Just St. Louis Things

Date: September 12, 2016

Author: astottler

Happy Monday!

My Wifi is super spotty right now so we’ll see when this post actually goes up.

The weather this weekend was absolutely perfect. We had crazy storms all Thursday and Friday. I went on possibly the soggiest run ever Friday morning. Luckily, the rain settled down for a bit by midmorning Friday, and I didn’t get to wet at work. It was nice enough to enjoy my Friday treat, a raspberry Dole whip!

This is Kali (pronounced Cully). He’s definitely the star of the zoo, and he’s the biggest ham.

I spent my Friday night in with cats and spaghetti squash mac n cheese.

Saturday morning I taught an early spin class, and then my roommate (who is leaving soon!) and I went to St. Charles, dog in tow. St. Charles is about 30 minutes north of St. Louis, and has a cute historic downtown.

We walked around a bit. It’s right by the river.

It was an interesting environment that day because there was some sort of bar crawl for charity going on, so downtown was pretty packed with crawlers in matching t-shirts. That’s a cool event though! We stopped for lunch at a place with an outdoor patio for the dog, and after walking around a bit more, we stopped into Kilwins for ice cream.

This was SO good. I haven’t had normal, non froyo/custard ice cream in forever. This was salted caramel. It had caramel swirls and pieces of chocolate covered, delicious salted caramel.

Sunday morning began with a run. I did a different route, and surprised myself by busting out a slightly faster pace. I’ll take it!

The big event of the day was going to a Cardinals game!

Busch stadium is beautiful.

Nothing like AT&T Park in SF, of course!

I had french fries and a beer for lunch. So healthy. I’m actually really happy that this was something I was able to do mentally and physically and be ok with. A year ago, the fat in the fries would have probably made me pretty sick. Progress, my friends!

I had to get Budweiser given my location. It’s really okay. Solid but seems so watery.

The game was super fast, just over 2 hours, which is crazy. It was very low scoring, and the Cards lost. Honestly, I had trouble deciding if I should root for or against them. I’m a die hard Giants fan, and we’re competing with the Cardinals for the Wild Card. But I have always liked the Cardinals (as a secondary team, of course).

I couldn’t bring myself to wear anything Cardinals. My loyalties lie elsewhere. But I did wear a Cardinal shirt! (Stanford Cardinal)

After the game, we walked over to Ballpark Village to the fudge shop to get chocolate covered marshmallows, which was something my roommate wanted to do one last time before she left.

I want to apologize for the abruptness of this post. My Wifi has been pretty spotty so getting this together was the biggest pain. Also, I want to apologize for the relative lack of pictures. I’ve been working on something for you guys, which will hopefully be up Tuesday night!

Where are your baseball loyalties?

Be Thankful for Your Body…One Year Ago Today

Date: September 8, 2016

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I absolutely love Timehop. I sadly had to delete a lot of pictures from my phone due to space issues, so I don’t get to see a lot of things that come up, but I do see posts or tweets, so I see my blog posts.

Exactly one year ago, I (partially) dislocated my shoulder.

(And in true Aurora fashion, I had no idea how serious and how far it was going to set me back at the time.)

I couldn’t lift my arm up. I couldn’t straighten my arm because the weight of my arm hanging down was too painful. Going through the x-ray scanner at airport security was interesting…I couldn’t raise my arm up so of course I got flagged for a pat down!

My shoulder was messed up. I spent the following week in Hawaii, unsure if 1. my shoulder was actually in place and 2. if I was going to need surgery to repair. Thankfully, it was in place, and I didn’t need surgery.

It was 2-3 months before I could even squat, because I couldn’t hold a bar. At the same time, that next month I was so incredibly sick with my gastroparesis (at that time still undiagnosed), so I can’t imagine I would have been getting too crazy anyway.

I let my shoulder rest. I let it heal. I did my physical therapy, and slowly started getting back into things. Then I worked my butt off.

This time a year ago, before my injury, I couldn’t really do pull ups. Maybe a kipping here or there, on a really good day.

Today, I knocked out this workout:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1

pull ups

wall ball

hang power clean

I hopped on the pull up bar with the biggest smile on my face. I teared up a little at the end. I literally built my shoulder up from nothing, and worked my butt off to get where I am now. My shoulder isn’t 100%; if I do a lot of overhead stuff day after day it gets creaky, and I don’t know if handstand push ups or pul ups from a dead hand will ever happen (kipping allows my shoulder to be in a better position). But I’m sure as heck proud of where I am now. A whole lot can change in a year. I definitely never pictured myself typing up a blog post, a year later, about how I could bust out pull ups, while sitting in my bed in St. Louis.

I am so, so thankful and appreciative of what my body can do. I don’t think pull ups are something I will take for granted. I’m amazed every single time I do them in a workout. I feel so lucky for what I can do, but I also realize how hard I worked to get here.

Take some time to appreciate your body. Let your injuries heal. Don’t be stupid—it may seem like the end of the world at the time, but look where I am now.

Since we’re on the topic, I wanted to give a quick foot update. It feels great! When I work it a lot (jumping or running), it feels weak but not painful which is HUGE, especially given I walk 5-6 miles a day around the zoo. That being said, I think I’ve managed my recovery extremely well. I took everything in baby steps, and was careful not to rush things. Right now I’ve worked my way up to 3 miles. I have no intention of going further than that for the next month or two. I’m hoping to work up to a 10k for Thanksgiving but I’m not going to push it. And I decided at the time of the injury that I wouldn’t do any distance for at least a year; it’s just not worth the risk. I’m going to stick to 3 miles for a long time. Maybe the 10k Turkey Trot, but otherwise 3 miles is a solid place to be. I don’t want to point fingers at all, but I have seen other bloggers with stress fractures return to running heavily pretty soon post-injury, and have recurring problems. I don’t want that. I want this to be it for good!

On the topic of serious things, I owe you guys a couple of posts. One is an update on my stomach condition, and the other is the final post of my #TransformationTuesday series. Things have been pretty crazy lately, but I do still plan to follow up on those.

Enough of the serious talk now. How about some food+animals? Sound good?

My friends, it’s time. I haven’t gone head over heels for pumpkin yet, but we can start here. Honestly, I didn’t love this is yogurt because the flavor was too subtle. My favorite way to eat it is by the handful, but I think the cereal would be delicious in a rice crispy type of dessert.

Tip: look for this at Target!

Just another day at work. This is Holly.

I might actually be getting a little tired of spaghetti squash. I seasoned the squash with garlic and mozzarella.

It has still been blazing hot here lately, so I suggested my roommate and I take a trip to Ted Drewes, amazing frozen custard that originated in St. Louis. I got vanilla with hot fudge and it was amazing and smooth. Better than Rita’s, for sure, probably better than Shake Shack too.

Dinner post Crossfit today was a frozen meal, a tamale. I really love tamales, and was tired of spaghetti squash, so I added some spinach, ate it with carrots, and called it dinner.

I’ve been craving chocolate like crazy the last couple of days, and instead of stuffing my face with less delicious substitutes, I decided the smart thing to do was just buy some at the store and satisfy my craving, because a little chocolate is definitely healthier than a lot of random things! Plus, I needed to buy tissues. My allergies have been CRAZY lately; I’m allergic to something blooming. I had to take heavier duty allergy medicine last night which was unplanned, because I couldn’t stop sneezing. Sadly, I took it later than ideal and was definitely a little dopey for the first part of the morning!

And now I’m off to make a spin playlist for this weekend!

How have you dealt with injuries?

Animal Kingdom

Date: September 4, 2016

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hi friends! I’ve been meaning to post all week, but somehow time got away from me! I want to catch you all up on workouts+food+fun (and animals because that is my life.) Yoyo is currently flopped out next to me, helping with the blogging process clearly.

First, I wanted to talk about Monday’s Crossfit. We did the Crossfit Total, which is finding the 1 rep max of back squat, press, and deadlift. Since I’ve had 1001 injuries lately, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew my squat wasn’t going to be a PR. I surprised myself by hitting 190# on the squat! I don’t think I’ve lifted heavier than like 165 since hurting my foot, so I was super happy with that. I hit 80#, which tied my max on press (definitely not my strongest lift), and fell quite short of my max on deadlifts at 225, which was to be expected because I haven’t done heavy deads in a while. My total was 495#. I looked back at the last time I did this, New Year’s Eve 2013, and I actually got the same total! Given my deadlifts were pretty low this time (I PRed deads that day), I was happy with my squat progress! I’ll take it!

Other workouts—running! 3 miles is feeling good on my foot right now, so I’m starting to slowly build a little speed (as in, I pay a tiny bit of attention to it.. I ran my first Garmin run this week! The first 3 mile run felt awful, but the second felt better, and my time even improved a tiny bit. I honestly don’t care about how much speed I’ve lost, because I knew that was going to happen. I’m ready to slowly build back up that endurance!

It was a good week at the zoo. The weather is finally cooling down to be quite pleasant, and I’m just hoping that sticks around!

The Tasmanian Devils are my favorites. They’re nocturnal and are usually sleeping when I see them, so it was a treat to see them up and moving around!

I’ve also been enjoy a lot of downtime snuggling with the kitties, Scooby and Yoyo.

Food:

Sunbutter and jam with my Aunt’s homemade blackberry jam! I needed some things from home and the shipping fee was a flat rate, so my parents there in something heavy!

I’m on a huge spaghetti squash kick right now. This is spaghetti squash with marinara, avocado toast, and broccoli.

I finally found watermelon yogurt! It’s good! Topped with granola and sunbutter.

My typical work lunch for now if it isn’t a sandwich is a peach, goat cheese, and chicken salad. Plus a savory granola bar. I like these. I thought the concept was a little weird, but they’re basically like crackers.

The zoo has Dole pineapple whips (soft serve) and I’ve been eying them since I got here! Friday during lunch was finally the time! So good.

Weekend happenings:

Friday afternoon my roommates invited me to go watch a big local bike race that evening, so I stopped by the grocery store on the way back from work to pick up some beer to bring. I happened into a pretty big free fall beer tasting, which was pretty cool! I ended up buying one of the beers, and it was really delicious!

Then, we headed over to the park to watch the races. They’re so fast!

We hung around for a few hours before heading out to dinner at a place by the house.

Saturday morning began bright and early, though brighter and earlier than necessary thanks to the aggressively needy Yoyo who figured out how to open my door, and subsequently found his toy at 5:30am. Then, it was off to teach spin! It was a good class, but small thanks to the gorgeous weather and the holiday weekend.

The main event Saturday was meeting up with my really good friend’s sister, who happened to randomly be in St. Louis! We met up at Rise for coffee, and it was great to catch up with her and meet her friend! They’re both dental students, so it was interesting to compare their experiences with all the vet stuff.

Sunday definitely did not go as planned. I was planning on going to Open Gym at Crossfit to make up the Saturday WOD that I missed, but when I got outside, I was greeted with a flat tire on my rental car. I ended up Ubering to Crossfit because I didn’t think the rental car place was open yet, and did the following workout:

heavy set of 3 sumo deadlifts (It was supposed to be 1rm but I probably haven’t done sumos in a good 2 years)

30-25-20-15-10-5

box jumps

wall balls

I wanted to do this one because it was pretty friendly to my hand, which is still pretty painful.

Then it was time to deal with the car. I was especially sad because I really liked driving that car–it was the same kind I drove in TN! The whole process was honestly pretty painful.

But now I have wheels again, so I can’t complain. I don’t have much going on the rest of the day. I have to work Monday morning so I’ll likely keep it low key! I might head to a park with a book, because my allergies tend to get a little bad after being around the animals all day!

What did you do for the long weekend?

Modifying Workouts Due to Injury and Jammin’ at the Zoo

Date: August 25, 2016

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hi friends!

Before I go any further, I am some exciting news to share! I’ve been featured by Blogtrepreneur as one of the Top 25 Fitness Blogs That Get Your Game On! This list features blogs that motivate others to fall in love and stick with, and go further with a fit lifestyle! This is quite the honor—check out the full list of amazing bloggers here.

I really do appreciate you guys coming to my blog, and I really do try to put out content that is both relatable, motivating, useful, and honest. I pride myself in putting out scientifically correct content that you guys can use, as well as pieces for entertainment.

So what do you say we hit a little bit of both today?

You could say it’s been a bit of a rough week, I suppose. I got locked out and climbed through a window Tuesday, and then today. I was SUPER excited for tonight’s Crossfit WOD. It has toes to bar and pull ups, my new tricks! I wasn’t going to do anything like run this morning, because I didn’t want to tire myself out or get dehydrated (like I did Wednesday at work). But then I naturally woke up an hour early. So I thought, “well maybe just a little run to get my blood flowing.” So I set out for a short 1.5 miles. And, in the words of my sorority little, I wiped out spectacularly. The sidewalks here are very uneven. And of course, it was right in front of the ONE house with people on the front porch.

So I’m pretty beaten up. My left hand, and strangely, my left thigh, took the brunt of it. Which was good for the sake of my knee, with just a minor scratch there. Seriously, how does one land on her thigh?

I’ll spare you the hand picture because it is ROUGH, but imagine an equal force concentrated into a smaller area. There is no skin on the base of my palm. And it’s fairly deep. OUCH.

I had to buy bigger band aids on the way to work, and have been in quite a bit of pain on and off all day, because my hand is stinging. I spend about half or more of my day doing computer stuff, and using the keyboard on those computers KILLS me.

Anyways, back to the point of this all. I wanted a good workout. I was sad to miss Crossfit, but I told myself I would save the workout and do it another day at Open Gym. And I figured, hey, I’ve had to modify my workouts for every injury under the sun this past year (dislocated shoulder, stress fracture), so why can’t I figure something out?

I went to the gym and got a killer workout in without killing my hand, and was in and out in 45 minutes. I did: single leg squats (back leg on a bench) while holding a 30# dumbbell in my good hand for both legs. 5 sets of 8. I supersetted that with 8 pistols each, onto a bench. Then, I did 4 sets of 6 each single leg RDLs at 45#. I finished with some quick abs on the BOSU. Note: my hand was ok to hold dumbbells for the RDLs, surprisingly.

I truly believe that when you’re down, you don’t have to be out. Work with what you have (and don’t be stupid about what you can’t do.)

Since we’re still sharing frustrations, I HATE iTUNES. I’ve had tons of issues lately with iTunes deleting songs from my spin playlists (which is why I have a playlists tab on my blog now! It’s already been a lifesaver), but today it told me I had to reinstall iTunes due to some error. Which might erase my songs. Guys, my backup is 2000 miles away, and I have to make a new playlist for this Saturday! AHHH. THANKFULLY, I reinstalled and all appears ok.

Do you want something happier? Let’s go happier.

Yesterday I got in an awesome 3.1 mile run in. My foot felt 100% normal, for the first time! We can ignore the fact that I flat out missed my very first turn and ran half a mile the wrong way without realizing it….

I was in the mood for chocolate when I got back, so I made one of my flapjacked muffins. The key: slightly undercook it (no eggs!) and it tastes like lava cake <3

It was really, really hot and humid at work yesterday. (And today, but I handled it better.)

I was feeling pretty icky when I got off, and had more plans outdoors that evening. I took my spare hour to grab a massive Subway salad with Baked Lays because I was also severely under fueled and needed carbs. And I drinks TONS of water.

Then, it was time for Jammin’ at the Zoo! This was a super cool event that I went to with some of the other interns. It was a beer/wine tasting with vendors set up around the zoo, and a live band! It was a great deal–$10 to enter covered all the sampling!

Of course we rode the merry-go-round.

Penguins and sparkling rose.

It was a lot of fun! Apparently there is wine country pretty close to St. Louis. Who knew?

And to close out this post, here are some adorable tasmanian devil pictures.

How do you modify your workouts when injured?

Patriotic City, Patriotic Day, Patriotic Banana Bread

Date: July 6, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

How was everyone’s fourth of July?

I had a great one-I’m pretty much in the perfect place for it!

I kicked off the festivities Thursday night. I had planned to do a run club workout that evening but with heavy rain coming, I wimped out and stayed in my bed watching Netflix until the evening when I Metro-ed over to a friends apartment for movie watching and banana bread making. I’ve been hinting at red, white, and blue banana bread, so here it is!

I don’t have a specific amount of the ingredients, but I made my banana bread recipe without any sweetener and added about a handful each of blueberries, raspberries, and white chocolate chips. The only white chocolate chips I could find were mini, and they kind of dissolved in the baking process, but it was still SO delicious!

Friday morning I had intentions of going for a run, but I slept in because my sleep schedule is really off right now-it was much needed!

I met up with my friends to watch the DC 4th of July parade!

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a parade before! It was fun, and I took a ton of pictures, but I condensed them into a little collage so I don’t bombard you guys!

After the parade, we wandered around looking for a lunch place that was actually open. We ended up at a cafeteria where I had a chicken gyro sandwich.

Then, we walked a ways to get gelato. It was perfectly refreshing on a hot day! I had vanilla chocolate chip and dark chocolate.

After some downtime and some weirdly shaped sunburns (I always miss a spot! Or two…), we met back up at the National Mall for the concerts and the fireworks show.

Except we never found the concert. We weren’t particularly close, and a random weird band was playing on a stage between us and the big main concert. It was ok though-I was mostly there for fireworks!

I swear it was like a movie watching the fireworks with the Washington Monument in the foreground. You know-the end of one of those rom-coms? Just me? Ok…They were really good, and I definitely haven’t watched fireworks with that many people before! The amount of screens you could see from people taking pictures was crazy!

I don’t understand how people for such good pictures…mine sort of just looked like the Washington Monument was exploding…

After the fireworks, I experienced the madness that is the Metro on the 4th of July. The first station I tried to go to was so full they were sending people away. The next one was also insane but after waiting in hoards of people to get through the gates, I was lucky enough to be one of the few people to get on the first train that I needed. It was PACKED. And people just kept trying to get on, even as we got further from the National Mall! Even the station I got off at was being held up due to crowds. Crazy!

After a couple of rest days, I hit the gym hard yesterday. Since I missed a training run, I started with a treadmill interval workout. 1 mile at a fast pace, then 5x of two minutes at a past pace and two minutes walking. I haven’t done this in FOREVER, and traditionally I do it 10x, but I didn’t have time for that, or the endurance! It did go better than I was expecting though!

Then, I did a short circuit (like 8 minutes) of push ups, squat jumps, mountain climbers, and sit ups, before heading to a spin class.

The class was AWESOME. The instructor was good and the music was great. I really pushed myself at the end, and the only thing that kept me pushing was seeing the big guy at the froth desk totally rocking out to our music. So great.

Since this post is getting crazy long, I’ll finish up quickly. I got a Whole Foods green smoothie, which was kind of watery but that was fantastic because it was so refreshing!

That afternoon, I met a friend and went to the zoo. It was fun, and the pandas were so adorable! I was EXHAUSTED by the end though, and my feet were far from happy.

I went back, grabbed a guacamole salad at SweetGreens (with blueberry basil lemonade-not a fan though) and planted myself on the couch with a movie.

Such a fun couple of days, but I’m ready for a low key day today! The only thing I have to do is a 6 miler!

How was your 4th?