Gasparilla Challenge: Training Week #2

- Mel

With a nearly-full schedule of holiday social engagements and pre-Christmas tasks, I knew that this would be a tough training week — and something I’ll have to pay mind to for the next couple weeks. It wasn’t a total bust though, as I somehow fit in two runs and a derby practice.

MONDAY: Two hours of roller derby practice, skills- and partner-work focused. Hot, sweaty, fun. I’ve regressed back into a couple of my bad habits (grabbing, becoming “small”… or smaller in my case, forgetting about my long-lost “lower butt”) and making stupid gameplay decisions, so I have some work to do. It’s hard not to switch to autopilot as I’ve done in the past.

TUESDAY: First of a three-peat of rest days. Sorry not sorry, my legs were beat. Side note: it’s been really nice waking up early, especially on tired legs and your boyfriend drives you to work in the morning.

WEDNESDAY: Rest Day (walked to/from work)

THURSDAY: Rest Day (walked to work)

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FRIDAY: Ran three miles (3.02) in the morning (!!!) at average 9:44 pace. My legs were feeling mighty stiff, but the weather was incredible at 7:30 a.m.

Splits: 9:29 / 9:30 / 10:06 (That last mile seriously felt all uphill!)

I also walked to work. Call it a cool down!

SATURDAY: Today’s workout brought to you by Christmas Shopping.

SUNDAY: This week’s long run was 5 miles (5.02) — and it was GORGEOUS outside! It’s still surreal to be outside in mid-December running in shorts. Average 10:19 pace, which felt easy. Though, even in shorts, I was sweating pretty good. After my run, I did a mini-circuit workout: two rounds with one minute on, one minute off of plank holds, sit-ups, squats, push-ups and lunges.

Splits: 10:21 / 10:18 / 10:39 / 9:58 / 10:09

TOTAL RUNS: 2
TOTAL MILES: 8.04 miles
TOTAL TRAINING MILES: 15.06 miles

Weekend Reading

- Mel

GAH, I didn’t hit publish on this post on Saturday!

I haven’t yet started a new book (only 4 left to go!), and I’m also not feeling any of my own creativity — so I’ve been catching up blogs and articles around the web. I decided to share a few things that have left an impression on me this week:

1. A clash of two of my favorite run bloggers, Natrunsfar guest blogging on This Mama Runs for Cupcakes! Natalie writes about her Boston Qualifying training and gives tips for those considering the achievement. I don’t know if a BQ is *ever* in my future (I laughed when I looked at the difference in finishing times for after I turn 40, because LOLZNEVER), but this post is great advice for anyone just looking to step up their run game a bit.

2. Toys Were Us: The Tragic End of F.A.O. Schwarz. Man, this story makes me so sad. I didn’t visit New York or FAO Schwartz for the first time until my mid-30s but we all know about its legacy from childhood. And anyone in her 30s fell in love with that piano scene in BIG, right?

3. Stressed at work? ME TOO. A friend and coworker sent me this one: 7 Yoga Poses You Can at Your Desk to Relieve Stress. Side question: do you sit “Indian Style” in your office chair?

Weekly Therapy: It feels nothing like Christmastime.

- Mel

the week:
FRI-YAY! We made it! And I successfully made it through another work week of waking up with my first alarm. This morning, I actually woke up at 5:45 and got a three-mile run in before work.

weekend:
You guys, it’s going to be 70 degrees in Pittsburgh this weekend. So, I don’t know about you, but I’ll be spending some time outside (and definitely running every day).

52 books in 52 weeks:
Crunch time! I’ve got 5 more books to finish in three weeks — and one of my intended readings is a whopper 800+ pager. I’m looking forward to those admin days at the end of the month!

#47 Dataclysm by Christian Rudder (cofounder of OKCupid) — really interesting insight about stats in the online dating world and how those identities we portray online are the same (or not) on how we live in real world. Don’t feel like the scientific data will be over your head! Rudder does a great job of breaking down social research terms and explaining the biases and desires that exist in our personal data. Good stuff! I received this book from Blogging for Books for review.

seven things, seven days:
1. First time having brunch at The Porch at Schenley — so excellent!!!
2. At our annual holiday season Girls Night, we also do a fun gift exchange. This year, I ended up with all the fixings for boozy hot chocolate. AND AN ENTIRE BAG OF MINI MARSHMALLOWS!
3. UPS almost ruined Christmas though! Geesh.
4. Um… I broke my big toenail at practice this week in a very precarious location. And now it’s basically wrapped in medical tape until it grows out a little further (and to keep it from ripping off). o_O
5. My amazing friend brought me back a “Built With Chocolate Milk” towel from her race expo last weekend. YAY! #teamchocolatemilk
6. Does it matter if women soldiers can’t do pull-ups? {via Pacific Standard}
7. This NY Times opinion piece is pivotal to the “can you be addicted to distraction” conversation: Addicted to Distraction.

A 30-something Year of Running 2015

- Mel

Taking a cue again today from another running blogger, Eat Pray Run DC, to reflect a little on this past year’s running experiences in the Year of Running 2015 link-up.

As far as running goals are concerned, I kicked ass this year! I completed my first half marathon and then my second and third — PR’ing each race; I ran my first full marathon under my goal time; I finally finished a 5K under 30 minutes; I also PR’d the Liberty Mile; and I ran my first legit sub 8-minute mile just last week. I’ll do a full 2015 Running Goals update in another post, but this year was pretty amazing.

Best race experience / race experience you would repeat in a heartbeat: By far, the Niagara Falls International Marathon. Prior to this race, I thought I’d be a one-and-done marathoner; and yet, here I am signing up for #2 in 2016! This race was the stuff that makes me feel so complete and fulfilled by this sport. I want to bottle up all of those emotions from Miles 21-26 of that course. Just, simply, an incredible day and experience for my first marathon.

Best run: During my group training runs, I realized my potential — running at a pace much faster than I ever thought possible for long distances. My favorite run was my group’s 16-mile “bridge run” starting from downtown at sunrise and looping around the city and its many bridges in Training Week 15. A camaraderie was born and those ladies helped me through the duration of my marathon training, including designing my 20-mile training run around the Lemieux 6.6 race (which… I haven’t recapped that race, have I?!).

Best new piece of running gear: The Exolite Sonic ear warmers from 180s. In fact, I think all of their cold weather running gear is top notch. Can it start snowing soon so that I can enjoy these things again?

Best running advice this year: “Do not eat the lube on the stick!” LOL (pre-Pittsburgh Half Marathon advice).

Most inspirational runner: Kim Stemple, no question.

“I am going to die; we are all going to die—I just have a little different perspective on it.” Stemple said. “So, I’m doing what makes me happy instead of laying on the couch looking at the loose hair on the pillow.”

She finished the 2015 Marine Corps Marathon in 4:15.

Favorite picture from a race or run this year:THIS.

LOOK AT HOW HAPPY!
LOOK AT HOW HAPPY!

If you could sum up your year in a couple of words, what would they be? I DID IT! I mean, seriously. My running adventure only began in September 2014, and I have accomplished so much since then. This journey has been so rewarding.

Click through to read all the Year of Running 2015 posts — and add your own:

Eat Pray Run DC

Setting up habits for 2016 resolutions

- Mel

You know that saying about not waiting to make changes? How January 1 shouldn’t be the impetus for life changes — and that you should start making good habits TODAY?

Baby steps, people. Yes, I do agree that a date on the calendar is widely misused as a placeholder for resolutions. So whether you decide that January 1 or your half-birthday is the day that you want to set some new goals for yourself, have at it. But real, honest change will come if you start doing something now. Like, NOW now. I’m not saying that your life will instantly change in that moment, but if you want something new or different to take place, do something right this second that leads to that eventual start date.

Say for example that your resolution is to “lose weight” in 2016 — do you have an exercise plan, have you consulted with your doctor, have you researched the monthly cost and/or joined a gym, hired a trainer or nutritionist, pinned some healthier meal options on Pinterest, or thrown out all your gross processed stuff in the freezer? And what does “lose weight” mean? I hope your goal is SMART or CLEAR. I guess there are HARD goals now as well. Do you at least know how to increase your chances at success? Doesn’t it feel SO OVERWHELMING?

Baby steps. One foot in front of the other. One day at at time. Write a to-do list. Buy some new sneakers.

So, yeah, I have goals for 2016 — quite a few, actually. But if I don’t start changing some of my bad habits now, I will be setting myself up for a mess of frustration on January 1. And likely, failure, by March 15. I can’t let my already-good habits go by the wayside either.

An example of my own baby steps? Waking up at my first alarm. NOT sleeping through five different alarms. I’m seven days in! This will lead to a bigger goal. But for now? I get to celebrate some small successes (and hopefully help my sleep schedule out a little in the meantime).

More reading:
Mind Tools has a bunch of articles about goals. Check out this article about personal goal setting. There are some great explanations about the different methods (with more links to further explain) and questions to ask yourself before you get started with the process. And if you have a coach or mentor (or are one), I personally like use of the GROW model.

Running Q+A

- Mel

Following the lead from This Mama Runs for Cupcakes, here are my answers to her Running Survey:

1. Would you rather run along a beach path or on a mountain trail?
I love the water but I hate the sand; my pick is for a mountain trail.

2. If you could choose the flavor of gatorade at your next race’s aid stations, what would it be?
Lemon-lime or GTFO. Also, I *hate* Gatorade, so anything else at the replenishment stations, please?

3. If I gave you a $100 gift card to a running store, what would be the first thing that you would purchase with it?
I know that I won’t be able to find new-old stock of my Ride 7s for too much longer, so I’ll put towards trying out a new pair of shoes.

4. Do you prefer to follow a training plan or wake up and decide then how far and how fast you want to run?
I definitely start with a plan, but let my body override and determine its course of action.

5. Would you rather start your run with the uphill and end on the downhill or start your run with the downhill and end with the uphill?
End with the uphill. Am I in the minority on this?

6. When you can’t run, what type of cross-training do you choose to do?
I do yoga and spinning and roller skating/derby.

7. What is your preference—> Out and back, point to point or loop runs?
It depends on if there’s a shuttle bus involved. (HA! And NO.) But seriously, loop runs are The Worst; I prefer an out and back, with point to point in second.

8. If you could recommend ANY running related item to a new runner, it would be a—>
A Buddy Pouch! I’m impressed by how awesome this thing is and I do not feel it at all when running — so long as I’m wearing pants/capris. I wish for a smaller/lighter version to wear with shorts that doesn’t flop. New runners: ALWAYS carry some sort of ID on you and my bonus pro tip: if you live in the city, carry a bus pass!

9. Do you ever see any wild animals while out on your runs?
Does a white tiger at Nemacolin count?!

A photo posted by Melinda (@melliesmel) on

10. Ever gotten lost while out on a run?
Yep.

11. If you could have one meal waiting and ready for you each time you got home from a run for the next 30 days… what would that meal be?
Chocolate milk (by post-workout must have!) and a sweet potato Eggs Benedict.

12. Capris or shorts… what do you run in most often?
I’m an all-weather runner but these lululemon speed shorts (I guess they’re only currently for sale in solid black) are seemingly part of my race day uniform.

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13. At what mile (or how many minutes) into your run does your body start to feel like it is warming up and ready to go?
Somewhere between Miles 4 and 5 are when I’m feeling my best for warm-up.

14. What do you do with your key when you run?
I have a lot of pockets in my gear (phone armband, water bottle, zippered pockets in my bottoms, key hole in my winter running gloves), but the block it pocket in the speed shorts is the best place where I don’t physically feel it and also feel that I won’t lose it.

15. If you could relive any race that you have done in the past, which one what it be?
The Niagara Falls International Marathon was an amazing experience for me, and I wish I could bottle up all of that awesomeness for future races.

Gasparilla Challenge: Training Week #1

- Mel

The training for my Gasparilla races started this week! I signed up for the Michelob Ultra Challenge, which consists of 30+ miles over two days in Tampa, Florida in February — a 15K and 5K on Saturday of race weekend and then on Sunday, a Half Marathon and 8K. I’ve obviously never trained for a race quite like this, and the swag is supposed to be ridiculous. My focus is on the half marathon, for which I’m adapting the Novice 2 Hal Higdon training schedule. An aside: I strongly dislike the Higdon app and keep a paper with my dates tacked to the wall like total old school. Anyone else feel the same way?

Because I do plenty of cardio and cross-training (and that will increase exponentially with derby practices), I’m cutting out the extraneous mid-week 3 mile run. I’m focusing on three runs per week — with one long run, a weekly regular 3-mile run and one additional mid-week run that spans from 2-3 miles throughout the 12-week program, and at least two cross-training sessions.

Week #1 of this plan calls for three 3-mile runs and one 4-mile run, with one day of cross and two rest days. I personally like two-a-days with another rest day, which is another way that I’ve adapted my training schedule. It worked well for my previous half and full marathon training plans. I haven’t decided yet if I intend to PR this race or not… but I still have a little bit of time to figure that out.

MONDAY: An hour of spinning at the Y. (Walked to work)

TUESDAY: REST DAY (Walked to/from work)

WEDNESDAY: 3 miles with run//yoga//run club (just less than 10-minute pace), followed by a hard, sweaty 75 minutes of hot flow yoga. While I didn’t have any abnormally-long coughing fits, I found myself struggling to move with my breath. We did a bunch of hip openers and core work which felt amazing. My legs, though, felt super sloggy during the run. Meh. (I also walked to work today.)

THURSDAY: REST DAY (Walked to/from work)

FRIDAY: REST DAY (Walked home from work)

Long winter shadows.
Long winter shadows.

SATURDAY: 4.02 miles – holy moly, my legs felt so fast today. I had my first sub-8 mile! I followed my run up with 3 sets of 60-second planks (and a very long, steamy shower).

SUNDAY: Stairs workout at The Cathedral of Learning, my first off-skates workout with my NEW TEAM, The Allegheny Avengers! I should say my new old team, as I was one of the home team’s inaugural members two seasons ago — but I got drafted back on this week now that I’m officially-official back playing roller derby. We did 10 minutes of interval climbs and then a 10-minute body weight circuit (crunches, planks, lunges, squats and push-ups). I hoped to run a couple miles after this workout, but my legs were toast!

This upcoming training week will be tough to schedule around all these holiday parties during the week, but my goal is for two runs and two other workouts.

TOTAL RUNS: 2
TOTAL MILES: 7.02

Sunday Bibliotherapy: Page 202, Last Paragraph

- Mel

My current book didn’t have anything on Page 202, so I went with the last paragraph on Page 203:

String theory predicts that our physical existence requires somewhere between ten and twenty-six dimensions. Our emotional universe surely has that many and more. And in combining these spaces — our interior landscape with our external world — we can portray existence with a new depth.

— from Dataclysm

Want to share your bibliotherapy? Post in the comments your excerpt from Page 202, Last Paragraph from the book you’re currently reading.

On transformations.

- Mel

I wrote this post a couple months ago, but I really feel that it should be outside of draft status.

I’ve been thinking a lot about transformations lately, which has spurred from so many different directions and mediums. An email found its way to my inbox, requesting an update from an article written about me in 2006 (and my single life), for one. This person, I’m sure with good intentions, basically wanted to know if I ended up “happy”… but also wanted to know about the dating scene in Cleveland. The latter, I’m sure is awful (because isn’t it awful everywhere); the former: undoubtedly, yes.

[Ed note: I never responded to the letter, and yes, I told my partner about it.]

Ultimately, the whole thing left me feeling exposed all over again. I didn’t really like feeling exposed then (yes, despite agreeing to have the magazine do an article about me), and particularly now, my former life (and all its mishaps and misadventures) feels like some deep secret that I need to keep closeted away.

Prior to this email, I was equally caught off-guard when catching up on my Rich Roll podcast, to hear the infamous name of a fellow blogger (some would probably call us both douchebags or some derivative in our collective blogger heyday): Tucker Max. We both reveled in a lifestyle of partying and drinking and sipping up every opportunity to be wild and independent of really any responsibility. Those were our 20s. And in the early blogging days, bloggers like us wrote about their dating exploits — the good, the sad, the cringe-worthy, and the total destruction of messy break-ups and subsequent loneliness. He, obviously, wrote a lot more about the sex.

[Read: Tucker Max gives up the game {via Forbes}]

I broke up with my old blog (and its identity) years ago and never looked back. I experienced growth far beyond that identity (even if there are still many who refuse to believe that a person can change — family included). There was an inherent shame that was soon evident, attaching my online persona to that of Real Life Me, which affected me deeply both personally and, I honestly think, professionally, despite my feelings of pride at the time. People made me feel really, really bad about who I was. So I did a lot of soul-searching and friend searching and acceptance searching — in a lot of bad ways. For a lot of years. But it took a lot of digging in to uncover what was truly going to make me happy (was I not happy?). Make me even a better person (was I really that terrible or that different from any other single 20-something person?). In any event, that type of lifestyle was sure to run its course, and it did, and I have evolved. And I’ve moved on.

What took the longest was my self-worth. That I was worthy of praise and accomplishment and, most of all, love. That’s a ridiculous thing to admit, right? But man… I felt so damned and worthless for a huge bulk of my early adulthood. And it was all online. Exposed. Shamed.

I think that’s what made reading Jon Ronson’s “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” so… pained for me. The differences in actions and behaviors of shaming so abunduntly different online versus real life, but wholly affecting the person subjected to this public display of admonishment in BOTH. That pain, I think, lingers deep and long. And even more sad (and a lot more recent), Bullies came out like cockroaches despite the best efforts in pest control.

I found peace in my transformations, to be sure, and I don’t go searching for anyone’s permission or acceptance to living my own life… but that email definitely stirred up some bad memories.

More reading: How does one go about re-inventing oneself? For me, it wasn’t so much calculated as it was maturity and experience. And an absence of naivete. Letting go of things that no longer serve you, so they say. My buddy Justin (if you followed that link at the beginning of this paragraph) sums it up so succinctly: All you have to do is think differently and act accordingly.