Well, my birthday was yesterday. I am now the ripe old age of 23, so hopefully in the next year or two I will be offered a nice retirement package from my employer and I can move to training fulltime while living off my pension.
I had a pretty awesome birthday evening I must say, although it wasn't very condusive to training. It led me to sleep in through my scheduled morning workouts, but hey it's my birthday and it only happens once a year. Anyways, back to my evening. My fiancee suprised me with registering us in a red wine tasting class that went for 2 hours. The topic was "Price Point: $10 reds vs $20 reds". Even though I've never tasted wines "properly" before, I am a pretty big fan of reds, and I was hoping this would be an opportunity to learn more about how they should be enjoyed.
The class was very interesting and the instructor never actually taught us proper tasting technique (we just kind of watched what he did and mimicked, acting like we knew what was going on), but I did learn loads of new information about the different types of red wines and the grapes that make them up. The class was way more fun than it even sounded. It was setup like a game where we'd get 2 wines made predominantly from the same grape, 1 was $10 and 1 was $20. Then we tasted them blind, with only general tasting notes from the producer that were not specified toward either glass. We then took notes and guessed which was the $20 bottle. We did this with 4 varietals of wines (so we tasted 8 wines total). At the end, the wines were revealed and we were shown whether we preferred 10 or 20 dollar wines. The class cost $20 per person, which i thought was a good deal for all the info you get, but on top of that they throw in a $12 gift card at the end so you can stock up on some wines afterward. I'd highly recommend it to anyone, it's money well spent for the experience. And the most amazing part was that my fiancee (an avid red wine hater) found that they aren't all evil. There were two of the 8 we both liked a lot, so we bought a bottle of each on the way out.
We left a little tipsy from the tasting and went to the Chart House, a local high end seafood establishment right on the river. Even though it was a rainy evening, the atmosphere was still great, and the fish! I haven't had good seafood in a while and I thought I was going to start drooling while reading the menu. I settled on the parmesan crusted snapper, which was topped with lump crab meat and was delicious. All in all, it was a great night, after a kind of dull day at work. I hadn't really been looking forward to my b-day, but it was great.
In other news, my training is going pretty well I'd say. I'm only in base 1, but my endurance is well above where it needs to be for the olympic race in august and I'm still building. I have another testing week next week, so updates on my speed progression (which will probably be small gains since I haven't done speed work persay) will be given. I'm not training the amount of hours I've scheduled but I think I overshot a little. I still feel like I will be faster than ever, mostly because I've started my tri-focused training so early. I used to not start training for tris fully until May, once the rowing season ended. Since my rowing career is over, tris have become my full-time commitment. I'm excited about the season.
One final note, I'm doing a 5k tommorrow morning and don't know if I'll go all out or not. I was thinking it'd be fun to throw down a good time, but it might also be fun to run at like 7:00/mile pace and just blow through the finish and keep going for another 35 minutes or so (slowing the pace) to make it an aerobic run. I'll let you know what how it goes down, though I'll probably go all out if I see that I can hang near the front of the race.
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