June Runfessions, and Halfway Day Check-in!
June is drawing to a close, and that means two things: it’s time to join Marcia for runfessions, AND we’re almost halfway through the year. Halfway Day is July 2nd, so it’s a perfect time to assess the year so far and see how we’re doing. My word for 2023 was “nourish.” So far, so good with that… for the most part. One of my main projects for 2023 was to increase my protein intake, and I do well with it on most days. On the days I go to the gym, I drink a protein shake, and other days I’ll add protein powder to my oatmeal or a smoothie. On days where I previously was “too busy” to eat lunch, I now eat a peanut butter sandwich on Ezekial bread (20 grams of protein, as opposed to zero.) On the days I don’t add protein powder to my oatmeal, I’ll make it with soymilk instead of water. Little changes like that definitely add up. Dinners have been protein-packed around here, thanks to my son. He’s been working out and tracking his protein intake. He manages an incredible 150 grams a day ON A VEGAN DIET. I don’t come anywhere near that- but I don’t weigh as much as he does, and I’m not a body builder. So that’s going well! I’ve also been reading some incredible books, and am on track to read 50 books this year- although I’m usually on track with that until November-December, when life gets crazy, and I inevitably come up short. This could be the year, though! Great! So I’m nourishing my body with healthy food and my mind with great books. How about sleep? Sigh. My sleep isn’t terrible, but I’m definitely not getting enough. I’ve fallen into my old habit of getting in bed seven hours before my alarm goes off. So if I fall asleep instantaneously and sleep soundly for the entire night, I would be getting seven hours. But that’s obviously not happening. I’m probably getting more like six hours a night, and it’s not enough. I don’t know why this is so hard for me! There are always so many things to do at night- but specifically, I love reading after everyone else has gone to bed. The other day my son said he thinks the biggest component to building muscle- other than going to the gym, of course- is sleep. GREAT. It’s always the one thing you’re not doing, right? For the second half of the year, I HAVE TO get more sleep. Let’s call this my “runfession” and a demerit. The whole point of giving yourself a demerit is to identify the problem and plan to do better, right? For the second half of 2023, I resolve to get better sleep. My Garmin tracks my sleep, but I’m always afraid to look at the data- which makes absolutely no sense. I resolve to LOOK at the data my Garmin is giving me, and track it in my planner. I’ll report back- and feel free to mock and ridicule me if I don’t improve. Thanks for listening to my “runfession!” Do you observe “Halfway Day”? Do you like to reassess your progress for the year? Do you think you get enough sleep?
The Best Two-Day Road Trip
Well, I’m back! On Sunday I drove my daughter and her friend up to camp in Tallahassee, and had a mini-adventure of my own on the way back. As my husband said, traveling is therapeutic, and it was great to have a change of scenery. Read on for details! The girls are attending a band camp at Florida State University, and had to be there to check in at 1:00 pm on Sunday. Tallahassee is a 6 1/2 drive from our house, so we left at 5:30 am. Oof. I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the trip, but it turned out to be fun. The girls were excited, and the friend had never been north of Orlando before, so once we got up into Central Florida she was astonished at the change. Yes, it looks a lot different up there! Tallahassee is up in the panhandle, and it really feels like a different state. Beautiful old trees (no palm trees!) very hilly, and the campus of FSU is beautiful. By the time I got the girls checked in and settled in their dorm room, they were ecstatic. It was my daughter’s first time at sleep away camp, but she wasn’t nervous at all. She had no problem saying goodbye, but I got very sad, which I wasn’t expecting. I had a simultaneous flashback to two years ago when I left my son at college, and a flash forward four years to when I’ll be dropping my daughter off for real. I didn’t cry (my daughter would have killed me) but I felt it. Sigh. But then! I drove away to start my own adventure. I headed back south a couple of hours to get to Ocala, where I would spend the night. Ocala is right in the middle of Florida, north of Orlando and south of Gainesville. I had never been there- all I knew was that it’s horse country, and there’s a national forest. When I googled it, I discovered an online walking tour of “historic downtown,” and decided there must be SOMETHING interesting to see, so I picked it as my destination. My original plan was to run in Ocala National Forest on one of the many trails. The problem is, the reviews on All Trails app were very positive for winter hiking and running, but overwhelmingly negative for the summer. People said the trails were wet, muggy, and buggy. One person said they pulled 45 ticks off their legs, and another said they had to turn back because there were so many spider webs with “spiders as big as my face.” Hopefully that last one was an exaggeration, but I still wasn’t too excited about running in the forest. But not to worry! My hotel was right near the Cross Florida Greenway.. What is that, you ask? “The Cross Florida Greenway is unique in many ways. Occupying more than 70,000 acres of land formerly known as the Cross Florida Barge Canal, the Greenway is a 110-mile linear park that is more than a mile wide in places. It hosts more than 300 miles of trails of all types — paddling, hiking, mountain biking, equestrian and paved multi-use.” At one point there was a public works project to build a canal across Florida, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, the project was abandoned (yes, I can see how having barge traffic going through the middle of Florida would really screw up the ecosystems.) The land that was cleared for the project is now a protected area. Who knew??? I used the All Trails app to find a five mile trail, and headed out for my run bright and early on Monday morning. You guys! There was SHADE! It was a trail runner’s dream. My five mile run turned into seven, thanks to the fact that I went off course several times. I wasn’t following the app closely- every once in a while I would take out my phone to check it, and one time I realized I had gone almost a mile off course- oops. But that’s okay! I had water, the trail was fun and I wasn’t overheating. I didn’t mind running a little extra. The only problem was, this was technically a mountain biking trail. Parts of it were narrow, and I was worried about encountering cyclists. But for most of it I was alone. Towards the end I met several bikers, who were extremely polite and grateful when I stepped off the trail to let them pass. Overall it was a great run! Next up: walking tour of downtown. After showering and checking out of my hotel, I headed to the downtown area. I had downloaded the tour on my phone, which consisted of descriptions of locations that corresponded to numbers on a teeny tiny map. If I tried to enlarge the map, it was very blurry. Hmmm. Each building featured on the tour had a little plaque with a QR code, which you could scan to read further information. Since these signs were fairly easy to spot, I eventually stopped squinting hopelessly at my phone, and just wandered up and down the streets, searching for signs on the buildings. This turned out to be a really fun way to see the city! And I saw things that I wouldn’t have seen if I had stuck to the original tour, like this: A running store! It was right next to “Brick City Bicycles.” As I learned, Ocala is nicknamed “Brick City” because after the great fire of 1883, the city was rebuilt with buildings using brick rather than wood. I also found a “secret” mural… and an art center, which had exhibits from local artists- sadly it’s closed on Mondays. Eventually I realized I was VERY hot, so I stopped in at a coffee chop for an iced tea. As I sat there, I scrolled through the tour on my phone, trying to
Weekly Rundown- A Gym PR
Hello and welcome to the Weekly Rundown, hosted as always by Kim and Deborah (thanks, ladies!) It was a good week with some hot, humid runs, and four gym days in a row, which may be a new PR for me (okay, one of those days was to run on the treadmill- but I was there!) Let’s just see how it all played out. Sunday Well, this was frustrating. I had a trail run planned, but when I woke up I heard the dreaded sound of thunder. ARRRG! I don’t mind running in the rain (as a matter of fact I prefer it to the sweltering heat) but I’m not going out in a thunderstorm. I would have gone for a treadmill run, but the gym doesn’t open until 8 on weekends. I waited an entire hour for the storm to pass, and finally felt that it was safe to run. By that point my desire for a trail run had waned (especially considering that it would be soaking wet) so I just went for a 6 mile run on the roads. Sigh. Monday Let’s try this again! No storms this morning, and I got out for a 4 mile run, followed by Caroline Girvan’s ab workout.. Tuesday Leg day at the gym! I did the Daily Shakedown to warm up, followed by five minutes on the stair climber. Then the usual routine of squats, Bulgarian split squats, calf raises. I skipped deadlifts because my low back wasn’t feeling it. I did hamstring curls instead, and then bench press and abs. Wednesday Speed work! This time, I sensibly took it to the treadmill. After a warmup of 1.5 miles, I did 12 x 400 at 5K pace. Whenever I do a workout with that many repeats, I always feel like I’ll NEVER be able to do it when I start out. The first one always feels so hard! But then as I go on it gets a little easier, and once I pass the halfway mark I feel better and better. I was even able to increase the speed gradually for the last six repeats. There’s hope for these turtle legs after all! Thursday This was the “bonus” gym day, an upper body workout. Our gym just got some fancy new machines, and my son likes them. He told me the lat pulldown machine works his lats better than regular lat pulldowns, so I tried it out. Judging by how horribly sore I was the next day, I think he’s right. I also did biceps, triceps, dumbbell overhead press, and abs. Friday Leg day! One of the other fancy-schmancy new machines is the hack squat. My son loves it, so I figured I would give it a try. I did my regular squats first, and deadlifts, then made my way over to the machine. It’s basically like doing a squat that doesn’t involve your low back at all. I think it would be good for working on form (I didn’t get low enough here, because I felt like I didn’t have my feet in the right place- it took me a couple sets to figure it out.) It would also be good if you have a back issue and can’t do regular squats. But I like the fact that squats engage the core. When I pointed that out to my son, he said he doesn’t care about that, he’s just trying to make his quads as big as possible. We have very different goals. Saturday 5 mile run! This run felt pretty good, despite the fact that when I walked out the door it felt like someone threw a hot, wet blanket over me. Side note: Jessie told me she’s been doing the Caroline Girvan deadbug workout and loves it. I realized that I didn’t do it once this week! I’ve been doing abs at the gym, and today they were so sore I just couldn’t bring myself to do the deadbugs. I want to get back to that workout next week though. Sunday On tap for today: lots and lots of sitting. I’m leaving early in the morning to drive my daughter and her friend to camp, in Tallahassee. I’ll stay overnight (and have a fun trail run planned!) and will arrive home Monday night. For that reason, I’ll be extremely late reading and commenting- but I will get to everyone’s posts, eventually! What was your weather like this week? – I was officially running through a swamp. Machines or free weights? Free weights! But my son likes a mix of both.
Reading and Eating
“This is how humans are. We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we REALLY believe, and those we never think to question.” -Ender, Speaker for the Dead I’ve read four books recently, and one of them was so good, the other ones pale by comparison. If you’ve read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, but haven’t gone on to read the other books in the series… you have a treat waiting for you. Ender’s Game was originally meant to be a prologue to the Ender Saga. The true story starts with Speaker for the Dead. This book is about philosophy, religion, how we treat people who are different from us, and it’s also a fascinating, compelling story. The Ender Saga changed my views of science fiction in the same way Harry Potter changed my opinion of fantasy. If you told me I would be reading a book where people cast spells and fly around on brooms, I would have said it sounds ridiculous. But in the world of Harry Potter, it totally works. The same goes for Speaker of the Dead. Oh, this guy is three thousand years old due to relatavistic time of interstellar travel? Makes perfect sense. I can’t really talk much about the plot of this without spoiling Ender’s Game. All I’ll say is- if you like (or even can tolerate) science fiction, READ IT. My son is finishing the next book in the series, and I’ll be reading it as soon as he’s done. Anything after that would be anticlimactic, and unfortunately the next book I read was… not very good. I almost DNF’d after two pages because the writing was so poor, but I stuck it out because- I’ll admit it- the story was intriguing. The premise is that a couple finds out their sperm donor, for the baby the wife is carrying, is a serial killer. That alone was interesting enough to make me keep reading. The problem was, as the story went on it became more and more preposterous. :Even a couple days later I find myself thinking back on it angrily: “The police wouldn’t do that! No one would act like that! No lawyer would say such a thing!” But I’ll say this- it was a quick read. I finished it in two days, so at least the experience wasn’t too drawn out. The other two books fall somewhere in the middle. The House on Mango Street is a beautifully-written book that I enjoyed, but I’ll be honest- not a lot of it stuck with me. I’m trying to think of something to say about it other than it was well-written, and I can’t. The Late Mrs. Willoughby is a MUST READ if you love Jane Austen. This is the second book in Claudia Gray’s Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney mystery series (the first one is The Death of Mr. Wickham, and they must be read in order!) If you don’t love Jane Austen, I don’t think these books are for you. The mystery alone isn’t enough to carry the book- but if you like hearing more about Marianne, Elinor, and characters from other Jane Austen novels, you would probably enjoy this. Let’s move on to food! On Monday Birchwood Pie shared this recipe for braised tofu, and I knew I had to make it immediately. Obviously, it was delicious! How could it not be? And, just to prove that we do eat something other than tofu, rice and broccoli, for Father’s Day my husband requested deep dish pizzas. I use this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, with the following modifications to make it vegan: Earth Balance instead of butter, Violife vegan mozzarella cheese, and my husband and son had Beyond Sausage on their’s (yuck.) Anyway, we all enjoyed it, and in the background you can see raspberry almond thumbprint cookies from Nora Cooks, which my husband requested for dessert. Have you read any of these books? What meal would you request if someone else were cooking?