Christmas day with the R family

Xmas AM: Run, 3K of nasty hill in 20:48

Indulge me. I'm going to describe the whole day. The running bits will be in red.

My parents have a beautiful house at Copacabana. It's their home - the flat I am living in is a place to stay during the week. It's right up the top, near a lookout, looking down on the beach. This is where we spend Christmas.

Being an early riser I was first up, starting the day with a flat white. I tooled around on Coolrunning while the others got themselves up.

This is our first Christmas with "the next generation": my niece Billie (last year, as a newborn, she spent the day with her Dad's family). She, quite rightly, was the focus of attention for the entire day. For the last few years we have opened our presents after breakfast. Not today - we wanted to see Billie open presents.

I am a practical man. You can't move up here for all the Fisher-Price my Mum has bought Billie since her birth. I bought and wrapped a bunch of bananas, her favourite food. My $1.89 was the wisest investment of the day - Billies eyes lit up and they were into her gob even before the clear plastic wrapping and skins were off.

That's not to say I'm a stingy bastard. I'm really proud of what I did for my Mum - I got twelve carefully chosen pictures of my immediate family and constructed a calendar- double sided, A4, colour, glossy and ring bound. I put in all public holiday, birthdays and anniversaries. She was blown away by it.

I scored well - a new Coolrunning tri top, a new South Sydney white training t-shirt (I really need this - my old one has the ghost of a thousand runs in it - Nilodor can't save it anymore) and some excellent books. I gave hints about a watch to time myself whilst swimming - I scored a coaches lap timing stopwatch - back to Rebel tomorrow.

After the presents my sister started teasing her dog by excitedly saying "Walk, Ollie!" when no-one was intending to walk the poor bugger. What else could I do? So on with the new tri top and out the door with Ollie in toe.

Now, I did nasty hillwork on Christmas eve, but there is nowhere to go around here but down, so I just ran slowly down the hill, to the beach (about 1.5K), and turned around and ran back up. Later the Garmin data revealed that it is about a 95m drop over the 1.5K to the beach, so it really is a nasty little run. Ollie had a ball, but my cardio and legs were having a tough time with the 95m back up.

My legs were quite sore for the rest of the day. Ollie also didn't seem much lively for the next hour or so.

So after I got back it was the traditional R family brunch: a two course gorging of monumental proportions. Always delicious, always happy. It's something we look forward to all year. Then we all nap, read, float in the pool or vegetate until the second gorging - Christmas dinner. Despite the fact that I'd drunk enough coffee to float a battleship, I flaked on the couch for an hour.

Dinner was another feast, before we retired to watch a video - "The Dinner Game" it's a French film and it's wonderful - we only pick the best for Christmas.

I hope yours was as good as mine.

Oh, and by the way - today is a rest day. My legs are still calling me rude names.