Wednesday Words: Passionate

I'm linking up with Deb Runs again for Wednesday Words.

This week's word is Passionate.

Boy, this could go any way, right?

Passionate defined means "having, compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling, fervid." But also "easily moved to anger; quick-tempered; irascible." As a redhead, that's probably a better description of this word for me, but we're going to focus on the first definition. :o)

I think that if you know me, or you've been around here long, you probably know the things I'm passionate about. They are typically the things I write about.

1. Family
2. Running
3. Cooking
4. Books/reading

There was a time in my life when my one, true passion, that nothing else compared to, was my horse Oliver and riding.

Sadly, life changes some things and horses are no longer a huge (or even small) part of my life, but I would change that in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. 

As we grow and learn, our passions change in the same way we do. My daughter is currently passionate about all things Frozen, and Disney princess in general. But she's also starting to learn new things in school and make new friends. I hope (and pray!) that she becomes passionate about learning and opens her minds to new things. 

Sometimes these changes are slow, and you wake up one day to realize that all of a sudden your life focus has really switched gears. My running is a good example of this. I started out just kind of putzing around, hoping to lose some baby weight, and now it's on the forefront of my mind at any given time. 

Some times you dive in head first and immerse yourself in a new interest that becomes a passion. My relationship with my husband was like this. I pretty much fell head over heels, and we quickly started spending all of our time together. 10+ years later...

Or the moment my daughter was born. Talk about some intense emotion! After spending 9 months wondering who this little person would be, and what she'd look like, the love and passion I felt for her was immediate. 

So what are you passionate about? Did you dive right in, or did you gradually warm up to it? 

Training for Tuesday: the Hay is in the Barn

Today I'm linking up with Tracy and Alyssa for their Training for Tuesday link-up. It's a monthly post where we can check in on our training, on the other blogger's training, and take some time to reflect on where we've been and where we're going.

A saying that gets thrown around a lot on my training website (RunnersConnect.net) is that "the hay is in the barn." Basically, it means that you've done all the work you can this training cycle, and it's time to relax and put that hard work to good use. Reap what you've sewn, if you will.

With less than 3 weeks until my marathon (20 days!), this is where I'm at. I've done all the hard work. Now it's time to start tapering, get lots of sleep, rest, recover, and maybe get my nutrition on point a little. (Definitely an area that I still need to improve).

After this morning's run, I've officially completed my toughest month of training. Seriously, when I looked at the training plan for this month, I was not sure how I was going to accomplish all of the workouts. A) they were tougher than anything I've done so far, and B) they were much longer - 8-9 mile workouts in the middle of the week!

But I'm happy to show you this today!

Every run is highlighted! I did it! 

Honestly, completing each run and workout just helped boost my confidence. Some runs I went in thinking "no way can I pull this off", and then I'd be pleasantly surprised when I was successful. This month has given me so much confidence going into my race. Sure, there will still be some anxiety, nerves, and lots of doubt. Hopefully I can draw on some of the workouts I've done this month and think "remember when you ran those 3 miles at a sub 8:30 pace in the middle of your 16 mile run? Yea, you can do this too."

I have to laugh when I think about how I'm officially in "taper town", but I still have long runs of 12 & 8 miles, plus 6-8 mile workouts. My training plan likes to keep the mileage up in the taper period so your legs don't get stale, but also helping to blow off a little of that nervous steam. 

The pace bands I ordered from Races2Remember showed up yesterday in the mail, with a sweet note from one of their employees wishing me good luck. 

I've never used a pace band before, but I figured it's worth a shot. Math is never my strong suit, and math after running 15 miles is like asking me to perform surgery while doing a headstand - bad idea.

So, it's starting to feel official! The hay is in the barn, and now I've just got to ride it out the next few weeks, stay healthy, and hopefully have a great race! 

How's your training going? Join up with us and tell us about it!

Fall Recipes

I normally do a weekend review on Mondays, but our weekend was pretty uneventful. We did go to an open house at our fire department, but Emily didn't want to do any of the activities they had (fire safety house, fireman obstacle course). So we were there for 20 minutes, got this picture, and left.

Besides a long run and watching football, we really didn't do anything. 

I have been knocking it out of the park in the kitchen lately, though. Fall is time for comfort foods, and there has been no shortage of that in my house lately. 

First up: Apple Bacon Stuffed Sweet Potatoes from How Sweet It Is. This recipe combines sweet and savory with a mix of the the sweet potato & apple with bacon, goat cheese and sage seasoning. One potato per person felt more than enough and filled me up, but you might want to serve it with a side salad.

Next we enjoyed this Stuffed Acorn Squash from Prevention RD. It's stuffed with sausage and apples, as well as some other things. The recipe calls for mushrooms, but I felt it was hearty enough without so I omitted them. Your call. 

Lastly, this yummy Greek Yogurt Dip from Food Faith Fitness. I wanted to make something yummy for the football game on Sunday, but not completely wreck my diet. I've also been having trouble with spinach lately, so this recipe really intrigued me. It's like a spinach artichoke dip, but it uses kale & cauliflower instead, along with a lot of parmesan cheese. While it's not exactly a salad, it's definitely better than most game day food. 

I also have to totally laugh at this picture, because it is my life. Adult food and drinks, eaten on my daughter's coloring table, surrounded by her toys. She was supposed to be napping, but ended up coming down after about an hour to crash our party. Such is life with kids. Here's a much better pic:

Taylor (Food Faith Fitness) uses a Blendtec to make this dip, but I just used my blender. While it probably didn't work quite as well as a Blendtec, it got the job done. First world problems, right? 

How was your weekend? Enjoyed any good eats lately?

Fitness Friday

Hello and happy Friday! I'm nearing the end of peak training, and it seems like there is a light at the end of the tunnel! It's getting closer!

This week was relatively "easy".

Sunday - 12 miles at easy pace, average of 9:43. The weather was gorgeous - 40 degrees, but sunny enough to warm me up so much that I had to take my lightweight jacket off mid-run. It's finally starting to feel like fall! Some trees are starting to turn color too, and there's some leaves on the trail too.

Monday - 7 miles on the bike, but they were pretty slow. My average speed was 12.3mph. At one point, a few miles in, I thought "oh yea, I have gears that could make this hill a little easier." Duh. That's what happens when you work out at 5am sometimes. Not all pistons are firing...

Tuesday - Tempo Intervals - 3 x 2.5 miles with 3 min rest periods. This is the longest workout in my training cycle (versus long runs, not to be confused), and I'm so glad to have it behind me! Also, totally loving the new Garmin watch. With the workout plugged in, I didn't have to worry about laps and checking my watch every few minutes. Very cool. I walked the rest periods and did a little backtracking so that I didn't run out of road for this route. Overall, really good run. 1 mile warm up: 9:38, 1st 2.5 mi: 8:38, 2nd 2.5 mi 8:41, 3rd 2.5 mi 8:38, 1 mile cool down: 9:49. 

Wednesday - Normally a rest and/or cross training day, but I had to switch things up this week. So just an easy 3 miles. Yay for only 3 miles!! There is a light at the end of this peak-training tunnel. My body is TIRED, and even this 3 miles felt like hard work. 

Thursday - My company had planned on participating in the National Run@Work day sponsored by the Road Runners Club of America, (technically last week but rain delayed to this week). Unfortunately, no one else wanted to go. Since I had planned on running that evening no matter what, I decided to take my new treadmill for a test spin. It's pretty nice! Even better is that my new Garmin watch clocked my miles in a little faster than the treadmill said I was going, I guess based on the historical data from my cadence (yep, fancy), so I was able to still get split pace data while running inside. Cool!

It's ok, you can be jealous.

Friday - This morning was rough. I had no idea what day it was when my alarm went off, and I stood next to my dresser with my pants half on for a good 30 seconds trying to convince myself to get out on my bike. A good dose of healthy guilt kicked in, and I got a workout in. 7 miles on the bike, in foggy/misty weather. I know I'm not going to be able to ride outside for much longer, so better get it in now!

This weekend is my last "big" training weekend before taper. I have a 7 mile steady pace run for Sat, and 16 miles on Sunday with a "fast finish". The weather looks like it's supposed to hold out, so hopefully this is a successful end to my peak training!

How's your training going? Do you have treadmill envy?

Wednesday Word: Comparison

I'm linking up with Deb Runs again this week for her Wednesday Word link-up. This week we're talking about Comparison. 

Photo Credit

This is the first thought that came into my head when I read the word. Immediately. 

Mainly, because it's so true. 

It's so easy to look at what others have and start to become envious. Dare I say...jealous. Especially when everyone and my mom has a Facebook account, and you know 90% (or some other statistically correct number that I didn't make up) of people are only posting the good stuff. 

So it's easy to start feeling down on yourself when you come home with a filthy kid that needs a bath, laundry to do right away, step in cat puke in the meanwhile, and a host of other things go wrong in your evening. (For real: my Monday night) Then you see Sally Smith and John Jones living it up on a beach somewhere, and you think "whhhhhyyyyy me?"

But you know what? My life is pretty great already. I'm betting yours is too.

When I first started really getting into running, the comparison bug started rearing it's little head. I'm talking like after my first 5k, while training for my first half marathon. Like when I realized that pace = finishing time, and sometimes those finishing times are considered "good" depending on your age and experience. 

Then I joined a running group, and a Ragnar team, and this comparison bone started to get even bigger. Honestly? It took me awhile to knock it off. 

I still have to remind myself that everyone runs at different paces, and that everyone is capable of different things. Yes, I'm training for a full marathon. No, I do not need to do an ultra marathon to be just as cool as so and so. And just because I'm training for a full does not mean that I'm better than someone else. That I can enjoy my own accomplishments and only compete with myself. Because really...

Don't you think?

What comes to mind when you think of the word "Comparison"? Link up and tell us about it!

Weekend Review: Picnics and Presents

This weekend was our annual company picnic. It used to be called the annual "summer" picnic, but we kept pushing the date back farther into September to accommodate for everyone's schedule (no one in northern MN likes to give up a summer weekend!), so now it's just the picnic.

Although the weather was beautiful - not a cloud in the sky - it definitely was not summer weather. Everyone showed up in jackets and sweatshirts, and I don't think it hit 70 until very late in the day.

This is the second year that I've been on the picnic planning committee, so I get to show up early and go home late.

Teamwork makes the dream work....

We always have the picnic at a nearby town hall that has a nice big kitchen for our caterers, a huge playground for the kids, and a large backyard for the bouncy house. Because, really, it's all about the bouncy house. We also host a bean bag tournament (sometimes also called cornhole?), and the winning team gets $100. Not too shabby!

This year we also did site tours, because our mine is really coming along. It's been under construction for awhile, but this year we have almost completed buildings and equipment. Like a real mine! We got to stop and take pictures with some of our newly acquired mine trucks.

I'm the ant-like figure in blue, holding the speck-like figure in pink.

Just in case you can't tell, they are huge. The tire is twice as tall as me. Pretty impressive.

My sister-in-law also works for my company, so we did a group photo.

The company also does giveaways, like gift cards, an extra day of PTO, and "big" prizes like tickets to sporting events. This year, I won tickets to a U of Minnesota - Duluth (UMD) hockey game! I never win anything, so I was pretty stoked!

It turned out to be a pretty great picnic, and I think everyone had fun. That's the most important part.

Speaking of presents...(subtle, right?)

My birthday is in less than 1 month! This year, we will be spending my entire birthday in the car, driving to Detroit. Nothing like forced bonding via a 12 hour road trip, right? 

Since we're taking this trip, kind of for my birthday (and kind of for the little marathon I'm running 2 days later), I told Travis no presents.

But then my Garmin watch started to malfunction, and made a liar out of me. I mean, I don't need a GPS watch, but it sure makes a lot of running easier. So I bought myself an early birthday present.

Forerunner 220! This watch is so sweet. It wirelessly uploads my saved runs to my phone, and I can also program workouts to it. So no more staring at my watch for 30 second intervals or whatever. I just plug the info into the website, send it to my phone, and it beeps at me for intervals, rest periods, etc. So awesome! I think the best part so far is that it it finds GPS satellites so fast. Like, I step out the door and it's already found it. My old watch would take up to 5 minutes to find a satellite. There I'd be, pacing in front of my watch staring at the screen, waiting. 

In my defense, I have a new friend from running camp that works at Garmin and helped me get a pretty sweet discount. So, it's not all that bad. Really....

I've used it twice now, and I'm definitely in love.

So besides some more running, football (Go Vikes!), and some housework, that about wraps up our weekend.

How was your weekend? Does your company host annual picnics or other parties? 

Fitness Friday

Another peak weak in training, and this girl is dog tired. I don't think there's enough coffee today to save me. Send an IV, stat!

Saturday - 6 miles, steady pace work out. Since my training program believes that running over 3 hours during training starts to negate your fitness gains, most of the runners (including myself) only see 16-18 miles as their longest long run in their training cycle. The way that they replicate the accumulated fatigue of a 20+ miler is to have a steady run the day before. So for me, it was 1 mile warm up, 4 miles at 8:40-8:50 pace, 1 mile cool down.

My watch has been losing satellite and being all kinds of goofy lately, so I ended up having to use the Mapmyrun (MMR) app on my phone at mile 2 for the rest of the run. Since I wasn't going to stare at my phone the entire time, I basically had to run this by feel which meant that my pace was kind of all over the place. So those steady miles were 8:31, 8:40, 8:50, and 8:44. But I got it done and took care of business on the fly.

Sunday - This run was originally planned to be 16 miles, with marathon surges: 6 x 90 sec @ 8:10 pace, 5 min rest at 8:55 in between starting at mile 9.

From the start, this run was a comedy of errors. Tummy trouble almost immediately that called for pit stops at both mile 5 and 7, then my fuel belt kept popping off mid stride. I finally got settled in and started the surges at mile 9, successfully completing 5 of them roughly at 8:00 min average with the rest periods being around 8:45-8:55, when my Garmin flashed "lap database error". Great. It stopped tracking me, reverted back to December 13th, and said that I had run 21 miles. Uh....no. So I took a break to regroup a little and figure out what I should do. I turned on my MMR app again, but I wasn't sure how far I'd gone at that point since I was so wrapped up in the timing of the surges. I figured I had about 7 miles to go, so I used my watch to time my last surge and ran that by feel before settling back into an easy pace. I got my watch to pick up satellite again with 5 miles to go, so I figured I'd at least be able to see my pace in real time.

When I got home, I plugged my route into the map feature on MMR. It said that I had actually run about 19.25 miles. Whoops. Apparently I was a little farther along then I originally thought when I started having my tech problems. I probably could have figured out how far I'd gone a I was just running an out & back course, but math on the fly is not my strong suit. Ah well, I ended right around 3 hours - I think. I also wasn't sure exactly what time I started running, but I figured it was around 6:25am and I ran till 9:30am. Good enough.

Monday - A very slow, easy 5.5 miles on the bike averaging 12.5mph. I was a little sore this morning, but actually not as much as I thought I'd be. Hooray for ice baths, foam rolling, stretching and plenty of couch time. But I am definitely glad to not be running today.

Tuesday - 9 mile cutdown: 2 mile warm up, then 6 miles at 9:15, 9:05, 8:55, 8:45, 8:35, 8:25, 1 mile cool down. I was tired from the get-go with this run, and really was not sure that I'd be able to hit the paces. Somehow I managed to muscle through it, but it definitely left me drained. Paces were: 9:39, 9:29, 9:12, 9:02, 8:53, 8:41, 8:38, 8:26, 10:13. I made sure I went to bed early enough the night before to get in 8 hours (bed by 7:20pm, asleep by 8:00pm, up at 4:15am), but I know the rest of the day will be a caffeine ride on the struggle bus. Running in the evening is just not fun or easy for me though, so it is what it is.

Wednesday - Yoga! I am starting to feel all kinds of stiff and sore with the increase mileage, so I thought my Yoga for Runners DVD would really help. It did, but it always makes my legs feel really heavy afterwards.

Thursday  - 8 miles easy at 9:43 average pace. This was hot and humid, and although I started off too fast, the humidity put me in check pretty easy. My hamstrings were bugging me Tues & Wed, but this morning it was my quads that were barking at me. What gives?

Friday - Another 8 miles easy, average around 9:38 pace. The most exciting thing about this run was that it was a brisk 47 degrees. Love! My quads are feeling a little better, thanks to a lot of stretching during the day. However, our power was out for 4 hours last night, which lead to a crappy night of sleep for me. Also, we went out to dinner last night and I probably (definitely) overindulged, which made for an unhappy tummy this morning. Not the greatest run, but it's done. Now I need to find a quiet place to nap.

Also, a quick note on marathon training and eating. A lot of people said that I would be hungry all the time. I'm not, but I know I should be eating. Which leads to overeating (because I'm not hungry to begin with). I'm a little sick of this cycle, but I don't really know what to do about it. The struggle is real! Also, I've gained 6-8 pounds, which I am really unhappy about.

How's your training going? Are you hungry all the time from running?