A Day in the Life

Well in one of my recent posts I talked about different directions and one of the things I would never do full time but a few people seemed interested in was a daily eats post with reference to refuelling exercise. So, here goes! My diet is far from perfect but I like to think my attitude towards food is healthy now, I try not to get too obsessive over things which is why you'll see some white flour and white rice noodles, both of which were banned from my diet for several years when I was suffering from anorexia and in the early years of recovery. I feel totally exposed posting this random days eats so please no judging! It's a day off from work today so I've been fairly sedentary apart from the run and Roxie's walks.. I'll perhaps post a work day as a comparrison at some point...

0830 Breakfast of porridge with peanut butter, xylitol and honey, topped with homemade granola, recipe to come...




0930 Take Roxie on a short walk to go to toilet

1130 Set off for my run it takes ages for my breakfast to digest enough for me to feel like running. Was planning on taking Roxie but she was in a naughty mood so decided to leave her at home as I can't control her when she's not behaving, especially not on a run! (She has come on heat today for the first time so that might explain things...)

I set out to do 6-7 miles at a pace which felt fairly comfortable. I was really hoping for 7 but I wasn't sure how my legs would hold up due to my low mileage of late. Luckily at the 3rd mile I felt strong and decided the 7 was well within my reach! My pace is all over the place due to hills and wind...

7 miles in 1.05.00 ave pace 9.17
Mile 1 - 9.33 uphill and some downhills towards the bridge
Mile 2 - 9.53 uphill onto bridge
Mile 3 - 8.44 flat!
Mile 4 - 9.10 downhill off bridge
Mile 5 - 10.10 uphill back onto bridge
Mile 6 - 8.54 downhill off bridge
Mile 7 - 8.37 started this mile off at 10ish pace while it's up and down for the first half then was helped by a nice downhill

I felt really good when I got home from the run, the distance didn't feel like it was my longest run since last September... I only just realised it was that long ago when I checked my blog posts! Wow.. I may not be able to walk tomorrow!! (ETA My legs feel great today! Amazing!)

1240 Get home, stretch, start running the bath whilst microwaving last nights curry.. this isn't a typical days eats but it was in the fridge calling my name and it was worth every bite! Probably not the best recovery fuel but at least it was full of veg right...? It was a veggie rogan josh with rice and vegetable stuffed naan bread.


1400 After a reeeeeeeally long soak in the bath (what are days off for?) Mike and I sat down and watched some comedy DVDs Lead Balloon was the choice today. It's kind of like Curb Your Enthusiasm only with Jack Dee instead of Larry David. I also had some unpictured grapes here... I totally forgot to photograph them.. only doing it for one day and forgot... but you all know what grapes look like so I'm sure you'll forgive me!

1500 Still watching Lead Balloon we both had a sandwhich, mine was cheese, tomato and some salad cream on a crusty granary roll, I put some nuts on the plate for crunch and protein but unfortunately they were stale... guess I didn't tie them up properly..


1530 I took Roxie for a longer walk to make up for this morning.. She decided to poo right near the persons drive who'd put literally 10 signs saying to clean up dog poo (our council lend out the yellow spray paint and stencil to anyone who wants to use it) and I almost didn't notice!! I hate dog poo as much as anyone but 10 signs is so excessive so I had a silent chuckle about her choice of poo area!

1700 Come Dine With Me... ahhhhh I love this program, it's the narrator who makes it for me, and the absolute loons it attracts to go on it! Anyway, the woman cooking today made brownies for desert and jogged my memory that I'd been meaning to make some sugar free brownies...

1800 We went in the kitchen and Mike cooked tea whilst I made brownies. We had a vegetable stir fry with tofu, rice noodles and black bean sauce. Really quick and easy one pan meal. I might have pinched a few bites of brownie straight from the pan too...

Sorry for the terrible picture... I hate taking pictures of food without natural light.. it looked nothing like that!!


1900 Tidied the kitchen then played Mario on the Wii... told ya it was a lazy day today!

2100 Begun my Monday night TV marathon... Biggest Loser UK and Glee accompanied by nachos! The nachos were good but a bit too rich too late at night, made my tummy feel a bit iffy! I make my own tortilla chips by baking wraps in the oven with some salt, they're almost as good as the real thing but a lot healthier. Be careful when you're cooking them though as they go from uncooked to burnt very quickly! We had them with sainsburys basics salsa which is actually really good, I always keep some in my cupboard, from memory it doesn't have added sugar in either which a lot of salsas do!



Well I hope you enjoyed reading this! It wasn't a completely typical day I just got up and decided why not do it today! It looks like an awful lot of food written down all together but I guess that's one thing running does is make you really hungry! I also want to add... I didn't document drinks which in hindsight was a bit silly... I made sure to rehydrate with LOTS of green tea and water... My hand was rarely without a mug of green tea! I like to brew a pot and keep topping it up with boiling water until it's gone too weak, then I brew another!

It's Been a While..

I never seem to post on here when I've not been training, and I was still feeling a bit rough after my intervals I haven't done much this week, training anyway! Been fairly busy otherwise! I did a talk at SEED, the ed group on Wednesday about my recovery. I was pretty nervous but it seemed to help the people there and they were really grateful that I'd talked about my experience and that made it so worth doing. I also found out about a conference on treating ED's and I'm thinking about going, if I do get on the mental health nursing course I would really love to specialise in eating disorders and that is likely an area I would do my dissertation on so it could be really useful, but it's over 100 pounds which is a lot of money to me at the moment.. Not sure if it's worth it...

On Friday I was supposed to do my 7 mile tempo run... let's rewind to Thursday night.... We went to one of our old student haunts as Mike's grandad was doing a poetry reading there and after he went home we got rather drunk.... All night I was still doing the tempo run but come Friday, I wasn't doing the tempo run, I haven't got drunk in a looooooooooooong time and I felt rough as anything! I did manage something though - just!

10 DB woodchoppers
10 DB squats
5 push-ups
30 lateral jumps

x 8 rounds in 12 minutes

Not nearly a tempo run but better than nothing! I still got my tempo in, I did it today, I normally take Saturday as a rest day but I've had plenty of rest this week and the week wasn't going by without my tempo!

Tempo Run
1 mile warm up (10.02)
2 miles short tempo (8.33, 8.12)
1 mile easy (10.53)
2 miles short tempo (8.36, 8.13)
1 mile cool down (9.58)

1.04.27 ave pace 9.13

Tempo runs are sooo hard! I can't believe how much effort they seem to take out of me, this felt a lot harder than my last 7 miler and that one was a fair bit faster than this one at 8.48 per mile.

I tried a go energy gel in the middle mile. Not a fan! I've never tried a gel before and I didn't like the taste... plus I'm not convinced it really helped me.. Anyone else from the uk had the go gels before? What do you think? I got it free in my half marathon packet but I don't think I'll get them again, I preferred the coconut water.

Weekly Totals
Miles - 10
Push-ups - 40

Hope everyone's enjoying the weekend!

A Good Run and Some Sushi

Yesterday Mike and I had planned to go to the track for our speedwork until we realised some money hadn't gone in to my account so we couldn't afford to go. Then we decided we'd do it on a field again with our garmins. We were all dressed and ready to go when I turned my garmin on to no battery! I must have left it turned on after I'd charged it... yes I can be that dizzy from time to time! After that we decided we may as well switch up the workouts, Mike would go first and do his long run then I would do mine.

Asside from my lack of headphones this run was pretty good! The first half was really tough but I got a really good second wind for the last 3-4 miles :-) I had to conciously slow down in the last half as I didn't want my legs to burn out and ruin the rest of my weeks workouts.

7 miles in 1.01.33 pace 8.48 (prescribed pace: long tempo, 8.53)
Mile 1 - 8.51
Mile 2 - 9.25
Mile 3 - 8.30
Mile 4 - 8.41
Mile 5 - 9.01
Mile 6 - 8.31
Mile 7 - 8.37

Today we did some boxing
1 round = 30s bag/30s lateral jumps x 2
x 10 rounds with 30s rest in between rounds.

This workout was messy! I was so sweaty haha

We made ugly sushi tonight! Has anyone made it before, we need some practice on presentation but it tasted lovely :-)

Sweet potato rolls and egg sheet rolls with cucumber and carrot

Cream cheese and roasted red pepper

Egg sheet rolls

Cream cheese and roast red pepper rolls

Sweet potato rolls

Yummy! We'll be making these again, but probably in slightly larger amounts since it was pretty labour intensive but is disappearing fast from the fridge!

My worst run ever!

As you might have guessed by the title my run today was not good!! Everything seemed to be wrong!

Lets rewind to last night, 1 glass of Asti with my meal and tirimasu for desert, that was definately enough alcohol for me. I'm quite the lightweight and even though the wine was only 7.5% I could feel it! Anyway after the meal we went back to my granparents house, they don't like it when you don't join in and have a drink, I'm not sure why but they really don't! They weren't impressed with my request for a glass of water so I caved and had a small whisky and coke, well my grandad's small is my very large so this morning I woke up with a stinking hangover! Not my gran and grandad's fault, but I must say the oldies in my family are a bad influence :P

Anyway back to the run from hellll... I had set out to do 9 miles with Mike, we ended up running 7.25, we cut it short due to Mike's blisters bothering him a lot I'm a bit sad we didn't finish it but I didn't want him to hurt his feet.

I wanted to quit so many times during the run, it was a real mental battle to keep on running. I had wanted to try running 9 miles at my goal half marathon pace (9 minute miles), just to see if I could. I couldn't, not even close. My body just wasn't having any of it, my heart rate was sky high, I couldn't control my breathing, I felt so unfit. The hills absolutely killed me, there was one really steep one in the trail section of the run which was so steep and slippy I lost time going down it and getting up it, well, awful! My pace slowed to 12.25 on the way up and I just felt so gutted. We almost stopped completely halfway through the 6th mile, after this killer hill. I'm ashamed to admit why really but I want the blog to be honest, good and bad moments! I got really upset after the hill that I was going so slow and couldn't get my pace back up that I started to cry, and then I couldn't breath at all, we paused the garmin and sat on the floor until I'd sorted myself out. I'm glad no-one saw cause I felt so silly. Mike thought we should stop there but I pursuaded him I was ok to carry on, I really wanted to finish what I'd set out to do, I'm a bit gutted we had to stop for his feet but they were really painful for him so it was the right thing to do.

Right here's the garmin data!
7.25 miles in 1:12:54
Average pace = 10.04
Average heartrate = 182

Mile 1 9.21 HR 169
Mile 2 9.40 HR 183
Mile 3 10.05 HR 185
Mile 4 9.49 HR 185
Mile 5 10.12 HR 184
Mile 6 10.29 HR 183
Mile 7 10.59 HR 181
0.25 (9.29 pace doesn't say the time) HR 180 (this was the longest hill down, so maybe I would have made up a little time)

So, lesson learned, no alcohol before running, ever!!

Here's some cute Tia pictures to cheer up this post!

17/03/10

AM
I went for a long slow run today trying to keep my HR around 160-165, it was frustratingly slow to keep in this HR range and it took all my willpower not to speed off! But I need to work on my aerobic fitness for the half marathon, I'm a lot more anaerobically fit from boxing I think. Anyway here are the run stats, I figured out how to set it to lap after every mile :-) I feel very clever about that haha

7 miles in 1:17:46
Average pace - 11.08 per mile
Average HR - 165

Mile 1 - 10.26 HR 161
Mile 2 - 11.06 HR 164
Mile 3 - 10.48 HR 165
Mile 4 - 10.57 HR 167
Mile 5 - 11.21 HR 167
Mile 6 - 11.32 HR 166
Mile 7 - 11.48 HR 166

I just had to get slower and slower to maintain a lowish heart rate, I find this really odd as my 6 mile run last week at 9 min per mile pace gave me an average HR of 175. Maybe it's because I'm still poorly but it seems so much slower just for 10bpm less!

The run was pretty boring, the most exciting thing happened in the third mile when a bee nearly flew down my top, actually change exciting to SCARY!

Does anyone elses garmin say you've run less than you have when you upload it, I stopped at 7.00 today and when I upload it it says 6.99, this happens all the time and Mike's always upload as 4.01 or just over! Mike doesn't wait to press it I think we both stop it at the same time, the garmin must have some conspiracy to give Mike my extra .01 miles haha. So frustrating cause it looks like I'm always cutting my runs short but even when I wait for it to go past the mile it comes up short, what is going on!

Wooo according to my ticker I have now run 100 miles in 2010, maybe I ought to change the goal though, don't think I'll be getting to 1000 in a year, just don't think my legs have coped with the increase in mileage as well as I'd hoped they would do. I'm going to leave it for now in case I manage to up my mileage a lot coming up to the half marathon but I'm way off target I needed to be running 83 miles a month and it's 2.5 months in and I've only just made 100, that means I'd need to run about 95 for the remaining months, I just can't see that happening!

PM
Boxing workout at home.
Warm up - 10 minutes
Shadow boxing/Heavy bag (alternating rounds) - 8 x 2 minute rounds
Focus mitts - 2 x 2 minute rounds
Cool down - 10 minutes yoga, I'm a convert!

This workout felt really good, we did it to a Bas Rutten tape which I've mentioned on the blog before. He is shouting combinations to throw, it's good cause he doesn't let up or let you slack! I was totally amazed at how good I felt during this workout, still being poorly and having jogged 7 miles in the morning I expected to be pretty slow and tired but I wasn't out of breath for much of it at all and I was really going for it it wasn't like I was being lazy and that's why I wasn't tired.. I remember the first time I did a Bas Rutten routine just shadow boxing and I felt close to puking/passing out, this one felt like a breeze :-)

We finished with some yoga, this is the dvd we've ordered, it's called yoga for stress relief, should be very suitable since we want to do it as a relaxation type exercise. I can't wait for it to arrive!

Check out Marcia's running skirt giveaway here.