Hiatus

Training hiatus that is... Well I thought I would be able to sustain my workout regimen without a coach. Sadly I am failing miserably. Maybe it has nothing to do with the coach but just with my lack of enthusiasm for racing. Maybe work and other interest are using the little free time I have. Well maybe all this is true but I miss it!



So I need to bring back the discipline and since well my lunch are used by work well I shall try to get my butt out of bed a tad bit earlier in the morning. So tomorrow I shall try to get up and go for a 30 min run.
This saturday I was all motivated to go for a 1:30 but heat plus a trip to Joanns drained my wallet and my alloted free time!
However the following day I went back on my mountain bike. B was there and the neighbor joined the party. After huffing and puffing on del mar mesa (can't believe B went running there the day before) I went for a full on adrenaline fest which left me quite emotinal. After a few hard spots where I went off the bike (do not like going downhill on loose round rocks) I managed to almost hang on due to their frequent stops on my behalf. I went over some technical spots on my bike.
I even went through a patch of flowers as tall as me...
So all in all it was fun I worked hard gathered a few bruises!
On the family front we are giving the family dinner another try. After finding ourselves eating every day at 10pm we decided that maybe we could all eat around 7:15pm. It is our second week and I am loving it. First of all we are done with dinner at 8pm. We have had 30min of family time without an electronique device. The kids are enjoying it and we don't snack as much.

We still haven't figured out how to go to bed early and I have a bad feeling about being able to get up 30min earlier than usual tomorrow....





The only thing is that I have to prepare dinner as soon as I get home and I need to find simpler meal for the whole family to enjoy! So far so good!

Change is in the air

So it is 9pm, dinner has been eaten as a family, kitchen is somewhat cleaned, my strength training somewhat done and I am ready for some stretching and reading in bed!
We have decided to start having dinner with the kids. It will take some time to figure out the proper routine. So tonight was a wee bit off but I'm sure we will get the hang of it.
On the workout front, since triathlon season is done! This year I realized that you have to be a good runner to be a good triathlete and so I decided to focus on running. This means about 4-6H00 of running per week!
When I saw my new schedule I gasped! 45min speed workout on Friday which means 5x3min all out 3min easy. 2h00 easy run on Saturday and 1h30 tempo intervals on Sunday... Challenging!
Saturday for my long run since B had to go to Encinitas to buy new shoes I decided to run to Solana Beach. Meet him and the kids there go to Encinitas then he would run home. I did it and it was one of my most awesome run. Mostly on the beach at a comfortable pace 11:45-12 min/mile.
Sunday I only had time for 1h00. Today though my legs were tired so now time for stretching and foam roller!

Discovering San Diego

Saturdays we do the errands, the long training etc... Sundays we decided to explore, go hike, go to seaworld etc... Today B wanted to go explore down south and go to IB through Coronado. We left around 11am and drove down the weather wasn't beautiful but it make it all the better. I love Coronado. I love the little houses and the small town feeling. We drove down silver strand and today driving by the beach reminded us of our trip up North. We walked down the pier in IB which is super long and much more stable than the one in PB. Yesterday while waiting for the tires to be changed on my car we went to the pier in PB to watch the waves. With each big waves we could feel the pier move underneath our feet.
After our little discovery we drove around in IB a little then when back to Coronado to have lunch at the Coronado Brewing Company. I had a crab and shrimp melt and B a tuna melt. It was really nice.
The week end is already done and tomorrow another week will start!

Holiday season

I can't believe Christmas is already there, and my birthday and the new year! I talked to my mom a few days ago and the Burgundy countryside is all covered in snow :( It is hard to not spend this holiday with my parents and sister. I'm sure we will have a nice quiet christmas since it is only the 4 of us. I will be cooking pheasant for christmas, still looking into how I'm going to prepare it. For my birthday dinner I think I may go get a fresh lobster and do some lobster pasta with home made pasta.
We have the Pisa tour of gifts in the garage. We have to open all the boxes and wrap everything up. B has yet to shop for my christmas presents. I think he got my birthday already covered. I'm super happy because his gift arrived in the mail yesterday after a annoucement telling me that it would be ship on Jan 20th!
The office is dead quiet and eventhough I have pretty tight deadline I find it extremely difficult to concentrate. I have made some good progress but unfortunately I still have quite a lot to do.
MAC has been going to a YMCA camp for the past two days and MEC has been really unhappy to still go to her regular school. If it was her choice she would already be in Kindergarten.
On the kids side eventhough we thought that the 3d kid options was killed a couple of month back it has reappeared and we are struggling to make a decision. To make things harder we have been watching our little neighbour. He is 20 months now and he is sooo darn cute. He fits in our family unit so well that a third one totally makes sense. But he is already almost 2, the idea of being pregnant for 9 month really doesn't apeal to me. I am also wondering how my gortex abb will handle a pregnancy. Will have to be reconstructed yet again after this. A baby now would be a age gap of at least 4 years between MEC and the little one at least. We are just coming out of the baby/toddle tunel do we really want to get back in. So many questions difficult to answer....

On the training side, after my really tough run saturday, I went for a short bike ride on sunday. Today I did my intervals 4x0.5M at 8:30 and it was work but easy. On a treadmill, doing intervals my mental isn't has negative as on the road. Too weird.
Anyways I can't wait for this training to be over so I can focus on shorter distance run which suit me just fine, and the bike and the swim.

I will be concluding this post with my carnitas recipe a new favorite:

- Pork shoulder remove as much of the fat as possible.
- Saute onion in a pan, brown the meat a little add some cumin and "Mexican spice" I think. This jar isn't labeled so I'm not too sure. If I had to make it I would put cumin, paprika, cinamon I think.
- Put the meat and onion in a crockpot, put chicken broth up to the middle of the meat
- Let it cook on low for 6-10 hours.
FYI I put my pork which was a really big chunk frozen in the crockpot, I started on high for a few of hours then switch to low. I did turn the meat after about 2hours.
- Take the meat out of the crockpot onto a plate
- Remove the fat pieces and pull the meat with fork.
- Add a little juice to moisten the meat.
- In a pan mix 2 tbsp of tequila, 4 tbsp of brown sugar, some more spices, and 2/3 cup of cooking juice.
- Add the meat and let simmer then caramelize a little bit.

Use it to make carnitas tacos or burritos....

Sunday night already!!!

Friday I had a swimm planned! I was going to try to hook up some of my trigirls friend. However the stars didn't aligned. First they had a crazy 2m swim planned. Let's face it I wasn't feeling a 2miler at the cove. My last swim was the solana beach tri!!! I wanted only to do a 1m swim. Then I had a lot of work todo since Thursday night was spent mostly sleeping off a light stomach bug!
To top it off B had an evening meeting and I was therefor on picking up duty. I was going to go to the pool when my friend JE told me she was planning a 7M run that evening! after some Im exchange we decided to meet up that evening for a7m run in my neighborhood followed by dinner! At 6:30pm that night we slowly got started! It was great because she forced me to keep a slow pace 10:30 min/miles. As a result I felt great and eventhough we opted for a shorter run we did push ourselves and did a nasty hill! This was my first longish run 6m in a long time and it felt good! this also helped me shake off all my frustration!
We had a great evening with friends we had a little wine, simle food and finished the evening by watching Daniel Tosh!
Saturday morning we woke up a little groggy from the late might. We then headed to UTC to grab a bagel some coffee and my new sunglasses. Our next stop of the day was our friends D&B in Encinitas to celebrate J 5th birthday!
The kids had a blast on the big inflatable water slide that was in the yard. After some pizza, cake we headed back home. The boys went for a long bike ride they got lost in the bushes. I was planning on riding myself but since B didn't get home before 6pm and that at that time stomach was growling we settled for dinner at Fidels. We had a great evening.
The next day was Mec's birthday party. We know that the kids love it but we hate the whole organization of the event and the fact that a 2 hour party is taking our whole day! selfish I know. Anyways the party was nice i made cupcakes using my usual chocolate lava cake recipe. I then put some premade icing on it with tons of sprinkles of all kinds.
Then to get rid of the tension the day brought I went for a very quick ride. Then we kicked back and relaxed for the rest of the day....

Where did the good resolutions go?

I'm talking about my long todo list to finish before guest arrive! Hahahah we stopped a while back and the guest bedroom is a mess of miscelleanous items, the garage not better, the faucets not changed because I'm the one who says there will always been next week.
Instead what have we done this week end. On friday, in between two lines of code I joined a group of women triathlete. For those of you who know me I am what is called an introvert which means I really don't like group especially group of people that I don't know. But since they have this mentor/mentee relationship I thought I could get some good advice and make the whole thing a little less intimidating. That night I went to the meeting and it was really nice. I met several people and hopefully will be able to schedule some workouts with them. I also got convinced to participate to the spring sprint triathlon in May.
On saturday we went to a store selling really nice guitars. B is turning 40 and has shown some interested in getting a new guitar. We took the kids to the store and we saw sooo many cool stuff, electric guitar, ukulele of all shape, mandoline, banjos etc.... The kids had a blast. Then we went to the beach grass cafe for breakfast.
After that we came back home and while the kids went down for a nap I put my new pedals and shoes and went for a short 9 miles bike to be followed by a 3 miles run.
Hey if I'm going to do a triathlon in May I wanted to see what it feels like to run after a bike ride. Well it is really really hard. I started, stopped went back to the house compained and went out the door again and ran 1.7miles. This means that I'm gonna have to start running after biking to get use to the transition.
Sunday was crazy, I had to go in to work at 7:30am for 2 hours. We took the kids to their swimming lesson. MEC loves to jump in the water it's too funny to see herself launch. MAC had the teacher for himself since the other kids were gone. Then we went to a little birthday party. We had friends over for dinner and I made filet mignon with red wine sauce, mash potatoes, salad and a pear upside down cake.
Today since I didn't feel like running, my legs are still sore from saturday, I went for a 40 minutes swim and I managed to finish 1500yards. I still have to be a faster biker and swimmer.
I'll try to do my first open water swim either this week end or next week. Depending on the feeling I have I will sign up for a sprint end of june.
Now I'm going to bed cuz I'm really really sleepy