Weekend, etc

Things at work have been Ca RAZY lately. Whew.

I've gotten in a few runs though. Friday I went outside for an easy 4.5 mile run. The weather was awesome - hovering above 40 with a bit of sun poking through. I really enjoyed it and took an easier pace.

Workout: Outdoor Run
Distance: 4.5 miles
Time: 39:30
Pace: 8:43/mile

The weekend weather sucked! But we had some really fun plans on the docket. We went over to Mollie and Ryan's house for dinner. K was a champion. I brought his PJs with so he could fall asleep there. I'm so one of those people now - a parent. Ha. Oh man, but I love it so oh well.

Saturday we went to the Home and Holiday show with Pete's brother and his wife. It was so much fun to see those guys. They are pregnant right now and I can't wait to meet my amazing nephew! K was loving all the time with his aunt and uncle too. Lucky guy. We found a display for a bath remodeling thing and so they had this mini tub and shower set up so you could see how nice it would look and it was like the perfect size tub for K so we had to put him in it. HA! It looks like a normal sized person in a normal sized tub. TOO CUTE!

Saturday night we went over to our friend's house to celebrate her birthday. It was a nice dinner and super fun to get to see her. They also have a baby so it was a parent night. DINNER WAS AMAZING! Holy moly. Tom made some pulled pork and I can't get it out of my head. Literally. So delicious - probably the best thing he's ever cooked for me and all I want to do is go steal the leftovers out of their fridge. :)

Monday I got in another run - but it was on the treadmill. I had a stitch in my side for most of the run and it was pretty miserable. Which sucks because my legs really should have been rested from a weekend of no working out. I think I was hungry...

Workout: Treadmill Run
Distance: 4 miles
Time: 33:10
Pace: 8:17/mile

My plan today is to run outside because it's supposed to be in the 40s again! WHOO HOO!
I'll leave you with one more pic of my dude being all snuggly last night :)

Outdoor Running

I much prefer to run outside. When I run outside I don't use an ipod or listen to any music. I just listen to my feet hitting the pavement - that rhythmic sound propels me forward. Especially in the fall when each step crunches into some newly fallen leaves. But we're quickly approaching the "run indoors only" weather. At least for this running mama. I know some die hard Minnesotans who run throughout the winter, but once there's ice on the ground I'm a treadmill girl until Spring. With the weather hovering in the mid 40s I had to take advantage of an outdoor run. I was lucky enough yesterday to have the company of my husband. We work in the same building downtown even though we work for two totally different companies. Occasionally that provides the opportunity to run together. It's always been a great benefit, but it's even more so now that we have Baby K. I made sure to dress warmly enough that I would be able to enjoy the run, but not overly so.

That's the lovely locker room in the gym at work. Yes I took a selfy... oh the shame. I have to admit that I much prefer reading blogs where people post pictures and I'm assuming it's the same for all of you out there. (All 3 of you.... HI!) So there you go. I wore running pants and a long sleeve shirt. I have a Halo Headband that I bought at a race expo last year that was perfect to just keep my ears warm but let my head breathe. I highly recommend using them for warmer winter running days. When it gets frigid I'm a full on hat girl though. 

My husband didn't have a lot of time so we did a 3 mile outdoor run. It was really nice to be able to run together. When we got back to the gym I was going to pop onto the treadmill and do one more mile but all the treadmills were full, so instead I did some lifting to round out the workout. 

Last night I went to Happy Hour with some girlfriends at World Street Kitchen. It was fun to catch up with them and leave K with dad. I wasn't a huge fan of what I ordered to eat, but my friend at work says she's gotten really good food there so don't my meal as a reason not to check it out. 

K turned 4 months old yesterday - and he's pretty freaking excited about it :)

That's all I have for now. I plan to run outside again today - a nice 4.5 mile loop. At my work we have a tradition of cracking a beer or pouring a glass of wine on Fridays at around 3:30pm. I plan to enjoy Beer Friday to round out the work week. Have an awesome weekend and I'll catch up with you guys next week. 

Life outside of working out

I didn't workout yesterday. Instead I went to lunch with some girls from work at the Macy's Skyroom. They have an incredible salad bar there and it was super fun to spend some time with those ladies talking about things other than work. I mean, let's be honest, of course we talked a little bit about work - laughing about some of the projects we're involved in right now, but for the most part we just caught up.

This picture doesn't do the salad bar justice, but it's a glimpse. The salad bar has everything you would want on an amazing salad PLUS pasta salads, a great selection of fruit, a soup bar, a bread selection, and pudding. It's awesome. I may or my not have gone back for seconds. :)

So let's talk about life outside of working out. I work downtown Minneapolis for a Marketing Agency. I'm a Senior Account Executive - which basically is a Project Manager. I really enjoy my job and I like working downtown. I'm enjoying being a working mom. 

I live in South Minneapolis with my husband - Pete, our son - K, our dog - Wyatt and our cat - Ribley. 

Life lately has been all about being a mom. And I love it. We're working on a sleep schedule with K. He comes home from daycare and takes an evening nap. Playing at daycare is a lot of work! Then he gets up and we play with him. Eventually we give him a bath - yes every night - he loves it. We read books, get jammies on, feed him and then rock him to sleep. He's a great evening baby and so full of smiles. He's been pretty sporadic at night and sometimes has great nights, while others are tougher. He had a stretch of time where he was waking once at 4am to eat and then crashing again until 6:45am. Those were the days! For the past few weeks he's been all over the place - literally. There are a few factors at play. First of all - I know he's been growing like a weed and growing is hard work. On top of that he's super active and can roll over like a champion. He can move ALL over his crib in the night. It's awesome. But that means we had to stop swaddling him. Since we stopped swaddling he's been waking himself up a bit more. I am not getting too frustrated. I know this will all work itself out and he'll have a consistent sleep schedule again. Some day. I just need to be consistent myself. Which means I let him whine a little in his crib and try to get him to soothe himself back to sleep, but if he starts crying I'll go get him. I'm his mom - I can't help it. He's only four months old, so I don't think we're at the point where he needs to "cry it out". I do give him time to try to soothe himself back to sleep though. He tends to play in his crib and talk to himself when he's not upset and so I lay in bed a lot at night staring at this: 

Look at that ADORABLE BABY! He's like - hey Mom you should come down here. It's a GREAT time to play right now. Just look at how cute I am! LOOK! MOM! Come play. It's 3:30am :) 

K turned 4 months old today. I can't believe how fast time is flying. I'm so glad we're past the infant stage - that was hard. And he's so rewarding. He lets you know how much he appreciates all your hard work by giving lots of smiles and even a few laughs. His dad and I love that little guy so much. 

I have Happy Hour tonight with some girlfriends in Uptown. I'm looking forward to having a drink and getting out. The weather is getting cold here in MN. When you get off work and it's cold out and there's not a hint of sunlight left in the sky it's easy to want to go home and put your sweatpants on. I'm glad that Pete and I are good about making plans with friends - just enough to get us out of the house, but not so often that we're missing out on good family nights. That's all for now. I'm going outside for my run today - it's supposed to be in the 40s and I need to take advantage of being able to run outside while I still can. I hope you are all having a great week.

Question of the day: How are you sleeping these days? Better than I am? Worse?

HIIT

Tuesday's workout was a toss up. I literally tossed some shorts and a tank top into a bag in the morning along with a banana and some leftover stir fry. I didn't even know if a workout was going to be in the cards for me with work being pretty busy but I figured I should at least be prepared in case I had a chance to sneak down to the gym around lunch.

I got some much needed testing done in the morning at work and at about noon it looked like I had a few extra minutes to sneak away. As I rode the elevator to the sub-floor level of the gym (depressing that the gym is in the basement), I was still contemplating what I should do. Since I ran on Monday I thought maybe I would just lift. Not that lifting is necessarily easier than running, but sometimes it SOUNDS easier. I was also thinking about getting in a run though since I committed to that whole 3 runs per week thing. I went to the locker room and changed and literally as I was walking out the door of the locker room into the gym I decided I would do a HIIT running workout. A HIIT workout is a High Intensity Interval Training run. Essentially it's a good speed workout, it works out your cardio in a way that a normal run can't. It helps to build some of those fast twitch muscles and helps you to become a faster runner over time. Here's the HIIT I made up for myself:

0:00 - 1:50 at Speed 6
1:50 - 3:00 at Speed 10

I did that rotation 10 times for a total of 30 minutes and finished up 2 additional minutes to reach 4 miles in 32:05.

Pace: 8:00/miles

Now wasn't I JUST talking about 8 minute miles? I don't really count a HIIT as a normal paced run, but it still felt great to see the numbers crunch together that way. Run Success. It's interesting too to see that not only do you burn more WHILE working out in a HIIT workout, but for a long time after your workout too. I can vouch for that seeing as I was famished for the rest of the day and tried to eat every food item that crossed my path yesterday :)

On another note I'm in the process of applying to be a Milk Donor. Too much information? I don't really care. I'm a mom and I'm breast feeding my baby. It's an awesome thing. Yadda yadda yadda. And anyway - I really want to be able to donate for babies that are born prematurely. When babies are born too soon their moms can't produce milk yet. The BEST thing for the survival of a premature baby is human milk. So yeah I'm going through the quite complicated and time consuming process of becoming a donor. I feel good about it. I went into preterm labor at 25 weeks and so I know the fear of having a baby too soon. I would have given anything at that time to have every chance possible for K to survive and thrive. I want to be able to give that chance to other moms who aren't as lucky as I am. I made it full term - in fact I went 4 days over my due date - and delivered a healthy, happy, amazing little dude. I'm excited to be able to work with a program in MN to give some of those babies born early a better shot at a healthy, happy life.

Other than that - nothing too new to report. I'm working on planning a baby shower for my sister in law who is due in March. That's exciting! I have a girl's happy hour on Thursday. My husband and I have dinner with my brother and his wife on Friday. We are going to the Home and Holiday show on Saturday afternoon with my brother in law and sister in law and then finally dinner with my best friend for her birthday on Sunday night. An eventful week to come!

Goals?

One of the primary reasons I started this blog was to have to hold myself accountable to some type of running goals. After K was born and I was able to start running again, my first running goal was to run 3 times a week. A run would have to be at least 3 miles long in order to count, but other than that the goal had no other "rules" attached to it. It certainly was motivation on quite a few Sundays to get that 3rd run in. And go figure - the week I started my blog is the first week since K was 4 weeks old that I did NOT run 3 times. Running Goal Fail. I was so tired on Sunday after a really tough sleep weekend with K being up a TON in the middle of the night and a yard full of 18 big bags of leaves. I mean inserting piles of leaves into that many bags can make a girl tired. Good thing I didn't have to RAKE any of the leaves (insert raking expert husband). And well... instead of running on Sunday I dragged my husband to Pizza Luce for a pint of Surly Furious. Sometimes a running mama just needs a beer.

So perhaps it's the perfect time to recommit to that goal. To say out loud to all my readers (even though there are likely only 3 of you out there) that I am RE-committing to running 3 times per week. My other running goal is to run 8 minute miles. I'll slowly increase my speed over the coming weeks and try to get in some solid runs at an 8:00 pace.

Monday's run was good. A far cry from the pain and horror that I endured on Thursday's run. I felt good. I was BREATHING instead of wheezing. I was gliding instead of clomping.

Distance: 4.5 miles
Time: 37:07
Pace: 8:15/mile

Now I want to reiterate that I'm on a treadmill. So they aren't really, truly 8:15/miles. But for the purpose of winter training all I can do is improve the pace on the treadmill and I'll deal with my outdoor pace come spring time.

So here I've gone and said it out loud. Ladies and gentleman - we have some running goals!

Work has been crazy busy - so working out during lunch at work is becoming increasingly more difficult. Which is fine. I love my job and I like being busy. It's just hard to work out a lot when you have a BABY! Life is good. We have some great plans this week that I'm looking forward to. I'll try to pop on and tell you a little about my week. Before I go I'll leave you with this recipe - which we made yesterday. I'm not necessarily suggesting this recipe because it blew my mind. Because it didn't. But it's healthy, and it was easy and with a little salt added on the plate I really liked it. We tossed the ingredients into the slow cooker and when we got home it was done. I love meals that work like that!



http://blog.naturebox.com/post/65567225991/slow-cooker-barley-chickpea-risotto

One of those runs

Do you ever have one of those runs - where you hit the pavement (or the treadmill) and it just feels really GREAT!?!? Your breathing is right on. Your legs feel great. You surprise yourself with your pace and add on an extra mile at the end.

It's those days that make you get out of the shower thinking I'm going to sign up for a Turkey Trot 10K! I'm going to PR my next race. I'm in such great shape!!

Last week, Thursday's run was NOT one of those runs. Thursday's run was the antithesis of that run. I don't know if it was because of how sore my quads were from the deep squats I did on Tuesday - clearly indicating that I'm not doing squats enough! Or if it was because I was really tired from being up with an adorable and very awake baby for a lot of the night. But Thursday's run was horrible. As in horrendous. As in I couldn't find a breathing rhythm that wasn't loud to my treadmill neighbors. I couldn't get the nasty stitch out of the right side of my guts for the. entire. run. My legs hurt that whole time. I mean normally you can run that lactic acid out in the first mile. But on Thursday's run? NOOOooooo!!! That did NOT happen. It was everything I had both physically and mentally to clock in my 4 miles. It was one of those horrible run days. I know we all have them. It's the kind of run that makes you question - am I really in that great of shape? Ha! But we have those runs and we move on, cringing inside hoping we never have one of those days on a race day. :)

On a happier note - let me tell you a little about my Wednesday. My husband and I had baby K almost 4 months ago now. Time is flying! When I came back to work, I missed my little dude SO MUCH. I don't want to be a stay at home mom, but I felt like working full time wasn't giving me enough time with him. Those daycare ladies, as amazing as they are, were getting all of those amazing little man smiles. And I felt like I was missing out on quality time with the newest, most important person in my life. So my husband and I talked and we agreed that I could take a 10% pay cut at work and start taking every other Wednesday off to spend time with K as he grows up. I was so happy that we were in a financial situation that this pay cut was possible and that my husband was so supportive of the idea when I brought it up. In fact he pretty much told me it was something I needed to do, both for me and for K. Anyway - so this week was one of those week's where I get to hang with my dude, and he was all smiles, all day.

We woke up and hung out around the house. I got a ton done - laundry, dishes, etc. and we played together.

Then we loaded up and headed to Target and to Jimmy Johns for some lunch. I was picking up lunch for me, but also for my best friend and her husband who just had their baby 3 weeks ago. I was in serious need of some time with that adorable baby! We headed over to hang out, just a couple of new moms, hanging with our adorable babies. I can't get enough of little E - she's perfect and amazing and so dang cute. 

We had a great day hanging out with my friend and then we headed home. K fell asleep on the ride home so I took the opportunity when we got home to make a batch of Banana Oat muffins - dairy free version since K has been having issues with dairy since he's been born and so I can't really eat it for the time being. Maybe I'll post the recipe, but it's pretty dang healthy and probably most people don't eat quite like that :) Anyway - muffins in the oven, I made a Merry Christmas banner because I can't WAIT to decorate for Christmas this year, even though I'll force myself to wait until after Thanksgiving. (maybe). Then I started putting up that plastic window insulator. If you are from MN you know what I mean. Our living room window is a little drafty and that's where K's exersaucer is so I wanted to get that up. It was a super productive day and I loved all the time with my dude. 

On Friday - we headed to Winona for my Uncle's wedding. It was great to be back at my Alma Mater and to see those two be able to get married. Friday night K did NOT sleep at the hotel - not as in didn't sleep well at the hotel - as in - DID NOT SLEEP. I think we got about 4.5 hours of total sleep. Blech. It was a tough night. Saturday was tough just because I was so pooped. Passed out on the couch at 9pm with my hip all twisted but apparently didn't care and didn't wake up in pain, until an hour later and I was so sore I could barely walk. So yeah, I guess I was tired. Ha. Had a decent night's sleep on Saturday and had a wonderful Sunday raking leaves in the sun with my husband. :)

Now it's time for a new week and I'm ready. I have some running goals this week and I'm hoping to get in some good ones that are not reminiscent of Thursdays slog run. 

Work Workout and Some Eats

For Tuesday's workout I went to the gym that is in my work building. It's in the basement. There are no windows. It's small. But it does the trick - there are some treadmills, weights, machines. Everything you really need to get a workout in. I'm not complaining because I feel super lucky to have the option to workout at lunch at work.

I tend to lift in a circuit fashion - which means I do 3 different exercises in a row without stopping in between. It allows one muscle group to rest for the next set on that muscle group while working on another one so you get a little cardio action in. 

My workout - 

Side Hypers - set of 15 with a 10 lb weight

Deep Squats - set of 15 with a 10 lb weight

Bicep Curls - set of 15 with two 15 lb dumbells

Repeat this circuit 3 times

Deep Dips - set of 15

Plank - 1 minute

Chest Flies - set of 15

Repeat this circuit 3 times

Elevated sit ups - set of 15

Lunges - 10 on each side with a 10 lb weight

Repeat this circuit 3 times

It was a great workout and I'm still feeling it in my legs today.

After my workout I heated up the soup I brought for a lunch. An amazing Thai Coconut Red Curry soup I made over the weekend. 

Tuesday night we cooked up a new recipe I found in this month's Cooking Light magazine: 

Beef Tenderloin, Swiss Chard, and Caramelized Fennel Tacos

We cut up the fennel and onions and cooked them in a little olive oil, salt and pepper:

Then we cooked up the Beef which we covered with Coriander, White Pepper, Black Pepper and Red Pepper. Delish!

We squeezed some lemon over some swiss chard and grilled some corn tortillas. The result was really delicious. We paired our tacos with a glass of Excelsior Brewing's Pale Ale that we had a growler of. 

It was a great night and K was full of smiles all night too. 

I'm off to the gym for a run this afternoon, so I'll catch up again soon. Last night K started rolling onto his stomach while swaddled, so we can't swaddle him anymore. That means a few nights (at least) of little sleep for this mama (and his dad too). I'm sure I'll detail that in my next post, along with what I did on Wednesday. I have every other Wednesday off from work to spend with my kiddo, so I'll be sure to share on here what we find to do on those really great days together. 

What's your favorite winter workout?