Silent Pity Party

You won't be hearing from me again until Thursday night, so I wanted to let you know how today went.  I slept.  A lot.  Since yesterday, anyway.  I was in bed until about 9:30 this morning.  I woke up fully looking forward to this afternoon's session with Samy.  Since we did chest/shoulders last week (aka-upper body), logic said today would be a legs day.  And logic did not disappoint.  When I woke up this morning, my hip flexors, shins, hamstrings and my calves a little bit too were all sore from yesterday's half marathon.  I knew from 2 weeks ago when I did my chilly 11.2 mile training run and then had a killer legs day the following day that today's session would do me good in my recovery.  I'm definitely an active recovery type of gal.

For my first round of exercises, there was the usual jump rope for 1 minute, then jogging in place while alternating arms with the heavy rope, then I donned the weigh vest and did freeweight squats with a 45 lb bar and two 25 lb plates (so 95 lbs on my shoulders plus the 25 or whatever the vest weighs).  After that, I kept the vest on and added a 25 lb sandbag to my shoulders and did what I'm going to call crawling lunges (you lunge and walk forward, but stay crouched, never coming all the way back up).  Then, he had me do the squat walk with the entire set of plates on the machine!!!  Yea, I need to start taking my weight lifting gloves with me.  My hands were so sweaty I could barely hold onto the bar as I did the squat walk.  The second round of exercises was the usual suicide sprints with a minute of medicine ball slams with jumps.  Three sets of that.  Then onto the kickboxing!  We did two rounds and BOTH times, he's the one that called "time" and told me to go get a drink.  Up until today, I was always the one to say I needed a break.  Today, I powered through it and it felt great!  We ended with abs, as usual.  One of the ab exercises he had me do was that TRX ab reach he had me do last week, the one that made my upper abs S-O-R-E until close to the end of the week.  Oh, and as I was setting up to do the ab reaches, I let him know that the TRX exercises are one of my favorites and that when I do buy a house I plan to put a set of TRX straps in my workout room.  So, he said we'll start doing more exercises with them since I like them so much.  YAY!  I'm excited to learn and do more TRX exercises!

legs day for 700, Alex

Earlier in the day, I had gone to the used bookstore and looked at the diet books they had there.  I was looking mostly at the ones that were promoting that you could lose 10 lbs with their book.  I pulled them down and flipped through them and then stuck each and every one of them back on the shelf.  I didn't buy any of them.  Why?  Because I know how to eat healthy, I'm just letting myself get overwhelmed by the fluff I've put on over the last couple weeks.  I've let myself fall into a bit of a pity party, thank god I didn't invite you guys to that party and kept it to myself.  Over the last couple weeks, I've taken the defeatist route and that's just not like me.  I let the frustration win and didn't do a dang thing to solve it.  What the heck?  I'm a problem solver.  I work great under pressure.  So, why oh why did I crumple under the minor pressure of regaining a few pounds after getting "stopped up"?  I don't have the answer to that.  But I'm going to rise back up and try to take control again.

So, I'm not going back in with the Shred Diet...not right now.  Right now, I think I'm just going to try and calorie count for the most part.  I'll try to plan out my food for the next 3 days tonight before bed.  I'm going for a sandwich (either pb&j or lunchmeat & cheese), 2 servings of yogurt, 2 servings of fruit and 3+ servings of veggies, chicken or fish, oh and breakfast...scrambled omelet with diced/sauteed onions, tomatoes and mushrooms and a glass of not from concentrate juice with a whole grain croissant.  Not sure how "good for you" those are, but they intrigued me, so for the next 4 mornings, I'll be eating one of those with breakfast.

Wish I had found this picture yesterday, because this was sooooooo me yesterday.  I stuffed my face and then I CRASHED!  Hahaha!

Oh, and not that I'm trying to reach any kind of mileage goal for the month, but I've got a good amount of miles in for this month already and there's still almost 2 weeks left!  For February so far, I've already logged 43.4 miles!!!  If I only run 3 mile runs for the remaining 5 runs I'll do for this month, that will get me 58.3 miles, but I know I'll run more than that.  For instance, I plan to do the 3.3 mile loop for tomorrow's run, so that right there will put me at 58.6...but only IF the rest of my runs for February are 3 miles each.  I'm also planning a 5 mile run for my "long run" next week...which will probably get done on Monday because Sunday I'll be at the renaissance festival with Amanda.

Also, maybe you noticed, but maybe you didn't, but I updated my run schedule in the right hand margin.  You'll notice that the Austin Marathon is listed as a PR for me.  Also, you may notice that I removed the RNRLV and replaced it with the Dallas Marathon.  Why?  Because 1) it'll be cheaper for me to do a somewhat local race, and 2) it's happening on my birthday, what better birthday present to myself than completing my first full marathon?  None.