Catching Up

I'm so behind on blogging that I don't know where to start. So here is a general blanket recap of last week and what I have been doing this week. I was under the weather last week so I didn't run much during the early part of the week.

I did eat a lot of frozen yogurt. Some on my own and some were eaten at a blogger meetup with Sarah, Heather, Julie, Margot and Monica. The Yogurtland where we had the meetup had the not-yet-released Twin Stars spoon that is not scheduled to be released until August 7. I asked the guy at the counter why they had them and it was because they were shipped the wrong box. Instead of Tuxedo Sam, they got the Twin Stars spoons. I know, my life is so exciting. I'm going to slow my roll now.

After some consideration, I decided that I am going to stop playing tennis. It seemed like a good idea for a while until I almost pulled a hamstring one day playing doubles. Tennis is not really good cross-training for running and now that I have started training for my fall races, I don't want to end up doing something stupid that will put me on the sidelines.

So last Wednesday I went to track to do mile repeats again and yes this was the day after coming out of being under the weather. I should have skipped it but the new me who is trying to stick to a schedule won in the end. I did 3 sets with a 5-minute rest in between. As you will notice, I was still somewhat consistent despite being a couple of seconds slower. I'm suppose to go out there again tomorrow but I'm going to skip it this week because I have a mild calf strain.

Yesterday was the first day of CIM training. To be honest, I haven't made up my mind on which plan to follow so I am pretty much going to mesh a couple of them together. They are all pretty much very similar with some minor differences here and there. For the most part, I am just going to listen to my body like I always have and do what feels best for me. I think this is the reason why I have never really followed any formal plans. I mean my body can only handle so much and I am not willing to compromise my health for a PR. I'm going to keep track of what I do and if it works well, I will use it for future training.

So I had 5 miles on the schedule yesterday but I ended up running 6 at pace. I have this game that I made up a couple of weeks ago called the Treadmill Death Race and I've been trying to sucker convince my running friends to do it with me. [*Okay, so I don't know if that is an original idea or if someone else had already came up with that name or the premise of this exercise and if so any similarity is purely coincidental]. You can do it solo but it is more fun with at least another person. What you do is do some stretching and then hop on the treadmill and start running. The warm-up is included in your final time and the first person to reach 6 miles wins. Or you can set up a time perimeter (as in 6 miles in under 50 mins) which was what I did yesterday because I was running it alone. Obviously, this is much easier outside or on a track but I've been running inside a lot recently because of the heat and treadmill running is just sucky and boring sometimes. So this helps a bit. On top of regular training, I also have 2 half marathons thrown in the mix for some long run pace training. I've discovered that for me, racing a half is just as effective as doing a long run. I mean I still plan to do a couple of 20s but racing a half is just so much more fun. I want to keep this training cycle as fun as possible.

Finally, this week I'm doing a vegetarian challenge with my spin class. We did salad week two weeks ago and last week we did seven servings of fruits/veggies. They are doing this for points and I had 17 participants the first week and 7 the second week. I'm curious to see how many people are taking part this week. I won't know until Friday but they have all been doing an amazing job. I have a ton of restaurant reviews to come with lots of food photos. I will get to that eventually.

Everything But...

My blogging has been pretty sporadic lately but that has always been normal behavior for me especially during the summer when it is just so beautiful outside that the last thing I want to be doing is sitting inside blogging.

I had meant to start off my weekend with a long run but since I had ran pretty hard on Friday, I was still a little bit sore on Saturday morning so I decided to hit up the farmers market instead. Everything is currently available and plentiful. Lots of beautiful bright colors and I even found some Romenesco which aren't always available. I didn't pick some up this weekend since my fridge is packed to the gills but next week if they are still there, I am getting some for sure.

So instead of running, I played some tennis this weekend. I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago and am starting to get my groove back.

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Speaking of getting my groove back...I've been playing more and more with Dance Central lately. It is definitely getting easier but I think I played with it too much this weekend because I woke up this morning and my glutes were really sore.

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Finally, I went online last week looking to buy a new bike jersey and I wanted a Hello Kitty one but I wasn't able to find one. So I decided to design my own over at Eclipse Cycling. You basically get a starting template and you control almost all aspects of the design. When everything is the way you want it, they print it for you. This short sleeve jersey here runs for about $29.99. Pretty neat, right?