Long weekend of fun

Fun is over, time to get back to it. But not before I recap the weekend's fun.

Saturday started by meeting my friend David at the Airport Club where we swam, biked and - nope - we didn't run after the bike. We made it back in time for his wife Anna's yoga class at 10 a.m. Now THAT is a pattern I could get into. Swim, Bike and Yoga. It was awesome!

I worked a little on Saturday afternoon and then Matt and I spent the evening together.

Sunday we went out on a short bike ride, only about 28 miles through some of my favorite roads in the county. We stopped for coffee on the way back at this great little coffee shop along Hwy 116 in Sebastopol and read the Sunday paper for about 20 minutes. I LOVE rides like that! They also gave me $0.50 off for riding my bike there. It's the little things...

Monday was chock full of fun things which was great since that was the day off...I really felt like I made every hour count! It began by meeting at the YMCA with a few members of my Monday morning spin class for a 28 mile ride. In last week's class we had talked about the fact that there would be no class on Monday, so one of my students had the idea of doing a ride instead. I was happy to lead and let them decide the pace, though I did throw a handful of 1-minute sprints on some straightaways to make them push out of their comfort zone.

There were so many fun things about that ride. It was so great to interact with these people outside of our usual venue. It was fun to get to know some of them better and actually be able to have a real conversation! One of the biggest rewards came from seeing their reactions at the end of the ride - they all were like "wow, it was so beautiful" and "those roads were so incredible."

Two of the folks even brought mountain bikes and were like "you know...if we have more rides like this I'm going to HAVE to buy a road bike!"

THAT was a really awesome moment. I feel like I got to share a part of my world that I love so much and show people what an amazing world cycling can be, and they SAW it. We all finished sitting around a table at Peet's coffee and reveling in how much fun we had. It was one of the few rides I've been on where speed wasn't a concern of mine. I got to simply make sure that everybody was doing well, having fun and getting some exercise, and that in itself was a great treat.

The rest of the day was spent at other people's houses eating awesome food, celebrating a birthday, celebrating friendship and drinking wine. Mmmmm. Let's just say there is no way I could say my bike ride that morning even came CLOSE to an excuse for eating that much food, but it's okay. It doesn't happen very often. ;)

ANYWAY now the week has begun. I have lots of things to blog about. I found the most amazing fish taco recipe, I'm still trying to figure out which tri to do as the last tri (Folsom next weekend is out, too much logistics for me to deal with, okay basically I don't feel like waking up at 3:30 a.m. to leave by 4 a.m. for an Olympic tri, and then racing and then visiting with family and then having to drive 2.5 hours home, just not fun (but racing with Carmen would be fun, that's the only fun part), and I want FUN!), I have my first cross country race next weekend, I have my first spin class to teach at the Airport Club this week, aahhhh so many cool things!!

Bring it!