Here are a few of my favourite things from this past week!

…Chloe’s latest trick is balancing a treat on her nose! So proud of her. She can balance it for about 15 seconds too!

…my wedding shoes arrived the other day! After going shopping last weekend with my bridesmaid Jen and hitting up four different shoe stores we couldn’t find yellow shoes ANYWHERE. So I ordered these off amazon and they were in within a few days. LOVE them! They are the Nina Culver Bridal Pumps in yellow and they are really cute and comfortable with a nice low heel!

…I’m loving my tiger tail this week. My calves have been really, really tight lately and this is the only thing I’ve found that gets nice and deep into the smaller muscles like my calves. I’ve been trying to roll with it for about 10 minutes every night.

…I tried Danica’s hair curling with a straightener trick this weekend and I really like how it turned out. My hair is super straight so it ended up being more wavy than anything but still a fun, and different, look from the same ole’ same ole’ I’ve been doing lately (see profile pic in top left of this blog for a picture of that).

And finally, It’s Friday! How can that not be a favourite?

This weekend I have 16 km (10 miles) on deck on what I’ve heard is going to be a VERY hilly route, possibly snowboarding all day tomorrow and some reading and video-chatting with faraway friends planned. Should be a good one!

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Questions of the day: What are your favourite things from this past week? What are you doing this weekend?

Lately my relationship with food hasn’t been great. I started taking pictures of my food last fall in order to be more aware of what I was putting in my mouth and when that wasn’t working anymore I started tracking using My Fitness Pal again. But tracking doesn’t work for me like it used to when I first lost weight four years ago now. I find that if I go over my calories, even by a little bit, I use it as an excuse to totally blow my eating for the day. I’ve fallen into the trend of binge eating more often than not recently and gone to bed with more than a few tummy aches from overeating in the last month.

Yes, I know better than to do that and I’m not sure why I’ve been doing it lately.

So I think I’m going to go back to the whole intuitive eating thing and maybe just track my calories on long run days to make sure I’m getting enough calories and also not going crazy and eating *too* much because I ran for 2-3 hours (that is how I gained 6 pounds training for my first marathon!)

I still don’t have this whole relationship with food thing down pat, but I’m in a lot healthier place than I was a few years ago so I’m thankful for that.

Anyways, onto another WIAW post. These are pictures of yesterdays eats. I didn’t track through My Fitness Pal yesterday and just took these photo’s and felt like I ate a lot better than I have in days so maybe just doing a weekly WIAW is the key

First, check out how many containers I took to work with me yesterday!!!

Haha a little excessive maybe but lunch took up three containers on it’s own!

Breakfast: Coffee with half-and-half and baked banana oatmeal. Baked oatmeal has been my go-to breakfast lately because I throw it in the oven before I jump in the shower in the morning. Yesterday’s consisted of 1/2 cup oats, almond milk, 1/2 banana, 1 tbsp brown sugar and 1/8 cup cashews. All thrown together and baked for 25 minutes! Delicious!

Lunch: A not very attractive but extremely delicious homemade bean burrito bowl with spinach, tortilla chips, spanish rice, refried pinto beans, plain greek yogurt, guacamole and salsa. SO good. I also shared a large coca cola with my friend who I met for lunch and had a couple of her strawberries – unpictured

Afternoon Snack #1: Carrots and Hummus.

Afternoon Snack #2 (pre-run): greek yogurt, 1 tbsp “holy crap” breakfast cereal, frozen blueberries and 1 tbsp chocolate chips. Then more chocolate chips while I did the dishes. I’ve been eating WAY too many chocolate chips lately. See my long ramble above…

Dinner (post-run): Salad with goat cheese, onions, cucumber, beets, kalamata olives and lemon poppyseed dressing and chips with guacamole!

Exercise for the day: 4-mile / 6.5-km run

Drinks: Coffee, 2L + of water, 1/2 a large coca cola at lunch.

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What did you eat yesterday? If you pack your lunch for work how many containers do you usually have?

• Vancouver Marathon Training: Week 1
• Vancouver Marathon Training: Week 2
• Vancouver Marathon Training: Week 3

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Week four of training was really good running-wise and not-so-good cross-training wise which isn’t so good in general because I will get injured if I don’t put in some time for cross-training. Oh well, live and learn. I definitely plan to fit in more cross-training in week 5!

Monday – REST / Massage

I headed to the RMT on Monday evening and got my first massage of the training cycle. It was awesome and oh-so-painful at the same time. My legs, and especially my calves, were very tight. I also have something weird going on in the left side of my back and I’m going back tonight to get it worked out some more. I do deal with a fair amount of back pain but I always thought it was just from sitting at a desk all day! Hopefully another massage will help get some of those knots and tension out.

Tuesday – 3.8 mile / 6.0 km run and 15-minutes of strength training

We’ve been doing the same route every Tuesday night and we are still just keeping it easy while we build up a base. Eventually this run will turn into a tempo run but my coach told me the other night that we will continue doing the shorter route on Tuesday’s throughout training.

3.8 miles / 41:49 / 10:57 pace
6.0 km / 6:48 pace

I came home from the run on Tuesday night and headed up to our home gym to fit in 15-minutes of strength training. This was my first strength training workout in over a month and I admit I felt really weak. Going to try and add this in every Tuesday after my shorter run and then find one more day a week to ST.

I did the following circuit twice to ease back into it:

• Squats – 15 @ 30 lbs (bar)
• Chest press – 15 @ 15 lbs (dumbbells)
• Single Arm Dumbbell Row – 15 @ 15 lbs
• Tricep double arm extension with dumbbells – 15 @ 10 lbs
• Bicep curls – 15 @ 10 lbs
• Alternating lunges with dumbbells – 15 @ 10 lbs
• Lateral raises – 8 @ 7 lbs
• Front raises – 8 @ 7 lbs
• Sit-ups – 15 @ bodyweight

Wednesday – 6.0 mile / 9.65 km run

This was a good run other than my calves were REALLY tight. Maybe from the strength training the night before? I stopped to stretch them twice during the run and then rolled them out really good with my tiger tail when I got home.

6.0 miles / 1:04:53 / 10:49 pace
9.65 km / 6:43 pace

Thursday – REST

I listened to my body on Thursday and gave it the rest it was asking for.

Friday – 5.0 mile / 8.0 km run

This was my first run completely by myself in my four weeks of marathon training! It was nice to run by myself but also kind of weird since it was on the same route I usually run with my group or with friends. My legs felt really heavy on this run, I guess I’m not used to early morning runs anymore now that I run in the evenings with my group.

5.0 miles / 52:39 / 10:32 pace
8.0 km / 6:32 pace

Saturday – 10.2 mile / 16.5 km run

I had plans on Sunday that meant I wouldn’t be able to go on the run with my running group so I headed out Saturday with some of my other running friends. I started 20 minutes early and ran the 1.5 miles to meet them and then did an out-and-back route with them.

I snapped the above photo just as I was getting ready to start my run. It had snowed the whole night before and was a winter wonderland out there! It was pretty hard to run in the fresh snow and by the end of 10 miles my legs and hips were definitely feeling it. I wasn’t sore at all on Sunday though so I’ll take that as a good sign.

It’s funny because this 10 mile run took me almost the exact same time to do as my 12-mile training run when I was training for my sub-2 half a few months ago. So funny how much difference a new training goal and a few months can make in your pace I’m not sweating it though, I know I could get fast again if I wanted to and right now I’m focused on training for distance and endurance and much less focused on pace!

10.2 miles / 1:55:02 / 11:17 pace
16.5 km / 7:00 pace

Sunday – 40-minute power flow yoga practice

Did you guys notice that one thing that’s usually there is missing from my training this week? YOGA! I woke up Sunday morning desperately craving yoga but knew I wouldn’t be able to fit any studio classes into my schedule that day so I decided to bust out my mat and do a class at home in my living room.

I did one of my power flow yoga dvd’s right when I got out of bed and was dripping sweat from all the sun salutations even though it wasn’t a hot practice. At the end I laid in savasana for almost 15 minutes and it was a fabulous way to start my day!

Training Tally:

Miles/Km ran last week: 25.0 miles / 40.2 km

Training-to-date mileage: 84 miles / 135.2 km

Yoga: 40 minutes

Strength Training: 15 minutes

Cycling/Spinning : 0

Thoughts:

Like I said, a great week for running but not so great on the cross-training front. I know that yoga helps me stay injury-free so I need to keep up my practice regularly while training.

However, all my runs did feel really good this week and I felt super strong which is an awesome sign as my mileage starts to increase! Happy to report there’s been no weird twinges or pains yet, other than the tight calves, so I’m hoping things stay that way and will continue booking massage or chiropractor appointments ever 4-8 weeks and rolling out daily with my tiger tail.

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Questions of the day: How did your week of training go? Do you do yoga at-home or in a studio?

I’m also looking for more Stay at Home mom’s to feature! I feature any and all careers, so if you think your career is “boring”, it probably isn’t and I would LOVE to feature you

Thanks!

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Did you guys know I’ve featured TWENTY-EIGHT different careers now? Wow!

Here are the last five careers I’ve featured and you can find ALL my career features HERE!

• Scientist
• Speech Language Pathologist
• Music Therapist
• History Professor
• Stay at Home Mom Feature II

Today I am featuring Holly from Scattered Words who is a Medical Secretary!

1. What is your official job title and what exactly does your job entail?

My official job title is “Medical Secretary” and I work in the medical department of an insurance company.  Claimants file injury claims with supporting medical documentation.  The medical consultants at my office review the documentation and compose reports, which they dictate for transcription.  95% of my job involves transcribing the medical reports and turning them into nicely formatted memos

2. How did you get into your field of work?

To be completely honest – “medical secretary” would never have made my Top 10 (or Top 100, for that matter!) list of Potential Future Careers.  My mother-in-law is a medical secretary – she knew her employers were hiring, she knew I was looking for a job – so she suggested I apply, even though I had no idea what I was applying for.  I did a typing test – I’m a ridiculously fast typist (thanks to my high school addiction to ICQ!) so I got the job, even though I had absolutely no experience in the medical field.  My employers paid for me to take an online medical terminology course and I got the rest of the training on the job.

Typically – you need a high school diploma supplemented with post-secondary education in secretarial training and office administration, certification in medical terminology and Dictaphone typing, computer courses in Microsoft Word, and a couple of years of medical secretarial experience with transcription.

3. Describe a typical day in your work life?

7:10-8:00 am – Processing.  This includes sending documents to scanning, printing letters and preparing envelopes for mailing, faxing anything that needs to be faxed, sorting documents into the appropriate folders on the computer (some of the doctors don’t know how to move things from one folder to another, so we do it for them!), reading and replying to e-mails, listening to voicemail messages, etc.

8:00-10:00 am – Transcription.

10:00-10:30 am – Coffee break.

10:30-12:00 pm – Transcription.

12:00-12:45 pm – Lunch.

12:45-3:00 pm – Transcription.

3:00-3:30 pm – Processing.

If there’s not much processing, that time is taken up with – you guessed it! – transcription.

Each transcription job has a length – ie 10 minutes, 27 seconds – and our supervisor keeps stats on each secretary.  We’re strongly encouraged to type at least 100 minutes/day (keeping in mind that it usually takes 20-30 minutes to type a 10 minute job).  That means if I’m typing slower than usual for whatever reason (usually it’s because I’m not used to the doctor I’m typing for, though a few years ago I did have stitches in my left index finger that caused me to slow down …) – I might not take a coffee break at all, and will probably take a shorter lunch break.  It can be a high pressure job at times – the doctors all want their reports right away! – but it’s usually not too stressful.  It’s definitely a job that stays at work – I never have to think about it once I’ve left the office!

4. What’s your least favourite thing about your job? What is your favourite thing about your job?

My least favourite thing about my job is the monotony.  I get to work, put on my headphones, and type, type, type!  If it’s really busy, sometimes I can go an entire day without actually speaking to anybody.  I’ve always had very people-oriented jobs so sometimes I really miss that interaction!

My favourite thing about my job is the doctors I work with.  A lot of them are older (70+) who have retired from their practices and offer their consulting services as a way to “stay sharp”, as they say.

Their jobs require them to do a lot of work on computers, but very few of them are even remotely computer-savvy – so I’m always showing someone how to send an e-mail, how to refill the paper in the printer, or how to use Google.  (I had one doctor who was so frustrated the website he needed wouldn’t work – only to discover he hadn’t hit Enter.)  It makes for a lot of laughs!  And they’re so grateful when I’m able to solve their technical problems – it makes me feel like I’m a computer genius!

They also love to talk and tell stories – which means sometimes I’ll step into someone’s office with a quick question and leave half an hour later – usually without the answer I was looking for in the first place.

5. What is something about your job that surprises people?

I think some people are surprised by how much we have to know.  Of course we need to be familiar with terminology in fairly diverse medical language disciplines (orthopaedic surgery, general surgery, plastic surgery, radiology, ophthalmology, dentistry, chiropractics, psychiatry, neurology, etc.)  – but we also have to know how proper grammar and punctuation and each doctor’s personal preferences.  Some like the British spellings of words, some like American spelling, for example – and heaven forbid you use the wrong one!  We also have to be able to understand a lot of different accents and dialects (we have doctors from South Africa, Poland, England, Czech, China …) – and type everything quickly and accurately.

6. If you could describe your career in one word, what would that word be?

I racked my brain to try to come up with something more positive to describe my career, but “monotonous” is the only fitting word I can come up with – and that’s not really positive at all.  It’s a good job – and for the most part, I really enjoy it – but it’s not a career I see myself staying in, long-term.

***

I have to say Holly, my wrists hurt just from reading this!!

I often have to transcribe interview notes for my freelance work and since I’m not used to typing for long periods of time my hands and wrists get really sore! Same thing if I happen to have to type a long email or report at work. I do a lot of typing at work, but usually for short sporadic moments.

You must have strong hands and wrists!!

Question of the day: How much typing, if any, do you do at your job?

Last night I spent the evening sipping wine, catching up on my overflowing inbox and doing some reading all from the comfort of my couch.

One thing I promised myself when I started marathon training was that I would listen to my body and give it rest when it asked for rest. That’s why it’s been easier for me to plan out my weeks one at a time, so I can really assess how busy I am with other things – like social activities and work – during each week and then plan my workouts around those things.

Yesterday I had “5:15 PM – yoga?” in my planner. The question mark was there because I added it in as an afterthought since I took Monday as a rest day already this week. But yesterday morning I woke up feeling really, really tired. Like could barely drag myself out of bed tired. I continued to feel tired through most of the work day.

After work I headed out for my usual walk with Chloe and on-the-spot decided that I would walk an extra 10 minutes with Chloe rather than go to the 90 minute yoga class I’d been thinking about. I still got a little bit of movement in but it was definitely more of a rest day since my walks with Chloe are more like a leisurely stroll!

Oh, and then I planked before bed. 1:30 was REALLY hard for me. My ultimate goal is a 3:00 plank but I have a long ways to go.

It was obviously just what I needed because this morning I leapt (OK, leapt is a strong word but I wasn’t as tired as I usually am at 5:30 AM) out of bed for my 5-mile run!! It was my first run all by myself in my full four weeks of training, which felt a little weird to be honest. Especially since it was on the same route I usually run with a friend or my group. The last two weeks haven’t looked like what I thought they would training-wise but I’ve been listening to what my body needs and I think that’s most important!

Off to work I go. Happy Friday!

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Question of the day: Anyone else in training for a spring marathon or race and find your body is asking for more rest than you planned to give it? What is everyone up to this weekend?