Week of Fitness 2/24-3/2/2014

Hello friends! I hope you are all doing great! I just wanted to stop in to let y’all know how my marathon training is going!

Sidenote: Ryan’s work and my school were both cancelled today because of icy roads! It’s so weird to me that it’s March and only a week before spring break and we are still having winter weather! Saturday it was 80 degrees here, and Ryan and I went outside to enjoy the weather. I wore shorts and a tank top! Now it’s freezing. Typical Texas weather.

Anyways, here are last week’s workouts!

Monday: 4.62 easy miles. My legs were extremely sore last weekend from my last long run, so I did this run easy. Then I did a new arm workout that I can’t wait to share with you guys! Also, I did some yoga poses that Christine said were good for runners!

Tuesday: 5×50 workout from PurelyTwins

Wednesday: Wednesday was a stressful afternoon that made me very short on time. I was only able to run a fast two miles and then do random strength and cardio exercises inside as I waited for dinner to cook.

Thursday: 5 miles, and I planned on doing abs in the afternoon, but we had a really busy afternoon and night and I wasn’t able to get around to it. That’s totally okay though

Friday: Yoga, oh how I am growing to love yoga and the challenge of trying to improve. 🙂

Saturday: 20 miles!! I was happy with how this went, and I felt much better when I finished than I did the week before after running 18!

Sunday: Rest! After those super long runs, I always love rest days. 🙂

If you read my last post then you know that I said I was going to go back on my mileage last week…that obviously didn’t happen since I did a 20 miler. I started thinking, and instead of taking a rest week, and then running 20 miles and 22 miles back to back weekends, I decided to run 20, cut back on my mileage this week, and then two weekends from now go for 22 miles. Last week I also didn’t get in near as much strength training as I was hoping for, so I am going to try to get in more strength workouts this week!

Okay, now time to go off and enjoy some time with the Hubs! Have a great day and week!

P.S. I miss posting more often! Love y’all!

Week of Fitness 2.17-2.23.2014

Hello again! Sorry for only posting the weekly fitness updates. Until I can get my blog self-hosted, this will be about all the posting I do. But I want to keep you updated on my marathon training, so I will make sure I keep these posts up. Last week was another good, hard week of training!

Monday:5 miles, 11 minute yoga with Ryan. I scheduled 7 miles for this day, but didn’t have time for that long of a run that morning.

Tuesday: This superset workout that was great! Then I did Olive to Run Ab’s workout that you can find here. Just scroll down the page a little to find the workout I did. I only had time to go through the ab workout once before I had to shower and get ready for work.

Wednesday: 8 hard 400x’s. I would run one 400 at a comfortable pace, then run one 400 hard until I had ran 8 400’s at a hard pace and 8 at a comfortable pace, for a total of four miles.

Thursday: Unexpected rest day. I was out late Wednesday night bridesmaid dress shopping with my beautiful friend Shelby who is getting married in June, so I didn’t go to sleep until about 11:00 Wednesday night. This is incredibly late for me, and I knew my body needed sleep, so I let myself sleep in until I had to get ready the next morning, and I wasn’t able to work out in the afternoon because we had plans.

Friday: 1 hour of very challenging yoga. I loved it!

Saturday: 18 miles! Now my longest run yet. Friday night my dad actually asked if I wanted to run a 15k with him Saturday morning. He knew I needed to do 18 miles, so he suggested I do the course twice. I can never turn down a chance to run a race with my Dad, so of course I jumped at the opportunity and just ran the course twice. 🙂 This long run was very hard though! I struggled the last five miles, and those  were a lot slower than the ones before. Part of this might have been because my competitive side got the best of me. I might have run the first nine miles a little too fast since I was running against other people and obviously wanted to beat them. 😉 But, it was all worth it when I finished my 18 miles and my parents held up a trophy and told me that I placed second place in my age division! I was pretty excited since I really wasn’t planning on running this race for speed.

Sunday: rest!!

I have been increasing my  mileage for the last four weeks, so now I will decrease my mileage this week to give my body a break. I am excited for this break because I think my body needs it. It’s crazy to think that I only have two more long runs before the marathon! In two weeks I have a 20 mile run, and then the week after that I am scheduled to run 22! I can’t believe the race is coming up so quickly!

I hope you are all doing great! I really miss blogging regularly, and I’m hoping to be self-hosting soon! Even though I have not been commenting as much lately because life has gotten busy, I have still been keeping up with blogs, and I still love reading everything y’all post!

Questions:

1. Tell me some fun things from your weekend. 

2. What workout are you most looking forward to this week?

3. What are some delicious meals you have eaten lately?

4. Do you have a good, easy homemade granola recipe? I would love if you would share it with me; I want an easy recipe to make! I love me some granola! 🙂 

Fitness Week of 2/10-2/16

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend! I had a fantastic weekend celebrating Valentine’s Day with Ryan on Friday night and then celebrating my birthday with my family Saturday night and Sunday. (My real birthday is actually today though.) We all had so much fun! I wish I could share pictures with y’all, but still hoping to switch to self-hosting soon! Remember, you can follow me on Instagram to still keep up with some of my pictures!

Saturday night my parents took Ryan and I and my brother and SIL to Saltgrass, a nice steak house, for dinner. I had grilled chicken with vegetables and a salad, and it was delicious! That night we stayed up late talking and laughing since we were all spending the night at my parents’ house. Sunday morning Ryan, Ben, my Dad, and I all played tennis, which was a blast! Then my whole family came over for a huge lunch of turkey, dressing, corn casserole, and a ton of other good food and desserts! We also got to play some ping pong and shoot Ryan’s new bow and arrow I got him for Valentine’s Day. It was seriously such a perfect way to start my birthday! I look forward to celebrating some more tonight with Ryan, and Ryan even says he will take me out to eat just us this weekend to celebrate my birthday too! 🙂

Anyways, I normally like to share my workouts from the past week on Sundays, but I never got a chance to post yesterday, so I wanted to briefly share last week’s workouts with y’all today.

Monday: 7 miles, 20 minute post run yoga (from doyogawithme.com), my add-on leg workout 3xs through.

Tuesday: Love Your Body workout from Purelytwins and my amazing arms workout 2xs

Wednesday: 4x400s & 4x800s. I would run one 400, walk for a minute, run one 800, walk for two minutes, and then start again with a 400 until I completed the workout.

Thursday: 6 miles and 8 minute abs

Friday: yoga from doyogawithme.com

Saturday: 17 mile run

Sunday: active rest day, tennis with the family.

I was so excited and happy after my 17 mile run because I felt great! This was the longest distance I have ever run, and the fact that I felt good during it was really encouraging since I am getting closer and closer to my marathon!

Anyways, I better go because since I can’t put new pictures on my posts, I am trying to keep them short. 😉

I hope you all have a great week!

Questions:

1. How was your weekend? Tell me some fun things you did!

2. Any plans for this week?

3. Are you off work today for President’s Day? I wish I was; Ryan is. We have a teacher work day, so I will be in training all day. 

4. How were your workouts last week?

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! This post is coming a little later than usual, but oh well.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to post today because of reasons stated in my last post, but I couldn’t resist!

I wish I could have been able to write the posts I wanted to about Valentine’s Day before this, but oh well, I will write them at some point. 🙂

So I’ll be honest, Valentine’s Day isn’t my favorite holiday. Probably because I think it’s a made up holiday so that stores can make money. But, I still enjoy today. 🙂 I think it’s so important, actually it’s most important, that people show love to the special people in their life year around, not just on today. That doesn’t mean celebrating today with that special person is wrong either though.

Ryan and I prefer to keep Valentine’s Day low key and not spend too much money. After all, my birthday is in three days, so that’s way more important to me than Valentine’s Day. 😉 But we still have plans to make tonight a fun, romantic, inexpensive date night. 🙂

I will go pick us up dinner at a restaurant Ryan has been wanting to try that is known for it’s burgers, fries,  and shakes. A.K.A. Ryan’s favorite kind of restaurant. When I am out picking up dinner, Ryan is going to make sure everything is perfect at home for a romantic, date night dinner at home. This is a perfect, low key Valentine’s Date for us. We would much rather do this than go out to an expensive restaurant that is extremely crowded and wait forever to be seated. Um, no thanks. We will stay at home and be comfortable. 🙂

I can almost guarantee I will be wearing fuzzy socks on this date. #totallynormal

I am also excited for the rest of this weekend! Like I have mentioned, my birthday is this Saturday, so this weekend we are celebrating that with my family.

Tomorrow morning Ryan and I are volunteering with a group from our church to do some type of canned food drive or something. (I’m not totally sure what we will be doing; I guess I will find out tomorrow!) Then tomorrow night Ryan and I are having dinner with my parents, brother, and SIL to celebrate my big day. I think we are all staying the night with my parents because Sunday we are having a big lunch with the rest of my family to celebrate my birthday and my little cousin’s 8th birthday, which was earlier this month. Here’s the whole group who should be at our Sunday lunch!

Plus my other set of grandparents who aren’t in this picture, but here they are below.

I am so excited for the birthday celebrations to begin!

Lucky for me though, the celebrations won’t end this weekend! Ryan and I will go out to eat by ourselves next weekend to celebrate my birthday! Since my birthday is on a Monday and I will have work the next day, I told Ryan I would rather us go out on a weekend so we won’t have to worry about working the next day. I also don’t mind extending my birthday celebrations. 😉

So there’s a little bit of what I will be up to this Valentine’s/birthday weekend! Oh I will also be fitting in a 17 mile run at some point! This will be the longest distance for me to ever run; I’m pretty excited!

Finally, I have to end by wishing my amazing husband/Valentine/best friend an amazing day!

      

Questions:

1. What are your thoughts about Valentine’s Day?

2. Do you have any plans for tonight or this weekend?

3. Tell me something you are loving lately!

Let’s Catch Up!

Hello everyone! It feels so good to be back blogging again! I have honestly really missed it! Thank you for all of your sweet comments on my past posts and for totally understanding that I needed to take a break after our family news.

After the funeral last Monday, the rest of the week just seemed to be hectic and tiring! I was trying to catch up and trying to regain my strength. I was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted. (Sidenote: I am considering writing a post about how to deal with total and complete exhaustion. Would you be interested?)

This is how I felt last Friday!

But now I am back, and I feel rejuvenated! I still ask for prayers for my family because it’s still a tough time. But you have to move on with life, be thankful for what you have, and choose to be happy and positive.

If you  need some ideas to boost your mood, try taking some ridiculous pictures with your family. It’s pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh. Just looking back at these pictures makes me smile. I love my crazy, fun family. 🙂

So if you have been reading my last few posts you have probably noticed that I have talked a lot about switching to self hosting my blog and getting my own domain name. I still want to do this, and I am in the process of researching and finding the best company to use that works best for me and our budget. The main thing is definitely money. Ryan and I have a pretty strict budget, and we try our best to stick to it since we are trying to save up for a house. Unfortunately, we have had some unexpected expenses come up lately, which kind of delays us paying money to self-host my blog at this moment.

I am currently out of media space on this blog, and I don’t want to pay to buy more space since I am planning on paying to self-host, where I will then have unlimited media space. So until I can start self-hosting, I also can’t post pictures. 😦 TOTAL BUMMER, RIGHT??? Well, I can still post old pictures that are saved to here already, but that’s it.

Anyways, I love putting pictures on here, and I love how it breaks up the reading. I, personally, don’t really like to read a long blog post with no pictures. It seems to take too long, and I guess I’m a kid at heart and need pretty pictures to pull me in. 😉

Random picture to pull you in, just in case you’re like me. 🙂

So I really didn’t know if I would post anything since this post couldn’t have pictures (at least new pictures), but I wanted to give y’all an update on my life and why I’ve been gone for so long! Not blogging for this past week or so has felt really weird! It has just become routine for me now.

So here are a few updates, in a numbered list format because it helps me feel more organized since this post is jumping all around to totally different subjects!

1. Marathon training is still going good! Last week we got snow (crazy weather for Texas!), so I had to miss a couple of runs, but I did get in a 16 miler on Saturday! I run 17 miles this Saturday; that will be the longest distance ever for me!

2. We are still enjoying our meatless meals, and Ryan is continually trying more and more foods!

Totally reusing pictures. 🙂

3. Ryan and I drove 30 minutes to a mall on Sunday after church so I could return a dress from Christmas, and when we got there I learned the store I needed to go to was closed on Sundays. Epic fail. Lucky for me, I am blessed with a very sweet and patient man, who didn’t even get mad at me. Love him to death!

4. Remember when Bear hurt his leg? Well a lot has happened since then, but I’m not going to share details until everything is final. His leg is getting better though. Our dogs are where part of the unexpected expenses are coming from.

5. With everything that has happened I really haven’t got to blog much in February, which is a shame because I haven’t been able to share how much I LOVE this month! And no, it has nothing to do with Valentines Day. February is my birthday month!! 🙂 Yes, I like to celebrate the whole month. Becky, (not to be confused with myself) you are with me on this, right? 😉 In case you were wondering and wanted to mark your calendar, the big day is February 17th. 😉

In case you want to send me a present, pro-compression socks would be nice. Or running shorts. Or if you really want to be best friends, you can send me running shoes. I wear a size 8. Or you know, you can send me food.

6. Valentines Day is in four days. What? How did it sneak up on us so fast? I have had a post planned for a while, “True Love”, that I was saving to write around Valentines Day, but the blog issues might not be totally resolved, so I might just do it at a random time. 😉

7. Ryan and I had an ice cream date Saturday night, and it was fantastic!

Except what I had Saturday was in a waffle cone!

8. How do the snowboarders and skiers on the Olympics make everything look so easy and smooth? If I went out there and tried any of the things they do…I would die.

9. After I finished writing this post yesterday, I accidentally hit publish before I wanted to publish it, so then I had to make it a draft again. So if you follow me by email, and you got an email that didn’t lead you to a post, that’s why. Sorry, my bad!

10. Yesterday, I was feeling super productive after work. I ran by the grocery store to get sunflower seeds and hairspray, came home, had a snack, washed my pullover (that I spilt barbecue sauce on at lunch), cleaned the kitchen, unloaded the dishwasher, did 20 minutes of yoga for runners, made homemade cashew butter, cooked tortilla soup, and while the soup was cooking on the stove I did three rounds of my Add on Leg Workout. And we still at dinner by 6:15! Plus, yesterday morning I was able to get in a 7 mile run! I need to make all of my days that productive!

That is all I have to share at this moment. I am hoping to be self-hosting soon! Thanks for being wonderful y’all! 🙂

Questions:

1. Tell me about what is going on in your life?

2. Would you like a post about how to deal with total and complete exhaustion?

3. Do you like to celebrate your birthday for the whole month, or is that just me?

4. Are you excited for Valentines Day?

5. What makes you be super productive? Having a list, or knowing what I need to do really helps me!