Hello, Rest Day

I have spent the last several days looking forward to today, my first day off from training in a month.  That is not to say that every day has been hours and hours of swimming, biking and running, as one day every week is always incredibly light and there are a few days in there that involve, say, less than three hours in the saddle, but there is nothing that can really rest you mentally and physically like waking up in the morning and not throwing on the swimsuit and driving to the pool, not loading fluids on the bike and gels and Powerbars in the jersey pockets and hitting the road for a ride, and not lacing up the run shoes and gazing at my Garmin for an hour or two. 

I've learned to value these rest days, especially when, like this time, I was really feeling the fatigue built up over the last few weeks and knew how much it was needed.  Of course, when you are alone in a city without any of your friends, your rest day starts to get old around, say, 9am.  I can appreciate lounging in front of the TV after four hours of workouts, but for some reason I have a hard time just sitting around all morning when I haven't done anything.  I will say though that it was nice to wake up this morning whenever I woke up and not feel like I had to jump out of bed and head to the pool.  I haven't minded my swim workouts lately, but it is less appealing to strip down to the bathing suit to jump in the pool when it's 35 degrees outside.  Yes, I know, I've only been here two months and I already think that 35 degrees is cold.  If it gets that warm in NH people start busting out the shorts. 

I also had decided yesterday to take care of any errands I'd been putting off, like an oil change that turned into a new radiator hose (can't let the car repairs slide when you still have to drive about 3500 miles in the near future) a trip to the post office, a little grocery shopping and canceling my gym membership.  No, I'm not done there yet, but if you're in a temporary situation like this you learn from experience to give a lot of notice on that so that they don't charge you an additional month that you won't even be there to utilize.  So that left me without much to take care of today.  This is a good thing from a rest standpoint, because the rest day loses its usefulness if you spend the entire time on your feet running all over town doing different things, but it can also leave you a little bit stir-crazy, but I'm hanging in there so far.  It is only 1:00, though...

What else?  Oh, when last I blogged it had snowed.  Well, the forecast for the rest of the week goes as follows:  78, 80, 80, 78, 78, 75... etc.  That's more like it.  No more of this cloudiness or snow or rain nonsense.  I have to say, while I love New Hampshire, I swear I do, it's going to be tough to go back to a place where it rains far more than one day a month.  What I won't miss are traffic lights, terrible pavement at times, broken glass on the shoulder, unreal amounts of white pick-up trucks on the road, lack of trees and lack of rolling hills.  Let's not get into what I will miss or I may start to wonder why I'm coming back.  Oh, wait, I also won't miss spending so much time by myself!  I know this has been good for me and I was fine with it for a long time, but I've had about enough of that now. 

But, now that I can post pictures, I forgot I have another one.  This was the sunset on my balcony the first day I got here:

Not bad, right?  Well, I think that's about enough of mindless ramblings in the midst of my extreme boredom for now.  But beware, there is another rest day coming up on Friday...