Long runs and new shoes and creepy bears, oh my!

I finally found a USB cord so I could upload my photos from my iPod to my laptop, so I've been failing at blogging lately. Here's a brief round up of what I've been up to:

1.  Long runs and new shoes

I forgot how much I missed my early Saturday long runs.  As much as I hate getting up early on one of my days off, I love getting to see the city before everyone else (besides all the other crazies out doing the same thing).  My friend Martha is training for the Marine Corp Marathon, and she is adding miles to the Team 13 training runs, so the last 2 weekends a few of us joined and made the 6 and 7 mile runs into 10 and 11 milers.  These runs have been great, it's been cool and not humid that early in the morning so I can actually breathe.  For the 11 mile run I broke down and bought new shoes the day before since I pretty much wore my Ravennas down to the foam and they were causing me some serious calf pain (note for new runners, don't be too cheap with shoes, they make a huge difference).  It was nice running without pain and I'm sure everyone with me was glad that I wasn't whining! My new shoes are Mizuno Wave Inspire 7s.  So far so good!

I prefer eating Jelly Belly Sport beans to eat during long runs, but since they are available aaaaalll the way the way across town I've been trying various kinds of gummy stuff.  I found you get strange looks at Thornton's when you are buying Swedish Fish at 5:30 in the morning.

Creepy Bears and Wine Monkeys (if I had a band, this would be the name)

Driving home from the run on Saturday I came across this:

That would be a polar bear in a Sulley costume pointing the way to a yard sale in my neighborhood.  Creepy, yet effective.  I probably wouldn't have noticed the yard sale sign otherwise, but seriously...


And then there was this...

Words can't describe the awesomeness.

Random question of the day:
Does anyone else find Swedish Fish to be kind of creepy and disturbing?  Like fish that got run over.

Strawberry-Lime Nuun Slushie

I'm going to post a real update sometime soon (the Olympics is sucking the productivity from me), but in the meantime I made this slushy to rehydrate after my sweaty sweaty run today, since one can't watch the Olympics without the proper fuel.  I used pink lemonade nuun as the liquid, but you could probably substitute water or juice. This is not a super sweet slushie, which is how I like it, but a little honey or sweetener could be added if that's what you're into:)

Strawberry-Lime Nuun Slushie

1 Nuun tablet (pink lemonade)

16 oz of water

juice of half a lime

3 or 4 mint leaves (didn't make it to the picture)

frozen strawberries (enough to make it is as slushie-ful as you prefer)

Drop the nuun into the water, I used cold water from my fridge.  The tabs take about 2 minutes to dissolve and don't require shaking or stirring (I really like that about nuun)

Add the lime juice, strawberries, mint leaves and nuun juice to the blender and blend, adding more strawberries or ice if needed.

Take outside to photograph because the lighting in your kitchen sucks.

Drink while watching the Olympics with a cat that really couldn't care less!

Like I said, this is not a sweet gas station slushie, but I think the iciness and the fruit and mint are refreshing.  

I love slushies, so if anyone has ideas/recipes, please share!

Can't Sleep Sunday!

This is a real thing for me... Sunday night rolls around and all of the sudden I feel like I should probably be productive and my mind starts racing with all of the crap I need to do this week and I should probably make lunch and look at Pinterest for dinner ideas and do laundry and ......AAAAAHHH!

So, while I'm waiting to get tired and while the laundry and the dishes get all clean, I figured I might do a little bloggin' about the week and share a recipe (and watch Adventure Time) since I'm all for multi-tasking!

This was week two of half marathon training and the mileage is still low.  I'm hoping this week I can start adding on to the prescribed amount and maybe start some strength training.  I wanted to do this last week, but it was hot and nasty and I at least got all my runs in:)

Thanks humidity!  And apparently all my sweat is on my back, because this shot does the sweatiness no 
justice.

So as part of today's Can't Sleep Sunday, I also felt the need to assemble lunch for the week.  I made something similar to this a few weeks ago.  If you aren't a fan of chickpeas, sorry 'bout ya.  I took some to work, and I ran into a lot of chickpea haters. This recipe is a spin-off of this one from eat-yourself-skinny.com, and it was very good.  I adjusted it to include some of the things I like, which is one of the nice things about it, you could really add about anything to adjust to your taste.

Cilantro-Lime Chickpea Salad

1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

juice of half a lime

dash of red pepper flakes

teaspoon of minced garlic (I cheat and used the pre-minced kind)

half a banana pepper sliced in rings

chopped cilantro, a tablespoon or two, depends on preference.

drizzle of olive oil

Mix it all together and let it sit for at least an hour to blend all of the flavors together.  I make mine the night before and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight.  After that the choice is yours. I eat them cold, added to salads, warmed up etc.  I kind of want to blend them together to make something kind of hummus like (maybe without the banana peppers), but I don't think my blender would do very well.

My garden fresh (sister-in-law's, not mine), but kind of unfortunately shaped banana pepper

 Mix it all together and......

Yum!

Does anyone else have issues with Sunday night sleeping? Good night!

Back to it (finally!)

So I've been pretty AWOL, and a lot has gone on in the last couple of months which has kept me from blogging and really focusing on some of the goals I had for myself.  It's not that these are all valid reasons, but sometimes it's easy to make any excuse to not do something!

 I have a new job (same place, different position).  I moved from being a chemist to an Inside Sales position.
I really like the job and the people, and now that I'm getting the hang of things, the stress level has gone down a lot.  It was a hard decision, I loved (and still do!) the people I worked with before, but I came to the realization that I can't make decisions because of others.  It was something I needed to do for myself.

My in-laws have suffered a lot of losses, many of them untimely.  I love both my families and this was a really stressful time.  Things are getting a little better (as good as they can), and we are starting to work on some projects to honor those members of the family that are no longer with us.  Hopefully I'll be able to talk about some of them in the future.

I find myself always making excuses to not eat right, to not run, be lazy...blah blah blah.  Then I get mad at myself for not doing those things, because they really do make me happy!

So... this week begins our city's Team 13 half marathon training.  I love this training program and seeing all my running friends again!  I'm going to take this and use it to spur myself to get back in the habit of eating better and running and doing some cross training, and trying to record it along the way.

Thanks for listening to my random rambling :)

One more new thing...meet Aurelius, the newest member of our fur family:

Chicago and a new PR (not necessarily related)

So last week I took my first train to an industry trade show in Chicago.  This was only the second time I've been to Chicago and definitely my first time on the Amtrak, so I thought I would share some pictures.  

 We had to drive two hours to get to the tiny little train station in Centralia, IL.  I'm not really sure what I expected from a train station (except tumbleweeds like in the old west), but I was hoping they would all at least have toilet paper.  No such luck.

 They do sometimes have historic wooden water towers across the street,

 and 7-Up machines.

 We decided that the coach class probable afforded less chance of the group of us getting kicked off the train for rowdiness.

 I'm happy because I'm on a train, and it has toilet paper...win!  I really like trains better than flying.  It is much more laid back and comfortable.  You can use your electronic devices and walk about freely.

 This is where we ended up in Chicago.  Much bigger than the Centralia station.

 As we explored the conference center at the hotel looking for registration we found some prom props.  I couldn't get anyone to take a prom picture with me:(

 I did get to go on a run my first day in Chicago, which was my goal.  It was about 4 miles and lightly raining, and it was great.  I found Navy Pier and ran along the river and took some pictures.  I really like running in Chicago, the trails were well populated with other, and except for the seagulls I actually felt pretty safe by myself (I'm sure there are much less savory parts of Chicago, but this was pretty decent).

 More Navy Pier.

 Oh how nice, Chicago knew I was coming and made an area just for me!

 The steps at the beginning and end of the run, I did much better than I thought running up them at the end.  I took a walk afterwards back to Navy Pier

Refueling at Gino's East, Chicago style.  This type of thing continued the rest of the week, which was probably why my first training run back home sucked so bad.  It was worth it though, I mean...look at it!

 There was a giant Marilyn Monroe near our hotel.  This was the the source of many a photo opportunity throughout the week.

 Like this one.

Now for the PR part of the show.  I ran a local 5K on Saturday and cut about 8 seconds off my previous PR time.  I couldn't bring my camera with me on this on one, so no pictures.  I was nervous about this one, because I knew the potential for a PR was there because of the course, but with the 3 days of eating and drinking in Chicago and everything else going on this week I was tired and hadn't run very much and I just wasn't feeling very confident.  I felt great that morning, and even though I struggled breathing (a lot! freaking humidity) I still managed to keep up a good pace.  I had to kick it at the end to make the time, but I did it!  Slowly inching my way to 25 minutes:)

Hopefully this week will be a little less crazy.  I need to get back on eating right, running regularly and cutting back the diet beverages again, I was really bad this week!

The Race and the Pace: St. Jude Give. Hope.Run. 5K

After last weekend's PR, I was fully not anticipating one for this race (aaannndd I was right).  It is super hilly and difficult, plus I got in some more miles by meeting a friend/co-worker at her house and we ran from there and ran back to her house after the race for a grand total of about 7.5 miles.

It is important to match your socks to your nuun

As hard as this race is, it is a really neat race to do.  This is the second year for it, and with around 1200 people last year and at least 1300 this year it is the largest St. Jude 5K in the country, which is pretty cool since we aren't that big of a city.  The atmosphere is pretty festive, they have music and bouncy houses, a kids run and a balloon release before the race.  Along the course there are pictures of actual St. Judes patients, so it is easier to keep pushing  (even as you tear up) when you see pictures of all these little kids that are fighting to stay alive.

Stylin'

Balloons!

99 Red Luftballoons

Kristy, Ashley, Me:)

Kristy and I had a good run over, and once we saw the huge line of cars waiting to get in, we were pretty happy with the running decision.  Once Ashley got there we took the obligatory photos of the fun socks we were wearing and watched the festivities until the run began.  The run starts straight up a big hill, then down a bigger hill then pretty flat until some fun little hillage at the end of the race.  I finished in 29:48, better than last year.  I was fairly happy considering sun + hills + hotness+ extra miles= not so fast.

Scientifically proven good post race food

After the race we refueled responsibly with boneless wings, orange sherbet, and cupcakes before taking off for home.  Sounds like a good nutrition plan to me!

We are heading to Chicago tomorrow for a trade show for work and taking the train.  Hopefully we will get to run at some point and I will give Chicago updates sometime next week.

Did anyone else run any fun races this weekend?

She's crafty and she knows it (race shirt redo)

Definitely not talking about myself, by the way.  I like to pretend I'm going to be crafty someday, but it's so much easier when my mom is crafty right now!  I always see ideas on Pinterest and I want to see when people I know try them to see if it really works, so I thought I'd share this race shirt redo from crafterhours that I found on Pinterest and my mom made for me (Note, I apologize to any men reading this, because you probably don't care).

I have a crap-ton of t-shirts laying around.  Three high school sports, sorority shirts, college shirts, and now racing shirts completely inundate my closet.  However, I belong on Hoarders:T-shirts and refuse to get rid of any of them.

This is about 30% of the T-shirts.  The labels are from when the husband  organized for me, I didn't do so well keeping it that way.

 I have a few that I like well enough, but not necessarily the fit, so when I saw the redo on Pinterest I had to try it tell my mom about it.  Plus it would be a unique tank top for the summer for free (minus the registration fee).

I was really happy with the finished product and will be shortly giving her more to do.  Plus my little sister saw it hanging in the basement and commissioned one on the spot for her as well.  She has a similar shirt problem.

To save face as a domestic wonder (riiiiiight), i will point out that even though I don't sew/craft very well, at least the recipes I find on Pinterest seem to be appreciated.

I'm always up for new ways to wear old shirts, so if anyone has ideas, let me know!