Runnin' on Empty

Last week I was a complete slacker with my working out at the beginning of the week thanks to a St. Patty's Day party at our house on Saturday night, which inevitiably took me days to recover from.  Damn that keg of Dogfish Head.  So my brilliant self decided to make up for it at the end of the week, and now my legs are officially dead tired.  Here's my workout schedule from last week.

Sunday- recovering from Saturday night

Monday- still recovering

Tuesday - ?still recovering....or just lazy

Wednesday- run 4 miles with Mike and Daisy, and 1 hour body pump.  My half-ass attempt to stick with my training schedule went like this: 
Schedule: jog 15 minutes, then run 1 mile at "push it" pace, jog for 2 minutes; repeat speedy mile/recovery combo for total of 3 times, then jog 15 minutes. 
My actual workout looked like this:  Jog 5 minutes; fast mile/recovery combo x2 (we couldn't possibly drag our asses for a third fast mile), then jog until we reached our 4 mile goal.  Blah.  Not what I was hoping for.

Thursday - slackin' again

Friday- Run 5 miles with Mike and Daisy.  Again, couldn't maintain the schedule. 
Schedule: Jog 15 minutes, then run at the fastest pace you can maintain for 4 miles, then jog for 15 minutes
Actual: Jog 5 minutes, attempted to keep decent pace for 2 miles, then couldn't even trick myself into believing we were still keeping up any sort of "fast pace" anymore as I drug myself through the last 2+ miles.  My legs felt like lead and i was literally not sure if I could complete this 5 mile run.  What is wrong with me this week???  Let me just rant for a minute.  First of all, I like this training plan that I'm working with, but seriously, jog 15 min at the beginning and 15 min at the end?  Thats's a full half hour... of just warm up and cool down.  Puh-lease.  Not gonna happen.  It's hard enough for me to just get the workout in; I'm not about to throw in an extra half hour of warm up/cool down.  Which brings me to my next point....  Now I'm sore.  Lack of warm up/cool down, you say?  Don't get me started.  Moving on.


Saturday- Thought maybe I'd redeem myself and pound out a nice, strong 8 miler.  Never mind that I haven't run 8 miles in one clip in literally a year.  No problem, right?  Wroooong, oh so wrong.  My eight miles of misery looked something like this: 

Started out with Daisy in the neighborhood and all is well. 

About a mile and a half later we arrive at the Greenway where Daisy decides it's a free for all.  She's pulling me in every direction.  It's hot and she won't drink from my water bottle (P.S. coming from a girl who never carries a water bottle...Damn, those things get heavy when you're carrying them for 8 miles!). 

I decide I'm gonna let her get a drink from the creek. 

She notices that we're going in that direction and flies like a bat out of hell, which causes me to have to make a split second decision:  face plant into the creek or...let go of the leash.  Sigh, I picked the latter.

She proceeds to go tearing around with her leash flapping behind her in the creek/mud.  Does she come when I call her?  Of course not; this is all a fun game.  I'm not laughing.  In fact, I'm tempted to just keep running at this point and leave her to her games.  But alas, I call Mike in a rage telling him to come and get HIS dog, because she's a nuisance and an embarassment...and a muddy mess. 

So I manage to step on her leash as she's flying past me and grab her to start heading back to the beginning of the Greenway where Mike will pick her up. 

She conveniently picks this time to shake her mud all over me.  Thanks dog, that just added to the delightful feelings I have toward you at this moment. 

We head back, and once Mike is in view I promptly hand over our wet, muddy, piss ant of a dog and proceed on my way.  I am only 3.5 miles in at this point, mind you. 

As soon as Mike and Daisy are out of sight I have to run up a long, steep hill.  I huff and puff, and shuffle my way to the top of that hill (looking like an 80 year old lady at this point...and not even caring). 

Jog another few minutes, and once my Nike plus lady says I've completed 5 miles I stop and walk for a minute to have my Gu.  Oh, did I say a minute?  Oops, that was the plan, not reality.  Walked for a good 5 minutes while I ate my Gu and drank way too much water.  Yay me.  I did feel better after the Gu though.  Is it all in my head that those Gu things work?  Perhaps, but it helped nonetheless. 

So I powered through miles 6 and 7 ("powered through" with times of 10:10 and 10:30.  Ha! I told you it was rough!) 

Slugged out the last mile and I am done.  An hour and 35 minutes later.  What a joke. 

So there you have it.  My workout week.  A sad state of affairs if I do say so myself.  Blah.  Then yesterday I did an hour of body pump followed by an hour of zumba.  If only there was a video camera...but thank goodness there wasn't.  Me doing salsa, hip hop, etc, was a sight for sore eyes I'm sure.  But I did it with a friend and it was our first time, so we just had fun with it.  I would try zumba again.  It's pretty much just dancing around to fun music, and it's a different (albeit, amusing) way to get your cardio in. 

Now it's Monday, and my knees are screaming "Give us a break!!".  They are definitely sore, so I'm going to be smart and just rest and ice today.  That's hard to do when you have a "training plan" that you're trying to follow.  I'm one of those people that is do or die with the training plans.  I do it if I'm sick or tired or sore.  And I think after all these years I've finally learned that that is not the way to train.  I need to listen to my body and what my body is telling me.  Mine is politely telling me (or, like I said, screaming at me) to lay off the working out for a day.  So for once in my life, I'm going to listen.  Training plan be damned, my body has it's own plan!

Here we go again...

Alright, so in my first entries I mentioned (or perhaps droned on and on about) my questionable fertility issues, and by the end of 2009 that was a big stressor for me.  Then Mike and I took a break for these last few months, which I knew was neccessary to keep me sane.  I feel soooo much better about the whole thing now than I did then, and we are at a place where we are going to start trying again.  I didn't want to be pregnant and due right around my sister's wedding, so we decided to take the winter "off" from trying.  Well, now spring has sprung... 

I had an appointment with a new ob/gyn today, which I booked as my yearly exam.  Well, it hasn't been a year since my last one, so insurance wouldn't cover that.  Therefore we changed the name of the appointment to...fertility consult.  Scary.  I thought I would just pop in for my appointment and then casually mention that we were trying to get pregnant and see if the doc had any tips.  Not so much.  No exam...just a "fertility consult".  For some reason those words made me so nervous as I was sitting in the exam room waiting for the doctor.  But it all worked out fine.  I really liked this doctor because she was so easy to talk to.  I told her that we had tried for about 7 months without success and she gave me some valuable advice and info.

Number one goal for me is: don't stress!  That was a big problem last time, which I know.  She recommended not taking ovulation tests and making it such a chore.  Just relax, listen to your body and enjoy the process.  So that is what I'm going to do.  No, really, I am.  Also, after this next half marathon, I'm gonna cut back on my running mileage, because that may be affecting my ovulation.  My frequent switching between night and day shift at work probably affects it too, but there is not a whole lot that I can do about that except try to sign up for more day shifts.  Before I left the office I also got blood drawn for rubella titers, thyroid levels, and prolactin levels.  My cycle isn't entirely regular (anywhere from 25-36 days), so they wanted to check my levels to see if there is a reason for my slight irregularity.  She also mentioned that with my longer cycles of 35 days I probably didn't ovulate at all those months, which I didn't know.   She then said that even if I did ovulate on some of those months, the egg was probably pretty puny and not likely to get fertilized.  Probably 1/3 of my cycles are about 35 days, and if I don't ovulate in those cycles, then my chances of getting pregnant were smaller than I thought.   Sounds scary when I write that, but oddly this info comforts me.  Because I know what I can do to try to fix it.  Decrease stress, decrease running mileage, more consistent schedule...  So I am excited to try all of these things and see where we end up. 

So we'll see.  But all in all I truly feel a lot better about the whole thing now than I did three months ago.  My doc told me to just relax for the next six months while trying and if I'm still not pregnant, then I'll go back and talk to her again and go from there.  We have every reason to believe there is no problem though.  Mike and I are both healthy and young, and we have no family history of infertility or disease.  So, here we go again... but this time I'm determined to enjoy the ride!

Florida....Sun?

I got back last week from my annual trip to the east coast of Florida to visit my grandparents, and it was wonderful and relaxing, as always.  It was also not great weather.....as always.  I know this year the weather in Florida has been unusually cold, but it's nothing new for my mom and I.  We always joke that the bad weather down there waits for us to get there.  They often get a "cold snap" or it rains (or both!) when we go down to visit.  It used to be so annoying, but now we just laugh about it.  We have fun down there no matter what, and now we say if it happens to be good weather, then that's just an added bonus.  We are in Florida, hanging out with family, and not working...that's what we came for, and that's what matter the most; not the weather.  Here are some shots from our trip.

The view from my grandparent's balcony (note the shuffleboard at the bottom...love it!)

The four of us at Animal Kingdom  (all wearing coats...we are in Florida for crying out loud!)

Loved the gorillas!

How beautiful!

They had this new Mt. Everest "roller coaster" that was definitely fun!  Nothing crazy as far as roller coasters go, but I liked it....and Mom tolerated it.

Like our shades?  Mom and I getting ready for the "Bug Eyed" 3D show

Yay!  We got one day out of the seven that we were there where it was warm enough to lay on the beach

We had a great trip all in all.  We watched the Olympics, visited with my Mom's Aunt and Uncle, went to Animal Kingdom, had some good seafood, went to the beach (even if only once), and mom and I worked out diligently.  Now this last one is nothing new for my mother (my sister and I affectionately call her the Workout Nazi), but as we all know it's a hit or miss for me.  Mom pointed out that last year I didn't work out with her at all in Florida.  Not once.  Well, this year I stepped it up a notch.  Truly, I feel so much better these days.  I'm running faster and feeling stronger and more energetic.  Here was our workout schedule for the week:

Thursday: Run 4 miles

Saturday: Ran 6 miles and 10 minute total body workout from a magazine

Sunday: Ran 30 minutes and did 100 crunches

Monday: Ran 4 miles with 4 30 second strides (pretty fast pace)

Tuesday: Fitness magazine strength exercises and ran the stairs at the condo

Wednesday: Ran 30 minutes with 2 miles at a quicker "race" pace (had a PR of 8:37 for one of the miles!)

Not bad huh?  And Mom did all of these workouts with me, which helps a lot.  The only day that we didn't work out was Friday, and that was because we were walking around Animal Kingdom all day.  I found a half-marathon plan in Fitness magazine that I liked and I'm going to try to stick with this plan as much as possible.  I want to try to get faster, and this plan incorporates speed work, which the previous training plan that I've used did not.  I am definitely faster than I've been since high school and that feels great! 

So another trip to Florida came to a close.  Mom and I had a great time, and hopefully some year soon my sis can come!  She is an accountant and can't take vacations during busy season, but she's trying to veer away from accounting and into photography, so someday we hope she'll join us for our annual trip to Florida!  Ta ta for now!