Breakfasts, lunches, and bike rides galore!

I haven't done too much since getting back to Colorado, besides Warrior Dash, of course. I was sooooo sore after that "race" that I could barely walk. Apparently I shouldn't be running down mountaintops without properly training beforehand. Oops.

In other news, school has started and I'm slowly starting to figure out my schedule. I finally have some human interaction during the course of my day, which is super nice. Yesterday (Wednesday) was my super long day, beginning with 2 lectures then an hour break for lunch and then 4 hours of section and lab. I woke up late so didn't eat breakfast and it wasn't looking like I'd be getting home for lunch. So no food til 5 pm?! Not gonna happen.

I decided to go to the campus grill/cafeteria and ended up getting roast chicken with potatoes and peas. That was heavenly. I also sat down next to a woman from the English department and we had a nice chat. I want to keep doing that (having lunch with someone) but I don't want to spend so much money every time.

And that's what brought me to looking into getting a snazzy lunchbox and packing a nice nutritious lunch for which I've planned ahead. From this other blog I read (Adios, fat pants!), I got a few websites dedicated to packing healthful lunches into Bento boxes, essentially lunch boxes with compartments that fit in very nicely. So I've been looking over them and I think I'm going to start small and plan a multi-colored, veggie-filled lunch once a week and build up from there.

Like this, from Basic Bento:

The next step is making breakfast as well, but I think that may be a once a week kind of thing. The same goes for biking to work/school instead of driving a few blocks and walking up that dreaded hill. But if I'm doing this once a week, what do I do the other days?

No weigh-in. Waiting on my beer water weight to go away. Perhaps tomorrow.

Nada either. SLACKER!

Warrior Dash!

Today was a really fun race that I had been looking forward to for a while. I even scheduled my California vacation around it, and had to cut out an extra weekend of fun on the beaches to get muddy. All in all, it was definitely worth it.

And now some photos...

Before the race, sparkling clean (I'm on the left in the brown shirt and my roommate's on the right):

Directly post mud pit:

 The last sprint to the finish, through fire, of course:

All in all, it was a really fun race but I thought it was a bit too easy obstacle-wise. I felt like it wasn't much of a challenge, excluding the long hill we had to run up, but that was just an endurance challenge and not a how-do-I-get-around-this-obstacle challenge. A little kid would've had no problem completing every single one of these obstacles, which many did. I was looking for a bit more of a challenge...not that my heavy and out-of-shape butt could've handled something more extreme, but details. And this is how Tough Guy comes into play.

Because of the relative ease of Warrior Dash, now I'm definitely set on Tough Guy UK: The World's safest, most dangerous taste of mental and physical pain, fear and endurance. It's a race held in January in bloody cold England that has some serious obstacles and some serious tests of inner strength.

Check out this appropriately titled ESPN review: Death Race 2007

So if I ever find myself in England (or even Europe) in January, I'm totally doing this. But I'm not flying across the pond for the sole purpose of putting myself through hell. At least that's what I say now. We'll see if that changes.


No weigh-in. Too early to even think about it.

Warrior Dash: 3.27 mile "run" with 12 obstacles

New leaf?

I have a tendency to write these kinds of posts after a super long absence. I get super optimistic about working out, eating healthy, and losing weight. And then a few days pass and I'm over it. This usually happens when I'm at home with nothing better to do but scheme, plan out my life, and make resolutions, which is the case today.

I'm hoping this time the feeling will stick. My mom has now lost 45 pounds (so proud of her!) and weighs 20 pounds LESS than me. How embarrassing. I have got to do something about this because I can't be fat and unhappy any longer. And I've noticed that my abs are absolute Jell-O. I can barely hold a crunch for 5 seconds, and the only reason I know that is because I couldn't hold myself up when I was fixing my hair in bed (try to imagine that one). I used to be able to do 200 crunches at once and now I've got nothing.

So I've started the 100 push-up program. It's a six-week program that "promises" you'll be able to do 100 push-ups at the end of it. It's pretty simple, like Couch to 5 k, and only requires 5 sets of a small number of push-ups three times a week. For example, Day One of Week One for my level is the following number of push-ups: 10, 12, 7, 7, and at least 9.

I can't do enough real push-ups to make this program worthwhile, because I would have to repeat too many weeks with little progress, so I've been doing "girl push-ups" instead, you know, the ones on your knees. And once I build up to 100 of those, I hope my upper body is strong enough to be able to do at least 10 real push-ups. And that's when I'll start the actual program. For now, though, I'm sticking to girl push-ups since I'm already super sore from the 15 I did two days ago. Not a good sign, but I can only go up from here!

I really like structured things like this and I've been meaning to start the day off with push-ups for years now, so this seems like a great thing for me to do. And there's no guess-work. Everything is planned out. Yay :)

Oh, and I'm going to add my weight and daily training to the end of each blog post in italics. Hopefully this will motivate me to post more often. So here's the first one:

210.5

Push-ups: 10, 12, 7, 7, 13!

Getting back to tri-ing

One more posting from the tri forum. Again, it captures my feelings about tris quite accurately.

I know I've been absent for a pretty good chunk of time and I'm sorry for my sudden departure without any explanation. The short version is I needed time away from tris and anything tri-related. The long version follows. Thanks so much for your concern through PMs and inspires. You guys rock!

All is well over here in the sense that nothing is majorly wrong, I guess. I haven't done much of anything (tri-specific, at least) since the Oly in late June. It took me a good three weeks to get back on my bike for a short ride. And after that amount of time off, it had to be short to be surviveable. Geez, it's amazing how much fitness can be lost in such a seemingly short amount of time! It's like I was back at square one.

Since then, I've only been back on the bike a couple times, with no scheduled runs or swims at all. Part of my reasoning was that I'm going back to sea level with no bike for two weeks, so whatever I build up before then will inevitably be lost. So why try, right? Yeah, not the right attitude at all, but it seemed like a sufficient justification at the time.

Anywhos, I felt (and now I know for sure) that I was still jilted by my last tri experience. I don't usually hold on to things for nearly this long so it was kind of weird to have this feeling of crappiness hover around me every time I thought of tris. I needed a positive experience but wasn't about to commit to another hellacious form of expensive torture without being absolutely sure it would do the trick of cheering me up.

And that's where volunteering changed everything. A few friends and I had signed up to volunteer for the Boulder 70.3 Ironman race held this morning a while back after we had a blast at the sprint early in the season. Although the actual volunteer experience wasn't nearly as good this time around from an organizational standpoint (some of the coordinators were absolutely infuriating and incompetent), the athletes I interacted with made getting up at 4 am well worthwhile. It was so much fun and exciting and totally restored my faith in triathlons. The positive vibe felt in transition and before the race start was what I had forgotten about tris. And I missed that. So that's why I'm posting back to the group. I miss you guys.

So yeah, I'm back, albeit slowly and probably going to work on building a base for next season or possibly a late-season race, but I'm excited to get back into things. That hasn't happened in a while. I'm also seriously considering joining the tri club out here to get in some swim workouts with instruction since I feel like that's where I need the most coached help. The bike and run I can fix on my own, I think, (that, and I'm really intimidated by the routes they do so that'll have to wait), but my swim form needs some outside assistance. And the tri club seems like the most cost-effective way to fix that.

And that's that. As always, sorry this is so long, but I figured a one-line explanation wouldn't be sufficient to explain my absence.