Full contact ride...

It was pissing rain this morning and I had no choice but to ride in it. There is only two times I wear contacts, one is when I race and the other time is when I ride in the rain. Today was a contact day. The worst part of riding in the rain is getting wet feet. If I didn't get wet feet I'd actually enjoy it. I try to prevent the wet feet by wrapping and taping plastic grocery bags to my feet, and it does help, but only for about a half hour.

Today was a speed session and I did two monster hills. It was pretty cloudy and dark out and I'm glad I picked up a new flashing light, I needed it and felt much safer, especially going on roads with heavily treed canopies that make the road dark. I was surprised how strong I felt going up the hills since I haven't done hill training for about a month. I made sure I went really slow down the hills, I was super paranoid about going down fast in the rain because there is no way to stop. Even riding the brakes slowly down the hill was a challenge. The water makes it impossible for the brakes to firmly grip the rim. I was up and on the road by 7 am, I had a golf game set up with a Mark Jackson and Sam Paulos, a couple of old high school classmates that I hadn't seem in 25 years. I managed to get my ride in and do a weight training session before I was at the golf course. Which makes for a guilt free afternoon.

It turned out that we didn't golf, it was still raining and too wet, so we did the next best thing. We sat at the golf course and drank the afternoon away. It was fun. The one thing about Ontario is that a lot of the restaurants and bars are paranoid about people drinking and driving, which is a good thing. After a couple hours the manager came to see if we had someone coming to pick us up. Which we did. I'm actually happy they are starting to do that. Alice picked me up around 5 pm and the party continued. With the kids away it still feels like were on holidays and I'm still eating to much "crappy" but "tasty" food. I've had more chicken wings in the last two weeks than I've had in the previous two years.

We ended up at my neighbor Jamie's place and he screwed me up. He's just like me, a drinker, a cigar smoker and an Ironman Triathlete. Where we differ is he buys expensive Cohiba's for $35 - $75 a piece and I don't like spending more than $8 per cigar. He gave me one of his cigars to smoke and I couldn't believe the flavor difference. I've always bought what I thought were decent cigars and even yesterday smoked one of mine and thought it was great. After smoking one of Jamie's I realized mine are "shit" compared to his. When I got home I had one of mine, I couldn't even smoke more than two or three puffs before putting it down. I've decided to sell all my knock offs to some of the guys at work and I'm going to restock my humidor with some of the premium stuff. Like I said, he screwed me up and now it's going to cost me.

Speed Bike - 1:18:09 / 36 km / 27.7 kph

Power Weights - 45

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