a long ride...

I hate the feeling i have late in the day when I haven't managed a workout when I had planned one. That was me last night. Typically I'm a pretty healthy eater, but last night we decided to try out a new wing place down the street. Add that to having not gotten in my planned run, and I felt like garbage.

Jay was getting ready to watch a movie that I had little desire to see, so I got up, put on my cycling shorts, cranked up the tunes on my ipod to drown out the sound of the trainer, and the movie, and hopped on my bike. I had previously looked through a few of the pre-planned workouts that are in Garmin Training Center, not having used many before, but apparently I didn't too much attention to them. Rifled through the names on the Garmin, and picked the one named Speedplay.

About an hour into the ride, I thought I noticed one of the intervals telling me I was on 2 of 5! WTF?! My a$s is already numb, and I have at least 3 more sets?! Ok, surely the next set of intervals won't take as long as the first half, as I'm sure I would have noticed this when I first checked out the program.

Clearly I was wrong. I almost hopped off a few times, but I'm planning a cycling trip in June, which will have 3 days of 60k+ of cycling each day... my bum will need to get used to riding this long as some point, so I just kept going. I think my longest ride so far is something like 29k.

This program took me to 52.5k in just under 2 hours!  It was about 10:30pm by the time I got off, stretched for about 15 minutes, at which point I was content; happy that I had done something.  That something burned off 1664 calories!  Goodbye crappy dinner and great for the HBBC points! :)

Today, I went to the new gym, of which I also became a member, and ran a quick 5.5k. Then I rode the neatest stationary bike ever for only a mile, just to see what it was like! Maybe some of you have already seen these, but I've never seen them in a gym before.  It's a company called Expresso, my Shimano SPD clipless shoes will work, and it's got an interactive screen with a bunch of different routes, courses, and you can create an account to track your progress, you can unlock other courses later on, and helps alleviate some boredom during the winter months when I can't be outside riding! How cool is that!  A little incentive to keep up with my cross-training efforts.

Anyway, the rest of the week will be about getting a workout in when I can... I think I finished my shopping tonight too.

I am now 37k away from my 1000k goal for the year.  I won't hit my original goal because I won't kill myself over the next week just to attain it.  Yes, a goal is a goal, but as I mentioned before, I'm completely satisfied with my accomplishments and progress this year.  Considering I had 11 weeks off this year due to injuries, and another week off when I was on vacation and sunburnt the tops of my feet...Oops! To come so close, I'm ecstatic.  2009 is a new year, for which there will be new goals.

Be safe everyone, and Happy Holidays if this is my last post before Christmas!