Can hardly wait until Drink day ...

For this Friday, my plan is to leave work early and Gord Brauer, an old buddy from Winnipeg is coming to visit in the afternoon. Then at 7 pm it's the online Twitter Christmas party. I'll be sitting a the home bar with Alice, having cocktails, watching Tiger get beat up on TV, listening to 70's music and twittering. I can hardly wait.

On the Gift front, I guess I better get my butt in gear and pick up Alice's Birthday and Christmas presents. Her birthday is next Tuesday. I already picked up MY Christmas presents and then gave them to Alice and she wrapped them last night. I can hardly wait to open my presents. I hope I got Sable goggles and a Swim MP3 player. Haha.

As strange as it sounds, since moving to Ontario we have never put presents under the tree. Until this year, we've always travelled back to Winnipeg for Christmas and had the presents boxed and shipped. This year we decided not to go back to Winnipeg and for the first time, we put the presents under the tree. Every day Reid sits beside the tree trying to figure out what his presents are. At 13 years old, it's the first time he's been able to do this and it's adding to the Christmas experience.

Last night he was even on the phone to a friend of his and was giving his friend the dimensions and weight of each of the presents and they were collectively trying to figure out what they were. Reid figured out what one of the presents was and when I asked him how he knows what it is, he pulled up the item up on the Internet and showed me a slight ridge on the top of the box and he could ever so slightly feel the ridge through the paper. To watch him get all excited and try and guess what he's getting for Christmas is worth not going back to Winnipeg this year.

At lunch time I did some weight training and then went to the Apple store to pick up my computer. My hard drive broke and they replaced it. The only hitch was that when I got home and went to back up the old data on the new hard drive, I found out that I didn't set up the back up system correctly and realized the last time I backed up the system was Nov 8, 2008. Doh!

For the rest of the night I was on the phone with Apple and had to re-load all the software I bought since Nov 8th, 2008. While it was loading, I went for my Tempo run. What a difference a couple days make. On Tuesday I thought I lost my running speed and then today I have one of the best tempo runs I've had in a long time. It was very tough for me to get my heart rate up to the 143 bpm maximum. Two day's ago my legs were flat and sore, today they felt fresh and energized.

The only thing I can think of that I'm doing differently is taking some fish and flaxseed oils and whey protein after the workout, which is around 9 - 10 pm. I've heard that taking whey protein before bed helps the body generate healing growth hormone while you sleep. I'm not sure if that's it, but something is working. For the past two day's I've felt great. Come to think of it, I've also had an apple as a snack on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

Weights - 30:00

Tempo Run - 55:18 / 6.92 miles / 7:58 pace / 140 avg hr

Diet 6.5/10