Playing Catch-Up and Eating Ketchup

I was out of town this past weekend in Michigan and had a FANTASTIC time. Per usual, there was lots of great food and great beer involved!

Seared big-eye tuna w/ginger-miso sauce, wasabi oil, julienned jicama salad and crispy sushi rice.

In between meals, Elaine and I rocked our wedding registry at a number of different stores - Macy's, Williams & Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, REI and Home Depot (yes!). After hearing horror stories about nearly failed engagements thanks to disputes over registry items, we made it a point to add anything we thought we might be interested in.This planned turned out GREAT. We FLEW through the stores without having to stop and conduct a small game of mind-chess over each little item.

Let me tell you though, that process is exhausting! The only big hurdle which we have yet to conquer were the infamous steak-knives. It seemed as though our options were either plastic/bendy crap or $100/knife Wusthof magnificence. While I'd love to have the Wusthof knives (regardless of the price, they were reeaaaallllly nice knives), that price is just insane.

Ok, well that's enough wedding planning jargon for now. Onto the workouts...

On Monday I got into the pool for the first time in roughly 11 days (mid-afternoon two Fridays ago was the last visit). Between house-guests, travel and snow this ended up being quite a departure from the regular 3x/week (@ roughly 10,000 meters). I just jumped in and just did a quick 2,000m with a few sets of 300m to see where my speed was at with all of the time off. I was sore, uncoordinated and slower, but only by a few seconds.

On Tuesday I put in an hour at the gym and then 1:20 on the bike while watching the movie Inside Man (no, it's not a porno). I was distracted by Jodie Foster's amazing calves for most of the movie, but from what I can remember it was a pretty good watch. I made up this workout that I'm going to use to progressively tack on more time/distance into my trainer workouts. It's basically a backwards ladder where, after your warm-up, you do something like the following...

10 mins. medium effort (135-150 bpm)
10 mins. hard effort (160+ bpm)
09 mins. medium
09 mins. hard
08....
07...
etc... (down to 1 minute)
10 mins. cool down

I only made it to about an hour and twenty minutes of riding which is the most I've done since last November. While the time in the saddle isn't that impressive, it still represents progress and that's exactly what I'm looking for right now. I relish the day in the near future when I complete the 2 hour 10 minute workout.

It'd also be cool to pick up some spinnerval DVDs and give those a shot, but frankly I'm just not willing to dish out the $$ for them. AND, hopefully the weather will start to get nice here in the next month or so thus making their purchase completely unnecessary. I also just discovered the massive stash of TdF DVDs that netflix has and plan on receiving those in the mail in the very near future.

Oh yeah, and I've been dipping my ham sandwiches in ketchup here at work for the last two days. I don't know why, but I love it.