I came back from vacation and what did I get as a “welcome back to work” gift? A really hard ascent sim. Ah well. I’m not complaining, because it means I’m one sim closer to the real launch! Only 17 days away…
The rest of the skiing trip was nice. The whole group went to Breckenridge on Thursday, and then Jose and I went to Breckenridge again, alone, on Friday while the others went back to Vail. We did some really nice greens and a couple easy blues and ended the trip on a more positive note, but I have to admit that I think Vail really took something out of us. Things weren’t as enjoyable after that. It just felt like work.
On Friday, for our last night in Colorado, Jose and Cari and I stayed in, got Thai takeout from across the street, and watched The Departed. (Just in time for the Academy Awards, eh?) Jose had already seen it and said it was one of the best movies ever. I don’t know about best ever, but it was very good.
Anyway, the best part of trip was the snowmobiling. The worst part was United Airlines. Both of our flights, to Denver and from Denver, were overbooked. As previously mentioned, Jose almost didn’t make it onto the flight out. And then on the way back, both he and I were given “confirmation” cards instead of boarding passes and told to go to the gate, where the lady told us the flight was overbooked and that she’d try to get us on. Bah. THEN we got back to Houston to find that our bags hadn’t made it onto our plane, so we ended up waiting for two hours for the next flight from Denver to arrive with our bags. (To be fair, we cut it extremely close with our airport arrival time — another story entirely — but I’ve cut flights just as close before and never had my bag not show up.) They gave us $100 vouchers for waiting for the bags (instead of having them delivered), which is nice, but considering the fact that I don’t feel like flying United again anytime soon, it will probably go unused. United sucks.
Because we only had the condo from Saturday through Saturday, I found myself with an extra day at the end of vacation to adjust to being back home before having to come to work this morning. It was a very strange feeling, since it’s basically never happened before; our travel plans usually have us returning to town mere hours before having to be back at the office.
I celebrated by sleeping until 11:00, and then I “celebrated” by taking a 43.5 mile bike ride, and then I celebrated by watching the Oscars at Becca’s and drinking daquiris in honor of the 3rd anniversary of her 25th birthday (that would be her 28th). You’ll notice that only one of those activities necessitated the use of sarcastic quotes with the word celebration.
I did my longest bike ride so far yesterday, 43.5 miles in just under 3 hours for an average of something like 15.8 mph. The first half of the bike ride averaged more like 16.5 mph. The last half of the bike ride averaged more like annoyance, fatigue, pain, and general suckage. Though I’m feeling a bit more positive today, last night I was having serious doubts about my decision to do this Half Ironman.
Of the three triathlon sports, biking is probably my least favorite. And yet it occupies the most time and distance!
I think I’ve nailed a big part of my problem yesterday though — in the 24 hours preceeding my ride, I had only eaten about 400 calories. Hopefully that explains the absolutely dead feeling in my legs as I struggled past mile 30 and on to the end. When I finally got back home, I could barely walk up the stairs to my apartment.
This morning, I woke up to a fair amount of soreness on the outside of my right knee. This worries me, because I felt some twinges there towards the end of my ride yesterday. It may be worth taking my bike to the store to have them double-check the fitting. I’ve never had this problem before, but maybe something has changed…