Why I Run

One of the main reasons I run is for my kids. Being active now will hopefully prevent disease later, which means more time that I’ll hopefully have with them. Being active also helps set a great example and shows how important it is to me and our family that we exercise. My five-year-old, Audrey, is really active and loves to run – you know, at recess and playing tag in the yard. But for the first time this year the kids ran in a fun run; they did a little less than a mile and I did a 5K. I ran with Audrey and was surprised at how well she did. She didn’t get out of breath and didn’t have to walk at all. Luke (the eight-year-old and not naturally inclined to do sports) also enjoyed it and they both want to participate in more races.

Today, when I said I needed to do a trail run and the hubs told the kids they would hike the same trail, Audrey told me she wanted to run with me. She wanted me to pick out clothes for her that would be appropriate for running. She is definitely paying attention to everything I do! I decided I would let her tag along for my first lap and then I’d do one at more my speed. Man, was she good! I was worried she would trip but she was really good at looking out for obstacles. And she was fast! We ran part of the Woodpecker Trail System shown on the right side of this picture. It helped that we started downhill (the P in the lower right), went down W-5, right at W-1, then accidentally up W-2 (we should have turned at W-3). She needed to walk at W-2 because it was uphill. We got to the top and realized we needed to go back down and pretty much walked the rest, up W-3 then ran just a short part at the top. She really enjoyed it. I think we ran about 4 tenths of a mile in about six minutes, and part of it was uphill. In total the run plus walking was 1.2 miles.

Here we are after our first trail run together.

I then did another loop by myself and went 1.3 miles in 14:24. Like I said in my last trail running post, I absolutely love it. And it appears I have already passed that love on. 🙂

 

Trail Run

On my list of races to possibly do yet this year is a 4 mile trail run on November 6. I have just been doing 5Ks on pavement so I thought it might be a good idea to actually run on a trail before I register. 🙂 Sometimes I try to run on the grass instead of the sidewalk but that gets tricky when there are tall weeds and when the utility company has been digging holes and doesn’t fill them in.

I’m so thrilled to report that trail running was much easier and more fun than trying to run in the grass. I chose a trail that we have hiked many times although I didn’t know the distance. Trying to decipher the trail head map was difficult because it gave the distances between 2 points and in order to know how far I went I would have to add up a few sections. Once I was finished I realized I could use the calculator on my phone to add the sections and the loop I did was 1.3 miles. The trail started downhill which was nice, but this section had stairs with a path next to them. I opted for the worn down path next to the stairs instead of hoping over stairs. The next half mile or so was pretty flat and went along the lake; it was such a pretty view! A welcome change from my usual runs in town.

Besides the natural beauty of this trail, the next best part about it was the soft dirt and leaves. The leaves pretty much covered everything but somehow I managed not to trip. The last section was uphill, which most people would groan about, but I was happy to do hills. There are none in the small city where I live. I know there will be hills during the 4 mile race so I need to be prepared! The loop ended up being shorter than I thought it would be so after returning to my starting point I went back down the first section, turned around and tried to run back up. It was pretty steep (this was the part with the stairs) and I had to walk part of it. All in all it was a great run and I went ahead and registered for the 4 mile race on the 6th. I’m looking forward to more trail running before then!

Fridge Friday – Better

Our household definitely ate more fruits and vegetables this week but I failed to get a picture when the fridge was full! So as not to bore you, I won’t post a picture of what it looks like now, because it’s somewhat similar to last Friday. I need to remember to snap a picture right after the trip to the grocery store! We tried some new recipes this week, at least, the hubs and I did. The challenge with some of the recipes we choose is that we know the kids won’t like them, so we try to give them some of the ingredients before throwing it all together.

We tried a new spinach salad with homemade balsamic vinegar dressing and bread sticks. We put mushrooms, avocado, tomato, chickpeas, and hard-boiled eggs in. It was pretty tasty but my favorite new meal is cheese tortellini with shrimp, broccoli, and tomatoes with a pesto sauce. Delicious! Had that for lunch today, as well. The kids ate sandwiches when we had the spinach salad and we gave them plain tortellini when we ate the tortellini with shrimp,  pesto, etc – they did not like the pesto when I tried to make them taste it on broccoli and tomato! We also had one of our favorite casseroles, an egg and ham with rolled-0ut crescent rolls on the bottom, which the kids love as well. And I cooked some sliced apples with cinnamon to go along with it.

I told myself this week that I was going to eat less sugar; we don’t eat a ton – don’t keep cookies around regularly and try not to eat a lot of cereal, but of course, with Halloween coming up it’s going to be difficult. I do so love the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. 🙂 And I gave in and bought a package of Halloween Oreos last weekend. I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to eat any, ANY, and then the Oreos won and I sat down and had about 5 (who’s counting?) dunked in Dairy Ease. Fail. But they were so good. Then about half an hour later my stomach was churning – dairy and I don’t always get along and I would guess the cream has some form of dairy in it. I’m not one to completely cut something out, ’cause that’s just going to make me want it more. Exhibit 1 – Oreos. I just have to tell myself the goal is to eat LESS sugar because I do not want to deny myself something so scrumptious. Maybe I should do something like run a mile for each piece of candy eaten after Halloween? Notice I said AFTER, not before or the day-of. 🙂

Valance or Curtains?

Guess what, I have interests other than running and eating! And I feel like writing about it and gather some advice while I’m at it. I enjoy decorating and changing things up around the house every once in a while and recently I have had the itch to do a few things. We have been in our house for 3 1/2 years and bought it brand-new, so there isn’t a great need to do much expect personalize it. Being new we had to buy all the window coverings; eight windows, one sliding door, and a small narrow window next to the front door. One of the biggest challenges is that our living room, dining room and kitchen are all one big space, which I love, but it makes choosing window coverings a challenge because there are four windows and the sliding door in the same space.

I currently have the same shimmery gold curtains on the two living room windows and the dining room window, along with white faux wood blinds. We also have a sliding door off of the dining room which is on the same wall as the two living room windows. To save money we bought white vertical blinds for the door, which quite honestly, I dislike. Surprisingly, the husband recently said he doesn’t like the valance and he’d like something different. I misinterpreted that to mean he wanted all new blinds, but no, he means just the valance. I haven’t done much research for ideas, so I’m open to suggestions.

The other project I am going to do is kitchen curtains. The window has the same white blinds as all the other windows so it’s feeling a little cold and I want to soften it up. My first thought was to do simple curtains like these (found here):

I got a yard of this fabric, Simple Pleasures by Debbie Beaves:

It’s brighter in person, though and luckily coordinates really well with the other curtains in the area (the dining room window is on the same wall). Then while looking around on Pinterest I came across this photo (from here):

I am leaning towards doing this one. The main reason is we have an outlet just to the right of the window sill where the coffee pot is plugged in and I’m sort of paranoid that if there was a spark or something the curtains would catch fire. Now I just need to find a nice ribbon, get a rod, and get it done. I wonder if something similar could be hung above the vertical blinds? Might need to wait and see how it looks on the kitchen window.

Protein Bars

My friend Shauna shared these bars with me a long time ago and I finally got around to making them last week (and again this week!). I wish I hadn’t waited so long to make them.

2 cups peanut butter
1 3/4 cups honey (or you can use half honey half agave)
2 1/4 cups Arbonne Protein Powder (found here and you can find Shauna’s Health and Wellness page on Facebook here)
– They have vanilla and chocolate protein powder; Shauna uses half vanilla/half chocolate and I used about 2 cups vanilla and the rest was cocoa. 🙂
3 cups rolled oats (I used Quaker cooking oats)

Heat peanut butter and honey in a large microwavable bowl.
Heat 60-90 seconds. Stir.
Add protein powder and mix well.
Add oats and stir gently.
Press into pan and refrigerate 1 hour. Cut into 24 squares.

So simple and so yummy – give them a try!

Fridge Friday – Fail

Not a lot has changed in my fridge since last Friday. I think somehow we made do with what was in the freezer and pantry for dinners. Some nights we just snack for dinner or have cereal. I did go to the grocery once and mostly bought drinks, as well as bacon, ice cream, applesauce, grapes, dried pineapple and my new favorite dried fruit, mango. Dried mango is delicious! The only downside is the added sugar; I must find a brand that does not have so much sugar. You might have noticed the same blue casserole dish on the top shelf. It is not the same pan of protein bars from last Friday, but a newly made batch. 🙂 They are so yummy and good for breakfast with bacon and good for a snack after running. And maybe more bacon. What? I’m just trying to up my protein intake! I definitely failed my goal of getting more fruits and veggies in there. Guess we’ll have to try harder!

I found a few delicious sounding/looking recipes on Pinterest that I hope to try over the weekend or next week. I also have a few weeks’ worth of Six O’Clock Scramble recipes to choose from. Side note: If you are not on Pinterest let me know and I will send you an invite. Just think organized eye candy and any do-it-yourself instruction at the click of the mouse. You can pretty much “pin” any picture from the internet onto your “boards” and the URL will stay with the picture for reference. You organize your pins on boards that you give any title, so you can keep like pins together.

So there you have it. Hopefully next week I can share how we have increased the amount of fresh fruits and veggies in the fridge!

5K – Met My Goal

This past Sunday I ran a 5K. It was a fundraiser for our school district and also included a 10K and half marathon. In total 2400 people participated! This was my first time running the course and I was a little nervous. I looked at the map to get a feel for it but didn’t really know what the elevation changes would be like. Luckily I found the kids’ PE teacher at the starting line and this was her 26th time running the race. I knew her goal time was 28-29 minutes and wanted to stay with her as long as I could. We worked great together and were able to talk during most of it, her telling me when an incline was coming and giving me a heads-up as to when we should kick it in high gear. She didn’t know I was pretty much already in high gear during the first mile. 🙂 We ran a 9:20 mile and during training I do a 9:40 first mile.

She commented that we were perfect running partners and it was as-if we had been running together all our lives. I was very impressed with her and hope I can run the same pace when I am her age (pretty sure she’s in her fifties, I am 32). I stuck with her for 2.5 miles and was then winded; the second mile was mostly uphill. My legs felt heavy and my hamstrings were a bit tight. It was also warm and I am not a good warm-weather runner.  She wanted to finish strong so took off, while I then walked for fifteen seconds to catch my breath. That last half mile felt LONG but at least it was downhill. It’s one of those courses where you can see the finish line during the last quarter of a mile so you start to sprint and then realize you sprinted too soon. At least, that’s what usually happens to me. I ended up finishing strong though and beat my goal time of 30 minutes by five seconds. If I had not run with the PE teacher I would not have reached that goal. I love having a running partner during races!

While I am happy with my time, I still want to improve and get faster but am not sure how to get there. I need to do some research on that. I also need to do an activity other than running and do some strength training. My plan is to start attending a zumba class because they seem to be wildly popular and I hear it’s a great workout. Anyone out there do zumba? Run a race this month? Have any training advice?

Happy Running!

Tax on Fat?

Recently Mark Bittman from The New York Times Opinion Pages has been writing about taxing fat in the U.S. It is being done in Austria, Switzerland, Hungary and Denmark. A few days ago he mentioned that Britain’s PM David Cameron is backing a national fat tax. You can read more about that here. You can read more about Denmark’s tax in Bittman’s article here.

Some of these countries also have taxes on soda, sugar, and salt to help pay for health care costs. Obesity in European countries is on the rise, as well as here in the US, as we know, and this is one way they hope to help combat it and also bring in some revenue. Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland have actually banned trans fats.

What I don’t understand is, are they taxing the companies who manufacture the food? I don’t think so, because it sounds like they are taxing the consumer. I suppose it doesn’t matter who they tax, though, because if they tax the companies then they’ll just raise the price of the foods.The I suppose the hope would be that people would stop purchasing those products and therefore force the company to make something with less fat/sugar/salt.

At first I thought this would really only affect processed foods, but something like a steak has fat in it; how do they measure the amount of fat from steak to steak? It also applies to food purchased at restaurants and that is where I think it could be very influential. Who takes the time to read the nutrition facts on meals at restaurants? I’m sure not many and I know I don’t. But I do read labels on foods I buy at the grocery.

We tax tobacco and alcohol; has that decreased the amount of people smoking/chewing and drinking? It seems like fewer people are smoking and that can probably be attributed to more understanding about smoking’s effects on health, but I haven’t read anything about whether or not the number of people smoking has definitely dropped in recent years; will have to do some research. I know Iowa has a hefty tax on cigarettes, I think $1 per pack.

Anyhow, I find this all very interesting and look forward to reading more and learning what effect the tax as on these countries’ obesity rates.

Fridge Friday

Fridge Friday – wherein I embarrassingly show you what is in my fridge and talk about what is right with it and what is wrong. This is from a couple of days ago and it actually still looks pretty similar. Hopefully some day it won’t be embarrassing. 🙂 That’s my goal.

We recently started using The Six O’Clock Scramble; a website that sends out a weekly menu and grocery list. You can go with what they choose or create your own menu. We just need more meal ideas and it’s handy to have the grocery list created for us. My sister-in-law recommended it and Mamasource.com had a coupon for 1/2 off a 6 month membership, so we’re giving it a try. We still have the ingredients for one of the recipes and they probably need to be tossed. That would be the broccoli and spinach (we ate some of it but now it’s rotting).

The top shelf holds a pan of protein bars that are delicious; I’ll share that recipe eventually. There are also a couple of containers of nasty cottage cheese, baby pickles, margarine, ground flax seed, and various containers of leftovers. In the drawer is mostly cheese – shredded varieties, Laughing Cow, a wedge of gorgonzola. The middle shelf has the broccoli that I don’t know if it’s still good, cut up zucchini leftover from a meal and eggs. The foil has pizza in it for us to take to work the following day for lunch. The bottom shelf is where we keep the drinks – there’s always orange juice, Dairy Ease, water, maybe some regular milk, beer, and apple juice, although you’ll see we’re out of apple juice at the moment. You may have noticed a bowl of brown stuff – that’s coffee grounds. Something was smelly in there a few days ago (I cleaned some old tomatoes out) and I read somewhere that coffee grounds can help eliminate smells. We had some pumpkin coffee up in a cupboard from a year ago (the coffee wasn’t that great so we didn’t drink it much) and I used that. Worked great!

The bottom drawers have apples, baby carrots, lemons and the nasty spinach. The door has the condiments and the wine. We need to get groceries and don’t have much to make a good meal. There’s chicken breasts in the freezer that we just keep forgetting to thaw, but in these posts I’m going to try to keep to the fridge and not venture into the freezer and pantry too much.

Now onto the goals. Eat more fresh fruits and veggies. We do pretty well eating fruits; we all love grapes, apples and bananas. I have a new-found love for dried mango – YUM! Most of the fresh veggies we partake in are carrots, so there’s a lot of room for improvement and I can tell the Scramble recipes are going to help; otherwise most of our veggies are frozen or canned and mostly peas, green beans, and corn. I am not a fan of onions or peppers, but last week I chose a recipe with them and actually ate it and liked it!

One thing we do pretty well is taking lunch to work, usually leftovers from the night before. It saves money and is usually healthier than the options we both have near work. I do so love the egg, bacon and cheese sandwich from Which Wich?, though! Another goal I have is not letting the leftovers go bad. That’s probably going to be the hardest thing with making new meals; we don’t know if we like them and if we don’t, we probably won’t eat the leftovers. I would like to be able to freeze food but that is something I have had little success doing. I must be using the wrong containers because everything gets freezer burn.

Anyone have any freezing tips? What’s the best thing about what is in your fridge right now? The worst? Spill it.

Fall/Winter Running – No Excuses

Running is not a new thing for me; I have run for exercise and done races (by races I mean mostly 5ks and sometimes a 7 mile) on and off since elementary school. By on and off I mean when I have not been in the process of growing another human or have been caring for a baby. I know, excuses, excuses. As of right now I have been consistently running for over almost 2 years, although I did not do as much as I should have over the winter. I live in Iowa, and it’s just too darn cold to run outside and sometimes it’s just too cold to drive the 3 minutes to the rec center and run on the track (for free). There I go I making excuses, again.

This winter I want to run outside as long as I can without getting frostbite. How do I plan to do that? Well, I bought some pants and a hat with a pony-tail hole. Yep, that’s where I’m starting. I need the warm clothes in order to run outside so I figured I ought to get them now before it actually gets cold. We have had some cold days but right now we’re having a week in the 80s. Once it is absolutely too cold to run outside I will head to the track. I will, I really will.

This is a set I made on Polyvore (SO FUN!). These are the pants and hat I have coming. I have the iPod and similar shoes, as well. I have enough shirts already that I can layer on the top and I have some Smartwool socks. I chose these Continuum Tights by Athleta because they are compression tights – I have found that I love compression shorts because they keep things from bouncing. I think compression will also help keep me warm. I forgot to include the shorts (worn as undies) I like in my set! They are the Nike Pro Compression Shorts, although, I have the 5″ and could probably use the 7″ because they start to creep up on my legs. Not annoying while I’m running but I tug on them when I’m not.

The Run Like A Mother book is on my wish list. It looks entertaining and maybe motivating, so I want to check it out. I just started following their blog, too – anothermotherrunner.com

Do you run in cold temps? Any advice?

Cold Weather Running II by photocrazykate featuring brooks shoes

Brook
$80 – brooksrunning.com

Brook
$55 – brooksrunning.com

Brooks shoes
$140 – brooksrunning.com

Hat
athleta.gap.com

Wool/Bamboo Infiniti QTR 1pack
$16 – brooksrunning.com