09 - 09 - 09 Happy Birthday to ME

I though I could celebrate today by running or biking my age in miles. Well, 36 (yikes!) miles is a lot, and so I ended up doing a combo of running and biking, for a total of 1hour and 36 minutes. Good enough! My legs are finally back in business, phew. After Sunday's race I biked and swam on Monday (thank you, Labor Day), and did my run on Tuesday. I left the house thinking that I am NOT going to do the 3.5 miles of speedwork, but then somehow my legs took me to the track. Once there, I planned on NOT doing the intervals at the speed called by my training plan, but somehow my legs had a different idea (1000m @ 6:36, 2000m @ 6:40, 1000m@ 6:33, 1000m @ 6:30...oops). I ended up running 9.75 miles including speed, and took an extra cold and long ice bath. Legs were sore after the run. The roller did not work well enough on my hamstrings, but the tennis ball did. Wow, that tennis ball knows how to torture one's hamstrings. If you have not tried it, please do; it is painful, but it helps a lot if you have tight spots that the roller can't get to. I thought about running another race this training cycle, but I think I am going to stick to marathon paced runs - I would love to do at least a 15 miler at MP. Will see.

So back to the birthday. It was nice and simple - funny card that my son picked (I am thinking he has a future in comedy), flowers and more flowers, CDs, subscription to triathlete magazine, biking shoes and pedals (yay!). Our neighbours surprised me by taking Petru over this evening so that Chris and I could have dinner out. Sweet. We all had chocolate cake with peanut brittle icecream, YUM! A good day. I am already looking forward to my tempo run tomorrow. It seems I can't get enough of this running thing!