Weather
Light out half way through my run? High of 70(!!!!!) today and 68(!!!!!!) tomorrow? We're definitely getting spoiled. It's going to be really painful when the first snow dump comes. The only time I'm having buyers remorse on this whole "going off daylight savings" thing is at 5pm when it looks like it's 8pm.
I never realized why it was so easy to gain weight in the winter until I moved up north. Because it's dark, your body tells you it's dinner time at 5pm and because it's cold it tells you another dinner at 8pm wouldn't be a bad idea.
The only thing I miss a little about running in the dark is scaring rabbits with my headlamp. It's only fair because before I had the headlamp fixed they did a good job scaring my with all their rustling in the woods and sounding like zombies and ax murderers.
The raccoons, however, don't scare at all. They just look at you with those beady eyes that say, "Chill out, light lady, I know where you live."
Exercise
I was going to take advantage of the warm weather and light do 5x1000m yesterday (seemed like a good speed workout for the week before a 5k race) but sadly when I walked outside I realized my GPS battery was totally dead. I had charged it over the weekend, but sometimes I accidentally turn it on somehow and kill the battery. I recharged it again yesterday and it seems to be working fine now.
I still wanted to get in some kind of quality workout so I did 8mi with 4mi tempo. I know where all the mile splits are on my routes that I run regularly so I didn't need the GPS for that. I was sad that I didn't get any of the mile splits, though, because I felt strong the whole way and think I kept a good pace.
This morning I'm headed to the gym before work. I've decided to tinker with my workout schedule once again. After the marathon I decided to do weights Tuesday afternoon and Friday morning so I could still run 5 days a week and take Sunday completely off. Having tried that for a few weeks I've decided I really don't like having to go to the gym after work. It's randomly crowded, and I always feel pressed for time getting home and getting dinner ready, laundry done, etc. especially when we have to go somewhere. Plus I like to have the time to do other non-exercise things I enjoy like yoga (this is sort of exercise related, but not the way I do it!) and practice piano.
So the new plan is just four days of running- one speed, one tempo, one medium long, and one long with two days of lifting and one day of rest. For me I think that the important thing is mileage in each run rather than overall weekly mileage. Is this schedule pretty light compared to a lot of people out there? Yeah, but I think it's going to be a good balance for me, and I'm trying to be okay with being different.
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| Plus it gives me an extra morning to work on the blog and see what crazy stuff comes up when I google image, "One of these things is not like the other." |
I'm cooking again! Yay! Actually I was cooking before, but I was feeling less than motivated to post about it on the blog. Not sure why, but in any case, food features are back.
This weekend I channeled my inner convenience food loving 50's housewife and put together this barbecue beef pizza for Daniel's lunch. Why barbecue beef and not chicken? Because that's what I made for dinner, and I used a little bit of the extra for the pizza. The sauce was made using a recipe that I thought I remembered that Daniel said he remembered from the sauce our host made at the Halloween party: 1 cup BBQ sauce, 1 cup catsup, 1 can cranberry sauce, 1/2 cup brown sugar. Not the healthiest thing in the world, but it turned out pretty good.
I also made cottage pie from this month's Cooking Light to take with me to work for lunch this week. The whole recipe makes 4 Chelsea-sized lunches and one dinner.
Well, gotta go! Time flies when you're uploading pictures. Have a good Tuesday, all.
