I just ran 9.5 miles, which means I left Eminem in my dust on the home stretch...my sister and I ran around the Glenmore Reservoir this morning and it was just over 15K. Yes, it took us over 2 hours, but it was a fantastic day, sunny and cool with the perfect breeze, and I'd never done it before. We stopped to look at herons, chipmunks, ladybugs and finches and weren't in a big hurry.
My sister, who has professional marathon training, was an excellent running partner and made us stop frequently to stretch at benches or wave our arms around like monkeys, or concentrate on breathing, none of which are things I ever do, so that was great to do. Hopefully I'm not as sore as usual tomorrow as a result. Oh, she also smiles and says hello to everyone we pass, so she's not just a better runner, she's a nicer person! I'm going to try to say hello to more runners on future runs and will DEFINITELY be doing the Glenmore loop again, it was beautiful!
Now I'm off to the Chinatown festival and Taste of Calgary...gotta refuel after such a long run!
Update: I ate EVERYTHING at Taste of Calgary, plus realized on Sunday that I had rubbed all the skin off my bellybutton. Eww...first running injury!
I guess this is the week that I'll be doing random 'cross training' in a variety of different 'sports'. Last night was lawn bowling. A very good friend is getting married today so last night she got both family and friends to brave the weather and have a lawn bowling/BBQ night. A great time was had by all.. though I can't imagine that the 8 lunges I did with my throws can account for any kind of training, though holding a new baby did seem to help the arm muscles! The beer hydration also really can't be considered as a training mechanism so I guess next week we'll have to go back to the more traditional training methods.. oh well it was fun while it lasted!
All that can be said for this morning's workout is that .. thank God we do the 30Day Shred Level 1 on Friday mornings, I don't think I could have handled much more!!
This morning I ran 5K on the treadmill on the speed interval setting. I toggled between 8.5KPH and 11.5KPH and finished in 32.18. Not my fastest 5K EVER, but it was still up there and I felt pretty good at the end! I ran my first half marathon last year but didn't keep up the training as well as I'd like to, so these are harder than they used to be. Now, remember my last post with the brief nutritional tutorial for runners? Well, yesterday was Miracle Day at Dairy Queen which means when you buy a Blizzard, you're not snarfing a tasty frozen treat, you're helping sick children!
We went over and tried out the new mini Blizzards, which are a PERFECT 6oz serving, you know, to help out the kids. I had checked nutritional info online before we went and chose the Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard (which I didn't know existed, I thought they used Reeses Pieces, which are delicious on their own but all waxy when added to ice cream and therefore not my favorite). The mini clocked in at a half decent 275 calories. I did a breakdown of these calories and they are as follows:
38g carbs
11g fat
6g protein
In other words, the breakdown was 69-20-11. An optimum runners diet should be roughly 60-20-20, so a Blizzard does go a bit over on carbs and under on protein, but is otherwise basically the perfect runners fuel. No wonder my run this morning was so decent! I was being fueled by a Dairy Queen Powerhouse!
You can't argue with science, folks. I'm adding a Blizzard mini into my diet at least twice a week until they take them away.
PS....Speaking of Blizzards I went to Cambodia last year and had a Large Blizzard, which was only slightly bigger that the North American Mini version. I think that nicely demonstrates why we're the most obese continent on the planet! Go Team!
So I'm not sure if mini-golf can be considered training but either way, it must be said that we had a fantastic time at our WestJet Vacations celebration party last night. Both Princess Felic and I spent a lot of the evening balancing 'calories out' with our workouts yesterday with 'calories in' aka chicken wings (chicken wing for Felic), Coors light and other appies to finish out the evening... gotta say 'calories in' might have a slight edge.
Back at the gym this am for day #2 of Dan the Man's workout. We were able to assess which exercises from Tuesday caused so much pain and just for the heck of it, did them all over again. No cardio as my snooze button was a little too nice to me this morning and didn't force me out of bed. Will make up tomorrow????...
