in which we are all just fine

Despite the fact that Amtrak ruined my plans to take NYC by storm, I actually ended up having a pretty stellar weekend.  Friday night we made sure to go out and stock up on all the essentials just in case we got stuck in the house for a while.

I woke up early Saturday morning for my short long run with CAR.  I FINALLY managed to convince the poet that running with this group is 328 times more awesome than running alone, so he came along as well.  He ended up running all 16 miles with Allison, who was also there for the first time and is training for Philadelphia as well.  

I had about half of that on my own schedule.  A big chunk of it was Z2 (cue scary music), and then working slowly up into Z3 and Z4 for the remainder of the run.  I actually had a much easier time of staying in Z2, although I did have to take one short walk break to bring my HR down near the end of the interval.  However, the morning was so humid that I couldn't really speed up that much in Z3 or Z4 without my HR zooming up, so I ended up finishing slightly short of the mileage I had anticipated.  The good thing about spending so much time with my HR this low is that, in general, at the end of these "long" runs I don't feel tired or sore or tight or hurt anywhere.  For now, I'll take it.


We went for a round of bagels and then came home for hot showers and naps.  And that kind of kicked off the rest of the day.  This is the first weekend since the poet and I have known each other where neither of us had to work either weekend day, and it was glorious.  We watched some trashy movies, I made some (slightly strange) chocolate-chip cookies, spent several hours minutes playing Fruit Ninja, and we drank an entire bottle of wine.  The puppies watched "Ratatouille" with us and then zonked out early.  Lame.

There's a worrisome drain near our basement back door, so we checked on that every hour or so throughout the day to make sure it wasn't clogged.  We lost power once for about 20 minutes and had lots of flickers and surges, but otherwise it was pretty uneventful.  Several very large branches came down in the wind, so letting the dogs out on Sunday when we got up was basically Christmas morning for them.

I think it's going to take her a while to work through all those sticks, but she is up to the task.

Sunday morning was pretty lazy, as I was hoping that the weather would calm down enough that I could do my long ride outside in the afternoon.  But hearing about all the debris and seeing that the wind was still pretty rough made me finally decide to do it on the trainer.  As we've been working on the basement, I've been slowly putting together a corner for my trainer to live, since I know I'm going to be spending lots of time on it this winter.  A few weeks ago, we bought a pretty inexpensive cabinet, and yesterday we hooked up the TV to the Apple TV so I didn't have to just spin and stare at the wall.  We're still not close to being done in the basement, but I'm pretty excited about this set-up.

I love that it's right by the back door, so in the winter I'll be able to crack that open and let some ice-cold air tickle my sweaty bod.

My coach was kind enough to put together a workout for me so it wasn't hours of mindless spinning.  Lots of technique work, some Z2/rpm work and some intervals broke it up a bit, but by the end I wished I had just gone outside and battled the wind.  This was quite likely the longest trainer ride I've ever done, and it was hard on my hard, hard head.  I feel like I work much harder on the trainer than I do outside for equal HR numbers, which means that even Z2 at a moderate rpm has me sweating buckets.  


We wrapped up the evening by joining some friends for a few beers and cheering on some other friends who were a little busy in the swim-bike-run arena yesterday.

How was your weekend?  Hopefully it wasn't ruined by trees or water or lack of electricity.