Carrotcake.

I’ve been craving carrot cake.  With cream cheese frosting.  Like my mom makes.

It has been decided.  The very first race of 2009 to officially get placed on my race calendar is the Spirit of Morgantown Triathlon on Sunday, August 9th in Morgantown, WV.  It’s a half ironman distance race.  Put on by the same good folks who put on the Spirit of Racine triathlon in Wisconsin, it looks like it will be a challenging bike course and a nice flat run, which suits me well.  Now all I have to do is sign up for the darn thing before May 1st so I can save $10.

I mapped out my training and it will officially begin on May 2nd, although by that point I need to be back up to running at least 6 miles.  I’ll start posting weekly training then.

In other news, I was in Sedona, AZ for 4 days this past weekend, and if you’ve never gone, I’m telling you now to put it on your list of places you must see.  It was stunningly beautiful; my only regret was not having a bike or Aaron with me.  It was a spa weekend for my Mother-In-Law’s birthday, so I got to do some things I usually can’t do, like get a 90 minute sports massage.  The only massages I’ve had til this point were either 60 minute nice, calm, easy and relaxing, or 30 minutes of a dude with his elbow in my IT band, so this was a whole new experience.  Rick, my masseuse, said he’s been doing sports massage for 18 years, and in his private practice all of his appointments are a minimum of 2 hours.  WHAT?  He started with my back and shoulders, and took a good long time working on my right shoulder, which he originally thought was a rotator cuff problem.  He also did a lot on my left hip (which usually gives me problems when running), and then flipped me over.  He worked for a long time on my neck and scalene muscles and said they were the tightest he’d ever felt (no doubt from holding up a set of boobs while riding a bike, a problem inherent in female bike riding).  He said if I could get regular work on those muscles he thought my headaches would go away… how about that!

It was the most intense, non relaxing workout of a massage I’ve ever had.

And then yesterday I undid it all with 45 minutes of intervals and an hour of weight lifting.

Sedona at Sunset