Balance and Personal Training

Workouts:
Wednesday: Ran 5.3 miles in 44:07. Ran an extra 2 miles with friends for roughly 20 mins. Total=7.3 miles
Thursday: Personal training for 1 hour.
Friday: Ran 3.4 miles in 27:48.

Life is all about balance. The balance between work and play, exercising and resting, eating good food and not getting fat, doing what you have to do and doing what you want to do, helping others and being selfish, etc, etc. This concept is becoming more and more clear to me as I get older. This may or may not have something to do with that whole frontal lobe maturation by age 25 thing. As I read/stalk everyone's blogs, I'm constantly learning new things from everyone and this makes me think about my own opinions and ideas about running and my diet.

Balance is key. Too much of one thing and everything else gets out of whack. The most blatant example is with food. Nowadays, "everyone" gorges on fast food, fatty food, food that's just plain bad for them. Many people I know who eat bad foods don't have energy, aren't happy, and complain about being fat. Besides exercising, one's diet is the biggest thing one can control! I know for myself that if I have even one day of eating poorly, I feel bloated, depressed, and lethargic. Basically, I feel like crap. My body is used to eating healthy foods (except for my daily chocolate doses) and so when I don't eat well, I can drastically feel the difference.

Healthy, yummy Greek yogurt!

This leads me to my first personal training session I had yesterday at 24 Hour Fitness. Before I get to the actual supa-dupa-fly workout she gave me, I want to talk about something she said that really struck a chord with me. I had mentioned my issues with shin splints (see HERE) and my injury (see HERE), so Karissa (the cutest trainer ever!) talked to me about how to strengthen my feet. She said that no matter how much I build up my calves, that if I don't have strong feet, I won't be stable and nothing will work. Our whole workout was based on making me more stable (at least we weren't talking about mentally stable!) and having my muscles communicate with each other, rather than just doing isolating exercises like bicep curls. When everything talks to each other, they all get along (um...hello metaphor for life!).

For me, I've always known that you need strong hips to have strong knees to have strong feet. But I never thought about it going the other direction, that you need to have strong feet to have strong knees to have strong hips. If one part of the puzzle is missing, the whole system fails. I think this has been what I've been dealing with. I've just focused on having strong legs and forgot that my feet, my sole means of transportation, need some lovin' too! Lately, I've been pondering barefoot running and while I'm not ready to hop on board that crazy train quite yet, I completely agree with the idea that shoes have ruined our feet. I've decided that unless I'm wearing sneakers for running or school or what have you, I'm going to try to wear minimal shoes. This works well since summer is coming up. No more stupid flip flops that cause plantar fascitis pain. I don't care how dorky I look, my feet are vital to my running and I need to take care of them.

Ok, onto the workout she gave me. She really wanted to focus on doing workouts that would improve my running fitness, not just muscle strength, which I thought was the bomb diggity! Anything to help me improve my running I'm totally down for!

So here's what we did in circuits:
3 sets

• diagonal lunges with knee cross-->15x/leg
• single leg shoulder press with knee up-->8x/leg with 10 lb dumbbells
• crunches with tricep extension-->15x with 5 lb dumbbells

3 sets

• Free Motion cable machine (with machine arm down) deadlift and row, single leg and single arm-->12x/arm with 15 lbs
• Core Board pushups w/rotation in each direction-->10x
• high plank, diagonal knee to elbow-->10x/leg

And then I died. Never have I ever wanted to cry so much during a workout! The pushups straight to the planks KILLED me! I had to take breaks like every 4 reps. I can hardly lift my arms today and my lats are letting me know how much they didn't appreciate that workout. But I know it's good for me and I will get stronger every time I do it!

How do you keep balance in your life? What are the struggles you face to keep that balance from deteriorating?

New Things

Hi lovelys :) As you can tell from the blast of purple hitting your eyes right now, I changed the design of my blog. My goal was to make it look a little classier and easier to read than before. I'm very big on the artistic appeal and aesthetics of things. Switching up the color scheme and background seemed a perfect idea. Many bloggers use a plain white background and add color through the text or their header, but I still wanted to keep color in the background. Hopefully the purple isn't an eyesore. If you experience seizures and/or lapses of consciousness from the purple background, please inform me :)

Secondly, I have my very first personal training session tomorrow, which I am super excited about! I won a free personal training session for having been a member of 24 Hour Fitness for 6 months. Heck yeah fitness! I'm looking forward to getting new arm exercises to add to my repertoire and maybe learn some new ways to strengthen my lame calves.

Thirdly, I'll be going for a 5 miler later today, followed by a walk/jog around a local park with some friends because one of them wants to start yyyyogging like us cool kids. I figured it'd be a nice cool down after my long run since I don't think we'll be running Kara Goucher fast (love that woman!).

Fourthly, Cousin and I made cookies last night. Cousin is allergic to gluten and dairy, so it really put a cramp in our cooking style. Luckily, there are other people out there with her same food issues who invented weird things like egg replacer and dairy-free/gluten-free cookie mix.

Cousin and I had tons of wonderful girl talk while making the cookies. She's in her freshman year of college so it was fun to talk about school and boys, mostly about boys and how dumb they can be :D

Cookie dough ready to be baked!

Cookies done!

The recipe turned out pretty well. The cookie dough never spread out in the oven and stayed exactly how we had plopped them down on the sheet. The cookies were pretty bready. Cousin said they tasted like chocolate chip bread, which, although I've never had that, I agree.

Yes, I normally look like that weird when surrounded by cookies. Cookie Monster wasn't my favorite Muppet for nothing!

Hope everyone has a fabulous Wednesday! And yes, I'm still floating on cloud 9 after yesterday :D

Sunburn Sunday!

Today was quite a busy day of doggies and sun, and eventually the gym. My vet tech program had its annual pet adoption day this afternoon. We managed to adopt out all but 3 dogs and 3 cats. For how little planning this event had (we were only informed a week ago that nothing had been set up...so frustrating!), I am very impressed we had such a good response from people!

Buster and Violet

I stupidly forgot my sunscreen at home and realized I would need it when I was halfway to school. Thinking I would happily stay under the tents, I didn't go buy any. Turned out it was chilly under the tents, so in order to stay warm, I stood in the sun. A lot. My face is now a lovely shade of crimson, as are my arms and neck. Since I was wearing my scrubs, the neck burn is a super sexy V. Hawt.

After playing with puppies and talking to the public all day, I hit the gym. The treadmill got some extra lovin' today, as I ran longer than I usually do, for 3.5 miles in 30:19. If that had been outdoors, I swear the time would've been about 27 or 28 minutes. This is why the treadmill and I are not good friends. I finished up the workout with legs, working the adductors, abductors, quad raises, leg presses, and lunges.

Normally I get red from my runs, but add that to my super sunburn, and you get TOMATO FACE!

I don't know about you all, but my gym has some amazing people to practice your people-watching skills on. Today was extremely entertaining when some brah was doing upright dumbbell chest presses...and he had a buddy spotting him by holding his arms. Not to mention that brah was yelling in anguish over the amount of weight he was pressing. Dude, if you can't do dumbbell chest presses with that weight, there is no shame in picking a lower weight. You looked and sounded ridiculous and stupid, especially with your buddy holding your arms. That's not spotting, that's assistance, dumbass.

Enough of my gym ranting, let's look at food! For dinner tonight, I made chicken tenders with a brushing of olive oil and seasoned with lemon pepper seasoning, steamed zucchini, and a baked red potato. Delish!

A meal is not complete without a Blue Moon...or two :)

For dessert, I made a chocolate angel food cake. I used to buy these all the time at Kroger when I lived in Kentucky and came to expect them on the regular, but since I moved home, I think I've had only one angel food cake and it didn't have chocolate in it. Sad panda. So it was time to make one.

Take one angel food cake mix plus 1/2 cup of Hershey's Cocoa powder (for baking, not hot chocolate) and put in a bowl with however much water your box tells you to. Secret: I didn't have enough cocoa, so it probably ended up being 1/4-1/3 of a cup I was able to add.

Whip it, whip it good. Peaks are necessary for the fluffiest of angel food cakes.

Put in the oven. Waste time licking the beaters and bowl. Enjoy your sugar rush.

When done, take out of oven and cool. I have a spaceship-looking angel food cake tin. It's pretty badass. Sadly, no aliens have visited me whilst making fluffy cakey goodness.

Gaze lovingly at your beautiful masterpiece and prepare to devour.

Smile into your camera with no makeup on and have no shame for posting said au natural face on a public blog for all the world to see. P.S. Can you see my nasty sunburn around my neck?!

Cut yourself a big hunkin' piece of your chocolatey angel food cake and gobble that sucker up! Those spots of chocolate are my mixer's fault, not mine. It's from the 60s and it's too tired to mix everything well.

How was your weekend? What delicious/healthy/totally fat laden but oh so good food did you make?

Third Post of the Day?!

I'm going a bit post crazy today! I have so much to share, I suppose. I have decided to make today a rest day. My feet are still pretty sore from my heels from last night and my energy level is at a 2. It's a gorgeous day, though, which makes me feel more guilty than usual when I skip a run. Oh well, it just wasn't meant to be.

I was searching through some old pictures and found some from my very first race way back in May 2008. Now, I have only run 3 races. Crazy, right?! I've been running for 3 years so you would inevitably think I would have run tons of races, maybe even a marathon here or there. But you would be wrong.

My first race was the Parkway 5K and I somehow managed to snag my age group's 3rd place finisher medal with a time of 25:43. Pretty freakin' sweet!

A few months later, I moved to Kentucky and began the first of my two internships at Thoroughbred farms. Due to working 6 days a week and always being exhausted from shoveling manure, dealing with usual horse antics, and trying to run at least a few days a week, fitting in races just wasn't going to happen.

I did manage to run Lexington's A Midsummer Night's Run 5K in August. It was a sweltering night with temps at around 85 with the humidity at about 85%. I died. Not really. I actually did better than my first 5K, with a time of 25:31. Had it not been Satan's armpit outside, I would have been much better, I'm sure.

When I came home from Kentucky in November of 2009, I ran Sacramento's big, giant Run to Feed the Hungry 10K in 56:41. It was poor effort because I hadn't trained for it and wasn't expecting much. I was definitely happy with my result, but I know I can do better.

And now we come to the present, somewhat. Last year, I made a New Year's resolution to run a half marathon. I was going to do the San Francisco half in July, but procrastinated on starting training, so I selected Sacramento's Urban Cow Half in October.

I trained. And trained. I made my own, slow training plan, where, over the course of a few months, made every long run 1 mile longer than the week before. I didn't come across many issues with my training plan and my body reacted pretty well.

Except for some black toenails :(

And then, one day in August, I went on a 6 miler during the middle of the week. I don't think anything exceptional happened, in fact I remember it being a really great run with a fast pace. The next day, I had an excruciating pain along the inside of my right tibia. This was not good. I attempted to run on it, but it progressively got worse to the point where I started crying 1 minute into my run. This was very, very bad :(

I went to my doctor, who took x-rays to make sure it wasn't a stress fracture. It eventually came back that I had medial tibial tendonitis, meaning the tendon that attaches the muscle to the inner part of my tibia was inflamed and pulling away from the bone. Thus, MAJOR pain!

No, not this one!

My doctor sent me to a physical therapist, who told me that my butt and hip muscles weren't very strong. He showed me exercises to make them stronger and told me to get stability shoes, rather than neutral cushioning shoes (my feet are extremely odd, so I'll have to remember to do a post on them soon). I also had to rest for a while and crosstrain. B-O-R-I-N-G!

After about a month of feeling sorry for myself, I got a gym membership at 24 Hour Fitness and started lifting weights and crosstraining. I also realized what caused my injury, more than just weak muscles. I run on concrete sidewalks (the worst running sin besides flinging snot/spit/sweat onto someone) and I was running in one direction on sidewalks that have a slight camber. This camber was putting a ton of pressure on my medial tibia and the muscles, so it only makes sense that I got hurt.

When October came, I went to the Urban Cow to support my running/training buddy, Daniel, who went out and ran it in 1:51:40! He's a stud!

 I also made him some pretty sweet signs that made the other half marathoners giggle :)

In January 2011, I began getting myself back into running shape. I'm still kind of stuck in that getting back to fitness phase. Running isn't the easiest of things for me, but I like the challenge. It's something that really makes me proud of myself when I've run further or faster than I thought I could. Nothing is better than feeling proud of yourself. No one can take that accomplishment away from you.

My ultimate goal for the year is to finally run the Urban Cow. I managed to get my enrollment deferred to this year (the race coordinators were so nice and understanding about my injury!). Last year was a good prep for me to see how I train so that this year I can do better and really kick this half's butt!