Chicago Marathon Training: Week 6 Recap

We are officially 1/3 of the way through training!!

Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 8.42.36 AM

Monday was my usual 45 minutes on the bike. I did some core strength training after but nothing too exciting.

I did double duty on Tuesday though, meeting up with the 5 at 5 crew in the morning and then with a local running store group in the evening.

The morning run was a double whammy of heat and humidity. Seriously, it was 5 in the freaking morning!! But I was still able to pull off negative splits and that made me really happy. Especially that last mile–8:49! I’ve been seeing a few 8s as of late and it’s making me do happy dances like whoa.

PhotoGrid_1436884955602

In the evening I was back at it for a quick 3 miler. And it was quick as my splits ended up being 9:40, 8:59, 8:48–again, those 8s!! 😀

It was Newton demo night and I tried on a pair of Kismets for this run. I actually liked them and am very much intrigued. Anyone run in Newtons? Tell me everything.

11745684_929127117151590_5847932776885626461_n

Wednesday morning found me doing some more core strength training and then I hit the track in the evening for some speed work.

It was Christmas in July and I wasn’t sure which direction on the track I should go….

15807_929557367108565_4378658356026478024_n

The plan called for 6x800s again and this time I was able to complete all of them with no allergy attack interruptions.

4:02, 4:05, 4:00, 3:59, 4:00, 3:58

I am very, very happy with these times.

I was starting to feel the fatigue of the double on Tuesday and the evening speed work on Wednesday that waking up for the 5 at 5 Thursday morning took all the energy and convincing…yet I somehow managed to crawl out of bed and get my butt on the road.

A friend (riding the struggle bus with me) and I decided we’d do 4 instead of 5 and it was the best decision ever. We decided to take it super easy too at a 10:26 average. Both of us had plans to run again later that evening, meeting up with the rest of our run club for that month’s Road Runner Adventure Run.

The theme was beach/pool:

I'm the one modestly trying to cover my coconuts ha!

I’m the one modestly trying to cover my coconuts ha!

We ran a little over 2 miles in our get up and rode the water slide again 😀

We didn’t win anything in the raffle but we had a blast nonetheless.

Friday was a major rest day. Two double runs in one week–I needed it, especially because

Saturday was Breakfast Burrito Day!!!

I was very close to reaching my #TeamRMHC charity goal so I decided to hold a fundraiser to get me over my goal amount. One of my friends in my run club had several ideas for me and ultimately I decided anything related to food would be best.

My run club has several hundred members in it, with about 80-100 really active ones. I posted on our Facebook page that I would be holding a burrito sale after our Saturday morning run and that I’d be taking pre-orders. Holy macaroni do people like their burritos!! I had 40 pre-orders on that post!!

I met up with them at 5 to see how far people were going (to gauge burrito delivery). Most were doing 8+ so I had plenty of time to get to burrito making.

My husband had ran 15 miles but started at crazy o’clock so he could help and my mom was manning the kitchen and together we cooked and rolled burritos. The tortillas were on the small side so we decided to make two smaller burritos for each order. In all, we ended making over 120 burritos!! We had a blast and kept saying how much fun this was lol!

My run club brought chairs and plopped themselves in the parking lot to eat their breakfast after their run and we ended up having a burrito tailgate party.

Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 8.23.27 AM

We raised over 400 dollars!!! Burrito sale success!!!

Since I was on burrito duty Saturday, I had to move my long run to Sunday. I had 15 on the schedule and knew I had to get an early start. I decided I’d meet up with my MRTT ladies and ran 3 miles to our meet up location. Then, with my buddy Jennifer @We’reRunningAMarathon?, I ran another 7. And finally, I ran a 5 mile route back home. It was an interesting run as I had several stops within, but I felt good the entire way and managed to stay in my 10:00/mile long run pace.

11751929_931243333606635_3765805646698417876_n

This was my biggest weekly mileage at 32.36. Luckily, I’m feeling pretty good and not fatigued with the increase in mileage…yet, ja! 🙂

How was your week? I hope you have a great Monday!! ❤ , helly

–How do you handle heat and/or humidity?
–Do you like doing two-a-day runs?
–Are you a breakfast burrito fan?

 

 

Got Swag? {link up!}

Happy Friday!!!

I’m linking up again with the DC Trifecta ladies Mar, Cynthia, and Courtney for their weekly Friday Five. This week’s theme: Race Swag. Awww yeah!!!!

I want to say I’m all about the swag but I’m not lol! I just like a good race and if they give a medal or shirt, extra bonus. That being said, I’ve run some races with some pretty sweet swag and I’ll share them with you today 🙂

1. Hot Chocolate 15k

This is an expensive race, not gonna lie, but you’re paying for a great race and great swag. I’ve had a blast the past two years I’ve run the race and have actually used the jackets they’ve given. Often times, we get a shirt and it becomes lost in the dark corners of our closets, but the jackets the Hot Chocolate race gives out are of good quality and stylish–you want to use it. Plus, it’s cool being out and about and seeing someone else wearing it. I always give and get a smile when I see people with their jackets on 🙂

IMG_20150717_083707

In addition to the jacket, you get a cup of hot chocolate and treats AND a medal!

Post race meal

Post race meal

20141207_114813

Unfortunately, it’s not edible.

2. Aravaipa Trail Race

I love trail running and if you want to run a trail race, you have to do an Araivaipa one. For this swag, you get a shirt (again, another one you can actually use) and a beer cup. No medal, but I do use that cup pretty often 😀

IMG_20150717_083115

For overall winners, you still don’t get a medal. You get a more unique award that differs each race. This is the hardware from badass Run EMZ who placed 1st female overall in a 100 miler (yeah, you read that right):

Screenshot_2015-07-17-08-08-42-1

Check her insta.

3. Flying Pig Marathon & 1/2 Marathon

This was seriously THE funnest race I’ve run. It didn’t produce my fastest time at all but it was the fastest in that time was a-flying!

The swag for this race lives up to the hype of the race itself. Each year it’s something different and this year I got hooked up with a one shoulder bag pack–very functional and useful, a race shirt (that is very stylish and wearable), a poster of the race, and a finisher’s medal.

20150503_192732

IMG_20150504_154318

My Flying Pig Medal.

At the end of the race, there’s a buffet as you leave the finisher’s area. I’m not kidding. A BUFFET. They have a chip table with different types of chips, a fruit table, a cereal bar table, a soup kitchen!, a candy table–I mean, you don’t have enough hands for all the food they give out at the end.

Probably one of my favorite races ever and I wish I wasn’t so far away so I could do it every year.

4. Marine Corps Marathon

Love. This. Marathon.

First, you get your race swag from a Marine.

Cheesin' real hard

Cheesin’ real hard

Second, I really enjoyed the Expo and they offered tons of items race related at affordable prices. Yeah, this happened.

20141024_171818

This pretty much means you spent too much money.

A lot of people weren’t thrilled with the long sleeved given to us (I actually didn’t mind it. It looked Marine-ish which is what I’d expect from the Marine Corps Marathon). But I couldn’t help myself get another piece to add to my MCM wardrobe.

Taking my new jacket for a stroll by the White House--nbd.

Taking my new jacket for a stroll by the White House–nbd.

And then of course, the medal.

Best. Medal. Ever.

So beautiful.

5. Phoenix Marathon

Their medals are legit. It is seriously the most awesomest medal in my rack — and it was my first marathon so there’s that too ja!!

Seriously, how beautiful is this medal??

Seriously, how beautiful is this medal??

I didn’t finish 2015’s marathon (ugh.) but the race shirt they gave is still the best one I’ve gotten from a race–a racerback and good quality material. However, I’m always reluctant to wear it (because I didn’t finish the race– btw, I hate typing that) but my running friends tell me to heck with it, I trained for that marathon and ran half of it so wear it with pride. It really is a nice shirt.

IMG_20150717_083132

There you have it! I hope everyone has a great weekend!! Who’s racing? Make sure to share your swag on social media 😀 ❤ , helly

–What’s your favorite race swag? Did the swag live up to the race?

–Any races with sub-par swag items?

Mid-Week Musings: Mental Toughness, Making Goals Public, and Another Convo on Shakes

Hi everybody!!! I hope everyone is having a great week so far.

The time is narrowing down to when I’ll return to work and I’ve been trying my hardest to take advantage of what’s left of my summer by running as much as I can (but smartly) and reading all the blogs 🙂

There are so many good blogs out there (you can check out some that I follow ^^^) but it’s tough setting aside time to keep up with reading and commenting. I usually try to limit myself to 5 different ones a day or else hours will have gone by without me realizing lol!

Mental Toughness

Anyway, I’ve been keeping notes on ideas for blog posts and one of them I’ve been wanting to talk about is increasing/coping with pain tolerance. Funny that yesterday I was on twitter and caught Amber from PB&PRs re-tweet on an article written by VegaTeam (more on them later) titled, How To Overcome Three Top Mental Challenges In Marathon Training. It is a very well-written article that talks about dealing with Pain, Intensity, and Fear, three things I know I need help on.

The article first talks about how pain is functional or non-functional. When it’s the latter, obviously the runner should stop to prevent injury. But the article talks about how when it’s the former type of pain, we can use it and control it however we’d like. Ultimately, we decide how we want to interpret functional pain.

“The defeatist mindset interprets pain to mean this sucks, I obviously didn’t train hard enough and now I’ll never achieve my goal. The competitive mindset, on the other hand, interprets pain to mean my body is talking to me to either let me know I need to adjust some aspect of my activity or dig deep for that extra motivation to power through. Once pain becomes less of an enemy and more of an ally, you can use imagery (A.K.A. visualization) to power through.”

The second topic on the list is understanding intensity. Recently, Rae at Darlin’ Rae talked about how important it is for us to take our “easy” runs seriously and I thought about her words while reading the article. The article emphasize listening to our body cues and using that as a guide to determine intensity. I dig.

Finally, the article addresses coping with fear. This is a big one for me along with the first, pain. I like that article acknowledges fear as a real thing and not something easy you can just ignore. The article does state however, that like pain, it is something we can control and offers suggestions on how to do it.

1.) When negative thoughts creep in, review past accomplishments
2.) Turn fear into challenges
3.) Feel your fears but do it anyway

Check out the article for more details on the above. It’s a good short read.

Publicizing Your Goals

My buddy at A Fast Paced Life recently wrote about the disadvantages of announcing your goals. This immediately sparked my interest as you usually associate announcing your goal as brave and conducive to achieving said goal.

But Cardamom makes some good points.

The researchers postulated that when people make their goals public, they receive praise and accolades just for setting those goals. Because they already received the reward (i.e., praise, attention), there is less incentive to fulfill the goal. Attention given to your public goal brings a premature sense of having already accomplished the goal by having your identity as a member of the group affirmed by other people.

I nodded my head reading this thinking yeah, that does happen. But at the same time, I think that how important the goal is to the person, finalizing it–making it come to life, is a huge factor in how easily they are affected by premature praise. Some people aren’t comfortable with praise unless they know they deserve it.

Very interesting article and topic, and I’d love to know your thoughts. Make sure you read her full article here.

The Shake Debate

Finally, last Friday I wrote about a few things I would never in Hell-y Land try, one of them being shakes (i.e. Herbal Life, Shakeology, Advocare, Plexus, etc.). For the most part, people agreed that the abundance of these companies that promote shakes is a little exasperating (like one commenter on another blog said, there’s a reason it’s a multi-million dollar industry), yet there were some who were offended that these companies they like and endorse get bad reps.

I don’t know the details of every single product, one person was offended that I associated their company solely with shakes (they offer pills and supplements as well). What I do know and what I dislike, is that there are a lot of people who think that the only way they can get healthy, get faster, get thinner, get whatever is by spending a lot of money on something they might not even need.

I know quite a few people who really like some of these companies, who promote them, who use them in their daily life and have noticed positive changes. I have a friend who works for Isagenix in one of their main offices. I have multiple friends who are Herbal Life and Beachbody coaches. In fact, I stalk follow Robin @KneadToCook who is a Vega Sport ambassador. She’s so unlike me in many ways. She’s really fast, she eats really, really healthy (she’s vegan), and she swears by Vega Sport, a clean, plant-based, natural nutrition system. Her recipes using the product seriously make me salivate.

These friends are great people who I really care about and I don’t judge them on what they believe truly works for them. I just don’t think people can expect others to readily accept something they’ve never been comfortable with or are not ready to try. I can respect other’s opinions on their beliefs in a product no matter how much I might disagree, I’d hope they’d respect my viewpoint in return.

So there you have it, I didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers with my anti-shakes post last week. I honestly respect those who use them, endorse them, swear by them. Right now, it’s just not for me. Maybe that will change in the future as I keep seeing Robin’s Instagram pictures of her food, and maybe it won’t (because you all know how much I looove cooking–except not!) 😀

Have a great week friends!! We’re getting closer and closer to TGIF! ❤ , helly

–Do you struggle with mental toughness while running?
–Are you comfortable publicizing your goals?
–Thoughts on the shake debate?