Hills, hills, glorious hills…

I totally dropped the ball on the cookie story at Yellow Lake.  Ally and I were riding to the top of Yellow Lake for cookies.  Imagine our disappointment when the place we were looking for wasn’t at the top!  Apparently the good cookies are at the start of the climb… Disappointing!  So when you ride the IMC bike course look for the Bear fruit stand on the left just outside Keremeos.  Apparently the cookies are amazing.

Last week was all about hills.  Hill repeats on the bike on Tuesday.  It started raining while we were out there and I kept hearing a squeak, squeak, squeak.  Angie heard it and tried to replicate the sound which only seemed to happen when someone was riding the bike.  Turns out it was my rear wheel that had slid forward slightly and was rubbing on the bike frame.  It is a lot easier to ride up hills when your rear wheel isn’t rubbing.  It also turns out that I am a complete scaredy cat riding downhill in the rain.

On Thursday I had a 90 min run with 3 x 2:00 hill repeats with 1:00 of squats at the top.  I wanted to knock the run out early as it was supposed to cool off and rain later in the day.  My run went fairly well.  At one point I looked down at my Garmin though and I saw that my heart rate was reading 240 bpm.  Seriously?  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be running so well if my heart rate was that high.  After reading through a few forums this seems to be a common problem with the new soft strap.  I’m not keen on the idea of going back to the old strap as it causes some really bad chaffing, but if the heart rate data is so erroneous there isn’t much point in wearing the strap.  Despite that one thing the rest of the run was good.  I picked a tough hill for my hill repeats and my legs were mad at me…

On Friday I had my longest swim ever…3500 meters.  Welcome to Ironman training!  It was long, kind of boring, but it went well.  I was reminded by Ryan to just take it stroke by stroke and that I would make it.  It actually wound up being my best swim this week.

On Saturday the plan was to ride 110K but we woke up to snow.  Snow at the end of May!!  I guess it really wouldn’t be Calgary is it didn’t snow at some point in May.  There would be no riding outside on this day.  I swept out the garage, cued up a DVD of the IMC bike course and Tara and Ally came over to knock out a 2.5 hour ride on the trainer.  2.5 hours is a long time on the trainer, but thanks to great company, great conversation and some good tunes it actually flew by.  Thanks for coming over ladies!

Thankfully the snow stopped and I managed to get in a fairly pleasant run on Sunday morning – a 60 min hilly run around my neighbourhood.  All of these hills!  My legs were toast but I still managed to feel strong and steady.  I found some good hills to run too…

And so that was last week in a nutshell!  This week?  We are bringing back the early morning workouts…

Oh, and go check out Rainmaker, he’s giving away a very fancy scale!