This quarter is insane. I spend half the time feeling like I’m in way over my head, which makes me angry because I’m supposed to be enjoying my last spring! And I spend the other half of the time (ok, maybe more like 25%) thinking, ok, I’ve totally got this, I can manage my time. Seeing as I’m currently blogging, I’m sitting in that 25% right now, after just about finishing my take home test due Monday. This is my schedule: GRE Saturday, take home test due Monday, essay due Monday, Biochem test Monday, normal reading due Monday. ARGH. The awful thing is that unfortunately this is definitely not my only Monday with those 4 things! This quarter is going to be the death of me. But right now I’m managing. And by right now, I mean in this exact moment.

Another current bane of my existence is that my university shut off my Wifi last week, and I had to go through a 10 hour encryption process to get it back. And TBH, it’s not worth doing that on my phone, so I’m currently not on Wifi on my phone, which means photos don’t transfer to iCloud very well. Blerch.

So Thursday. I had a super awesome Crossfit workout that morning. I was able to do kipping pull ups for real, no band, stringing them together (ok, in 3’s) during the WOD, which is a huge first for me. Then we did 100 weighted hanging knee raises. Then I decided to do one more extra pull-up, just for fun. And on that one bonus pull up, I tore the #@%$#$ out of my hand. I’ve never exactly understand hand tearing before—I’ve gotten blisters, etc. but in this case, my callus tore off my viable skin. Yuck. I had to wrap my hand to be functional in life.

But pull-ups, am I right??

Here are some Thursday meals.

Mushroom garlic soup with GF grilled cheese for lunch.

A really weird taco, essentially filled with lettuce, tomatoes, and hominy. But it had avocado, so of course it was great. Side note: I really love hominy! For those unfamiliar with it, it’s corn that is sort of soaked/sprouted.

Thursday night, I made the questionable decision of going to Senior Night. Questionable because #sleep. 

We ended up taking an Uber because the bus line was insane. It was a super fun night, but I didn’t make it to bed until 3ish.

I got up earlier than necessary Friday morning to run. While that may seem like a questionable decision, 1. it wakes me up and 2. I woke up before my alarm anyway because I can’t sleep in. Whoopee. Friday night I had sorority recruitment until 1am, and 5 hours of classes leading up to it. The prospect was daunting. Friday morning was turning out to not be my morning at all either. First, after my run, I managed to lock my car keys in my trunk. I didn’t think that was possible. Then, on the way to class, I totally wiped out on my bike. My hand was still wrapped up and beat up from pull ups, so I couldn’t grip my handle bars well with that hand. It was raining, and my good hand slipped off my handlebars. There was no way to go but now. I landed on my hands and knees, drenching myself, but reasonably unscathed. Then I got to be the hot mess showing up to section applying all kinds of bandaids, with a big wet spot on my leg.

My mom sent me these pictures after I complained, haha!

Luckily, before my last class I was able to sneak in a little baby nap. I had to leave pretty early for class because the hand I landed on (i.e. my formerly good hand) was bruised and scraped up, and my wrist was a bit sore, so I had to walk to class because I couldn’t hold the handle bars. I never walk, so this was kind of a big deal!

After 8 long hours of sorority recruitment, I ended up staying up until 4ish talking and joking with my friends. I think we were all a little slap happy. But man, that knocked me out.

Saturday, I spent the morning resting up, and then tested out my new Crossfit shoes. I’m trying the Nikes, and so far I like them a lot! Although I do worry I have 1/2 a size too big.

I lifted on my own, to the best of my torn hand’s ability. I did back squats, deadlifts (though my hand wouldn’t let me go as heavy as I hoped), single leg deadlifts, calf raises, and weighted planks.

Then, I headed home to get my Senior Formal dress (!!!) altered. And to eat.

Basic wrap: corn tortilla with grilled chicken, cheese, and pilothouse farms caesar (I’m officially a fan of Bolthouse farms). Plus a side salad.

I stayed home for several hours to bust out a cover letter that had been hanging over my head.

Sunday was spent catching up on work and going to a spin class.

On Monday, this dinner was noteworthy. The soup of the week was a spinach and goat cheese, and I was a huge fan! It reminded me a bit of the Greek spinach and cheese pastries, Spanakopita. The recipe calls for 24 cups of spinach! And makes about 4-8 servings of soup…

We added some chicken for a little staying power. I really liked this one; it’s crazy how versatile soup can be!

Also noteworthy: these. Blueberry and fig. YUM.

Monday was also my puppy’s first birthday! So here’s a little throwback.

Tuesday morning after Crossfit, I had breakfast with a view.

For one of my classes this quarter, I’m observing squirrels 2 hours every week, and this is my location of choice, so I packed some yogurt to enjoy while watching the wildlife.

One of my subjects.

This was a delicious lunch. Chicken salad with grapes and sunflower seeds, roasted root veggies, and sautéed mushrooms.

Tuesday night, I made it out to another baseball game. Despite my crazy schedule, I’m so glad I did. I think my biggest regret at Stanford is not going to more baseball games.

I packed a wrap for dinner, so dinner was with a view as well.

It was a good game; we CRUSHED SJ State.

And that brings us to todayish. The only few noteworthy things I can think of:

1. Apparently my new Crossfit shoes are magic because I can now string together double unders. I usually do double-single-double-single, and only got like 3 doubles straight through ever. In the workout I busted out the full set of 21. What?? Where did that come from??
2. I was super inspired for this week’s spin class. Lots of new music, and requests from my students! Sadly, everyone who requested something was not there to enjoy it, but I think everyone who was there had a good time!
3. I got a rabies vaccine today. #prevetproblems Just to be clear, it’s preventative, not because I’ve been exposed! Also, the process took a while, and I was waiting by myself for about 15 minutes with a detailed handout about potential side effects. And I’m sort of a hypochondriac so that was fun. So far, so good though!
4. I have a wild Friday night planned. Biochem studying. Maybe I’ll get a little wild and throw in some GRE vocab.
5. I got a pineapple. In my fruit and cheese of the month box! Pretty sure I’ll need to bring it home to cut because it’s going to laugh at my silly dorm knives.                                       
6. And now I think it’s time for bed. WHEW. Let the craziness continue! (Except please don’t. Ugh.)

What is your favorite fruit?

I’m currently pretty excited that it’s mango season!

Let’s back it up a bit, shall we? 

Wednesday morning I went to the gym for a Crossfit-like workout (basically the one they did on Tuesday that I couldn’t make), plus 2 miles on the treadmill. The workout was working on hang cleans, and the conditioning part was 3 rounds of 500m row, 21 pull ups (assisted), and 21 push ups. The sad thing about this workout is it definitely made me realize my knee isn’t 100%. I had some trouble with the rowing! Also, I have a mystery bruise on the top of my foot, right along one of the seams…so that feels fabulous.

I went to the dining hall for breakfast-I really wanted a change of pace! Sadly they didn’t have just egg whites (which can be less sketchy), but I went with plain scrambled eggs and egg onion, spinach, and cheese. Plus a side of fruit!

Wednesday was a little crazy-I had an evening midterm, which needed to be studied for. Plus, I had lots to do for Thursday! I actually got 9 hours of sleep Tuesday night, and it was absolutely glorious. And I’m currently contemplating bed…

Anyways, here’s my randomly packed lunch-totally normal to eat turkey burgers and corn on the cob out of a bag, right??

This filled me up SO MUCH. This is the change I was talking about-when I get full, I’m SO FULL CAN’T EAT ANOTHER BITE. And when I’m hungry, I’m KILL ME NOW I’M STARVING hungry. I’m not sure if this is my metabolism changing? 

Fun fact-did you know that polyunsaturated fats get used as hormones that regulate metabolism? So maybe this is because I’m eating more fat?

Now I’m thinking it may be something else though-like my body adjusting to more fiber/different foods. Today, I couldn’t eat a ton without being TOTALLY stuffed.

But on that theme, I left studying to come back to my room and eat a snack-the last of the yogurt from the giant container, with berries and sunflower seed butter.

If you can’t tell, I’m running a little low on bowls. And utensils…I ate my soup off of a plate.

I have real, non-paper bowls but they’re really deep, and since the soup got thinner when it thawed, all the goodies on top sink to the bottom. So plate=problem solved…?

My test went fine. Which is good. And I was on top of things enough that I wasn’t up crazy late (5 hours of sleep-yay!). 

The next morning I went to spin, and studied for my morning midterm while eating. Breakfast was 0% Greek yogurt+mashed banana+cocoa powder. I poured everything onto a (you guessed it) plate, and it’s amazing how much yogurt comes out of a tiny container!

I ended up finishing my Nutrition midterm 30 minutes early-this stuff is my jam So I had plenty of time to do my pre-lab before my afternoon class. 

For lunch, I went with something small and more moderate-butter sage mashed sweet potatoes-but I didn’t want to waste the skin, so I stuffed them! Yum!

Look how it compacted after rolling around in the container all day!

After lab, I had a snack of sunflower seed butter (the last of it ) and an apple, plus corn on the cob (totally normal, right??). Then, Crossfit. We didn’t have strength today-just mobility. Which basically meant foam rolling for half the time. Since my race is coming up, I wanted an easier type of workout anyways! The WOD ended up being worse than expected-we did 10, 9, 8, 7,….1 thrusters, with 90 jump ropes between each set, followed by an 800m run at the end. My shoulders are still really sore from push presses on Tuesday, so that was kind of terrible. 

I pushed the run a lot at the end, and ended up feeling kind of sick, thanks to whatever changes are going on. I’m kind of concerned about this given my 5k is this Sunday, and that naturally has a tendency towards nausea. I think I may to stick to lower fiber/easier to digest foods or something! I think I’m going to have kombucha tomorrow morning too. 

I forced myself to eat something afterwards-what ended up working the best was the brown rice fried rice (not really fried rice, they just like giving their rice different names to seem fancier.)

Veggies weren’t that appealing (but maybe the veggies choices also weren’t great), and I ate a lot of the tofu. Plus this mini plate with more rice and chicken, and a little pineapple.

So hopefully whatever is going on resolves itself-this is really strange! But I guess your body will react when you completely change what you’re eating!

Oh, and I came back to my dorm to find this:

Yes, that is my door. (And by that I mean the door I always use to enter/exit my dorm). No clue how that happened. #collegelife

One story is someone was mad and kicked it in. Another is someone accidentally ran into it. Not sure how that is possible….

In fitness news-why is this half training different? Besides the fact that I’ll be doing more speed work than before, some of the longer runs may be a bit more…unconventional. Why? I’m doing a Tough Mudder! The weekend after my half…the timing isn’t ideal, but I’m doing it with my sister and her boyfriend. We’re trying to get up a bigger group as well! So some of my longer runs may incorporate more strength elements-like running 5 miles, doing Crossfit, running 5 miles. Or doing some type of strength move every mile. That would definitely break up the monotony of a treadmill run as well!

Can I confess something? I’m on week 2 of my project…and I don’t feel different. Maybe feeling good is my new normal (I think this is the case), but I want to keep seeing changes! I’m scared this project won’t work. That after 4 months nothing will be different. That my theories were wrong. And I understand that it’s really too soon to tell whether this will be life changing, but I’m impatient. I would just feel really silly if after 4 weeks, nothing happens. I mean, I’m definitely developing new habits and trying new things, which is great, but do you have any idea how many cookies I’ve passed up on? I never realized how abundant cookies are on a college campus. They even had cookies for us after the bio midterm! But I know I need to be patient. And I’m determined to stick with this. And get more sleep…I’m actually not sleep deprived right now thanks to Tuesday night, but I know it will happen again if I don’t make sleep more of a priority. One of my chem friends today was super sleep deprived, to the point it was amusing to witness. Remember last Thursday when I was running on 3 hours of sleep? I was flat out delirious. Inspired, yes. Very inspired. But totally delirious. I’m running out of energy here-and since no more work needs to be done today, bed sounds really nice right now. Maybe I am more sleep deprived than I thought?

Have you ever done any type of obstacle course race?

My alarm went off this morning…freaking too early. 4.5 hours of sleep after a 5 hour of sleep night is just not enough. But that’s temporary. I headed to the gym for a lifting session. It was supposed to be entirely leg day (my Leg Demolisher workout, but I didn’t have a bar to use for overhead squats, so instead I made myself a little pull up WOD. Before that, I tested with the pull up machine how little resistance I could use and still be able to perform the exercise. GUYS. I’m only 25 pounds away from being able to do a real live pull up! Anyways, the WOD was 15-12-9 pull ups and box jumps. Short and sweet.

I also added on some planks. I’ve definitely neglected ab work lately, and after power yoga tonight as well, I can already feel it. 

After my workout, my sleep deprivation started to catch up to me, so I went to the dining hall for breakfast for the first time this year for some quick coffee.

Life saver. Except not because either dining hall coffee isn’t very strong or I’m just used to my beloved cappuccinos. I was very tired today, and we’ll leave it at that. Here are some other morning eats.

Dining hall fruit. Not too shabby!

Casually stealing eggs from the dining hall in a glass…That’s totally normal…

I really tried to rally after finishing the days classes to go to the lab, but the banana was just not going to be a substitute for sleep. I decided I wouldn’t be able to do good work anyways so I returned to my dorm for a glorious, glorious nap.

After my nap, I made a half asleep decision to have a snack of pumpkin cream cheese and pumpkin butter on crackers. I say half asleep because I could not for the life of me remember making that decision…but hey, it was a delicious one! Aaaand let’s just say the pumpkin cream cheese may kinda sorta be gone already. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing this week’s problem sets (yay!) and skipping my run because I napped for so long. I’m fine with this-my original plan was 3x a week, so the 4th run is icing. 

Chicken, balsamic salad, and root vegetables that tasted how horses smell. But maybe I’m just not a root vegetable person. 

Baby dessert-muesli with a little grape jelly and almond milk-so happy the dining hall has almond milk this year! The whole “only pumpkin desserts” thing? Well…

They brought gourmet ice cream sandwiches to our house meeting…And once again, the free foods wins. Which is partly why I’m still awake.

Before the house meeting, I spent a ton of time on iTunes browsing new spin music. Did you know there was a genre called “hardcore dance”? Interesting…Well, I made a class for myself to do sometime this week. Which leads to the multitasking. I decided to listen to the playlist to get a feel for it while doing laundry (yes, it’s 11pm). I desperately needed to do laundry-I have no clothes left (specifically workout clothes) plus my sorority has a mixer on Friday and I won’t have any time on Friday to do it then. I decided to do half a load tonight and half a load tomorrow. So I’m currently doing laundry, blogging, and checking up on my playlist. 

Also-I was stupid enough to throw all my clothes in the dryer and press start…before realizing it was the dryer and not the washer. Yes, it’s been that long since I’ve done laundry.

And after all this spin talk, guess what??

I finally registered for spin certification training! So, I’m actually doing it-I’m going to teach spin! The class is 9am-6pm. I’m HOPING we’re not on the bike for the whole time….

That’s all I have today! My laundry calls!

After my 9 am class, I had time for a nice nap before lunch. I don’t usually go to the dining hall for lunch because I’m usually out, but I went there today, and this is what I came out with:Cesar salad, broccoli, tofu, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Plus more salad and a cookie. Yeah, I don’t like eating lunch at the dining hall. I feel like it is too heavy and greasy for a mid day meal. Dining hall meals in general are not very satisfying, which is why I usually end up with some type of dessert…I also had a mango and cinnamon popcorn later on. 

After lunch, I went to my Psych section, and we got to examine and hold human brains! How cool is that?? I briefly considered trying to take a picture for the blog and then decided, yeahh I probably shouldn’t. For many reasons. 

In the evening, I went to a power yoga class, which was awesome as always. As you guys can probably tell, not a lot of excitement happening today. But that’s not a bad thing. Just not the best to blog about!For dinner, I whipped myself up an egg scramble in the microwave. This combo is one of my favorite meals. Egg whites, spinach, mozzarella, pesto, and avocado. So, so good. 

For dessert I decided to try my hand at a protein mug cake. It was warm and gooey. HOWEVER. I failed to add any sweetener besides my protein powder, so it basically tasted like cardboard. Yum. Next time folks, next time.

My roommate and I both eat similar things, and like to eat healthily. We also both really dislike our dining hall. She has a better excuse though, she has a pretty big gluten intolerance, and can’t eat hardly anything. So, I had a brilliant idea. We’re each going to make dinner once a week. I’m SOSOSOSO excited! I’m already brainstorming things to make. I love bowl meals, so prepare to see many more of those. And of course, everything should be microwave friendly.

This led into a discussion about food and food blogs. I don’t tell everyone I know about this blog, even though it is my baby. So I actually ended up showing it to her, along with some of my favorite blogs. She loves to bake and she loves photography, so she wants to start a food blog as well! Yay! I told her about how awesome you guys are and I think she’s convinced!

Well, this discussion occurred fairly late at night, when I should have been doing homework. So I went to bed pretty late, considering I woke up at 6:30. But it’s weird. It’s like I don’t need sleep anymore. I’m not tired all the time, and I’ve hardly slept this week. But I tend to stay up talking or whatnot because I’m just not tired. Avoiding grains as much as possible has certainly helped with my energy levels. Or something has. I realize at some point I will start getting tired, but I’m enjoying this while I can! Have a good night everybody!