning JJ into taking her on the inter-tube slide about 47 times. And don't let the placid water fool you, there was danger lurking beneath the surface. Both Ariel and I cut our toes and required bandaids. We are so going to sue.
We swam for almost 2 hours and left just before everyone imploded. We stopped at Del Taco for lunch and in our hunger-crazed stupor we made some poor nutrition choices:
Drinks??? French Fries??? I'm not sure why Ariel looks so surly, she enjoyed her cheeseburger kid's meal with churro desert. I couldn't believe we ended up spending more than we would at Chipolte, with a significant decrease in quality.
After our crazy morning, we had a quiet afternoon with the boys watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Ariel napping. And I had the rare treat of going to the grocery store all by myself. After Del Taco, I was very inspired to buy some real food.
---
And if you watch Lost, check out this recap blog. I loled. A lot. (Thanks Bonnie!)
Well kids, we are starting to get into the serious endurance training. I knocked out 2 hours at the res today, which handily is 2 laps. Today was all about time and I had to hold myself back at the beginning and push a little at the end. The last time I ran out there was the long course, and like the long course, I spaced my walk breaks on the uphills. I ended up doing 10.65 miles at a 11:17 pace, which brings me to this cool training tool. When I plug in my time for my 4 mile race yesterday, I get a vdot value of 34.85, an indicator of my fitness. This website is cool because it has a chart showing how that fitness level would preform at different distances. Hypothetically, yesterday I could have also run a 27:04 5k and a 56:14 10k.
The other chart has training level paces. Presumably, I could run a 11:19 mile at 70% of my max heart rate, which is my easy long run goal. So today I was pretty happy to hit 11:17, especially since I was running in 2" of snow in my yak traxs in 20 degree weather, while keeping my heart rate in zone 2.
In general, I really hate seeing my mile pace above 11:00. But going back to the vdot page, in theory I can still race the half marathon in 2:04:40, which is very much not 11 minute miles. I think I'm going to set my Canyonland goal to be sub-2:10 but the closer to 2:00 I get, the happier I will be.
And in closing, long runs are still really hard. I got a blister in on my right arch (ski sock related?) and my legs got pretty tight and sore at the end.
Week Totals:
Swim: 5800 yards Bike: 2 hours at track Run: 25.5 miles
Today, Becky, Rachel, and I raced the Loveland 4 mile. It turned out to be a fairly difficult course. The first 1.5 miles were downhill with a tailwind and I was lulled into a false sense of my abilities. I did 2 miles in 17 minutes. And the last 2.75 miles were uphill into a fairly serious headwind. At any rate, I got a PR! Ha, I've never raced 4 miles before. And really, it was challenged to figure out how hard to go, not as short as a 5k but much less than a 10k... I also got a heart rate PR. My last two races, I have averaged 176 bpm and today I hit 177 bpm. Averaged. My last 15 minutes were around 183 bpm, which is not a very comfortable place to be. And a 10 year old girl beat me. My watch time was 35:18, which placed me mid-pack of the women 30-39. I ran the same pace I ran for Rudolph's Revenge 10k back in December.
Adam's class foregoedforewent skipped the classic Valentine's party and instead celebrated the Chinese New Year at Tibet's Restaurant. Because, I supposed, Tibet is part of China, though the restaurant serves (excellent) food from Tibet, Nepal and India. And also, the owners' children go to Creekside, one girl in Alex's class and one in Adam's class.
We enjoyed a fun filled bus ride to Louisville and then had the restaurant to ourselves:
The owner, Kandu Sherpa (yes, Sherpa!) serving tea in the background:
A little Tibet culture. I don't think the Chinese revere the Dali Lama so much:
Alas, we were not served yak meat, though it's on the menu. I would have tried it:
Adam chowing down on chicken tiki on the bone. Guess we aren't vegetarian anymore:
We had a fabulous brunch (ok, it was a bit hard to chow down at 10:00am) of chicken masala, spinach saag and choi mein. We were served way to much food and I started the trend of asking for take out boxes. I scored us dinner too.
And now, I am all field tripped out for a good long while.
Today I had the pleasure of joining the second grade class on a field trip to the Museum of Nature and Science. I use the word "pleasure" loosely.
Our first order of business was attending a class classed "You've got guts." The intrepid teacher went over the digestive track while the class wiggled and waited for the real highlight - a real frog dissection:
None of the kids vomited and only one ran out the the room crying, so I'd say the frog was a success. And speaking of frog dissection, we've move well beyond the dark ages of my 1988 7th grade biology class. We were assured this frog grew up happy and lived a long life on a farm and died of natural causes before being preserved for science. I'm not sure what qualifies as natural causes these days, the teacher found a beetle in his mouth. Perhaps he choked?
After the class, we had about 20 minutes to explore the museum before our IMAX show. I was in charge of 3 kids - Alex, Zach and Luke - who apparently thought the museum was a parkour course. We bounded and leapt through the space exhibit before the movie.
Disappointingly, the movie was Wild Ocean, which Alex and I had already seen. I believe my review was "less talking, more feeding frenzy." But I still like the gannets diving bombing into the ocean after the sardines. Next we had lunch and then 30 minutes of museum time. It was Alex's turn to pick so of course we had to go see the puffins. It was nice to hear Luke finally say, "These birds are cool, I see why you like them so much, Alex."
And then, the wildly fun bus ride home. I really don't know who I respect more after this trip, second grade teachers or bus drivers. They are saints and martyrs and have my eternal admiration.
... the NUMBER ONE NASTAR ranked female snowboarder aged 30-34 in the state of Colorado. Out of an esteemed and competitive list of... 1. Ranked 2 out of 3 at Breckenridge, 1 out of 1 at Keystone. I'm dedicating February to becoming the number 3 ranked 30-34 woman in the NATION. All I need is 3 more separate days of NASTAR races and the spot is mine. Winter Olympics 2014???
So mark your calendars for the NASTAR national championships in Winter Park, March 25-28. How can I not race? And where can I acquire a skin suit?
Just a snowy day, not a snow day. We probably got about 4" in Boulder. Lilianna came over for a playdate and we kicked the girls outside. They were ok with that:
Ariel showed Lilianna how she makes snow angels:
Then Ariel throw snow in Lilianna's face. Lilianna took it pretty well but Ariel was reprimanded:
And then they spent about 20 minutes making slush in the heated bird bath until their mittens got soaked and they came in for hot chocolate.
I'd say that was the highlight of the day. Ariel and Lilianna played a bit together inside before it was time for us to pick up Adam. Then we had lunch, went to the grocery store (where Ariel made the biggest doughnut mess I've ever seen) and then she and Adam played until it was nap time. Ariel started getting grouchy around 2:00 and when I told her it was time for a nap she got near hysterical and uninvited me to her birthday party. Given her reaction, I think I made a good decision regarding napping today.
First, a big shout out to my awesome family for an awesome birthday weekend!
My family and Becky, J, Ariel, and Laura all went up to Breckenridge Friday night. On Saturday, we headed over to Keystone for a full day of skiing and riding. We even got Laura out on skis for the first time in 18 years, and I can't believe no one got a picture.
Here's Becky and J in the Gondola:
Laura and Me:
My kids had their regular ski school. We ran into Adam about 3 times on the mountain, but never saw Alex.
Becky's looking pretty strong on the snowboard:
We took a mid-day break to check out the tubing. It was pretty intense. The guys working the top had to do some pretty athletic moves to get a tube going:
Here's Becky and J doing a double tube ride:
After that, we all went together in a 4 cluster for the rest of the hour. And to get back to the top, a covered magic carpet:
Sometime during the day, Jeremy and I managed to work in 5 NASTAR official races. I may be a bit premature, but I do think I qualified for nationals. Because, as far as I can tell, there is no racing my category at Keystone. I'll know for sure on the 16th.
In the evening, we had a wonderful lasagna dinner and the birthday cake my Mommy made:
After we got the kids in bed, I introduced my family to Sequence, the funnest game in the world. As usual, we played boys against girls, and sadly (as usual) my team lost. I'm beginning to wonder if it really is me. When Jeremy called it quits, we played Mexican Train dominoes. What does it say of Dad made it an hour more than my husband?
The next morning, Jeremy, Alex and I went skiing at Breckenridge. I got to ski with Alex first and he has really improved since Christmas. He is matching his skis through his whole turn and I don't have to slow down for him much. I took him for his first run ever on Peak 10. Then Jeremy and I traded and Jeremy took Alex on a couple black runs. While Adam and I managed a blue/black run on 10, it was just steep enough to be slow and hard for Adam so we moved on to easier stuff. It was easy to convince Adam to run some NASTAR races with me.
We ended up doing 3 races but I only videoed Adam's first attempt. Poor guy slipped on the first gate but recovered and didn't disqualify. He was awesome on the next 2 races and was so proud of his finisher's pin. I put it on his jacket right away and it was lost before we got to the car. I feel so bad that I didn't grab an extra one just in case:
I had a great birthday weekend, I should turn 35 more often!
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.
...but I got through it anyway. One of my various and sundry weekend activities left me really sore. I could explain the sore legs from a full day of snowboarding but my back and arms really hurt too. For the most part, my running program has been building mileage with some non-intense speed work. Today's run called for a 40 minute run at lactic threshold (aka as fast as you can run for 40 minutes). My 10 minute warm up was ok and my first mile went pretty well too. And then I hit a wall. I bargained with myself that I didn't have to do the full 40 minutes, but I did have to do a race effort 5k. I managed to do 28:24 and my average heart rate was 2 beats per minute lower than race pace. And it was unpleasant. All the pain of racing with none of the adrenaline or schwag.
My next workout was masters. With my sore arms and 5 mile run I wasn't expecting much, so I was pleasantly surprised. I was slow, but I was able to swim the entire hour comfortably. We did a fun workout, or at least a novel one, which helped. We started on at 2:30 interval and we were to swim as far as we thought we could and get the rest we needed. I swam 150 yards in 2:27, so I got 3 seconds rest and started again. The interval dropped by 5 seconds every round so the next time I did 125 yards in 2:05 and had 20 seconds to rest. We did the pattern for the rest of class, ending on a minute interval.
I may not blog about it much anymore, but Ariel and I are still having adventures. This morning we visited the chiropractor again. Ariel stayed in the waiting area playing with Mr. Potato Head and I had a more quiet appointment than last week. Last week she came into the room with me and was coloring quietly until the chiropractor made the mistake of engaging her in conversation, then the two of us never got in another word edgewise.
After my appointment I thought we were going to Rachel and Lilianna's house for a playdate, but when I called no one answered and I didn't want to drive all the way out to Louisville for nothing. So we went to Starbucks, for the second time this year. I got a chai since I'm still nearly coffee free. Rachel still hadn't called back after we were done, so we went home and I started on my grocery list. She finally called back at 9:30 so Ariel and I headed over for a quick playdate.
Ariel told me she wanted to play with Lilianna's kitchen. Lilianna didn't really want to though, so they didn't play there very long:
They did other things, like jump on the bed and play dress up:
After we picked up Adam, we went to the grocery store. It was not the most zen trip I've ever made. Ariel is going through some preschool bipolar stage in which she's hysterically hyper and if you reprimand her, she bursts into tears. She eventually lost 1/2 her doughnut, which we bought to eat after lunch.
Ariel and Adam shared mac & cheese for lunch, along with apple slices and denominations of donuts. After lunch, they played together quite nicely until it was time for Adam to go to chess club and Ariel to take a nap.
We had an incident at chess club today. Alex hit Adam and was sent home early. I hoped Alex was mortified by having to leave (hope hope hope) but as an additional punishment he had to pay me for the missed chess class, which was $3. On Friday, Alex's teacher told me that he feels like he and Alex have been having a lot of words about keeping hands to himself too. I fear we are back to the duct tape solution stage.
Today was my shopping/food prep day. I made some rice krispie treats from the leftover penguin marshmallows:
And a big pot of black beans and rice for Jeremy's burrito factory. And if I can manage to get the bathrooms cleaned, I will consider today a domestic success.
Last week I finally resigned myself to just getting a new pair of my current acceptable - but not exciting - running shoes. I returned the latest pair of torture devices to Boulder Running Company but they didn't have the shoes in my size so I walked out with a refund. This was not a bad thing, as I knew I could get the shoes cheaper on line anyway. While I was looking for the shoes, I did a last ditch attempt to find the magic shoes - the shoes before these shoes. And low and behold, on a very obscure and sketchy looking website I found exactly one pair in exactly my size (to be truthful, I've always been able to find the shoe - in size 6 or 6.5). I used the sketchy check out system (to which Jeremy said, "You either bought shoes or gave the Russian mafia all your credit card information.") and on Friday I received a pair of new shoes. At this point, I don't even care if the Russian mafia starts trafficking drugs with my credit information! I have new shoes! And now all my problems are solved for the next 4 month until I get to do this all over again.
This week went pretty good. I felt over my illness and did all my workouts, except the two strength sessions. I'll add some back in next week. I did a 90 minute/8.5 mile run on Thursday that felt better than the 75 min/7 mile run I did last Sunday. This week added a bit of mileage and my knee was fine with it all. I did 2 killer swim workouts. On Friday I took Wes Hobson's last master class at Rally's. The main set was 17 x 100's on a decreasing interval. I was able to do the 100's on 1:45 and 1:40, but when we dropped down to 1:35 and 1:30 I started suffering. My best of the day (at the very end) was 1:32. Much better than the 1:45's I've been complaining about this month. And then I realized, I usually do my run before my swim class now and maybe that's a reason why my times are slower. On Friday, the only workout I did was the swim.
Yesterday we had the 3rd day of ski school, which was also the last day of the first session (out of two sessions). We weren't able to use the Breckenridge house so we drove up Saturday morning. By leaving Boulder at 6:10am, we were able to get to Dillon by 8:00. That left us time for a second hobbit breakfast at Starbucks, plus a chance to get the boys in their ski pants and boots (done better inside than at a 15 deg parking lot).
Since it was the last day of the session, some of the groups did special costumes. Adam's teacher brought everyone a feather from her pet Macaw. Adam talked about getting the feather all week:
Adam skied level 4 this session. That means he rode the big lifts and did mainly green and blue runs. He was the smallest and youngest of his group. The terrain was fine for him, but he had trouble keeping up some of the time. Nevertheless, I think it was a good fit for him to be challenged. He actually does pretty well when he's trying and not goofing off.
Alex skied level 6. He was skiing blue and some black with trees and bumps. They even were doing the race gates (more on that late). He's also finally upgraded to poles. I don't think he uses them much while skiing, but they do come in handy when it's flat. Here he is in blue next to his instructor at the beginning of the day:
Once we drop the kids off, Jeremy and I have 6 hours to ski. Which is about 2-3 hours longer than we would do on our own. We did our first 3 runs in the little terrain park. We did some baby jumps (Jeremy went off bigger ones than I did). Actually, I don't mind the jumping so much, it's the landing that doesn't always go so well. On the 3rd trip I tried a big flat tabletop. The tabletop went fine, but it dumped out 2 feet off the ground and surprised me. I fell pretty hard on my front, that was a new thing. But beyond bruising my hip, I didn't hurt anything.
After that, we skied around until lunch. We found Alex at the Outpost at lunch, and he told us he's been doing the NASTAR race course. I have always wanted to try it. I talk about it all the time, especially when we ride the lift that goes oven the course. But I thought it cost $20/race and that seemed a bit high. But after lunch we went and looked at it and it's only $2/run (it's more if you get into the NASTAR database, but we thought we'd just try it out first).
We each got in 2 races before they closed at 2:30. Jeremy's times were 24.9 and 24.5. I think my first time was 34, and my second was 37 because I slipped on a turn and sat down. The course was pretty hard because it wasn't that steep but the turns were really icy (as is most of Keystone these days). Alex's ski teacher thought his time was 34 seconds too, but I won't believe until I see it. We are so going back next weekend, I have to get under 30 seconds!
After ski school, we didn't want to sit in traffic so we went to the Silverthorne rec center to swim. They have a pretty cool pool, including a 10' dive pool. The boys amazed me by both going to the bottom to retrieve rings. Once Jeremy showed us all how to pop our ears underwater so the pressure doesn't hurt, we all took trips to the bottom. Jeremy and I took turns bringing up a 5 lbs brick (and now my upper body is aching).
We finished the day with a Chipolte dinner and got on the road at 6:45. We hit a bit of traffic around Idaho Springs, but still made it home in 90 minutes. And we were all wiped from our 15 hour day.
I had a dentist appointment at 8:30 today. I got there at 8:25 and settled in with a magazine. At 8:35, I started wondering why there was nobody in the office. I finally noticed a sign that said, "Please make yourself comfortable, we will be with you after our 9:00 patient care meeting." Huh? How could I have an 8:30 appointment if they didn't begin until 9:00? Apparently the receptionist called me in November to tell me of the change but I swear I didn't get the message. And she did call again yesterday but I didn't bother to listen to the message since I assumed it would be a standard reminder call. I think there's a lesson in there somewhere...
This was only important because I had a 70 minute run on my schedule today. If I had had an 8:30 appointment, I could have just squeezed in the full workout. As it was, I got in 40 minutes. But, given my illness last week, it's probably ok if this week starts out a little light. I must be in some sort of mileage building phase anyway, tomorrow is 2 miles and the Thursday is 9.
I also did my master's class. I'm still feeling slow. I did 4 x 100 on 1:46 and I know I can do them in 1:40 or under. I was talking to the boys' swim director at their lesson (she swims the intro class, which is ok because she's 9 months pregnant) and she asked me how often I've been swimming. Ok, so not much. I have to WORK to get faster again? It was nice in the beginning 20 months ago when I was starting from scratch and I couldn't get worse. Now I have peaks and valleys and have to WORK. I also remember that my coach said I could swim 2 days a week in January, but need to bump it up to 3 days a week in February. Which mysteriously starts next week.
I finally feel like I'm over my cold of doom. On Saturday, the kids had ski school and Jeremy and I skied and rode all day (even though the snow was still pretty crappy). After the penguin cupcake bake off on Sunday, I managed to sneak in my long run. I did 75 minutes and while it wasn't the best run of my life, it was ok. I really didn't run over an hour during the fall run-specific program, so I have to build up my endurance again.
So last week, I took 3 days off and swam only once and felt like a big slug. And not counting snowboarding, I still worked out 5 hours. I guess that's a good perspective to have when my weekly workload starts inching around the 20 hour mark.
...
I had another chiropractor appointment today. On my run yesterday, I was beginning to feel the outer bottom of my left knees. Apparently my left pelvic bone is still misaligned, causing some knee misalignment as well. I got my adjustments and left with a foam roller to stretch my IT band on a daily basis. I still feel like I'm catching problems early, but it sure would be nice if there were no problems to catch. And since today's visit wasn't great, I'm to go back in one week. Today was chiro, tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and Wednesday is the acupuncturist. I'm beginning to feel like a hypochondriac.
You would think after 4 hours of penguin cupcakes, I would be done with cupcakes for the month, if not the year. You would be wrong. Alex's school is still one of those backwater joints that allows not only treats on birthdays, but homemade treats. I asked Alex what he wanted to bring and he said cupcakes, specifically chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting and sprinkles. So last night after the party(ies) I came home and whipped up a batch of homemade chocolate cupcakes. They looked divine. And then, as I was taking them out of the oven, I somehow hit the top of the range with the pan, dropped the pan, and all those lovely little cupcakes crumbled all over the bottom of the oven. Not one was salvageable, though Jeremy and I did find them edible (but after 5 minutes I had Jeremy take the crumbs to the compost, I did NOT need more junk food).
And then, what could I do? Jeremy said, "Well, you could always bring store bought." It's like he doesn't even know me. At that point, it was about 9:00 and I didn't want to go out to get either a cake box or more baking soda so I went to bed. And then this morning, I bought more baking soda and made another batch of cupcakes and delivered them to Alex's class before lunch. And NOW I'm done with cupcakes, at least for this month.
I'm a stay at home mom to Alex (8 1/2 years old) and Adam (6 years old) and a middle of the pack triathlete. I completed my first Ironman in Wisconsin in 2010.
