Hello and happy Saturday 🙂 cheers to another weekend! This week was my first week back at work since Christmas and boy it’s always rough transitioning out of the lazy days of vacation! I am determined to start this year off strong, and so far I’ve been pretty successful (we’ll see what happens in the next week;).
2016 ended pretty rough in terms of exercise and stress. November and December were tough for me physically – I got pretty sick around Thanksgiving and it stuck around for quite sometime. These two months were full of stress getting ready for our elementary concerts and running and working out were pretty much non existent. I found myself in a huge mental struggle trying to figure out when/if I should workout while I am busy/sick/injured. Don’t get me wrong, when you are sick or injured, you are absolutely justified in taking time off. However, I tend to elaborate these illnesses or activities in my head and find myself in a cycle or not running because I am busy or stressed, and in turn getting more and more stressed from not doing any physical activities. This cycle is my biggest mental and physical challenge – the longer I go without exercise, the more and more stressed I get and the harder it is to get myself back into it.
The new year couldn’t have come at a better time! I am using 2017 as my excuse to start a fresh training plan and am using it to mentally get myself started on the right track. Breaking the cycle and jumping back in to working out is always the hardest, but once I do I always feel a million times better! As soon as I finish about 2 workouts in a row I feel so much happier with myself and less stressed with day to day events. I can finally say that I’ve completed all 6 of my workouts this first week of January and am such a better place mentally! I already feel like I am getting stronger and starting to regain some strength I lost during the whole elbow era (whether this is the placebo effect or not, I’ll take it;) and am finding myself happier and less stressed during the day. I’ve got about 12 weeks to go until the half marathon and I can’t wait to keep going!
This week I ran three times, all outside. Early in the week I completed my interval workout – 7 x 400s. Since it was already starting to get dark by the time I went outside, I ran these 400s in loops around my neighborhood. I made a point of pushing myself until I was uncomfortable and am very happy with the times I was able to get! Having a heart rate monitor on my watch has been awesome so far. It puts me in my place when I am running a 400 and think I’m running hard enough but can see by my heart rate that I am just being lazy 😉 I also ran a 4 miler and a 6 miler. The 4 miler took place earlier this week the day before a huge snow storm was about to pass through, so there were some pretty intense winds. I forgot what it was like to run outside in the true cold after having such a mild winter this year! I almost turned around right away when I left for this run because I was running right into the wind, but I am glad I kept going. This morning I went out for 6 miles. I wore a lot of layers because the temperature was 6 degrees with a wind chill of -5! This helped a bunch and I wasn’t nearly as cold. We got quite a bit of snow these past few days so there was about 3 inches of snow on the road that I ran through, which was tough at first, but once I got used to it didn’t seem like much of an obstacle. My fiance decided to come out and run the last mile with me which was fun! I spent two other days on my spin bike and one day doing a workout from Kayla Itsines’ BBG program.
Well, I probably briefed you on more details than you care to hear and if you read through all of that I am thoroughly impressed! I’m keeping myself accountable by posting about my runs on here so I will feel more guilty if I skip out on some 😉
I spent about 30 minutes yesterday trying to find the phone in this picture. If you’re looking for a good challenge or time killer, try and find the phone in this picture! The case is up so you can see the camera on it a little bit. Maybe I am just slow, but it sure took me a long time to find it.
Hope you have a perfect weekend!