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WIAW-Birthday Edition

How is it Wednesday already?? I swear I was just typing up last week’s WIAW. Thanks as always to Jenn for starting this weekly fun!

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A few things before we get started. 1. No word on my MRI which is super frustrating.

2. This week’s soup was a winner! I wasn’t sure how split pea would be, but the verdict was LOVE. It has mushroom and parmesan, and is full of flavor!

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I also appreciated time with my crazies.

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Now let’s get on with it!

Tuesday was my birthday! Nothing too crazy around here, just food and spending all day studying for a midterm!

Pre-Workout:

Lemon blueberry bread. Yum.

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Workout: Crossfit. I was super excited that this workout was a collection of most of the things I can actually do! We started with bench press, and then the WOD was 4 rounds (90s rest between) of the following for me (with some subs):

250m row

10 push ups

1:00 airdyne bike

10 push ups

1:00 airdyne bike

It felt so good to be moving and pretending to be a normal person!

Breakfast:

Eaten on the go between Crossfit and squirrel watching. Fage 2%, blueberries, and sunbutter.

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I wish I had a more clear picture, but this guy was really funny! He was walking around with a huge amount of grass in his mouth.

Lunch:

I went out to a cafe on campus with my family! I had a arepa with black beans and cheese, plus a side salad.

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As you can see in the background I brought my own dressing since there’s something in the dressing that comes with the salad that my body doesn’t love.

But the highlight? My parents brought cupcakes from my favorite bakery! Gluten free chocolate and dulce de leche. But look at these decorations!

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I had a chocolate.

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Snack:

Avocado toast on GF bread, plus the inside of another piece of bread (don’t ask, it’s good bread!).

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My dinner was sort of snack-y since I had a test through dinner.

Dinnerish:

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Cheddar popcorn+dried mango (more than in the picture).

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The other half of my arepa from lunch+beet and apple salad with goat cheese.

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Dulce de leche cupcake.

After my midterm, I had a few bites of stir fry veggies, half a piece of GF pumpkin bread, a couple of carrots and hummus, and a strawberry the size of my head thanks to a fruit of the month delivery.

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Also—check out these beautiful flowers from my mom! Sometimes you have to improvise a bit in a dorm…

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For my birthday, my friends got together and got me some of my favorite ice cream—Tin Pot! We had orange creamsicle, Tcho chocolate (of course) and maple.

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I had another mini dulce de leche cupcake to go with it because birthday 🙂

We were all feeling the sugar a bit, so we went for the protein. I had a beautiful meatsicle (chicken with ketchup. #classy).

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My friends are seriously fantastic.

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Thanks guys for a great birthday!

What is your birthday cake of choice?

My typical with my family is probably mint chocolate chip ice cream cake, which we enjoyed a few days early this year!

Running Without Numbers

How’s everyone’s weekend going? I’ve had a pretty low key day so far, so I think it’s time to do a bit of blogging! I seriously had the best day of exercise on Friday. Let me just preface this post by saying this week will be very Crossfit heavy because it is the one week out of maybe 6 weeks all year that I get to go to my home Crossfit, and I absolutely love it there!

I began Friday morning with a run.

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I’ve been doing a fastish mid-long run on Sundays with my Crossfit run group the past few weeks, but this Sunday my sister is graduating and I can’t go, so I decided to do a 6 miler on Friday morning. I wanted to keep my pace up since I’m trying to PR. I wore my watch, but I set it so I could only see time. I think I have a tendency to see a pace that is faster than I think is comfortable, and it freaks me out. I start thinking I should be breathing harder, so I do, and it’s just all bad from there! I ran based on feel, while trying to go a bit faster than a comfortable pace. I ended up just about exactly where I wanted my pace to be, although I must admit the last mile was pretty tough! It’s hard right now to imagine 13.2 miles at a pace faster than this, but I have plenty of time to work on it before then!

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Since I’m a blogger, I take pictures of my watch. But it’s actually a really great tool. I have a log now of my runs so I can look back at half training from a year ago and compare, which is pretty cool!

Also cool? I just realized that I ate exactly the same thing one year ago as I ate today!

Last night for dinner, we made Whole Foods’s Black Bean Soup (although made with 1/2 broth instead of all water for more flavor).

Topped with cheese, and of course, avocado! I had leftovers for dinner as well!

This year’s bowls:

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And for comparison-a picture from exactly a year ago!
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Also from the fitness world: I got new Crossfit shoes! I love love love them! IMG_8060 IMG_8061

 

They are a million times better-I didn’t even realize how bad and worn out my old ones were. These were so much better to run in, and my Achilles felt totally fine after running 1.5 miles in them during Crossfit this morning. I’m wondering if my old Crossfit shoes played a bit of a role in my tendonitis. It’s definitely feeling better today!

On the life front, I’ve trying to get ready for my trip to DC. I’m buying business clothes, I’m seeing my high school friends, I’m figuring out last minute details. Also-an update on the nut allergy. I’ve FINALLY rid myself of all my reactions. I kept accidentally eating half a peanut, and my skin would break out, but since I’ve been super careful, I am happy to say that my skin is 100% fine now!

And lastly-my main activity for today was baking a Boston Cream Pie for my sister’s college graduation. Her boyfriend is also graduating, so his family is coming to our house for dessert.For those that don’t know, a Boston Cream Pie is sponge cake with a custard filling, topped with chocolate ganache. It’s a fairly involved cake, but I’ve made it a few times before so I wasn’t concerned. Funny story-the very first time I made it a few years ago, I fell down an entire flight of stairs while holding it. My foot was bruised for months, but the cake was fine so totally worth it!

Sponge cake:

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Sponge cake is mostly air-I spent so much time whipped egg whites and then egg yolks!

Then the custard:

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And finally the chocolate ganache!

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Memorial Day Weekend

First, a huge thanks to all those serving or who have served.

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I also want to spend a moment honoring those killed in the Santa Barbara shooting. This truly is a horrific thing, and I can’t imagine what it must be like for the students there. They are all in my thoughts!

I hope everyone had a nice weekend! I had a pretty busy one-not a million pictures but packed with fun, friends, and family! As we speak, I’m fighting heavy eyelids, and it’s still early!

Friday night was a retreat for my sorority. The girl’s house we stayed at had a wood burning oven, which was awesome!

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And a cat-even more awesome!

Here are some other Friday food pics: cappuccino, berries+banana+sunbutter, and dining hall lunch.

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Saturday morning, I drove the early car back to campus and went to 10am Crossfit. The workout included lots of ring dips, ring rows, and burpees, plus a long farmer’s carry at the end! (Farmer’s carry is holding a heavy weight-I had 2 20kilo kettle bells!)

Saturday was spent doing housekeeping related things-I FINALLY got a car wash, cleaned, and did some laundry.

I then proceeded to stay up much too late prior to an early morning run. I went home to run with Crossfit people there-at one of my favorite places to run! It’s the trail I did all my long runs on last summer!

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I did 6 pretty fast (for me) miles. Running with a group definitely makes me run faster than I would have otherwise! Our overall pace isn’t indicative of how we ran most of it, since the first mile was pretty slow. When I split off with a few other people from the main group, we picked up the pace quite a bit and ran most of it around a 9:15 pace.

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I was definitely sore from this! I then returned home to visit my parents and kitties-but not before being convinced to spend the night at home so I could do Murph at my home Crossfit today.

I refueled with a simple egg sandwich and some of my mom’s leftover birthday cake.

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After catching up with my parents, I was off to the mall for business casual shopping with my high school friends! The only picture I have from that was a froyo break.

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Dinner with my family was a favorite of ours-BBQ chicken salad. The salad consists of chicken breast with barbecue sauce, on top of a salad of lettuce, fresh corn, red pepper, onion, tomato, avocado, and olive oil and lime juice.

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I also managed to get plenty of kitty time! Although my allergies definitely flared up. Worth it!

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Monday morning, I did” Murph”! Murph is  a Crossfit workout named after a fallen soldier, Mike Murphy, and is traditionally done at Crossfit boxes on Memorial Day. It’s one of my favorite Crossfit workouts, and consists of the following:

1 mile run

100 pull ups

200 push ups

300 squats

1 mile run

It’s one of the longest Crossfit workouts, and is recommended if you’re beastly to be done with a weighted vest (which I of course did not do).

I’ve done this workout once before. Like last time, I broke up the middle circuit into 20 rounds of 5 pull ups (banded), 10 push ups, and 15 squats. I was conservative on the run, but I’m definitely slower running than last time I did this (although my legs may have been a bit heavy from the previous day’s run). I was about 20 seconds off of last time on the first run, and significantly slower on the second. 300 squats makes the second mile feel like death! Although I didn’t beat my previous time (3 minutes off), I was the 3rd person to finish, and the first female! My time was 47:30. But here’s the super crazy part. The pull ups were so easy! I used the same band I always use for WODs, and it just never got difficult like I was expecting! So after I finished the workout and gulped down water, I figured, what the heck. I’ll try some unbounded pull ups. (If you’re keeping track, I’ve done one pull up once.) So, I just did it. And it wasn’t hard, at all. So I did another. And another. What…?!? It felt just like doing the banded pull ups! So I’ve clearly been slacking off! I think doing 100 pull ups with the band really honed in my kipping technique..or something. It was awesome though! I’m going to try to keep up this new found ability!

And here’s a group shot post-Murph.

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Right before leaving this morning, I threw my experimental loaf in the oven. It was good, but still needs some work before it’s worth sharing. Any guess as to what it is? 🙂

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After Crossfit, I refueled with some of that, plus some egg salad and roused carrots. No pic, so here’s breakfast pre-Murph: egg sandwich with Monterey Jack, on whole wheat.

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And some of MY leftover birthday cake was consumed as well.

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And now here I am! I may not have had the healthiest weekend in terms of sugar consumption, but it was definitely active-I got some great workouts in! And I loved the time spent with friends and family. Now, I just gotta push through these last few weeks until summer!

What did you do for the long weekend? 

Uncertainty

Hey guys! I’m just going to pop in briefly to say at this point, I’m not really sure where I’m going to go with the project moving forward. I’ve gotten to the point where the restrictions are causing me to actually eat more unhealthily because I can’t have what I really want! And I’ve been living in the loopholes so much lately that I’m not sure how much of the integrity of the project is holding up. Plus living outside the loopholes this weekend…I’m also not sure I like having to put THIS much thought into food-it’s starting to mess with my head a little bit! So not sure what’s going to happen in the future, but I’m going to play it by ear and how I feel-which right now is not so hot thanks to some most definitely processed food…so here’s a bit of a photo dump of this weekend, and I’ll do a more detailed project post a little bit later in the week!

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Sushi bowl-again. But sadly without avocado.

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My attempt at coconut truffles. Which didn’t really work out-the inside was just mashed banana and coconut, and it just tasted like not that ripe banana…but the chocolate was amazing!

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Sloppy yogurt bowl with applesauce that still needed a few hours in the slow cooker.

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Saturday I was going to go to the gym, but then brunch sounded really good so this happened.

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Also in place of gym-we may or may not have swiped a carton of heavy whipping cream from the dining hall. Homemade chocolate with this? AMAZING. It tasted like the center of a lava cake.

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Cinnamon tea made by a girl in my sorority-she boiled cinnamon sticks!

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Highlight of the weekend-sorority retreat and getting to see a real, live cat.

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Retreat food.

And the actual nail in the project’s coffin (for now-will definitely be discussed): fresh ice cream sandwich.

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What am I wearing? On a side note, now I really want a tutu of my own. 

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Applesauce 2.0-much better! Plus sun butter.

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My innovative wrapping skills-tomorrow is my sister’s birthday so we went out to dinner! And wrapping paper was nowhere to be found…

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And cake.

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As for this week? I’m going to eat as well as possible with as little effort as possible. I went to Trader Joe’s and stock dup today. I have to say though, since doing this project, reading all the nutrition labels/ingredients was really frustrating because EVERYTHING had extra little ingredients, even at a place like Trader Joe’s! 

Another observation-as my eating habits deteriorated, so did the positive effects. My foot issues are starting to come back a little bit for one thing-so when I’m not so full of delicious food I’ll figure out a plan going forward. I will say this about the project now though-the biggest problem was being underprepared in the second and third week, and eating in a dining hall made things harder because the food was definitely lower quality. If I wan’t living at college and if I was cooking completely for myself, this would have been much easier. So expect a follow up post soon!

Plan Backfired

Happy weekend! Only 2 weeks of class until Thanksgiving. Hallelujah. 

Friday morning I did a 30 minute fartlek run. It was reasonably hard but not impossible-I could probably push harder in the future. 

Friday was really awesome for two reasons-Bio ended 45 minutes early, and my 4 hour Chem lab ended 2.5 hours early.

Bio lab ending early gave me an opportunity to do one thing. This.

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There’s a cafe I like to sit at and do homework, and i have seen this pumpkin bread there since the beginning of October! However, at the main lunch hours when I’m there, the lines are INSANE so I never get anything. Well, 45 minutes early did the trick. And this. Was. Awesome. I think this pretty much does it for my fall foods bucket list. I’m actually pretty tired of pumpkin!

My chem lab consisted of smelling lots of chemicals. Kind of weird. But short-I’ll take it. If you want to know how to make artificial grape scent, I can hook you up!

Friday evening was Crossfit. We did a lot of heavy deadlifts. What is sad was that my abs may have been my limiting factor. My core is more sore than my hamstrings today! I’ve clearly been neglecting that core work! The WOD was a giant tabata of 4 exercises- thrusters, sit ups, push ups, and double unders. A few notes-on the push ups, my arms turned to jello FAST. I couldn’t figure out why, and then realized it was because I did 80 in 4 minutes. Yeah, that’ll do it! Note 2: double unders are SO much harder with jello arms! I couldn’t get the rope around fast enough! I ended up whipping my hands really hard a few times, and bruised a knuckle. Yes, jumping rope. 

That evening I had to go to Jewish Special Dinner (I’m not actually Jewish). My sorority is historically Jewish, so we put in on with the Jewish frat. It’s basically just dinner. I actually got semi-dressed up.

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The food was vaguely Greek. It was pitch dark when we were eating-I partly wanted to picture to have some idea later of what the heck everything was!

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Apparently the guys cooking it didn’t want the people to actually be able to see the food? My friend who was involved in some of the cooking told me afterwards that some of it was definitely suspect. The couscous was not supposed to look like mashed potatoes, and some of the falafel was really awful. My table got served first, so I guess I got the good batch because everything seemed fine to me!

I ended up leaving with a few friends to go downtown and get Cream. Cream is an amazing ice cream sandwich shop where you can have pretty much any combination of ice cream and cookie, plus the cookies are served hot.

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I went with cookie dough ice cream, a chocolate chip cookie, and a double chocolate chip cookie. It was good, but I think I would have preferred just getting a warm cookie. I think I’ve developed a dislike of ice cream. Craziness. 

I was also on photostalking photographer duty for my friend and her new boyfriend. She wanted me to subtly take cute pictures of the two of them. For the record, these two were the ones I was talking about when I played wingman a while ago. Wingman-ing=success. 

Last night I had the genius idea to bike to the dinner and then leave it there, since it was close to the new gym, so I’d have to run to the gym the next morning and get a workout in before I would be able to go anywhere. Well, that backfired. Somewhere on the run to the gym, my keychain ejected my bike key, so my bike and I were stuck on the opposite side of campus…and I couldn’t get it! Before hunting for the key, I got a good workout in. Wednesday’s Crossfit workout seemed like such a good one, but I couldn’t make it in that day so I made it up today. By the way, I’m loving the new gym. It opens an hour earlier on weekends, and it’s SO much less crowded. All the bars were empty! That’s unheard of! 

The workout was 10 minutes of 3 squats every minute at 80% of my one rep max. These were rough. A lot rougher than I was expecting. Hellooo jello legs. Then, 5 sets of 3 push presses at 75% one rep max, and good mornings. The WOD was 100 hollow rocks (a core strength focused exercise). I followed that with 8 minutes on the erg. I’m trying to log more time on the erg in preparation for my 5k since I felt like it really helped me last year with my race. I’m not sure how I kept my pace for those 8 minutes though-on the looong walk back my legs were complete jello. And I must have looked ridiculous weaving around and staring at the ground the entire way back, looking for my lost key. I immediately got a new key chain-the old one was kind of broken, hence the key ejection-and symbolically tossed my old key chain. I’m just so grateful it was my bike key, not my room key or lab key-my roommate is gone all weekend since she has bronchitis. 

I then went on some errands-I need new running shoes so I hit up the running store. I brought my favorite old shoes that I’ve had many pairs of, as well as my most recent pair. It turns out they were the same model! No wonder I liked them!

I just went with the tried and true, although they had to be ordered. I’m excited about the new color though! Not that I disliked my old ones, but they weren’t exactly me.

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I then went to Peet’s with the intentions of spending the day doing work. I ordered a cappuccino and a blueberry banana muffin.

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However, after spending quite a few minutes looking up running workouts on my phone and enjoying my refreshments, I realized that the environment probably wasn’t the most conducive to me doing work. At least that kind of work. 

I had dinner with my family tonight to celebrate my dad’s birthday!

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The big 5-0. Happy birthday to my dad!

And here was dinner:

I started with a basic half salad.

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And chose teriyaki tofu stir fry as my entree. Yum!

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We then headed back to my sister’s apartment for delicious German chocolate cake. I tried to avoid the nuts as much as possible, but between the cake and the few nuts in my salad, I’m pretty sure my skin is not going to be happy.

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And since this post has been pretty devoid of pictures, let’s look at some other eats from the past couple of days.

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Chicken sausage and figs. That’s a totally normal snack, right?

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Zucchini bread.

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Microwave nachos and cold chili for dipping purposes.

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A new granola bar with sunflower seeds/butter. It was pretty good. It’s actually engineered to have a perfect carb to protein ration for post-workout, and all the ingredients are good. 

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What may be my last pumpkin of the season. I’m actually pretty sick of it at this point! I made a mini mug cake with pumpkin, egg, almond milk, spices, coconut sugar, and some pumpkin butter. Delicious! I topped it with coconut cream. I’ve never had coconut cream before, and to be honest, it was a little much for me. It would probably be more my taste if it was thinned out a little bit. But not a bad combo. 

Tomorrow, my training schedule calls for a “long run.” It’s funny, the run it prescribes is 2 hours less than last weekend’s run (16 miles). It calls for 60 minutes, but I’ll probably end up doing 8 miles instead because the distance and route just work out better that way. And, I’ll stay in longer distance shape for my 10 turkey trot. 

In terms of workouts and eating, I feel kind of ready for a change. I need a new challenge. I need results. I desperately want to get faster, and I feel like my body is starting to get complacent with my workouts-Crossfit is no longer quite as torturous, and I’m looking to ramp things up. I’m not really sure how to do that though! I think I’ll try to make an awesome meal plan, and work some plyometrics and sprints into my workout routine. I desperately need to do a timed mile, but that’s easier said than done because I want to do it in the afternoon when I’m looser, and the track is closed for track practice all afternoon. Plus, I need to actually be fresh for it! Such a dilemma. 

Also-I did finally get my bike back. Luckily, I had a spare key at home which my parents brought me at dinner! Phew!

What’s the hardest workout you’ve ever done? Please share!