Burning the Candle at Both Ends

That would be the work end and the play end of the candle that are getting burned at both ends. So where is the athlete end of the candle? Sheesh. So my Saturday was busy. I put in some solid time at the office, attempted my long run only to be plagued by nausea, then ran some errands at the mall and at Ikea. Sunday I was up at 6:30 and doing stuff from the word "go." I had important things like laundry and grocery shopping to take care of, not to mention you saw my little garage project. By the way - I *love* my garage set up. I haven't actually ridden the bike in it since I put everything together, but I know it is going to be great. It took me slightly longer to put together my TV stand mostly because the box came devoid of instructions. By the time it was all together I opted to eat, then hit the grocery store in order to give my food some time to digest before attempting my run. I was responsible for bringing poutine to the Grey Cup party so I needed to pick up fries, gravy and cheese curds. All of a sudden I'm heading out the door at 1 pm for my 2 hour run, with more errands and a spinning workout required, and kick off at 4 pm. You probably don't need a calculator to realize that there just wasn't enough time to do it all, so first things first, I mentally geared up for a shorter run. An hour and a half, but still with my 3 x 15:00 marathon race pace intervals.

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I used the McMillan Running Calculator to figure out what my marathon race pace should be based off of my Last Chance Half finishing time. 10:17/mi. Fair enough, except I was warming up at what felt like a slow and easy pace and coming nowhere close to getting my heart rate toward zone 2...and I was running sub-10:00 miles. As soon as I hit my first interval my Garmin was regularly shouting at me to slow down. I was frustrated that my Garmin was beeping so much and that I didn't have enough time in the day to get everything done, and that this run wasn't really working out like it was supposed to. On the plus side the weather sure was fabulous though..! Anyhow, I got my hour and a half run in, showered, got the errands done, and showed up for the part at 4:22 pm. Not too bad...

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As for the game? It was terrible. Not exciting at all, although the Calgary Stampeders won. But the food was good! Because the game was in Montreal and it was Montreal vs. Calgary we themed it up. Montreal smoked meat sandwiches (with meat direct from Montreal), my poutine, sausages from Spolumbos (a gourmet sausage company started by three former Calgary Stampeders), and beer margaritas (mostly because they are tasty, not because they go with the theme). I did have a random thought that I would get my spinning workout in after the game, but after all of those beer margaritas somehow it just didn't seem like a good idea..