Happy Friday afternoon! Almost the weekend and it feels soooo good. Am I right?!
I started my Friday off on the right foot, literally, with a morning run with my buddy Sokphal.
It was really cold but so beautiful out, and we had fun catching up since we hadn’t seen each other in awhile!
We ended up covering 6 miles, waking up with the sun. 🙂
I definitely wouldn’t have run this far on my own – gotta love a good running buddy. Great pace, too – 8:35 min/mile average. Here’s Sokphal’s watch, since I forgot to put mine on in the bleary-eyed darkness this morning.
Thanks for the miles, girl!
Now that it’s been quite awhile since I’ve seriously trained for a race, I’m starting to get the itch to train – really train – for something. Even though I’ve still been running consistently since the LA Marathon in March, and I did a bunch of half marathons and other races in spring/summer/fall, I haven’t been training exactly. I made sure that I had a solid enough base to do the races, but focused on enjoying them/running for fun, not speed at all, and I wasn’t following any set weekly running plan. I needed that for awhile after doing the Richmond Marathon and LA back-to-back, and loved the time to just do whatever I wanted fitness-wise without following anything specific. But now that it’s the new year I’m starting to feel ready to work on speed for real again. I’m not ready to do another full marathon, but I’d love to break my half marathon PR (currently 1:43 from the Nike Women’s Half Marathon in spring 2013 – yikes, did I really run that fast?!). I’m going to spend some time this weekend researching training programs in the DC area, because I think I’d like to join a group. I’ve always followed a training program for goal races, but I think it would be nice this time to have a group to meet and someone to coach me through exactly what to do at the track each week, etc. If you are local and have any training group recommendations, I’d love to hear them! I’m eying the In-Person Individualized Training via Potomac River Runners – it’s $400 for 4 months worth but you get an individualized plan and two coached track workouts per week… pricey but seems worth it. We’ll see! I’ll keep you guys updated. 🙂
Anyway! Also on the workout front this week, I hit up CorePower Yoga again yesterday morning with my buddy Karen. We’re obsessed! Their sculpt class hurts so good. We grabbed coffee at Starbucks (loving the new Flat White – have you tried it? It’s basically a latte but even smoother/foamier, and it’s automatically made with whole milk, which I’m all about) and then treated ourselves to breakfast at Whole Foods to catch up before having to get to various work obligations.
I’d never had breakfast from the Whole Foods hot bar before – it was really good! That’s a piece of bacon hiding under the kale. #balance 🙂
The rest of yesterday was insane – in addition to normal blog and client work and emails, I styled and photographed 3 healthy lunch recipes that will be in the Nutrition for Runners program I’m co-authoring with Jason, and then spent a few hours editing the meal guide/recipe section for formatting and other errors. Home stretch! Sneak peek of the lunches:
We’ll be releasing the full program in a couple weeks – if you’d like to get an early bird peek, sign up for the Nutrition for Runners program email list – you’ll get early access to the program and potentially a special bonus. 🙂
On the topic of sports nutrition and our impending program release, Jason and I recorded our sports nutrition Q&A session this morning based on the questions you guys sent in! Sign up for the email list to be notified when the audio presentation is available for download (it’s free – we’re doing this as a promo for the upcoming full program). We answer questions like how to balance lots of running with eating healthy/eating enough/not too much, whether you should count calories or macros, if you can focus on weight loss and on training at the same time, how to decrease sugar cravings after long runs, and more! Enjoy. 🙂
And now – back to work. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, my friends! See you back here on Monday!
One more thing before I head out:
- You still have time to get $50 off your first month of ClassPass! Here’s my affiliate link to get the deal. The way it works is that you pay the normal $99, and then ClassPass mails you a $50 VISA gift card as a kickback in a couple weeks. They will email you for your shipping info. Not sure why they made it complicated, but I promise you will get $50 back. 🙂 If you’ve been on the fence about signing up, this is your chance! Deal expires Sunday night at midnight.
