Girl With The Red Hair

Friday Favourites

by MissAmber on February 3, 2012 · 30 comments

Aron does a Friday’s Favourite’s post every so often showing off her favourite things from the week and I’ve also seen them on a few other blogs I read. I thought I’d jump on board and do one this week as well since I don’t feel like I have a lot to say lately.

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!

143 out of 366

…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!

146 out of 366

…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).

Wavy hair

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?

{ 30 comments }

WIAW III

by MissAmber on February 1, 2012 · 22 comments

in series,WIAW

I’ve been meaning to talk about food for awhile on the blog. I haven’t wrote a proper follow-up to this post or this post and I’ve been meaning to (yes, even though it’s a year later!).

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?

{ 22 comments }

Vancouver Marathon Training: Week 4

by MissAmber on January 31, 2012 · 19 comments

in marathon training,running,Vancouver Marathon,weekly training recap

Training so far:

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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!

Screen shot 2012 01 29 at 9 06 19 AM

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

138 out of 366

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

142 out of 366

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.

YOGA at home

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?

{ 19 comments }

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