Monday, January 19, 2009

Weekend Wrap-up

I ran 10 miles on the treadmill Friday after work. That brought me to 15 for the day and 32 for the week. I hadn't run that many miles in a day or week since the day/week of my marathon in early November. Overall, I felt fine with the distance, although I've slowed down my pace as I've started to add some miles.

Saturday morning was nowhere near as cold as Friday morning, but it was still cold outside. My family skipped skiing that day, but I needed to be at work, so I went to the mountain. I spent the day with the kids taking one ski run and then going inside to warm up. We managed to avoid any frostbite and despite skiing fewer vertical feet than normal, we had a good day.

Three new girls joined my ski group this weekend, which means I'm now the coach for a group of 10 girls. On Saturday, only 7 of them were skiing, so it was pretty easy to maintain control of the group. On Sunday, 9 of the 10 showed up and I knew the mountain was going to be very busy. I grabbed my son as a second coach for my group, so I got to ski with both of my children for the day, plus 8 other little girls. As the groups get larger, it becomes harder and harder to give individual attention to each child, but I still think we had a good day. One of the toughest things about a large group is when we meet at a stopping point and I'm one student short of the number I should have. A few times yesterday, I counted 8 helmets and then I'd stand there trying to figure out which of the 9 girls was missing for the moment. Usually, the 9th helmet would ski around the corner before I could even figure out who was missing. One time, it was my own daughter who was the last one down the hill and I still couldn't figure out who I was missing before she arrived.

One of the highlights of the day was a race between me and my son. The girls wanted to see us race each other, and I knew what the result would be before we even took off. My son is a very good skier who started skiing at age 5. I'm an old guy who skied for the first time when I was 18, and I got serious about skiing 10 years ago. I beat him occasionally in the race course, but I would guess that he wins 80% of the time.

Yesterday, he smoked me on the course and the girls all thought it was hilarious. I had a terrible run and I'm afraid to go to the NASTAR web site to see how I did.

Because today is a holiday for many people, most of the girls were staying at the mountain to ski one more day. I gave each parent some "homework" for today - something to remind their child about as the families ski together for the day.

I didn't sleep well last night despite being exhausted. It seemed like I just couldn't fall asleep. I've never had insomnia issues in my life, but my sleep has been erratic the past few weeks. Some nights, I'll fall asleep early and then wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and have a hard time going back to sleep. I don't think I'm overtraining right now, and I'll mention it to my doctor when my annual physical finally happens, but I don't think it's a big deal. I certainly don't want any drugs to make me fall asleep or stay asleep. I'd rather my body tell me when it wants to sleep and when it doesn't.

Tonight after work, my wife and I will go to the gym to lift. The gym has been really crowded lately with the "resolutionaries", but things should start to slow down in a week or two. Because of the holiday, I'm hoping things will be quiet tonight.

My plans for this week include two lifting sessions, 5-7 hours of running, and 2 days of skiing. Next week, I'll bump the running time up a bit.

2 comments:

David Ray said...

Avoiding frostbite is good. The sleep thing is odd. Maybe stress related? You got stuff on your mind? As much as you work out, I'd think insomnia would be the last problem to worry about.

Could be weather related, I guess, if the sun's not showing up to regulate the body clock.

Damon said...

This time of year can be somewhat stressful for me. I am working 3 jobs right now. I work 32 hours per week at a hospital, 16 hours per week for a healthcare software start-up company, and I teach skiing for another 12 or so hours per week. So, that's 60 hours of work per week, and more when the software stuff gets really busy.

But, the skiing isn't really stressful, or at least I don't find it to be so. I truly enjoy the days I spend with the kids on the mountain. But, I take their safety very seriously, so there might be stresses there I don't notice.

Lately, if anything, it might be that I'm going to bed too early and then I'm waking up early because I've had enough sleep. Friday night, I turned out the lights at 7:55 and I was asleep in minutes.

Last night, we finished dinner at 6:30 and I joked about going to bed right then. But, before I spent the rest of the evening reading, I checked my e-mail account at the start-up job and found that a co-worker was having some issues and needed my help. So, I worked until about 10:00 last night instead.

It's possible that I'm being so adamant about getting enough sleep that I'm trying to sleep more than I need. Or, perhaps the training and the skiing and the work are all more taxing than I realize.