Plan Backfired

Date: November 9, 2013

Author: astottler

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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

And here was dinner:

I started with a basic half salad.

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

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.

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

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

Zucchini bread.

Microwave nachos and cold chili for dipping purposes.

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.

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!

So…That Just Happened

Date: November 3, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

What just happened? THIS.

(NOTE-that wasn’t my pace-it was displaying the fastest pace.)

Wait…what?

I’ve been hinting to you guys that I wanted to get one last long run in before 5k training starts, but I purposely didn’t say the amount because I wasn’t sure how it would go, and I didn’t want to push through if something felt off. But let’s back up a tiny bit.

Pre-run breakfast-eg, banana, cocoa powder. I couldn’t find my normal cocoa powder so I used the dark chocolate, which worked just fine.

Then, I laid out my fueling-so much different than just my one packet of goo for a normal long run!

I wore my water belt, but I also carried a plastic pouch of water because I knew that wouldn’t be enough, and I didn’t think I’d have anywhere to fill it (although I did end up seeing a water fountain and public bathroom at mile 7.5-good to know!) I had so much to carry though!

I also brought my phone on this in case something went horribly wrong-it was a loop, so if I got hurt or anything, I would be far, far away from where I needed to be.

I was planning on listening to my audiobook, but I decided to listen to just one song to get me started. But I was really enjoying the whole running to music thing, so I kind of cheated and just turned on my #werunsf race day playlist. Hey, I’m not going to be running a half for a very long time anyways! Since my route was a lot more interesting than the out and backs I do at the bay trail, the music served as the perfect amount of distraction. Plus, I was running near cars a lot, which makes my audiobook difficult to hear.

The weather was perfect. The run route was really awesome too-I’ve biked this loop before so I knew what to expect. It took me past a pumpkin patch, many horse farms, a vineyard, a farm. There were also a ton of beautiful fall trees.

This route definitely wasn’t flat though. There weren’t mountains, but I checked the elevation, and I think there were around 400 feet of gains. For the record-I would much rather run up these hills than bike them! The first 6 miles were uphill-slightly uphill, but fairly constant. I wasn’t worrying about pace at all, but my pace was concerning me a little in this part, just because if I kept that pace the whole way, it would take FOREVER. There was a trail/path off the road, but it had a TON of rolling hills because it followed the natural terrain and was much lower than the road, but every quarter mile or so would come back up to meet the road. I ended up running on the street quite a bit (FACING traffic-don’t worry!).

I really, really enjoyed it. I passed a million bikers, which was pretty cool. I think I had the dorkiest smile on my face. Especially around Mile 11-but that may have had something to do with the fact that it was pretty much downhill from there.

Check out this view at mile 11!

And what I just came down from.

I loved this route because it was so varied, and I never got bored.

But enough about the scenery. How did it feel?

My feet weren’t a non-issue. And this run really was a test for them to see if they would handle marathon training. I was able to manage them by focusing on running on a very particular part of my foot. And since I wasn’t trying to break any speed record, I’d stop as necessary to shake them out, which helped a ton. I also stretched as needed, which definitely helped. My left toe stopped hurting at the end, but I’m pretty sure that’s just because my legs starting getting super tired and I just lost track of my foot pain, because it really hurt after my run was finished.

I realized around mile 1 that I didn’t even think about replenishing electrolytes. Whoops. None of my runs in the past were really long enough for this to be an issue, so I didn’t even think about it. During a long hill climb around mile 11, my hamstring started acting up a little (cramping), but I was able to stretch it out and carry on, although it’s a little sore today.

My biggest issue with this run? The distances didn’t quite work out, so I ended up running around my dorm area for the last mile/half mile or so. Which is the. worst. thing. ever. You can see the finish line, and you’re there, but you’re not there. Which stinks when your legs are DONE.

As far as fueling goes, I tried the raspberry Cliff goo for the first time. I bought it when I wasn’t sure if I’d find chocolate for my race. First of all, I love Cliff goos for the ingredient list. It doesn’t have weird chemicals, so they goo just tastes like syrup, not like chemicals (like the one other brand I tried. Ick!) The raspberry was a little thinner, and maybe a little sweeter. Which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but I had a cold a week ago, and have a tiny bit of a lingering cough, especially when I eat sweet things. Add that to 10 miles of running, and you get a coughing fit while trying to eat a goo. I think the bikers thought I was crazy. It’s casual.

I also understand why fruit is handed out on the marathon course. I would have killed for watermelon at mile 13.1 when I had to eat my bar. Next time!

As soon as I finished, I threw on my compression socks. My calves were already getting sore!

At that point, I also would have killed for a smoothie. So I snuck into the dining hall as it was closing, and had an awesome post run breakfast.

My legs actually did not feel bad after this. I’m a little sore today, but nothing crazy. It’s amazing how things have changed since I first started training for a half. After my first 10 miler, I could not walk. At all. Yesterday, I was fine. Although stairs still seemed a little intimidating.

Also, while I wasn’t worrying about pace, I just stuck to what felt comfortable, I was still only a few seconds off the pace for my first ever 12 miler, which was waaaaay flatter than this hilly run. In this run, on flats, I often found myself in the 9:00s, 10, 12 miles into the run. Mile 15 was probably near a 10:00 pace, which used to be a huge push for me.

So….my conclusion from this run? Could I run 10 more? I don’t know. Maybe with training. But I’m not going to be running a marathon in the near future. For one thing, it doesn’t really fit into my race schedule. I’m working on shorter distances until my warm up half marathon in April. I’m going to try to PR the Giant’s half marathon in the summer, since it’s a relatively flat course (for SF).

But.

The timing would set me up pretty perfectly for a fall marathon.

So we shall see!

For now though, I’m excited to focus on shorter distances and speed. I really, really need to do a timed mile, but I’m kind of dreading it because those are painful. I want to try to do some fast 5ks in January and February as well, you know, before I move into a faster age division!

After my run, I had a retreat for my sorority. The best part? The girl whose house it was at had 3 cats. Heaven.

For dinner, we ordered Thai food, which was really good! And after 16 miles…I may or may not have been a bottomless pit.

I didn’t spend the night because I’m sleep deprived and drowning in work, so I ended up getting a solid 9.5 hours of sleep last night. Oh daylight savings time, you could not have come at a better time.

Also, congrats to Meghan for finishing a full IRONMAN. That’s insane! I was definitely thinking about her on my run yesterday!

Should I run a marathon? Am I crazy? What’s your favorite post workout food?

Biscuits were salty and amazing yesterday. OMG.

Speedy Feet-Life After Half Marathon Training

Date: October 27, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Sunday! I’m currently holed up in a coffeeshop. It is such a beautiful day, so I biked off campus, books in tow, with the intention of spending all day doing schoolwork in a coffeeshop. However, I realized I forgot to bring several items critical to me actually doing my work, but I still want to spend a little time here, since I made the effort to bike all the way here.

A cappuccino, as always. I actually slept pretty late this morning. I stayed up late last night doing pretty wild things- helping my roommate start a food blog, reading my old blog posts, watching a Biochem lecture for fun, and rearranging my furniture at 1am. I’m clearly the life of the party.

Also, I may finally be pumpkined out. For a snack, I had this:

Pumpkin bread, cottage cheese with pumpkin butter and sunflower seed butter, and a pumpkin spice chai latte.

But I may or may not have had pumpkin bread for breakfast….

A few things though-this is the video I was watching: Sugar: The Bitter Truth. If you do anything today, please please please watch this! It’s one of my favorite videos, and this stuff is basically what I want to spend my life studying-and it’s been way too long since I last watched it!

Also-guess what? Instead of taking another Chem lab next quarter, I’m taking Human Nutrition, a higher level class than the Intro to Nutrition class I took last fall. I’m really excited-except that after I take this class, I’ll have taken all the Nutrition classes at my school. Yes, all 2.

When I was helping my roommate figure out some blog things, I got sucked into reading some of my first blog posts. And possibly making fun of my past self a little bit. If you’re interested, here’s my first post. I think this was really great for me to re-read, because it reminds me of why I initially started blogging.

I also read a lot of the posts from when I was rowing. It really made me miss rowing! I miss my teammates, being part of a team, and just in general doing a sport. However, there is a lot that sounds pretty torturous. Like my post titled “Cold and Wet…Again.” Key phrases such as “day 2 of our 3 workouts a day,” “it was sooo cold,” and “it started pouring while we were in the boat.” Yeah, given I’m such a wimp in the cold, it’s no wonder I got mono!

I read through some of the posts from last winter-I feel like my eating was a little more interesting, but I’m definitely in a much better place mentally now than I was then.

Anyway, since I crave workout structure, I decided that I’m going to follow a Cross Country training plan in preparation for PRing a 5k in December. I’m actually super excited for this-there are lots of speed workouts, which are always fun, plus the runs are a lot shorter than my half training, so it will be a really nice change. I’m tentatively planning to always run in the morning, so I have some sort of structure in my schedule. Plus, that’s one of the times I know the track team isn’t practicing on the track.

Also, if you’re wondering, the time I’m trying to beat is 24:58. I think it’s definitely doable-I hadn’t run much before that race, but I was in awesome rowing shape, so it will be interesting to see how fast I can get in the next 8 weeks or so.

But I may or may not have ulterior motives than just PRing-last year I placed 5th in my division-and top 3 get medals. If I can break 24:00, I have a decent shot at placing. The only problem? I have absolutely no idea how fast I am right now-my last timed mile was 8:00, but that was when I was just coming off of Mono, and hadn’t run in many months.

But here’s the thing-the only chance I might really have to place in races is while I’m still in the same age division-and in at my next birthday, I’ll move up a division. In my division, I was actually able to come in first in my 10k a year ago. So I think I need to run a ton of 5 and 10ks before I get any older! It’s definitely nice to have something different to train for-I’m really excited! I still miss my team sports though. There’s a running club, but my friends who regularly go basically told me I’d have to be able to run 10 miles at a 6:00 pace. Yeah, not happening.

So, I mapped out a new running schedule for myself, and I’m going to spend the weeks leading up to my race getting fast, strong, and building endurance. One other thing I realized when I was reading my old posts was that I never really go into much detail about my workouts anymore-and my blog is called “FITNESS is Sweet.” So I’ll make sure to add more detail on those! I’m really excited for my new training-I start in a week, after one more long run.

Sidenote-on my long run, if for some reason something goes wrong and I can’t finish, the place where I’d be when that might likely happen just so happens to be at my favorite froyo place. So even if I can’t finish, it’s a win-win, right??
And my roommate and I are officially the most popular people in our dorm.

We put out candy yesterday and it was gone within an hour, so I had to restock! I lovelovelove that I still get to buy Halloween candy, even though I’m in a dorm!

Bloggers-do you ever read your old posts? Thoughts on them?

I’m Flying Jack!

Date: October 12, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Ok, confession: I’ve never actually seen the Titanic. Moving on…

Yesterday morning (Friday) I donned by neon shirt and headed out for an early morning run. I checked the weather report-47 degrees was the low…and the low was at the time of my run. Awesome. The temperatures are really starting to cool down here. Want to know something bizarre? Next week we have lows of 47 and highs of 80. While it does tend to get cold at night here, that much temperature difference is insane!

3 miles were on the schedule for Friday morning. I ran half a mile there, and half a mile back, so my workout was 8x400m repeats. I really like these-and yesterday I felt like I was flying. I don’t wear my Garmin for these, but I’m sure I was well under my goal pace. Something I like even more? 200 repeats. I’ll get to do a lot of those while I train to PR my 5k. SO pumped. I just felt really great out there Friday-I felt like I was flying on my 9 mile run last weekend as well-I feel like I’ve suddenly gotten a lot faster-perfect timing though! T minus 8 days until RACE DAY.

I’m liking my new post early morning workout coffee ritual.

It’s always cold in the morning, plus if I go straight from my workout, I beat all the on the way to work/class crowd. Perfect.

Walking back to my dorm, I saw this:

I wish I lived on the first floor. The cat is back! I called to it and it came running over to me.

Such a sweetie! He almost made me late to class, but so, so worth it.

And…um…he followed me in the door. Which was obviously a problem-it was a good thing my friend was there to kick him out because I definitely didn’t have the heart to do it!

I took zero food pictures from yesterday. But I did do things. And eat things. My dorm had a “homecoming” dance, so we all got dressed up and had fun. When I get the pictures back, I’ll show you guys! I also got ready and totally showered in 15 minutes flat. Because my friends wanted to leave and I was watching How I Met Your Mother….Priorities people! It was actually a lot of fun-everyone was expecting it to be super awkward, but it really wasn’t. It was great to connect with people from my dorm.

This morning I decided to go to Crossfit. 2 weeks ago I PRed my clean and jerk, but today I just couldn’t get it up. You can’t PR everyday, and you don’t always have good lifting days. I wasn’t committing on the jerks, and I kept missing the cleans. I’m pretty sure in the last 2 weeks I’ve developed some bad habits-it felt awesome 2 weeks ago, but then the following week, I started banging up my legs doing cleans.

Which is not right. I was having the same problem today, but no bruising. I could tell I just wasn’t getting in the right position. But it happens. I was frustrated, but looking forward to the WOD: 3 400m sprints with 2 minutes of rest, and then 1 minute of rest in between. I brought my running shoes for this. I was expecting to finish last because everyone else was guys, but it didn’t turn out that way at all. I beat everyone in my heat (we split into 2 heats, starting 10 seconds apart to avoid running into each other), and even passed a person or two from the heat before me. It. Felt. Awesome. I’m starting to really look forward to training for the 5k-I haven’t done much fast running lately, and I forgot how much I liked it! And passing people? Best thing ever.

On a sidenote, I REALLY need to do a timed mile, but I’ve been putting it off. My last one was 8:00, but that was pretty soon after mono and before any half training started. I would think I’d be somewhere around 7:30. I would LOVE to get down to under 7:00 like back in the day, buttt we’ll see about that.

After my workout, I made the world’s worst smoothie. I brought my little packet of chocolate protein powder and cocoa powder to the dining hall, and even waited in the super long blender line. I added blueberries, mango, and milk. And…..WAIT FOR IT-arugula. I wanted spinach but they only had an arugula spinach mix, so I figured, why not? WRONG. WRONGWRONGWRONG. Arugula is a lot more flavorful than spinach. So I had 2 giant glasses of chocolate arugula. It was awful.

I attempted to drink it alongside a biscuit and some chicken/guac. But then gave up and just got another biscuit. Shudder.

Hopefully you guys are having something at least a little more delicious! Tomorrow is my last “long” run before my race. I’m doing 6, even though my plan calls for 8. Last time I felt like my legs really benefitted from the extra rest. The body wants what the body wants! (Which, by the way, is NOT an arugula smoothie.)

Have a great Saturday!

The Day I Ate Nothing But Yogurt and Pumpkin

Date: October 10, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hi friends! Can you believe tomorrow is Friday? It kind of snuck up on me this week! Tonight I still need to do a lab report and a prelab. Fun stuff. I skipped yoga in favor of homework for once…

WARNING: If you’re looking for a healthy lifestyle, today may not be the best example. But such is life.

I actually slept 8 hours last night. I can’t even remember the last time! I had weird dreams though-driving to softball practice on a motorcycle??

I went to 8am Crossfit. The workout included lots of thrusters and push presses (a brutal combo), and more double unders. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do a million and two single unders-I just had to attempt doubles for one minute each round. Way easier on the calves! And I actually did string some double unders together too-something sort of clicked!

Post-Crossfit.

I decided to go to the dining hall to restock on eggs.

And might as well get breakfast while I’m there, right?? Plus, after seeing these vats of yogurt….Swoon.

I also did something crazy…I drank decaf coffee! Who am I? Drinking coffee for a reason other than caffeine?? It was eh. (That’s what I get.)

I decided to pack lunch today-it was time to attempt pumpkin yogurt! Sadly, my yogurt got a little beat up in my bag and ended up leaking all over my lunch bag…it could have been much worse!

Here are the ingredients:

Plain yogurt, pumpkin pie filling, cinnamon. And yes, I did pack the entire cinnamon container-I’m just cool like that.

Yummmmm. So if we’re keeping a tally-yogurt #2 for the day.

After my Ochem section, I was mentally done. I’ve worked pretty hard this week, and my brain was feeling it. I decided to take a break and just watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother. SO good. Here are a few pre-football snacks:

I mashed up a small avocado with my guac mix and BAM. Instant guac party of one.

Pumpkin pie filling and sunflower seed butter. Pumpkin pie filling obviously isn’t the most nutritionally sound food, but folks, I have a big can to finish and it’s delicious. Hence, the don’t do as I do. Also, multiply this by more as a later snack.

Snap pea crisps and a pumpkin granola bar from Trader Joe’s. These are not my favorite, but interesting to try.

Then, it was off to my first flag football game of the year! It was really fun-we lost but I wasn’t expecting anything crazy. I got knocked down twice by the same guy and skinned my knee up a tiny bit. #battlescars Ok, technically I ran into him, and when a smaller mass and larger mass collide, guess who falls? Putting my Physics knowledge to use people!

On the way back to my dorm, I saw my little friend from last year! DAY. MADE.

He actually had a tag this year-his name is Finnegan, and he lives with the Resident Fellows in a dorm nearby. And he always seems to pop up around exam times…

I debated 1. going to yoga 2. going to the dining hall 3. eating in my dorm. I chose the dining hall. Nothing exceptional today-I got some type of fish which was pretty good.

They also had a baked potato bar today, which was fun. I got a small potato with all the fixings.

Aaaand because I obviously didn’t have enough sugar in the form of pumpkin pie filling, this happened.

Soooo yeah. That’s that. The rest of the nigh is homework time for me! Tomorrow morning, I’m hoping my calf is sufficiently recovered so I can get a solid run in. I’d like to get one more speed workout in-I’m hoping to get 3 miles in-.5 mile there, .5 mile back, and then 8×400 repeats. Cross your fingers!

Do you ever get into food ruts?