Staying on Plan and Hill Repeats

Staying on plan.
I took the day off work on Thursday as my wonderful husband gave me tickets to see Bryan Adams in concert for my birthday back in December.  Wednesday's concert didn't start until 8pm and considering the length of a concert, traffic and the hour plus drive home, we decided to treat ourselves to a day off so we wouldn't have to go to work on very little sleep.  Turns out that was an excellent plan.  I drove into work with my friend I carpool with and after work, I drove downtown to her office so I could give her car to her.

After I dropped off the car, I figured I had a good hour or so to wait until my husband would arrive for us to go for dinner before the concert.  In the past I probably would have set myself up in a coffee shop, reading a book and drinking tea.  However, it was a dry day, a little brisk but the sun was out so I decided to go walk the Seawall.  I figured since we were eating out and the restaurant my husband chose doesn't really have a lot of "plan" friendly meals, I knew that I was going to be using a lot of points for dinner no matter what I ordered, so I decided to earn some activity points.

Beautiful view of the North Shore Mountains on my walk

I had a nice brisk walk fr 45 minutes when I got a text from my wonderful husband that he had just pulled off the freeway and would be at our meeting spot shortly.  I turned around and headed for where we were going to go for dinner to meet up with him.  I went through the menu earlier and decided on the Chicken Sandwich with Side Salad, pretty on plan but still 22 points!

After dinner, we still had almost an hour before the doors would open for the concert so we decided to go for a moonlit walk along the seawall.  It was pitch black but there is nice lighting around the area where we were walking.  I took a picture of my husband but the one he took of me didn't turn out.  I love this picture of him with the North Shore mountains lit up behind him.

Lights of the North Shore in the Background

After our walk we headed back to the car and drove to Roger's Arena to await Bryan Adams. The concert was phenomenal.  I love seeing Bryan Adams in concert.  He's old school in that there's no flash or glitz, it's the man and his band or the man and his guitar and he sings his heart out for a couple of hours. 

So it must be Thursday as I had hill repeats on the schedule again.  After I posted about doing hill repeats last week I received an email from an advanced runner who told me what I actually did was a Pyramid run.  So I decided to try to do hill repeats again, but instead of figuring it out myself I used the Hill program on the actual treadmill.  My only mistake was waiting until after dinner to go to the gym.   We had dinner early as I took the day off.  We ate around 5pm and I headed to the gym around 7 but halfway through my hill run I felt like I was going to throw up.  I persevered though and survived.  I set the treadmill for the hill program level 5 with a speed of 3.2mph, set my garmin for 2:1's (2 minutes running, 1 minute walking) and set off.  To my great relief I made it!  I did my hill repeats without having to split the 2 minutes of running up!  A big improvement over last week!

Hill Repeats completed!