Napa

Date: November 25, 2013

Author: astottler

I hope everyone is having a great, short week! I definitely am having an amazing time-I have all week off!

This morning, I woke up early for abs class and spinning on my own. I’m already sore from abs! For spin, i did the same class I did last Thursday, but on a different type of bike-on “real” spin bikes it was definitely harder! I left completely drenched.

Once home, I experienced one of the great lies of the world.

Flavored coffee. It smells amazingly delicious-this one was French vanilla-and then…it tastes like coffee. I mean it wasn’t bad coffee-just a disappointment.

I also had this bar-pretty good!

After more furry kitty time (and therefore sneezing and itchy eyes), it was time to make the drive to Napa!

We stopped at the Genova Delicatessen, one of our longtime favorites.

This local favorite features sandwiches, interesting packaged foods, and housemade pasta. I always order the egg salad-it’s amazingly rich, so my mom and I shared a sandwich, along with a side of Greek cucumber salad.

We also sampled some desserts-Bananas Foster and Caramel Apple pies.

Everything was delicious. I brought some kombucha that I bought yesterday as well-guava is a new to me flavor, and while not my favorite, it was still delicious, and more special than just water for a deli meal.

We have a tradition of going to Ross Dress for Less in Napa every year at Thanksgiving, so we spent a couple of hours combing the shelves there. I ended up leaving with a new shirt and some photo props for some Christmas-bloggy things.

We then checked in and took a walk around the grounds.

The lighting was perfect, and I was actually wearing real people clothes (well, jeans and a scarf-not workout clothes!), so we took advantage of the situation and took some artsy photos.

A nice snowy day!

HAH. If that was actually snow, I would be wearing about 10 more layers. It’s sand!

Then, we settled into our room for a cozy night and room service. I ordered a chicken Caesar salad, but the dressing was a little too anchovy-y for my taste.

For dessert, I had a slice of Cranberry bread and a chocolate shortbread cookie.

I’m feeling pretty confident about my ability to stay healthy and sane during the holidays this year. So far, I’m choosing foods that make me feel good, but also enjoying the treats in moderation and not stressing about it. I had a lot of stress going into the holidays last year (rowing, adjusting to college, being away from home for the holiday season, just finding out I was not longer trying to drop weight to row lightweight…), and I think it made me go a little crazy. I somehow managed to gain 6 pounds last year over the week of Thanksgiving. And I’m not talking about the “oh, too much turkey in my stomach, but it’s gone in a few days” pounds. I’m talking about lasting weight-do the math and think about how much I would have had to eat to accomplish that. I’m in SO much of a better place this year! It really is amazing how much I’ve grown and improved in the last year.

And, I’m getting really excited for my Turkey Trot! It’s weird because I basically haven’t trained for this particular race at all, so I feel really unprepared! I know I’m not though-I’ve still been running!

What are your holiday traditions?

Big Game

Date: November 24, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a terrific weekend! I was busy, busy!

Sunday morning, I went to Crossfit. The WOD was rough-it took me 46 minutes and involved lots of push ups, pull ups, and double unders. I actually did all 100 double unders! It was hard. And I have a bruised pinkie to show for it!

Immediately after Crossfit, I headed out to Big Game-the football game against our rivals.

It must have been my lucky day-I caught a free water bottle AND a free t-shirt!

Things started well when we scored a touchdown in the first 30 seconds or so.

I ended up leaving at halftime-we won 63-13! It was great. I actually ran into some of my high school friends who now go to my rival school while I was biking around after the game-how crazy is that? It was great to catch up-it had been way too long!

Then, it was time for a mass packing and room cleaning. I had to take home an insane amount of stuff, especially given I’ll only be back for a week! Since finals are coming up, I had to take every single textbook. The number of shoes I brought back is embarassing as well-like 7 or 8 pairs, and I am almost positive I’ll wear them all. When you have Spin shoes, Crossfit shoes, workout shoes, running shoes, old running shoes for if it rains…etc. It adds up quickly. Getting everything to my car was an adventure to say the least.

For my first meal home, we brought back food from a local restaurant, and I had huevos rancheros and a salad.

As well as a delicious pumpkin cookie with sticky toffee icing from my grandma.

The best part? I was reunited with this guy:

He sheds like crazy. I’m pretty much a ball of fur at this point. My dad picked up my turkey trot shirt from the expo, and it got all furry just from ME. Well worth it though. Want to know a lesser known about Aurora fact? I’m actually allergic to cats. I just put up with it because they are 100% worth it-but it’s amazing how fast allergies come back-it’s not something that ever even crosses my mind at school!

This morning I went to my home gym to go to one of my favorite spin classes. I did a bit of erging and ab work beforehand. The class was amazing. It’s so nice to have good bikes-it’s a completely different experience. I left the class feeling exhilarated. I have a new appreciation for spin classes now that I’ve been making my own!

After spin I spent way too long in Whole Foods, mostly buying granola bars and THIS. I could not resist.

Almond milk eggnog. Guys, this was seriously amazing. And so much less sugar than regular egg nog, but the flavor was still spot on.

I also picked up lunch-an Asian chicken salad wrap and Thai carrot ginger soup for my mom and me.

Then, we did a little shopping-some Christmas decorations, some workout clothes, and some real people clothes-so basically it was great.

This is going on my dorm door. My roommate and I may or may not be going crazy with the Christmas decorating this year.

The mall was so festive! Santa is ALREADY doing pictures with kids. It seems ridiculous that this all is happening before Christmas, but I guess Thanksgiving is really late this year.

For dinner, I had a teriyaki chicken bowl. I can’t remember the last time I had one of these!

We also may a trip to Starbucks for some berry coffeecake and a peppermint brownie cake pop. They’re good. Get one. They are more or less moist brownies with peppermint bark on the outside. Yum. And so pretty!

The rest of the evening has been spent planning 12 Days of Christmas. And cranberry bread is currently in the oven-we’re going to Napa tomorrow per our usual Thanksgiving tradition, so we’re baking it to take along.

Throwback to Napa trip 4 years ago!

And here’s a question: What do I wear for a rainy race??

Multitasking and I’m Finally Doing It!

Date: October 2, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hello everyone! I wasn’t exactly planning on posting, but this day has become more post-able so here I am.

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!

Who’s Excited??

Date: August 30, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hey guys! Sorry for the lack of regular posts the last couple of days. I felt kind of off-sort of like I was stuck in a rut. That kind of bothers me since I haven’t really felt like that all summer, but I did feel that way some during school. I just didn’t feel like DOING anything. I skipped Crossfit last night, but I did get my butt in gear for a nice walk, which kind of threw me out of the funk. I’m pretty sure the funk may have been partly because I ate too many carbs…they mess with my brain!

Anyways, now that I’m done complaining, I’ll highlight some pictures from the last couple of days and get onto TODAY!

A pretty view of San Francisco from my walk the other today. Sad news-I finished my audiobook mid walk. This sure as heck beats mid-12 mile run, but meh. I feel a little nostalgic about that audiobook-it took me through my long runs of my first half marathon training!

This dinner was not really supposed to be this. The plan was to make a quesadilla with this recipe. However, my mom had to brief the guy taking care of our cats while we’re on vacation, and before I knew it it was 9pm and still no food. Instead of going through the effort of making the tortilla, I just microwaved the leftover meat we were planning on using with a can of diced tomatoes and pepper, plus taco seasoning. I also whipped up some guac. Add a bed of lettuce, and we were good to go! I may have gotten a little seasoning-happy. This was SPICY. (Well, keep in mind all the seasoning was mild…#wimp).

Thursday morning was the kitten nursery. I really do love working with them.

Followed by breakfast-it turned out to be much bigger than this but this is what I got on camera. Yesterday, I discovered I had 2 days to eat 6 mangoes. Challenge accepted. There’s one left.

I also took a “cat nap.” Haha…I’m going to miss that when I go back to school!

Aaaand here’s some more food. Nothing too crazy. I want to get to today’s workouts!

Ok, onto today! 5:45am spin was cancelled due to Labor Day weekend. Booo. But it did give me an opportunity to sleep in a little and make my own spin workout. I really want to be a spin teacher someday, and it’s been a while since I’ve made my own class. Plus, I want to do a post on my local fitness blog about HIIT training, but…I’ve never done it before. So that would be a little hypocritical. I’ve been reading about the benefits in the book I’m reading, and so many bloggers do HIIT training. I designed an hour long class, which included 18 minutes of HIIT training. I did 1:00 of intense, all out work, followed by 1:15 of moderate intensity. I did this sequence 8 times through.

OMG I was DYING. I have NEVER worked that hard on a Spin bike before. To get the true benefits of HIIT, you really need to go 100% max effort during the minute on. Whew. Ouch. And why did I put this at the beginning of my class? For the intervals on, I did a mix of high resistance fast speed, and pretty high resistance super fast speed. My legs hurt….

Anyways, in case you’re wondering, I thought I’d post the “class” so you can all go out and feel my pain. Sound good?

Here’s the playlist I made.

And here’s the sequence:

(Song #)

1-Warm Up

2- Hill: increase resistance every minute and hold 80 RPMs

3-hill: heavy, hold 1:30 and then repeaters

4-first 2:00 downhill then start Hiit

5-9 HIIT then downhill

10-flat road endurance-hold 100 RPMs at working pace

11- hill- 30 sec intervals in/out of saddle

12- hill: heavy repeaters

13- hill: jumps (8 sec on saddle, 8 out/4 in/out, 2 in/out)

14- downhill, high speed (over 100 RPM)

15- flat road intervals

16- flat road intervals

17-cool down

*Repeaters- 20 seconds in saddle, 20 seconds standing straight, 20 seconds standing over bike

I followed this with 10 minutes of abs.

And then cursed myself for being dumb and not running BEFORE my spin workout. It’s one thing to not run before a 5:45am class, but when I could spin ANY TIME, and it’s not even early, I should run first.

4 miles were on the schedule for today. I actually did a decent portion of it on trails-which I hate but need to practice. It was pretty hot. And I did not choose my clothing very well. A big, thick, cotton t-shirt, already drenched in sweat. I was literally drowning in my own shirt. Eh. Oh well.

I decided to mix it up a little today shoe-wise and wear my Brooks. They actually felt better than I remember! Maybe it was my new inserts?

The rest of my day will be spent getting ready for tomorrow- I’M GOING TO HAWAII! I leave super early (well, as a regular at 5:45am spin it won’t be too bad…), so I have to get everything ready to go tonight! I need to go to the library for fun books and to look for new audiobooks. I also have Crossfit tonight…legs rest up quickly! I refuled from my sweaty run with my post-workout recovery drink (aka homemade chocolate milk) which I made in my Vitamix so I wouldn’t have to heat the milk, and could add in an extra ice cube or two.

In Hawaii, I actually have quite a few workouts planned. Which is probably good-it’ll keep me sane. I have 4-5 days of running, including 2 long runs. I’ve contacted some of the Crossfits in Maui, and will drop in for a class or two while I’m away as well. How cool is that??

I might pop in once or twice with a post while I’m away since I’m brining my laptop, but don’t worry-I’ve got you covered with some AWESOME guest posters while I’m gone! Like, really great. While I read the posts I kept wanting to comment!

I hope you all have a GREAT holiday weekend! I’ll make sure to take lots of pictures while I’m gone!

What are you doing this weekend?

My New Favorite Smoothie

Date: July 23, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Let’s start this post off with a recipe, shall we? I FINALLY went out and got myself some Designer Whey protein powder, and I’M IN LOVE (note-I was not compensated for this and had to buy the protein powder myself. All opinions are my own). I’ve never had a decent-tasting protein powder before. In my protein shakes, I’d use MAYBE half a scoop because I was afraid I’d be able to taste this. For my first test, I wanted a fairly basic chocolate smoothie. Here it is!

Chocolate Protein Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 scoop chocolate protein powder

1 T cocoa powder

1/2 frozen banana

1 c unsweetened almond milk

1 pinch xantham gum

1/2 vanilla kefir (you can sub yogurt here)

1 handful spinach

1 large handful ice

Directions:

1. Blend almond milk and spinach together with the half banana first so the spinach can get extra well combined.

2. Add all ingredients but ice and blend.

3. Add ice last, and as necessary for consistency.

This made 2 glasses for me, and the total is about 300 calories.

And it was just as delicious the second time!

So now on to my life. Yesterday I went to Target to look at summer clothes, and things besides workout clothes to wear in Hawaii. Speaking of which, it’s still kind of a ways out, but I’m looking for guest posters! Email me at astottler @ gmail.com.

I took the evening off to rest my calf. More on that in a moment. Here’s yesterday’s food!

Lunch was polenta mixed with onion and chive cream cheese and topped with leftover broccoli.

My mom got polenta from Costco, so there’s kind of a ton of that.

Dinner was vegetarian chili, plus a cilantro lime salad. I love homemade salad dressing-it’s amazing how fresh it tastes! It makes a world of difference in flavor.

Also, at Target yesterday, I picked up this:

This has freeze-dried yogurt! It was actually really good-the mix had freeze dried cranberries and blueberries as well, and made the perfect snack.

I’ve talked about it the last couple of days, but my calf has really been bothering me lately. It started about 7 miles in to my long run, but it wasn’t very intense so I figured it was nothing and kept going. It wasn’t really bothering me at the time, but it tightened WAY up afterwards. Yesterday morning I ran a little at Crossfit and it was bothering me a bit by the end. I’m extremely frustrated that this is happened given my race is in less than 2 weeks! I haven’t had any problems this whole time (besides my weird foot thing), and of course this would come up right before my race. I skipped today’s run. If it continues to feel better tomorrow, I might test it a little with a baby run (I’m talking like a mile here) as long as there is no pain. I’m confidant that it will feel better in time for the race (or at least good enough), but I don’t want to take any chances. I went to my dad’s physical therapist today who has been known to work wonders, and I’m going back tomorrow. I’m not really sure what’s going on or how serious it is (as in how much my brain is simply just freaking out on me). I really don’t like the idea of having a problem with the muscle. For some reason pulled muscles give me the heebie jeebies. Joint problems? I’ll take it. But NOT muscle tears/strains. Ugh.

But here’s the good news. I was able to cross train this morning. I took a morning spin class where I was very conservative. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to stand on the bike (extremely carefully of course). I also did some front squats and abs. I was going to use the rowing machine but it stretched my calf a little more than I’m comfortable with. So that’s that. Lots of spinning until I’m good to run again. And ab work, which I so desperately need. I’ve been seriously slacking there.

I refueled from my workout with a new-to-me yogurt, apple cinnamon. I’m a fan! I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but it was good. Plus half a piece of frozen zucchini bread.

I hope you all are having a great week! Send lots of healing vibes my way!

Have you ever been injured right before a race or big event? What did you do?