Living Life

It has been a good day of living life today.

This has been a four day weekend for me this weekend. Tomorrow is a holiday in WA and so I have one more day of rest to go. Often when we have extended long weekends we ask ourselves the question, what should we do with the weekend? We have four days, we should make the most of it, go away somewhere, something like that. However, often we don't, typically because it is easier not to. That sometimes causes us to ask whether we have wasted the long weekend. We had exactly that conversation this weekend.

However, this weekend I had a bit of an epiphany. We have had a flat out day today, and really a bit of a flat out weekend. Hence why I am writing this at 9:30 in the evening. Today we have spent about 5 hours in two different parks with friends. We have had dinner with another friend. I spent nearly 5 hours on a bike yesterday. Swam in the river with a mate today. Tomorrow I am going swimming and then we are meeting friends for lunch. I might ride again in the afternoon (weather permitting).

These are all activities that we have been able to fit in because of our four day weekend. Certainly it is nice to head out of town on the occasional long weekend, and sometimes we do that too. But other times it is great to take the extra time to live life and make sure you do a good job of it. That is what this long weekend has been for us.

As well as loads of socialising today has had a bit of training. I started off the day with a run. Today's run was similar to last Wednesday's controlled pace run. I have to say today's run wasn't as good. It felt good and was actually quicker than Wednesday, but the control element wasn't well executed. In essence I ran too quickly. That sort of sounds like a good thing, but not when you consider the point of the session was to run at a controlled pace. A bit frustrating, but I struggled to slow it down.

After the run it was time for a swim in the river and that was quite nice, albeit freezing cold (definitely wetsuit). I was swimming with a mate who is quite good swimmer and doing so made me realise how far I have to go. He fairly whumped me. Still it was nice to be out in the water getting in a decent continuous swim.

The one frustrating thing about the swim, and my day in general is that it seemed to be a day in which technology is rebelling against me. Not in a Skynet sort of way, just in a annoying unreliable way. First my heart rate monitor refused to pick up on the run. No matter what threats I used it was stubbornly unresponsive. This is happening more and more with this heart rate monitor which I consider to be an ominous sign. I have never had much luck with Garmin Heart Rate monitors and this one struggling is true to form. This one has lasted a while and I was hoping that it might continue to do so, but now I am less hopeful. The frustrating thing is that it is entirely random, some runs it works fine and others it doesn't work at all. Annoying as I never quite know whether I am going to get data or not. These heart rate monitors are not cheap these days, so it is annoying to have to replace them semi-regularly. For now I will persevere with it, hopefully it is just a hiccough.

The other area of technology that betrayed me today was the GPS on my Garmin 920XT. It just seems to give the most random course tracking when I am open water swimming. Today it was doing fine for 75% of the swim, but then in the last part it went haywire and plotted me swimming over land and recorded where I finished my swim about 100m short. My mate who uses a Garmin 910XT had no problems at all, which is very annoying as it is an older watch. The frustrating thing is that the 920XT does this most times that we swim and I have no idea why or whether there is anything I can do about it. Annoying.

On top of that the rear light for my bike seems to be dying a slow death and my power meter threw an absolute wobbly yesterday, some days you are forced to think that perhaps technology hates you a little bit.