Weekly review

This week was only ok on the working out front.  I was babying my knee in the early part of the week so Monday was a rest day.  Tuesday I went on a 20 minute walk at work and Wednesday I went on a 20 minute walk with Mike in the evening.  Mike noticed that the sidewalks in our neighborhood our kind of slanted so I wonder if that's why it's more uncomfortable for me to run here?

Thursday, I ran on the treadmill after work.  For some reason, it was a horrible work out.  I felt like I had a hard time breathing and walked more than my planned 6/1 intervals :(

Friday, I went for another 20 minute walk in the morning.  Saturday morning I met up with some people from the running group at a local trail. The group had decided to continue meeting informally through the summer, which is great.  And I had a wonderful run!  I did buy a knee brace for my left leg and it really seemed to help, as did being on the trail instead of in my neighborhood and taking Claritin the night before.  We were on the Capital Crescent Trail in Bethesda and there's a neighborhood right off the trail that has cherry blossoms in bloom so we included a run in the neighborhood as part of our route.  It was a beautiful morning with perfect temperature, fun company, and great scenery.  As you can see below, I was able to keep the pace mostly consistent and I only had to take one walk break at around 25 minutes.

We also did a lot more walking on Saturday as we went downtown in the afternoon and visited the American History Museum. In addition to walking around the museum, we decided to walk to gallery place for dinner instead of taking the train as the metro looked so crowded.  My fitbit goal is 10,000 steps per day and I had more than 20,000 steps on Saturday.  I ended the week on Sunday with a strength training routine from Fitocracy.

So the week ended really well and I'm hoping to continue that momentum into this week.  I plan to do yoga on Monday, meet some people from the running group on Tuesday, run on Thursday, strength train on Friday, and run on Saturday.

I hope everyone had a good weekend!

Friday Five Things Making Me Happy

Yay, it's finally Friday!  I've had a long week so I'm extra happy this week that the weekend is almost here.  And of course, that means it's time for another Friday Five link up with Mar, Cynthia, and Courtney.

To continue with the happy Spring feelings, I'm going to talk about 5 things making me happy right now.

1.  The Cherry Blossoms are finally in full bloom and we're going to head into DC to see them tomorrow.  We have plans to go down to the Tidal Basin to see the Cherry Blossoms and take some photos, dinner reservations at a restaurant I've been wanting to try, and tickets for the Wizards game.  This is the first season in a long time that they're going to make the play-offs so it's an exciting year for them.

2. Speaking of photos, I'm glad that Spring is here and I'll have more opportunities to get out and about to indulge in one of my other hobbies, photography.  Hopefully I'll be able to get to the zoo soon since they have several adorable baby animals right now and they're a great photography subject :)


Photo from my last trip to the botanical garden in DC

3. My first 10k is coming up in June and I just started an 8 week training plan from Hal Higdon yesterday.  I'm looking forward to the training for a new race distance.

4.  I just joined Twitter!  Yes, I know I'm a bit behind the times but I've been finding a wealth of great information on there.  My user name is @Chaita_1 on twitter.

5.  My second race volunteer experience is coming up at the end of April.  I'll be volunteering at the post race water station at the Nike Women's Half Marathon in DC.  Let me know if you're going to be racing that one :) Also, Stephanie from Cat Lady Runs is hosting a blogger brunch the day before the race.  The information is available on her site if anyone else wants to meet up.

Ben's Run

Ben's Run is a local 5k race with a 1 mile option as well.  It is held in a friend's neighborhood and she asked me to do it with her.  Initially, I was going to decline just because I had the Piece of Cake 5k the weekend before.  But once I read the website, I had to do it.

Ben passed away at Children's National Medical Center after 6 years of battling Leukemia. The website has a very touching write up about Ben and his battle and the funds raised through the run go to benefit the Children's National Medical Center. The write up ends with the following paragraph:

"This race honors Ben’s amazing spirit, and the many other children who battle life-threatening illnesses every day.  Run or walk this race for Ben, and for the other heroic children out there.  Do it because they can’t."

All photos from Ben's Run website.

Well, after reading that I had to do the race.  And I am glad that I did.  This was a wonderful event with a great community feel and it was so well organized.  I was truly impressed. There were lots of families, kids, and dogs everywhere. This was the neighborhood where Ben grew up and the race started in the parking lot of the school where he attended elementary school.  I got the feeling that there were a lot of people who had actually know Ben and know his family.

I can't speak to the parking because I parked at my friend's house and we walked to the start as it was only a 5 minute walk. There was a lot of energy in the air. There was a clown, a bouncy castle for the kids, a silent auction, food trucks, and various other bits of entertainment.

The race itself ran through the streets of a hilly neighborhood.  It was a little congested at the beginning but cleared out quickly.  According to the website, there were more than 1100 participants and $65,000 raised.

There were people from the neighborhood out cheering, as well as students from local schools.  We saw cheerleaders, lacrosse players  and basketball players encouraging runners along the course. And there were plenty of volunteers with one water stop at the halfway point.

I was running with friends and we were doing 6/1 run walk intervals. My time was 1 minute slower than the Piece of Cake, but I was mostly just trying to enjoy myself at this one.  And Runkeeper seemed to think the course was a little long.

According to the race results, my time was 45:07 with an average pace of 14:32.

The finish line was also well organized.  There seemed to be plenty of water, juice, bananas, oranges and bagels. There was live music and the party continued on.  I would absolutely do this race again in the future.  I've already talked to friends about making this one a yearly tradition.

Baked potato bar

It's Tuesday and that means time for another Tasty Tuesday link up hosted by Lean Lena and Fairytales and Fitness. Thank you again for hosting!  Sunday we had about 8 people over at our house for dinner and wrestlemania. I'm not a wrestling fan but enjoy entertaining so I was agreeable with this plan :) The group had various dietary needs such as gluten free and vegetarian, so we figured some sort of fix-it-yourself option allowed for the most flexibility.

We decided on a baked potato bar with sweet potatoes and regular potatoes as well as veggie chili and various toppings.

First step was getting the potatoes baking.  We preheated the oven to 425 degrees.  While the oven was heating we scrubbed the potatoes, poked them with a fork, rubbed the outside with olive oil and some salt, and wrapped them in foil.  The wrapping in foil isn't necessary but we figured they'd stay warm longer that way since people may want to eat at different times. They went into the oven for 45 minutes. We took one out at that point to poke with a fork to see if it went through easily and since it didn't, we put the potatoes back in for another 15 minutes. At that point, we tested again and they were ready to go.

While the potatoes were baking, I made the veggie chili using this recipe from The Picky Eater blog. There was some chopping to start with, an onion and two bell peppers.

But it wasn't too much work after that.  Just sauté the veggies, and then add in the canned beans, canned tomatoes, veggie broth and seasonings.  This was a great recipe for veggie chili!  It had a really interesting depth of flavor.

Once it was time to serve dinner, we put out the foil wrapped potatoes (labeling which were sweet potatoes and which were regular) with the veggie chili in a crockpot to stay warm.  We also had cheese, sour cream, bacon, broccoli and green onions for people to use as toppings.

It was delicious and everyone seemed to enjoy the options. We also had beer and wine, with regular and gluten free cookies to end the evening. We had some chips, salsa, veggies and hummus out as snacks for people as they arrived before dinner was ready.  We had leftover chili for dinner today and I think I'll turn the leftover potatoes into a soup for dinner later this week.

Anyone have any recommendations for a good go-to for entertaining a small group?  I'd love to hear about it!

Weekly review

Time for another weekly review. I had a pretty good week. Monday started out as a rest day and Tuesday I ended up on the elliptical.

Wednesday I did a strength training routine from Fitocracy. Oddly, the routine I had been doing and planning to move up to the next level was gone. I guess they cycle out the options sometimes? So anyway, here is the new one I did instead.

Plus tricep dips and planks.

Thursday was another rest day (though I did get in a 20 minute walk with a colleague during lunch time). Friday was a run around my neighborhood in the afternoon since I was working from home that day. This run didn't go too well. I decided to do intervals of 6 minutes running to 1 minute walking. The first 2 running intervals went ok and I felt good. But then I started coughing and had a hard time catching my breath. I can see how the intervals slowed down when I look at my splits :( I finally gave up and just walked at the end. My left knee was also beginning to hurt. This worried me since I had a 5k on Saturday. But I stretched, foam rolled, and iced that evening and hoped for the best.

Well, I woke up feeling great on Saturday and my knee didn't hurt at all. I had also taken some allergy medicine so the coughing was gone. The race was in a friend's neighborhood so I went to their house early to hang out and we walked to the start together. I'll do a full review later but the race went great! I felt good the whole time, had no problems with either my breathing or my knee, and had fun running with friends.

So I'm not sure why the run on Friday was so bad. I think the breathing issue was due to the start of allergy season so I'll have to remember my medicine. And I think part of it may be a pacing problem. I still haven't figured this out but maybe I'm going out too quickly at the start when I'm on my own without other people to pace me. But I can't figure out why running around my neighborhood hurt my knee when running on the streets in my friend's neighborhood was fine. Is there that much of a different between concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets? Have any of you experienced this type of difference from one day to the next?

The rest of the weekend went pretty well. We saw the Captain America movie and had a great evening with friends over to watch wrestling on Sunday. I even enjoyed wrestling, mostly for the great costumes and campy story lines :) I hope everyone else had a great weekend too!

Friday five grab bag

Yay, it's finally Friday! For some reason this has seemed like a really long week. As usual, I'm linking up with the DC Trifecta (Mar, Courtney, and Cynthia) for the Friday Five.

Today is just a random grab bag of five things on my mind.

1 I love that it finally feels like Spring. There are daffodils in my yard! I'm looking forward to running a race tomorrow where I don't have to wear my jacket. And I'm going to spend some time this weekend clearing out the yard and planning my garden.

2. I'm not a wrestling fan but my husband is. And he's invited people over to watch a special wrestling thing on Sunday (I don't even know what it's called). But I love entertaining, so it works out. We're planning a baked potato bar with baked potatoes, baked sweet potatoes, veggie chilli and various toppings such as cheese, sour cream, and green onions.

Photo Mike texted me from the wrestling match he was at last week.

3. We're doing a fun wellness challenge at work where teams of 2 "walk to the beach." The way the challenge is set up is that they have calculated the number of miles to Key West and each team has to exercise that number of minutes in a 6 week period. The catch is that the weekly exercise minutes are based on the number of minutes logged by the person that exercised the least. So if my partner exercises 4 hours and I exercise 4 minutes, we can only log 4 minutes. It's motivating because you don't want to feel like the one holding your partner back! And we've been taking walks at lunch to get in some extra minutes. The mid-day walk is great to stave off the afternoon sleepies. And everyone that makes it to "the beach" gets entered into a raffle for prizes, which certainly doesn't hurt!

4. The one annoying thing about the challenge is that they specifically said you can't count strength training or yoga. Umm, what!?!  Building muscle and flexibility are just as important as cardio for a well rounded exercise regime. If walking (at any speed) counts, I don't see why yoga and strength training shouldn't count.  Plus, they didn't tell us that before we signed up for the challenge.

5. Lastly, I'm getting excited about some vacations we have coming up. We booked show tickets for our long weekend in Vegas and we've booked a hotel for our trip to Disney World for the Tower of Terror 10 miler. Yay for quick get aways :)

 

Port Orleans Riverside, where we stayed on our last trip to Disney World and where we'll stay again on this trip.

I hope everyone has a good weekend ahead of them!

Piece of Cake 5k

I did the Piece of Cake 5k this past Sunday. It was the goal race for the beginning running group that i had been part of since January. It is also the race MCRRC uses to celebrate their anniversary and hold their annual awards ceremony. There is a full brunch afterward, and of course, cake!

The race has always been a 10k in the past and this year was the first time they added the 5k option. It was at Seneca Creek State Park and I knew that the course was hilly because the MCRRC New Year's Day race was there too.

Sadly, it was cold, windy and rainy that morning.  I think that this affected the number of racers. Based on the results, there were 269 10k finishers and 69 5k finishers. So a very small race.  Which was good given the parking situation. Cars could not park on the grass because of hiw wet it was so it was difficult finding spots and there was a but of a walk to the start line even though I was there an hour early. However, the volunteers and park rangers did a great job about directing the parking and helping show us where to park.  

Registration was simple for me since I was already a club member and had my 2014 bib and chip, which I can use for all their low key races in the year. It looked like registration was very quick even for the people registering that morning.  The 10k started at 9am and the 5k 10 minutes afterward.

Registration tents.  Photos courtesy of MCRRC.  I love the free photo downloads.

I'd run the course just a few weeks earlier but it seemed so much harder this day. I assume that's because of the horrible weather. My hands and feet just felt numb after a while.  But I finished in 44:34 with a 14:21 per mile pace according to the official results.  This was 2 minutes slower than when I had done this same course 2 weeks earlier.

I turned it on a bit early and stopped it a bit late.

The course is usually a beautiful run on the roads in the state park with rolling hills and views of the lake and forest. 

But I couldn't think about anything but being done. The course is an out and back and the 10k course starts out the same as the 5k course. At one point, the 10 k runners turn right to keep going and the 5k runners turn left to return. It was very well marked with plenty of volunteers to make the directions clear. 

On the way back, I was running with the back of the pack for the 5k and the speedy 10k participants. There were lots of people cheering at the finish, which was nice.  They were mostly club members heading to the awards brunch, I assume.

Almost done!

After the race, I walked over to the tent where the brunch was being held.  The food was tasty, hot, and plentiful. I definitely appreciated it after the cold run. There were eggs, sausage, potatoes, pancakes, fruit, juice and coffee.  

However, there wasn't much warmth in the tent. I stayed through the beginning of the awards ceremony but left early because I was just getting colder and colder sitting there in my wet clothes. I even left before the cake.  I walked by the cake table on the way out and there were several cakes that all looked delicious.  It seemed like the cake would be plentiful too for those that stayed.

Overall, this was a really well organized race and the small numbers were kind of nice.  The full brunch afterward was great.  But the weather made it hard to fully enjoy.