Slow and Steady Right?

Today was a tough day of tilting at windmills and I knew I needed to run as badly as I wanted to just skip it.

I let myself be very slow.  It was hot, humid, and windy threatening a storm.  We had about 6 sprinkles but no rain.  The wind was helpful, but the humidity was killer.

When I got home I did The Runner's Core workout level 1.  It took about 10 minutes, and I couldn't complete all of it.  Planks for days, but situps will stop me in my tracks every time.  And my balance ball was more inflated than theirs so it was pretty funny - my husband had to help balance me.

Bogart the Amazon spent the entire time giving the yoga mat the hairy eyeball.  He really didn't like that thing, and was growling at it when I was doing planks.  Mark had to reassure him I was ok and was not being eaten by the blue thing.

Then I brought in the balance ball and BD immediately went "tall bird" and felt that he needed to protect me from the awful thing.  I don't blame him - I might have needed protection.

I have no doubt that I am going to feel this workout in the morning.  I am going to try to do core at least 3x a week - either after runs or on nights I am not running is still up in the air.

Yeah, OK, I'm not dead

Or injured.  Or anything that might be a good reason not to be running and blogging.

I ran tonight - not a bad run but not great.  I'm officially on plan.

I downloaded the Hal Higdon's 1/2 Marathon Novice 1 Training Program.  It fought with me on wanting to start today, not next Monday.  But I won.  It works well, and I hope it will make keeping up with my runs a little easier since I don't want the calendar on the fridge while we are trying to sell the house.  It does not, however, sync with Garmin or Daily Mile so I will keep using my Garmin too.  Considering how reliable my iPhone has been with run apps in the past and the GPS data, this is probably a good idea.  Garmin won't cheat me out of that last .20 like the iPhone does.

Let me tell you, if you held Hal at gunpoint I don't think he could sound less enthusiastic than he does in this app.  I'm can't find where to turn off his "cheers" but they made me kind of laugh anyway.  I never knew "You're doing great" could be a dirge.  Anybody remember the old Clear Eyes commercials with Ben Stein - yeah, like that.

I discovered if you loosen the laces on your stability shoes too much, your legs ache and feel like lead.  I tightened them back up and the last mile was so much better.  I also discovered that if you run 7 miles in a week for the first time in months, you might experience some delayed onset muscle soreness.  Yeah, I thought I might be immune or something.....

I've missed running.  It feels very daunting to look at 7 miles last week and think that I want to be able to run 13.1 all at once again when this is over.  But I guess we will go back to baby steps.  One of these days I will be a continuous runner and stop the cycle.

My goal is to run the Covered Bridges Half in New Hampshire on Labor Day weekend.  Wish me luck!!

And immediately a change in plans

So I sent my husband the training plan, and he said great but.....

He mentioned that perhaps this would be ambitious while we are working on selling the house, what with showings and 30 minutes to get the birds and GTFO and probably this being a lot on nights and weekends.

He knows how frustrated I tend to get when my plans don't work.  So.....

I am holding this plan for the 2nd half of the year and going into a 12 week Novice 1 Hal Higdon Half Marathon Plan.

Because I can be taught.

I think I should start spring training now

Then again, I think spring should have started by now too so we all know how that works.  BUT.  I have been reading Run Less, Run Faster and I have decided to give it a shot.  I've based my training on a 39 minute 5k time (which is somewhere between my fastest and my slowest) and I've set it up to start the week after I get back from DAR State Conference.  In between I'm going to try to do a little base building, which is what I've been trying to do for the last month and failing.  ANYWAY.

So my first week of training will look like this:

April 23 - Track Repeats - 8 repeats of 400 meters with a 400 meter recovery interval - target pace for repeats is 2:58 (I've never done repeats, but I understand I can program my trusty Garmin to yell at me appropriately)

April 24 - Cross Training - I am going to use the bike with the trainer for this - 10 minutes easy, 8 minutes tempo, 7 minutes easy (tempo should correspond to about short sentence effort)

April 25 - Tempo Run - 5k (3.1 miles) at 12:50 pace

April 26 - Cross Training - 10 minutes easy, 10 minutes tempo, 5 minutes easy

April 28 - Long Run - 10k (6.1 miles) at 13:20 pace

I know I can do the paces for everything but track and I understand that is supposed to be my major hard workout every week.  I am going for an improved 10k time.  My last 10k was about 1:20 and that was planned as I took it really, really easy.  This 12 week plan will get me through to July, although my goal 10k is actually at the end of June.

Can I work out 5 days a week and keep it up?  Who knows.  I like that the cross training can be done indoors and it is in minutes so should only eat a half hour of my day.  I'm a slow runner, so a simple 5k takes 40 minutes if I don't drive to the park to do it.  Add driving to the park and it takes an hour of my day.

If the plan is too ambitious, I can always recalculate.  But the point is for it to be hard.  Here's to hard work.

It hasn't been much of a week for workouts

So last week was another exercise bust for the most part.  I got in my 5k for jelly bean.  And we spent 6 hours on Saturday painting and another 4 on Sunday scrubbing hardwood floors, so counted 6 points toward my workouts there.  My legs are killing me from doing the painters squats.

The TV room is finished:

 The dining room no longer has wallpaper:

 And the room where we used to have the dining room furniture has been transformed into a formal type living room:

I cannot tell you how different this all looks.  It is very fresh and clean and pretty and if all of our stuff fit and we had a bathtub I could soak in and maybe a better kitchen we might stay. 

A pathological fear of wallpaper

Is that possible?  I think I am developing one.

While Mark took the master bedroom from this:

To this:

I took the dining room wallpaper from this:

To this:

I still have a wall and a half to go, and I'm at 10 hours of stripping.  With a steamer, up and down a ladder.  So I'm giving myself credit for 90 minutes of the 6 hours I spent on Saturday lifting a 5 pound steamer up and down.  I'm going to have great shoulders for summer at this rate.

I have been really good with the water, but horrible with the fruits and veggies.

All in all, Spring Bootie Buster has been pretty much a bust for me.  Then again, spring has been pretty much a bust at this point since it's still cold and wet and gross here.

Here's to a better week!

21 Days

Today is day 21 of Intuitive Eating.  I am not calling it a "challenge" anymore because really it is a lifestyle change, not a temporary challenge.

I'm finally starting to feel like I have a handle on my emotions and why I eat when I am not hungry.  I'm starting to figure out ways to go around that, and to keep it from happening.  And sometimes that actually means dealing with why I feel stressed or tired or sad.

I'm starting to not give food the power to convince me that I am hungry when I am not.  Or that I need one more bite.  I'm a big girl. If I get hungry later, I know where to find more food.

I'm starting to understand that emotionally a doughnut is the same as an apple - both are food and neither should have an emotional good or bad value.  The only questions are am I hungry and is that what I am craving?

Still a process, still learning, still going to keep challenging myself and the way I think.  But when a friend at work kept saying "somebody eat that piece of doughnut left so I don't have to" I realized that it had NO power over me anymore.  I didn't care if there was half or a whole box - I didn't want one mentally.  And that is where the "challenge" comes in.

I'm sure I will have ups and downs.  I'm sure that some days I will eat emotionally and know I'm doing it and not care. But life is a process all the way.  And it's nice to stop using food as at crutch, diets as an excuse and allowing myself to fail because I didn't really want to try in the first place. 

Food is food.  Life is too short.  Go play.