Progressive Miles

I did 6 progressive miles outside today.

It's the first time in weeks that I've run outside for longer than 2-3 miles per the doctors orders... He told me to stick to the treadmill... but I just couldn't do it today.

He was just too cute not to add in again

I tried, I really did.

But when I walked into my living room the thought of running another run on the treadmill made me a little bit sad inside. And I just couldn't bring myself to walk into the back room and hop on the stupid thing.

So I grabbed my mace, knife, and Garmin and left the house. It's hot and humid outside. But I ran pretty good considering.

These were my splits:

All I wanted to do this run was make it progressive. I wanted to finish strong and I did. So that's a win. I can't wait til it's a little bit cooler and I don't feel like I'm running through a sauna.

For whatever bizarre reason, I'm also breaking out a like a 15 year old boy right now. I think it's from lack of sleep, but I can't be certain.

Gross.

In other news, I think I have hooked LB on running! One down, one to go. Sean, you're next.

If he's reading this, I'm fairly positive he's going "yeahhhh right" right now. But I am stubborn.

Do you try and get family members to run too?? I have been after Sean for a while but it hasn't worked yet. Just recently LB has become interested, which makes me very happy.

Competitiveness

Merriam-Webster defines the word compete as follows: to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective

Taken in that context, I am a very competitive person in just about every aspect of my life. Especially running. Nine times out of ten I have some sort of goal that I want to meet. Usually it's a time goal that I've arbitrarily picked out. Sometimes it's that I want to place in my age group. Sometimes it's both. For instance when I ran the 10k, I had several goals set, the most important of which was that I wanted to run it under 53 minutes. I finished in 51:13 and finished first in my age group. 

Within 20 minutes of finishing almost 2 minutes under my desired time, I already was plotting out the next time that I wanted to beat. My thought process went something like this: 


YES! I DID IT! I AM AWESOME!


::20 minutes later::


Hmm... I should run it under 50 minutes. I will be really fast then. 


And thus the new goal was born and now I won't rest until it's accomplished. The same is true for everything from 5ks to marathons. I set goals and if I reach them I immediately start to plan out how to exceed them.

Don't get me wrong - I think having goals is one of the best ways to advance in anything and everything. But Em wrote a great post the other day about giving yourself some credit. And it really got me thinking - as competitive as I am, I'm doing some pretty awesome things right now.


I had a really sucktastic 16 mile run on Saturday. I bitched about it, both mentally and verbally, all day long. But I RAN 16 MILES. It was hard, it was miserable, I walked a lot, heck I stopped a lot, there wasn't a single step that I took on Saturday that didn't cause me some sort of mental or physical pain, but I did it. And if I can run 16, I can run 18. And if I can run 18, I can run a marathon. And that is a-freaking-mazing, whether I BQ or finish in 6 hours.


Sometimes I think I let my competitiveness with running get the better of me. Sometimes it causes extreme negative self-talk conversations in my head. And sometimes I need a good kick to remind me that every single day I'm working towards incredible things.


And a big tribute to Em for writing the post that sparked this post.


THAT BEING SAID, LB came over last night to run with me. It was a 2 mile training run for me, supposed to be easy, and I figured it'd be a cake walk for him. Needless to say, it was a very humbling experience for me, one that reminded me that we all start at square one. 

We ran at about an 8:45 pace give or take - sometimes faster, sometimes slower. But by mile 1.5 he was dying and I could see it written all over his face. 


So I stopped my Garmin and we walked. I started it back up and we ran. I let him walk while I ran back and forth until we hit roughly 2 miles (my Garmin died at about mile 1.83). And in that last half mile and for the rest of the night, I remembered everything about when I started running. I remembered getting winded after a mere 5 minutes. I remembered hating it. I remembered my first 5k and how freaking exhilarating it was. 

1.5 miles at an 8:45 pace is pretty good for someone that never runs. 


Oh and after taking our picture, Sean had to take this picture "for the blog" (his words) so that everyone knows that he was working while we were running, not sitting around eating bon-bons. Even though when we got back 25 minutes later he was sitting on the couch in the dark.

Are you competitive by nature? With what?


Do you set new goals immediately upon breaking old ones? 

Three Things Thursday

1. Lately I've been hearing the word "epic" to describe things, events, etc (OK, mainly from my little brother). While I assume that, like, epic is the new "like", I think the term "epic" is WAY overused. Just because you had a good day does not make it "epic". Just because we went to Yogurt Cup, does not mean it was "epic" (well, that one is debatable...)

2. I just bought these on sale from $30 from White House Black Market. My Vegas trip thanks you for putting these on clearance.

3. There is a slight twinge in my right leg that showed up this morning. I've been trying to ignore it today by propping it up on my trashcan and putting an ice pack on it. Britt and I have 10 miles to cover this weekend, so that needs to stop immediately. Unfortunately, my entire leg has gone numb. That tingly feeling is driving me insane right now.

Has anyone else heard the extreme overuse of the word "epic"? (And Luke, if you're reading this, I promise I make fun of Sean way more than you).


Do you get to wear slippers at work? I don't really leave my office in them (yes I do), but I wear them sitting at my desk all the time. I also usually have a pair of flats and a pair of heels readily available.

Making it work

EDIT: Are you serious? Someone searched this TWICE and my blog came up? "have a nice life. who am i kidding? i hope you get hit by a moving truck."

I mean, sometimes I get frustrated with Sean and all, but never that much...

What started out as a comment on Running Girl's post, turned out looking incredibly long-winded, so I'm just going to go ahead and preface this by saying you should check out her post here and then you'll get the basis of my post.

For anyone too lazy to click over and read her post, to sum it up she basically is talking about finding the healthy balance between planning your days, your workouts, your food, etc. while also allowing for life to intervene like it so often does.

Like her, I'm incredibly particular about my workouts. I am a very list-driven person (just take a look at my planner on any given day) and I thrive off of crossing things off one at a time. I also have found that I execute workouts at a much higher success rate if I know ahead of time what I'm going to do and have some sort of schedule about it.

Unfortunately for my perfectly planned out life, LIFE has a way of jumping in the way of those plans sometimes. It doesn't matter if all of my t's are crossed and i's are dotted - sometimes life just throws a wrench in all of that.

It's taken me a long time to figure out what works for me. And what it comes down to is schedule + flexibility. I am at my best when I have mapped out certain training runs that I have to hit - though I am flexible about which days I hit them. I have at least one hills or speed workout that I want to get in per week. I try to do at least one day of yoga and one day of pilates (though usually I just get in one day of one of them) and I try to get in 2 days of total body strength training (even if that means one day of arms, one of legs, etc. and then one total body day).

What works for me won't work for everyone, myself included sometimes.

There are days that I have planned to go to spin class and I wake up and I don't feel like driving to the gym (It's really far. A whole 7 minutes). So I'll pull my bike out of the garage and bike around the neighborhood, or I'll do an interval workout on the treadmill instead.

And there's days where I finish a run and know I need to get in some abs, but when I peek into my bedroom and see my husband still sleeping peacefully, the only right option at that point is to crawl back into bed and snuggle up to him and nap for 20 more minutes (so what if I did that yesterday? I got my ab workout in after work!).

Lovelovelove!



That's what it's all about to me though, making it work for YOU. No one else's schedule will fit yours. You have to find that balance.

Kind of like skipping dinner so you can do this:

Don't judge that we are wearing the same shirt. It was not planned. And dinners consisting of froyo are perfectly acceptable. They hit my calcium AND fruit needs and I got an added bonus with the dark chocolate chips that I added in. And I'm pretty sure that pecan praline froyo counts as a "healthy fat". Plus, little brother had never been, so it's obvious that he needed to experience this wonderland. Duh.

Oh and for anyone who cares, Yogurt Cup is 5.1 miles away from my house. Which is a perfectly legit running distance to be rewarded with froyo after. The hubs will just have to meet me there...