Monday, March 30, 2009

Baby's got a new pair of shoes

I bought two new pairs of shoes this weekend, actually. A new pair of running shoes, because I'm gonna need them for marathon training, and our running group got a wonderful discount at the store we were at on Saturday.

And a pair of bicycling shoes. And pedals. Anneke has finally gone clipless, after talking about it for about two years. Eric and I brought my bike to the store on Sunday for them to put on the new pedals, and to have them show me how to get in and out of them on their trainer. Then they had me ride for a bit (on the trainer) and checked the fit of the bike, and looked at the adjustment of the seat and handlebars. And it was spot on. I guess I did something right!!!!

This weekend, I started over, or recommitted, or whatever you want to call it. The scale was creeping up to a scarier place, and it had to stop. I actually spent a lot of time in the kitchen this weekend, cooking, cleaning, prepping food, and getting rid of some of the crap I have around. I tell ya, sometimes it's hard to stay on track when your husband can pretty much eat whatever he wants with no ill effects.

And I will have a new training plan on Saturday, so there's no looking back.

~a

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

greetings and salutations

It's definately been a week.

Went for a great run last Monday after work... went and explored another park in my area, and got in about 3 miles. Felt great.

Then the plague set in. Headache, sneezy, stuffed up. Can we say YUK! And I just was feeling sluggish all week.

Good news is that I got up to meet my running group on Saturday morning. I wasn't sure how things would go, but figured if nothing else, I would walk. I ran. Set the pace for the 4 of us in the group, probably doing 11 to 11 1/2 minute miles. And when we had gone about 3.5 miles, we were back a Lake Como, and I decided to kick it up a step. 10 minute miles. For a mile and a half.

Not bad for the sicko who hadn't run since Monday!

I talked to the running coach of the group, and we are going to work on putting together a 6-month plan with the goal of running the Twin Cities Marathon in the fall. We'll put together a 3-month plan, encorporating some bicycling in it (to help prevent another knee injury), then will do a 3-month marathon training plan starting in July. It's gonna happen.

Other than that, things have been kind of quiet around here... work keeps throwing meetings and activities at me that are in town, and I have not gone out of town for work since the beginning of February. I spent two weeks jetting about the country for "fun" but it's been kind of weird not to have gone anywhere for work. And my boss is in town this week, and using my company vehicle to save on rental car costs, so I'm in town all week too. I'm sure things will be starting up soon, but I'm enjoying my time at home!

Eating has been kind of okay - I'm back to almost where I was before all of the vacation. The past two days I have been doing well with all Phase 2 south beach foods, but then I have book club tonight, and I am not sure what will be served. Gotta work it into real life, right? I'll accept it, and move on, and get up and exercise in the morning. No biggie.

On that note, gotta get moving and out of the house.
~a

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Crappy food and no exercise make Anneke a cranky girl

Wow.

stepped on the scale this morning, knew it would not be fun, but I needed to get some accountability going. And there it was. It scares me that that number can go up like it does.

I'm guessing the beer and pizza last night didn't help. But that was an end to two weeks of really "eh" eating. And I didn't exercise at all last week.

So what's been going on, you ask? Well, Feb 27th to March 8th we vacationed in Florida, staying with my parents in their 5th wheel for all of that time. I did actually get out and run 4 mornings, and they were all pretty awesome runs - the last one being a little over 6 miles (6.8 according to my garmin) in an hour and four minutes. My best time for a 10 K race is an hour and 4 minutes, and this felt like a easy run for me... in fact I consciously slowed down a couple of times because I thought I was going too fast for a long training run.

Then we were home for 3 days. And then on the 11th, we caught a plane to Atlanta, rented a car, and drove to Columbia, South Carolina, where my stepson was graduating from basic training. We got home yesterday afternoon (the 14th) and having been gone for so long, I didn't want to scrounge through the house for food, and I wanted some non-family interaction, so we had an inprompto pizza night at a local bar.

Ugh. That's about all I can say about that.

Anyway, I know I have not updated in a while. Life has gotten a bit crazy, and I had to give up something, and it was mostly trying to not log on to the computer at night after work (and I can't blog at work).

So other interesting things that have happened in the last month:

My niece won a literary contest. It's a program through the national library of congress where school age children write letters to authors about how reading their book changed their outlook on things. And she won in her age group in the state of Oklahoma, and then it gets reviewed at the national level.

I fell down when I was running one morning in Florida. Kind of scared the crap out of me... I hit a big rock sticking out of the ground with my toe, stumbled, flailed about, figured I was gonna biff, tried to tuck and do as little damage as possible, and ended up landing on my shoulder and hip on my right side. All of my clothing survived, along with my i-Pod, and only scraped up the side of my right hand. I was more shaken up than anything. Which is definately a good thing!

Went to a Twins game in Florida. Spring training, of course. It was fun and a beautiful day to be outside watching a game.

I got my taxes done, and we got refunds from both state and federal. And they are in the bank... okay, so they are gone already (we went on vaction, you know!)

My dad had his 70th birthday. They had a celebration for him in Florida, in the park where they spend two months out of the winter. Mom organized a spagetti feed.

My stepson grauated from basic training - Eric, Eric's mother, and I flew down to attend family day and graduation, and my parents drove up from Florida. Curtis' mother (Eric's ex-wife) and Curt's cousin were also there, and we all spent Thursday (family day) together. It was very weird. As Eric put it, he never thought that he would spend an afternoon bowling with his son, his wife and his ex-wife. And on the last game, both his ex and I bowled a 107.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm sure there's more stuff, but I need to get ready to meet a friend - we're going hiking this morning. gonna try to work off some of that beer and pizza!

~a