Week 8 - Skating in DAR

After meeting Bob in Conway a couple of weeks ago, where he invited me to play indoor soccer with his team, Arsenal, in Northampton, it was finally happening. Since I had tossed my soccer shoes during the move to Conway, having not played in 10 years, I had to buy some new shoes. It turned out Bob's car was broken, and I picked him up on West Road in Ashfield. When we arrived at the Allsports Arena, I had to register and forkm over some cash. After a short warm-up, we played a 2x25 minute game. I thought I was pretty fit, but chasing around in quick, short sprints had me gasping for air after only 5 minutes, and I needed to take a breather. We played pretty well in the beginning and were even leading for a while, but then the energy levels on the Arsenal side went down, and we lost by a few goals. Definitely a shock to the system; even though ball control was pretty good, passing and shooting were definitely under par. Hopefully, that will improve. Oh, and yes, soccer is a contact sport, so I got my chin beat up by running into an unforgiving shoulder.

On Tuesday, Paula and I went looking for some skatable ice. When driving past Ashfield Lake two days before, it looked pretty skatable. But up close, it was completely unskatable. We decided to try the lake at DAR, which turned out to have much smoother ice, and we skated for an hour. When I got home, I raced the NCC Zwift time trial on the Richmond course. I had a pretty good race, my third best time ever, with an average of 263 watts and a time of 26:05. I had focused this time on putting extra power on the climbs and recovering on the downhills, which seemed to work well.

Wednesday morning, Paula and I went for an early ski, as we had to be back by noon for a new refrigerator delivery. I did 7 runs, and we also skied with Dusty for a bit. In the evening, we played some pickleball.

I was pretty exhausted after all the activities, and the rest of the week I had been busy with working on our new bathroom, with contractors coming in to do the rough plumbing and electrical over the weekend. Overall, there was a lot of progress in that respect. On Friday night, I did play some pickleball, but I tweaked a quad muscle near the end of the session and decided to skip the next day's session.

On Sunday, I went for my regular run to see how the muscle felt, and it was fine after a day of rest.

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