Category Archives: speed workouts

Accountability

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I have been blessed with an incredible drive to reach the goals that I set for myself. One of my college friends emailed me several months ago asking some questions pertaining to running and asked me how I stayed motivated to run. I have a lot of tricks for getting myself out the door or onto the treadmill, but the truth is once I’ve decided I’m going to do something not much stands in my way – both in life and in working out.

However that’s not to say that I don’t sometimes struggle with finding the motivation to work out, I think I’m just better at ignoring the little voices telling me not to go then a lot of people.

motivationcomic

credit to Google as always

Over the past few months, though, I’ve found myself even more motivated than normal to hit the pavement or the weights, and I owe that largely to Britt and to my blog friends. Britt and I made a deal to commit to 1 yoga session, 2 strength sessions, and 3 quality runs a week (speed, tempo & long) and that has been the driving force behind getting me going when I’m less than enthusiastic about it.

Last night on my way home from work as I was thinking about the speed work on tap, we exchanged the following texts:

R: I’m so uninterested in running tonight it’s ridiculous

B: I was just gonna text you and say I really just wanna go home and drink wine. Not work out.

R: LOL ahhh I hate today!

B: Oh I mean no go workout. You’ll feel better after. And you’ll be super speedy in January if you do speed work.

I’m pretty sure that anyone driving next to me thought I was crazy because I was laughing out loud in my car. By that point I knew she was right, I would feel better, but I was still favoring not working out so I tweeted this:

tweet

Almost immediately Kim replied with this:

kim

I couldn’t remember exactly what my speed work entailed, just that it involved 800 repeats. I told myself that if it was anything over 4 repeats I could put it off until the morning (except I suffer from exercise guilt when I do things like this so I probably would’ve guilted myself into it) and low and behold when I got home guess what I saw:

run

Of course, right?

At which point I decided that it had to happen. And you know what? Despite the extreme lack of wanting to run and a dead iPod resulting in a musicless (real word!) run, I had a fantastic run. Which further proves the theory that you never regret a workout.

Having people hold me accountable has been one of the best ways for me to push past any desire I have to skip a workout, and I am eternally grateful for each and every one of you that has given me support when I’ve needed it.

Do you have someone that holds you accountable?

Running on Rainbows

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Yesterday I had one of those runs. You know the kind. The kind that you go into thinking “gah, I don’t want to do this” and come out of thinking “holy crap, I AM AWESOME”.

I bet you didn’t know that:

1. I was so tall and Ryan Hall was so small

2. I run with the elites

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

It started at 5:30 yesterday morning. I crawled out of bed thinking about the six 800 repeats I needed to do and how I was going to knock it out in the morning. I fumbled around in the dark for a while before stumbling into the garage to grab my running shoes, which hadn’t moved since my rainfest run on Sunday. Much to my dismay, they were still damp. Now, I like to think that I can be (key words there: can be) a hardcore runner. I will schlep it out in the rain, brave 100 degree temps coupled with 100% humidity, and face blisteringly cold weather in the dark morning hours during the winter. I will trudge through a run even when I don’t want to and force myself to finish no matter what.  I will get up at 4:30 in the morning to run a 20-miler before flying out to Vegas. But if I don’t have to run in damp shoes, I’m not going to. So I threw them in the dryer and decorated my house for Fall instead – clearly an even trade.

I knew that I was going to have to tackle it when I got home, but I pushed this thought as far from my head as possible all day. I prefer morning running, even though lately I’ve been slowly doing more and more of my runs after work. I blame this on pure laziness and the knowledge that I get home an hour and a half earlier than I did previously. The fact that I was up on time yesterday morning and couldn’t run irritated me.

Typically I don’t give myself any time to even debate the thought of running. Too much time spent thinking means not a whole lot of action for me. This means that as soon as I walk through that front door after work I am throwing my purse and lunchbox on the kitchen counters and tossing off clothes walking to the bedroom. Before I know it I’m either walking outside setting my Garmin or walking to the treadmill while going over my plan of attack – and I haven’t even had time to register that I’m about to run. And usually when I run after work I usually grab shotbloks to give me some pep. A girls’ gotta do what a girls’ gotta do.

Also, Clif, please feel free to send me some shotbloks to review. I will very willingly do so! ;-)

Yesterday I realized that I was completely out. Ugh. I also spent a good 10 minutes debating switching my speedwork with my tempo run before finally just sucking it up and going with the speedwork. I told myself that if I still wasn’t feeling 800 repeats after my warmup mile, I could still switch gears. I also ate sour cherry balls from who knows when (actually, I do know when, they’re from Funfest) to trick myself into thinking they were shotbloks (ok, maybe just to reward myself for being about to run. I KNOW you aren’t supposed to give yourself rewards for working out blah blah blah but I don’t agree and I fully believe in bribes with myself).

And then some magical happened. As I pounded through my first mile listening to some pretty rockin’ tunes I started smiling. Six 800 repeats at a 7:30 pace with a minute and a half “rest” (I run my “rests” at 8:34 in case you were wondering) in between? Pssshhhh. Child’s play. Ok, maybe not child’s play, but definitely doable.

I hit them all hard. I felt like I was flying. Just call me Kara Goucher, because I felt speedy. I flew through 6.4 miles in 55 minutes which gave me a MASSIVE surge of confidence for the 10k on Saturday.

Oh, I didn’t mention that? I’m running a 10k on Saturday. My previous 10k was a pretty glorious experience that I’m hoping to recreate in a few days. I have some silent time goals that I’m praying for, but I also am trying to go into it with a level-head and the mental check that I am currently marathon training and that doesn’t equal fast it equals distance. We shall see though.

Anyone else racing this weekend? I feel like it’s been forever since I last had a race… I’m excited!

Counting Calories

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Tuesday’s workout: ROCKIN’ 5 miles of speedwork, 10 min warm up, 1 min @ 7:30 pace, 3 min @ 8:34 pace (repeat 6 times), 10 min cool down

Today’s workout: (will be) BODYPUMP and maybe some running or cardio. MAYBE.

Couple things

1. If you don’t like posts without pictures, this is not the post for you, except that I need your advice so please keep reading. Edit to add: I put in some old pics, so keep reading!

2. To all my BLOGGER friends! I can’t post on the majority of your sites anymore :( :( This makes me infinitely sad because I want to show your blogs some love but get frustrated and can’t most of the time. If you can go in an edit your comments section to include the Name/URL option I will be eternally grateful so that I can comment away :)

Counting Calories

As a rule, I don’t. Plain and simple.

Why, you may ask? I can’t. I am not patient enough to count calories and I have no doubt that I would be obsessed if I did. I also work out to feel good about myself not to lose weight. And it’s kind of funny that I’m even posting this because Heidi and I were just talking about NOT counting calories this weekend.

All that being said, I’m thinking about giving it a go – one work day, one weekend day… just to see.

Why, you may ask?

Marathon training BLOWS.

No, it really doesn’t, I actually thoroughly enjoy it and have found a lot of neat things I love in the process – like speedwork and tempo runs (I know, I know, a lot of people hate tempo runs, but I really really like them) and BODYPUMP (and if you’re wondering, I will almost always put BODYPUMP in all caps. It makes me feel hardcore ;-) which makes it worth me looking ridiculous).

However – and I’m sure anyone else training can attest to this – I am hungry all the time and occassionally a lot of the time my willpower cannot say no to fried pickles and beer. Which doesn’t bode well because it doesn’t matter if you ran 10, 12, 14, or more miles, they still aren’t good for you and they still make me feel awful the next day (fried food just doesn’t sit well with me which is super lame because I love it). Especially when those fried pickles make their debut at 12:30…. AM. :-/

I’m getting off topic though. I kind of am curious how many calories I’m eating versus burning and see if I’m being healthy or hurting myself (either by eating too much or too little… except let’s be honest, there’s NO WAY I’m eating too little…)

That’s where you guys come in… have any of you ever counted calories before? Tell me  about it, I’m really curious. 

Busy Weekends!!

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That is such a lie.

But I somewhat feel like I did have one… Ok, that’s a lie too. The busiest I got was taking two naps on Saturday and two naps on Sunday. And this is going to be a long post because I’m feeling chatty so get ready!

First, I have to talk about dinner on Friday.

We met my parents for dinner at BJ’s, which is easily one of my favorite places to eat. I have been craving a mojito for a while now, so I almost jumped for joy when my mom said she was going to order one. Go on ahead and get me one of those bad boys too!

Delicious.

We started off by splitting the Thai Shrimp Lettuce Wraps and the Avocado Egg Rolls.

Sean was obsessed with the Avocado Egg Rolls (to the point he said we need to make them at home… yeah, let me get right on that…) but I thought the Thai Shrimp Lettuce Wraps took the cake. SO SO GOOD.

The above picture does no justice. I was trying to be creative and failed. I followed the appetizers with the Seared Ahi Tuna Salad (though I skipped the crisy wonton strips). Then I died and went to heaven. I LOVE seared Ahi tuna and this was no exception. There wasn’t one bad thing about this salad. Usually I order dressing on the side, but I didn’t this time and I don’t regret that decision one bit.

I also ignored Sean trying to tell me to not take pictures and snapped away. You’re welcome.

Follow that with another mojito to keep the conversation going before wrapping up the night. I really like my parents as best friends and as parents, and love spending time with them. Since the past couple weeks have been so hectic, we haven’t gotten together with them in a while, and I’m glad we made the time to do so Friday night.

We trucked over the B-Dubs afterwards and met up with Sarah (coworker/bestie) and then went to Stats for a bit before I rounded up Sean and we went home and I ate the rest of the ice cream in the house (sorry, hon).

I woke up with a headache around 8:30 Saturday morning that never went away. To counteract this I went back to bed at 10:30, got up at 11:30 and moved back to the couch, took another nap around 12:30 and finally got moving around 2… Oops.

I kept debating working out and what I wanted to do (I had 7 miles to get in over the weekend and some cross-training) but nothing sounded appealing other than running. And not running the 7 miles.

So I did something I haven’t done in months. I ran for the sheer joy of it. I ran because I love running. I feel like over the past couple months I’ve gotten so wrapped up in training that I forgot why I started training in the first place. Sure, it’s because I want to run a marathon, but more importantly it’s because I freaking love it. So I got in a little over 5 miles of my favorite kind of speedwork. And it was GLORIOUS.

The couch was calling my name after that, so I happily obliged until it was time to meet up with Sarah and her fiance Kenneth to go to the Stevie Nicks concert. Suffice it to say, I still had a headache, but it was fun to go out with them and to do something different than the norm. Sean and I went home and to bed afterwards and I slept like a baby.

Sunday I got up with every intention of doing the 7 miles…

I made peanut butter banana bread instead. :)

Except, when I started baking I realized something: we absolutely never use butter with anything. So I subbed in coconut oil instead.

Oh, and I skipped regular PB and used White Chocolate Wonderful PB instead (GOOD DECISION).

Way better decision than running 7 miles. I also did laundry and grocery shopped, before taking a page out of this girl’s book (er, blog?) and making my sandwich into a panini (of sorts). MMMMMMMM YUM! It was so good!

Then I took a nap. :) Sean left to go golfing, so I finally pulled myself onto the treadmill to do my 7 miles. However, I didn’t run the 7 miles at a steady pace, I started at 6.1 and every two minutes would move the speed up .1 until I hit 6.6, where I ran for four minutes before moving it down every two minutes til I was back at 6.1, where I stayed for four minutes and then repeated over and over until I was close to 7 miles. Once I hit 6.6 for the last time instead of slowing the speed down, I increased it every two minutes until I hit the 7 miles. It was the PERFECT way to make 7 miles fly by on the treadmill.

And then I took my fourth nap of the weekend. Nothing notable happened after that. I basically read, watched tv, and then went to sleep.

After having weeks of strenuous marathon training, I think my body needed a chance to calm down a bit, so I took full advantage of taking naps!

Do you ever get overwhelmed with training and just need a break? I’m so glad I had a lighter mileage week this week. I needed to rediscover why I’m putting myself through all this again! 

Tell me about your weekends!

Vegas DAY FIVE

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Sad days, friends, this is the last of the Vegas posts. I suppose I could write a post about our flight home, but that’s boring so I’ll stop with the wedding.

I started off my last day with a pretty miserable 6 miles of speedwork on the treadmill. I did ok the first 4.5  miles, but the last 1.5 was rough.

But it was done, and that’s what counts, right? After that I grabbed some ice water and ran upstairs to quickly shower and get ready because we had big plans… The Hoover Dam!

That red guy was actually there, in case you’re wondering. I don’t know how he turned out so cartoon-like. Weird.

The tour started off with a short movie and then we were all ushered down down down to tour the inner-workings of the dam.

When they finished testing our claustrophobia in the damp tunnels, we hopped on the elevator back up to the normal level so we could see the rest of what made the dam tick.

And then we went outside to ogle the majestic qualities of the dam.

 

This is just a model and that isn’t a real boat. Don’t try to pretend like you knew that already.

A big thanks to Sean’s parents for taking Andrew, Lindsay, Sean and I to the Hoover Dam!!

Pretty much as soon as we got back Sean grabbed his tux and headed out to Daniel’s room so all the guys could get ready together (isn’t that cuuuute?!). I, on the other hand, did what any person in my position would do and poured myself a Skinnygirl Margarita, turned on the hot water, and made myself a bubble bath.

Then Linds and I met up and went to the ceremony. Their ceremony was a lot like Sean and I’s – short and sweet :) and was held in one of the chapels at Mandalay Bay.

But I think everyone knows the BEST part of weddings is the reception (which was also at Mandalay Bay)! We enjoyed tons of delicious food and wine…

Naturally, we had some cake…

And we had really good company!

Andrew & Lindsay – whom I adore…

My other set of parents – love them so much, they are awesome…

Andrew, Daniel (the groom), and Sean…

Me and Lindsay (Sean told us we needed to look like we were talking, which is how he ended up with this lovely shot of the back of my head…  BUT at least you can see how cool the back of my dress was!)

And, last but not least, myself and the bride. (Linds, if you read this, I had to cut you out because you were blinking and I figured you would want that all over the internet :) )

Doesn’t she look gorgeous?!

Our camera died after that, and really we just did a bunch of dancing and having fun. After the reception ended, we all went back out to Mandalay and gambled for a while before Sean and I headed over to Luxor to use the last of our vouchers (versus just trading them in for cash, because THAT would have made way too much sense).

Thank you so much Daniel & Tosha for letting us be a part of such a wonderful day (well, week!)!! We had such a great time and you both looked fantastic!

Do you love wedding receptions? I do! I am the world’s worst dancer, but I love getting out there and having fun with Sean. 

 

Weekly Workout Recaps, Week 10

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First, I want to thank all my guest posters for coming in and keeping the blog alive while I was gone! Since Vegas is going to take me forever to recap, I’m just gonna sum up workouts right now and then start to compile a few Vegas posts.

What I was supposed to be doing:

Monday: Rest/Cross-training day
Tuesday: 2 miles @ 9:54 min/pace
Wednesday: Rest/Cross-training day
Thursday: 6 miles speedwork with warm up, 3×1600 in 7:53 min/pace with 800 jogs inbetween, cool down
Friday: Rest/Cross-training day
Saturday: Rest/Cross-training day
Sunday: 20 miles @ 9:54 min/pace
What really happened:

Monday: Jackie Warner 15 min total body circuit, 10 min Pilates total body circuit, 10 min Pilates long & limber
Tuesday: 20 miles @ 9:50 min/pace
Wednesday: resssssst day… and by rest I mean Sean and I went on a 4 mile trek up and down the strip :)
Thursday: 2 miles and 20 min on the space machine thing (that machine that combines the elliptical/stairstepper?)
Friday: 45 min elliptical
Saturday: 6 mile speedwork, 1 mile @9:50, 3 x 7:47 min/miles with 800 jogs in between, the last mile was ROUGH and I varied walking/running
Sunday: if drinking 2 bloody mary’s in the airport counts then that’s what I did :)

Overall planned miles: 28

Overall actual miles: 28

BAM. How’s that for working out while on vacation?! I was worried about getting in the 20 miles so I just did them super early Tuesday morning before we left. DONE AND DONE.

And don’t worry, I wouldn’t leave you without at least one picture!

 

What did you guys do this weekend?? Heck, what’s been going on since Tuesday!?

Making it work

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EDIT: Are you serious? Someone searched this TWICE and my blog came up? “have a nice life. who am i kidding? i hope you get hit by a moving truck.”

I mean, sometimes I get frustrated with Sean and all, but never that much…

What started out as a comment on Running Girl’s post, turned out looking incredibly long-winded, so I’m just going to go ahead and preface this by saying you should check out her post here and then you’ll get the basis of my post.

For anyone too lazy to click over and read her post, to sum it up she basically is talking about finding the healthy balance between planning your days, your workouts, your food, etc. while also allowing for life to intervene like it so often does.
Like her, I’m incredibly particular about my workouts. I am a very list-driven person (just take a look at my planner on any given day) and I thrive off of crossing things off one at a time. I also have found that I execute workouts at a much higher success rate if I know ahead of time what I’m going to do and have some sort of schedule about it.
Unfortunately for my perfectly planned out life, LIFE has a way of jumping in the way of those plans sometimes. It doesn’t matter if all of my t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted – sometimes life just throws a wrench in all of that.
It’s taken me a long time to figure out what works for me. And what it comes down to is schedule + flexibility. I am at my best when I have mapped out certain training runs that I have to hit – though I am flexible about which days I hit them. I have at least one hills or speed workout that I want to get in per week. I try to do at least one day of yoga and one day of pilates (though usually I just get in one day of one of them) and I try to get in 2 days of total body strength training (even if that means one day of arms, one of legs, etc. and then one total body day).
What works for me won’t work for everyone, myself included sometimes.
There are days that I have planned to go to spin class and I wake up and I don’t feel like driving to the gym (It’s really far. A whole 7 minutes). So I’ll pull my bike out of the garage and bike around the neighborhood, or I’ll do an interval workout on the treadmill instead.
And there’s days where I finish a run and know I need to get in some abs, but when I peek into my bedroom and see my husband still sleeping peacefully, the only right option at that point is to crawl back into bed and snuggle up to him and nap for 20 more minutes (so what if I did that yesterday? I got my ab workout in after work!).
Lovelovelove!

That’s what it’s all about to me though, making it work for YOU. No one else’s schedule will fit yours. You have to find that balance.
Kind of like skipping dinner so you can do this:

Don’t judge that we are wearing the same shirt. It was not planned. And dinners consisting of froyo are perfectly acceptable. They hit my calcium AND fruit needs and I got an added bonus with the dark chocolate chips that I added in. And I’m pretty sure that pecan praline froyo counts as a “healthy fat”. Plus, little brother had never been, so it’s obvious that he needed to experience this wonderland. Duh.
Oh and for anyone who cares, Yogurt Cup is 5.1 miles away from my house. Which is a perfectly legit running distance to be rewarded with froyo after. The hubs will just have to meet me there…

Zombieland V. 1.0

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No sleep = Zombie. I didn’t sleep at all last night.

I did a k.i.l.l.e.r speed workout on Tuesday after work. And I was so.happy. There was no sarcasm in that last sentence. If people looked into the window of my makeshift workout room they probably would have thought I was a huge creep. I was running along at level 8 on the treadmill anticipating when I would have to bump it up to level 9 and for whatever reason it was just working right then. I had a huge, goofy smile on my face and every now and then I would pump my arms in enthusiasm.

I have no good explanation. It was just a phenomenal five miles of speed work. I also had a great run Wednesday and a fair strength workout today. But those are not worth mentioning right now.

In other good news, I can not stop eating that stupid wedding cake. And it is never ending. For such a small circle of cake that is left, I don’t get how Sean and I are still able to eat it every.single.night.

But that’s the boring news. Let’s get on to the exciting news.
I should never be allowed to bring this stuff to work with me:

Get real. Like I would ever just have a teaspoon of almond butter. It just makes me feel like I’m being healthy, all sixteen times I fill it up.
When I got home from work yesterday I literally squealed like a small child (or pig, you take your pick) in excitement at this:

AHHHH!!! It’s like Christmas in April!!

Can you feel the anticipation building??

YAYYY CHOBANI!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SENDING THIS TO ME!! You are officially the love of my life. Sorry Sean, you lose out to INCREDIBLE Greek yogurt. And no, you can not have any, just stay away from the second shelf of our fridge!

I cleaned out the entire fridge right then just so I could dedicate an entire shelf to my soul mates up there. I wish I was joking.

Since I was home alone last night while the hubs was at softball I decided I would take a page from Hungry Healthy Happy:

Um, you just need to go to this blog post on her website. I would share the recipe, but I really want her to have all the credit for this PHENOMENAL meal.

And just to make her happy, I even sat down at the table, just like she did:

Twice baked sweet potato, you are hands down my new favorite meal. HANDS DOWN.

When Sean got home and crawled into bed and asked me how my night was I told him I made the best meal ever. And then I spent 15 minutes describing its goodness while he told me he hated me for making the best meal ever while he was gone. LOVE YOU HONEY!

:) Best wife of the year?