Happy Monday!

Another good morning. But first, a catch-up note.

I stayed up late Thursday night to finish Harry Potter. So I skipped Friday's workout, unless dancing half the night counts. :-) (Did we ever determine how many hours of dancing equals how many hours of running?) Saturday was a planned rest day (lots of kid stuff going on), but then Sunday it was rainy and nasty...so my friends bagged on our planned long bike ride and I was left to consider what to do.

I waited until early afternoon, and it cleared up. But still no friends to ride with. I realized I'd never ridden more than 20 miles or so alone (except in a race, but you're really not alone in a race, right). So I decided I should get out there and ride by myself.

I planned a 65-mile route, all areas I'd ridden before. I procrastinated a lot on my way out the door, but eventually I got going. And I found that I didn't really mind riding alone. I wasn't bored and I didn't try to talk myself into a shorter route. I just went along, did my thing, didn't bother to watch speed or stress about how fast or slow I was going, and just enjoyed being out. I wrote a lot of letters to my friends in my head (none of which will ever actually see paper, of course) and I played clips of Paul Van Dyk songs in my head - except when I was climbing any of the three big hills, where all thoughts were crowded out by the focus I had to put on turning the pedals. Wow, there were some hard hills on my route. A couple of times I actually thought about walking my bike, but then I pretended Danielle was ahead of me and I needed to keep going.

I ended up only being able to ride 50 miles because I had somewhere to be and not enough time to get there - that was because of poor planning on my part, not slow riding - but I finished happy, and confident that I can go 112 by myself if I have to.

So this morning I had to drag my behind out of bed to swim - the goal was 4 laps, or 1.2 miles.

Well, it started out as a good morning. My hubby fixed my car so that when you press a button up by the rearview mirror the garage door opens - so I don't need an opener anymore. Then in the Starbucks drive-through, the woman ahead of me paid for my coffee. Then the sun was rising over the lake and it was just so darned pretty!

THEN - Jodi joined me and Danielle for our swim, and she wore her Garmin for the four laps. Four laps - not including the out-and-back parts - was 1.36 miles on her Garmin...which makes our total mileage about 1.6! And I think that's more accurate than what I was going on before (otherwise, I swim WAY faster in races than in practice, which I don't think is actually true).

So I had a solid swim, then my favorite coffee (from Victor's, not from Starbucks), and it's a gorgeous day (yeah, I gotta work, but it's cool). Oh, and a friend dropped by and gave me some new music to listen to - the one benefit to having a Zune over an iPod is that the Zunes can talk wirelessly to one another and share music, so he gave me two hour-long DJ sets from a local DJ, and I'm halfway through the first and it's perfect. Makes me want to dance.

But maybe I should do some work - you know, since I'm in the office anyway.