Not much meal prep this weekend [rowing]

Saturday was my birthday! I am finally done with being the stupid age of 41. I think 41 is the stupidest number for an age that I have encountered so far in my life. I am extremely happy to be 42 instead. A much better number!

My rowing teammates insisted that we go to our local German beer hall to celebrate, because they give a person a boot full of beer for free, for their birthday.

I had mine filled with a delicious IPA. At 9 in the morning. For reasons that will be made clear below.



Celebrating with teammates:




I'm grateful that teammates and S helped me finish this.

There were 2 reasons for the early-morning libations. The first is that we usually get coffee after our morning rowing practice, so it seemed simplest to just invite people to the beer hall instead. The second reason is that on Sunday some of us were heading to our first erg race of the winter, so I wanted to maximize the amount of time between drinking a large volume of beer and putting in an all-out effort on the rowing machine.

We had a great time at the race. One of my teammates raced right next to me, and it was so wonderful to have her company:


Our race was the first one of the day, so after we finished we got to cheer on our teammates:


This is one of our junior rowers, who had a great race and shaved 2 seconds off her personal best time:



Here, she summarizes what it feels like to finish a 2000m race on a rowing machine:



These only take around 8 minutes, but it's amazing what can happen physiologically over that kind of timeframe.

So all told, the only cooking I did this weekend was to bake myself a birthday cake. S did make me a birthday pizza, so altogether we'll manage to scrape by on leftovers for the week.

And now, time to get back to work.