Heart rate monitor straps don't work when worn on your head

This was a great weekend training-wise.  Jen has had a challenge trying to get me recovered from Ironman before doing a short build-and-taper for USAT Nationals (4 weeks later) and now another build-and-taper for 70.3 Worlds (which are 3 weeks after USAT Nationals).  Fortunately not much recovery time was really needed after an oly race, but it does shoot down a weekend for long riding and running.  I also went on a self-imposed swim hiatus for the first few days of this past week.  On Monday I biked to work and I literally made it all the way to my front door, dodging errant children and vehicles the whole 10 miles home, before I fell off my bike and got road rash.  In fact, I didn't even fall off my bike, I had already gotten off of it, took a step, and my cleat slipped on the wet pavement and I went down, scraping up my right elbow pretty nicely.  I'm squeamish about those things and I knew Mr. Sweetie was on his way home so I just waited for him to arrive and clean me up.  Lucky him.  In the meantime, I took the dog out for a walk and greeted our new neighbors (because nothing says welcome to the neighborhood than someone with a bloody elbow shaking your hand while trying to control her out-of-control dog with her other hand, all while wearing smelly bike clothes).

I didn't swim until Friday.  I could've gone on Thursday because things were mostly healed up at that point, but it was one of those mornings where I got up, put my swimsuit on, shook my head, and got back into bed.  Those days rarely happen, but when they do, it's best just to give in.

At swim practice on Friday, Katie Ledecky (800m freestyle Olympic Gold medalist) was at morning Masters (obviously swimming a million lanes above mine seeing as my she can do 200m to every one of my 100m).  She's half my age and twice my speed.  I wonder what it feels like to be going into Junior Year of high school with a gold medal.  My biggest accomplishment at that point was almost passing driver's ed (yes, I said almost - now don't you want to get in the car with me?).  Oh, and my lack of swimming over the past week.  I definitely paid for it on Friday.  It was painful, made even worse when we did stroke work as the very last set.  My butterfly was still in hibernation, too ugly to come out of its cocoon and show itself to the world.

But this weekend - everything was GOOD.  I had a long run that looked easy on paper but was more challenging when I was actually out doing it.  Hills and Zone 4.  BUT, it was less than 90 minutes long (goodbye Ironman training, see you forever in the future) and had I not spent a good THREE HOURS watching movie trailers on Netflix when I first woke up, I would've actually been done with my workout at a reasonable time (when a trailer is only 2:30 long, it's very easy to say oh hey, I'll just watch one more...).  But all the same, it was awfully nice to have three hours of laziness, do my run, and still be done by noon.  And I went biking with Katie on the local MacArthur route.  The morning did not have an auspicious start - when I was packing up my bag, my Bento box was nowhere to be found (still nowhere to be found).  And then after we jumped on our bikes and started riding, I realized I'd forgotten to put on my HR monitor strap.  I was afraid I'd left it outside the car because I was 100% positive I'd packed it in my bag before we left my house, but when we got back to the car it was NOWHERE to be found.  I finally figured that a disgruntled Georgetown neighbor (who was NOT happy we parked in front of his house) found my forgotten HR monitor strap on the ground by the car and just took it out of spite.  But when we finished the ride, the mystery was solved.  I took off my helmet and THERE IT WAS, right inside the helmet.  I even had a mark on my forehead from the plastic part of the strap.  Brilliant.  Anyway, about the ride - it was fantastic.  The weather gods were smiling at us - literally every big downhill was dry and it was as though the storm clouds parted like the Red Sea for us as we rode, as almost everywhere had gotten rain but it rained on us for about 30 seconds during the entire ride.  This ride was filled with intervals as well, but overall I felt pretty good on them.  Had planned to gauge my effort using HR, but because I was accidentally wearing the HR monitor strap on my head, I just went by feel instead.  Post-ride called for bagel sandwiches and cupcakes.  I actually bought the cupcake for Mr. Sweetie since he was playing in his first golf tournament since high school, but I had the not-so-secret hope that he would share with me (which he did).  And tonight we're having pasta with Mr. Sweetie's homemade tomato sauce for dinner.  It really doesn't get much better than this.