Calling All Tour des Fleurs Racers

September 13, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

There have been  a few of you out there that have mentioned to us that you are running Tour des Fleurs and so are we!

The sad thing about this is the moment we are finished with the 10K we will be booking it out of there to get back to  Beth’s so we can shower and be all purdy for a wedding shower.

Why are we telling you all of this? Well, we would reeeeally like to see people there, so if you happen to get there early we will be at the arboretum at 6:45 a.m. and hanging out by the area where bands normally play.

Look for us in our orange Lululemon skirts again and possibly the same top? We just discussed wearing the same skirt! =)

 

If we happen to not see you before TDF we wish you the best of luck and send you speedy vibes!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Worry We Didn’t Forget about Our August Report and New Goals for September

September 7, 2012 by · 10 Comments

Just SO many things were happening to start off this month we wanted to fill you in on those first!  And Beth’s wedding is now officially NEXT month, where has the time gone?!?

Yah, we don’t know either, so on to our August Report Card…

Teal:

1. Get through the first month of my new job without having any major breakdowns. I have found out over the last 3 days that this is going to be crazy- in a good way crazy but there is so much to learn and a lot at stake for mistakes.

A: I would have given myself an A+ but I did come close to having one.  Really I almost lost it on the computer system. It doesn’t exactly do what you want it to do!

2. Keep running at least 3 days outside. I don’t like the treadmill but it is about 100 even at 9 o’clock at night and the mornings range in the upper 80’s with the sun still down.

A+: I did it, but really do not let this deceive you some of them were a mile and half….

Beth:

1. Yoga once a week.  I’ve been trying to do this and haven’t but I think for my stress levels this month I REALLY need to add this one into my routine!

F: so, um, yah….I went once. 🙁 It was really awesome though! Plus it made me realize I am only 31 classes away from 250  yoga classes! Must do better!

2. Mail ALL wedding invitations!

A-: They are mailed!!! I do still need to hand deliver invitations to my parental units and siblings plus I have a couple people who moved right as invitations were going out so I need to redo a couple and send them out hence the A-.

some of the invites that were mailed

3. I’m going to be like Teal and say keep up with my running and get in 4 days of running each week!

B: I ended up running 12 out of the 31 days, so that averages out 3 times a week.  Still pretty darn proud of myself and can definitely remember times I didn’t go on a run because I let wedding stuff take priority.

Joint Goal:

Our marathon training for the Louisiana Marathon will be here in no time and in preparation for training and making a plan we both are going to take the time this month to read Run Less Run Faster. Just want to explore options and get a plan that fits both of us!

F: Yah, Beth downloaded it to her kindle and didn’t read it…..Teal ordered it from Amazon in the middle of August and still has not received her copy. Major fail!

****

Teal:

1. Make Bridesmaid dress fit!

2. Read my book club book before September 23rd without having to cram, but hopefully Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult will hold my interest (I am not a big fiction book person and the club turned down my 100 Year Lie suggestion).

3. Log food within 100 calories of goal.

4. Not cry on my 30th Birthday!

Beth:

1. Run 20 miles a week.

2. Not kill anyone….haha, not trying to be morbid, but wedding planning is HARD!

As far as running hills once a week this past month I have been running bleachers once a week which I pretty much count if I do one of them a week I’m doing great!  My books for this month were a couple of chicklit, mindless reads, Something Blue by Emily Giffin and Build a Man by Talli Roland) and then a memoir that was good! I recommend Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Joint:

1. Figure out and finalize our marathon training plan!

2. Run a good, strong race at Tour des Fleurs since we will be basing our training times off of this 10k!

So there you have it! This is what we are currently reaching for this month and hopefully we’ll have some good stuff to report to you throughout September as well as by the time October rolls around! 🙂

Filed Under: Goals Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wounded Warrior 10K

June 11, 2012 by · 8 Comments

This weekend was another solo race weekend….well, kind of!  Teal was off at a friend’s wedding in the Dominican Republic and I was still here in Tejas! 🙂  I might have driven to the Wounded Warrior race alone, but managed to see some friends out there!  Before I could even get out of my car I saw my friends Ashley & Jason walk by.  Somehow I always miss them at races so I jumped out of my car as fast as I could to catch up with them.  I’d also planned on meeting up with a few other twitter ladies, but sadly we didn’t all see each other! :-/  We’ll have to work on that again for another race, Caron & Kyra!!  But it was SO good to meet Shannon as well as your mom and Cory!

Totally stole this picture from Shannon! 🙂

The half marathon started 15 minutes before the 10k, so we all parted ways.  I walked up to see the half marathoners take off and chatted with a mom and her daughter who were also doing the 10K.  Loved hearing about how her other daughter was running the half and she had gotten them into doing races.  They’d driven up from Katy (Houston area) to participate in the Wounded Warrior race.  The mom told me she would probably be the last person finished.  I quickly told her I doubted it and with her run walk method she had she would be ahead of others.  I was proud of her when I saw her on the back part of my race and there were plenty of people behind her.  I quickly gave her a high five and told her good job and to keep it up!

Anyways, back to the start of this race, I had run this same race last year and kind of knew what I was getting into.  I just kept thinking let’s get this done and over with before it’s reeeally hot out there.  Off we were!  Within the first half of a mile I realized they had made the course different this year which was nice because it created less direct sunlight as a lot of it was on the Campion Trail in Irving.  I ran without any sort of water on me, but grabbed some at each water stop.

Thanks to my Runkeeper app I knew I was coming up on the 3.1 mark and therefore the turnaround because I might have missed it.  I didn’t need to make this a longer race than it was suppose to be like I did Too Hot to Handle last year! Ha, but there was only a small sign that said turn around.  Not a human being there to reassure you that you do in fact need to turn around.  Turn around here? Or like this is my warning sign that it’s coming up??  A barefoot man in front of me yelled TURN AROUND and I then said this is really the turn around??  But I followed his lead and figured if I needed to I could just admit to all of you I accidentally cut my run short.  That is probably my one and only complaint about the race, but I think the Race Director does such a good job with this one that I can let it slide. 🙂

Once I turned around I kind of had a need to vomit feeling hanging around me for the last three miles.  I just wanted to be finished with the heat.  I drank water, dumped water on myself, took cold towels from the awesome volunteers and kept chugging along.  When I got off the Campion Trail I was in the home stretch for the finish line.  I kept telling myself to push but not so hard that you do in fact vomit.  Well, guess I did push too hard bc in the last .1 of a mile I had to pull over to the side and you know…vomit not once, not twice, but three times. Ha.  See I knew my pace had a potential for a new PR, so I was having an inner struggle of get that PR yet don’t kill yourself.

I didn’t get a PR yesterday and I’m completely OK with that.  I crossed the finished line running with 2 minutes and some change until the hour mark and I’m proud of that.  If you look at my results online I finished 10th in my age group and 170th overall and I’m proud of that!  If you look at the ladies who finished 8th and 9th in my age group even if I hadn’t have had to make my little stop before the finish line I wouldn’t have gotten there faster than them and would have still been 10th in my age group.

(source)

Thanks to April who got to see my fun incident right before the finish for checking on me!  I got some water, powerade and pop ice in me and was feeling MUCH better!  I absolutely love that they provide pop ice at the end of this race!  Love it so much I ate three of them!

After that I hung around to see if I might see anyone else that I know plus I knew Ashley was around somewhere with their cute dog, Atlas, since she’s sidelined from running right now. 🙁  Hoping your recovery time heals you up all the way, lady!  Overall, it was fun just sitting and watching people finish and the soliders that were out there.  Love this race! It is for such a good cause that even though it’s freakin’ hot in Texas in June it still draws a crowd!  This was the Wounded Warrior Half Marathon & 10K’s third year and drew in over 3,000 runners and doubled their fundraising this year from last to over $50,000 raised for the Semper Fi fund.

I ran into Jason, Ashley & Atlas again after Jason completed his half.  Congrats to you on a new PR and completing a half in that heat!  So impressed with everyone that goes out there and runs the half in that toasty weather!

If you are in the Dallas area you should really consider adding this race to your schedule for next year!  Like I said it’s for a great cause, but it is also a race that is put on really well!

Do you have a race that you go back to every year that despite everything else the cause gets you signed up again and again?

Filed Under: Races Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trinity River Levee Run

March 5, 2012 by · 2 Comments

I woke up Friday morning with beginnings of a cold coming on. Ugh, not so perfect timing! But got to bed early for a 6 a.m. wake up call for the 10k. That seemed SO late considering how early Teal & I woke up for Princess Half!

First I should backup and say the packet pickup at Luke’s was pretty easy at Luke’s Locker especially since I heeded the advice from email to know my bib number before getting there. I walked up to the nice fireman, told him bib 962 and in under 30 seconds I was off and looking at the running clothes sale. 🙂 Kudos to this race for having firemen help with packet pickup! 🙂

I’d seen multiple things regarding driving directions to the race and I had every intention of following them until I found myself on the exact street it said to avoid. Oh, well! Quickly parked on the opposite side of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge from where the race started, but ultimately I was glad because I got to walk across it twice in addition to running across it!

After crossing the bridge I found my friends Mary, Cory, Tom and Paige pretty quickly and in no time it seemed like we were off!  Since Teal was on a field trip with her students I just assumed I’d be running this race by myself and I was totally wrong!  Tom and I ended up running pretty much the whole race together.  We chatted about anything and everything!  Talking during races and even during training runs is not something I commonly do, so it was a nice change of pace.  Tom kept me updated periodically on what our pace was.  I knew I’d want to do another 6ish mile run later in the day so I was too concerned with pushing real hard in this race.  Overall the course was fun, lots of awesome volunteers out passing out powerade and water.  I don’t frequent that area of town all that much so it was fun seeing everything around there.

(source)

Tom & I after the race - please enjoy the mess that is my hair!

The results for this race were a little tricky to find or maybe I’m just not that use to having to click on so many links to be taken to a word document containing a link that holds my results?  My chip time was 57:41, 201st female to finish and 661st person to finish overall.  The thing I was most proud of in this race was the kick I gave at the end.  When I stopped my runkeeper at the end it said I had been running at a 7:14 pace! So excited to see the difference my hill and tempo workouts have given me in a short amount of time!  Would also, like to give a shout out to Teal’s workout buddy, Cynthia I saw out there!  Wish I would have seen you after the race!

After the race was over I made sure to take a picture of one of the three murals that Shepherd Fairey recently put up on Singleton Avenue in Dallas.  Tons of people were having their picture taken with the murals so I got just this one with no one else in the picture before I headed out.

On my walk back to the car I took advantage of the time and snapped some more pictures of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge or as I’ve already heard some referring to it as #largeMarge.  I’m going to hold out and put one of my favorite pictures I took walking across the bridge to the race on Facebook only, so come find it on our Facebook page! And if you haven’t liked us on Facebook yet – why not??

Later that afternoon I headed out for a 6 mile run that I was hoping would include some hills.  I set off on a bit of a new route for me, and to be honest in the beginning I wasn’t completely feeling this run.  As I was nearing the halfway point of my run which also was the point where I was running down my soon to be monster hill to run up, I saw a police officer and contemplated asking him to give me a ride home if I wimped out on the hill.  But let’s be honest – no matter how much I wanted to wimp out I wasn’t going to.  The hill was hard, but once I did it and recovered from it I felt great!  The whole last half of my run was fabulous!  I get more of a high from running when I accomplish something hard out in the course than if it was just completely flat.  Run #2 on Saturday felt like another victory for my tempo and hill workouts!

Hope everyone had a fabulous weekend!  There were so many people out racing and Teal & I are both excited to see your race recaps! 🙂

Filed Under: Races Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dr. Seuss, Levee Run & New Book

March 2, 2012 by · 5 Comments

So many things going on this Friday, but first of all – Happy Birthday to Dr. Seuss!  So fun that we just got to visit Seuss Landing less than a week ago!  Anyone going to see The Lorax this weekend?  This is one movie that Teal will probably catch in the theaters despite not being a big movie person because The Lorax is her favorite Seuss book.

Tomorrow Beth will be running the Trinity River Levee Run 10k!  Sadly, Teal being the good teacher that she is, will be on a field trip with her students and cannot participate in this run. 🙁

(source)

The new Margaret Hunt Hill bridge is officially open in Dallas as of this weekend, and the 8th Annual Trinity River Levee Run is the kickoff to a day of celebrating.  Part of the selling point for this year’s run is that this will be your only chance to run across the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge, well you know in a safe way were it’s blocked off for runners. It has also been a long time since either one of us has raced the 10k distance, so it’ll be good to get back out there and give it another go!  But we’ll have to find another 10k to do so Teal can revisit that distance too!  There isn’t really a goal for this race, but Beth’s 10k PR stands at 56:46.  That PR was accomplished in the July Texas Heat, so guess there could always be hope of a new PR this weekend!

On a completely different note, perhaps aimed more at the people who are big readers – Beth’s sister Kate as of today is an author!  About four years ago, Kate wrote a “chicklit” book, attempted to get publisher for it, and when that didn’t work she decided in today’s technology that she would self-publish!  We are both really excited for her in this endeavor and so proud of her for following one of her dreams!  The book is called Creative Chaos and will be available to purchase as an iBook & on your Nook today, and then to follow all you Kindle users will also be able to purchase it!

You can learn more about Kate over at her blog which also has some more details on the book!  If you buy it you have got to let us know!  And a big CONGRATS to Kate, the author! 🙂

Happy Friday to you all!  What do you have in store for your weekend?

Filed Under: Races, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

June’s Race

June 13, 2011 by · 4 Comments

Well we survived!! The person who decided to start the race at 7:15 was genius, any later and we really might not have made our goal of not dying and finishing. This being our first “hot” weather race, we were very nervous. Neither of us does well in the heat, as we are sure many runners feel the same way, although our friend Chris will tell you he enjoys it, we think he’s nuts.


We both rolled out of bed at the crack of dawn (both a blessing and a curse) as I said, any later of a start and we might not have made it, but as the busy people we are, less sleep is always a negative! We arrived at the race about 30 minutes early and met up with Tracy, Michael, Ashley and Chris. Chris pulled a hamstring earlier in the week and was unable to run, but he raised money for the cause and just loves to cheer us on, so he came! We didn’t see our friend Joe before, but we were able to catch up with him at the end. He ran the ½ like a pro!
The race started promptly at 7:15 (good job, race organizers!) It started at Williams Square, which is a really cool part of downtown Las Colinas, and ran through the Campion Trail area. The course was well laid out and the website even states that it is essentially “hill-less”! Huge plus! We were even able to run a part of the race in shade, as part of the trail ran through a tree-lined area. As previously stated we didn’t know how fast we would run, but we both came in the first mile at a little over an 8 minute pace! Not bad!  The goal really was steady and finish. We had no idea how the heat would get or how we would do having been inconsistent for the month. Around mile 3, we were both together and pretty much stayed the way through the race! For the first time in a while, both of us ran most of the race close together. We discussed afterwards how kind of weird it is. Both of us actually think it’s weird how the other can keep going based on what we sound like running.  If you ever listen to another runner’s breathing it is actually crazy! We all sound weird.  I always think Beth is dying and she thinks I am. Very funny, but somehow we both make it each time.
It really did heat up outside toward the end and the last miles was rather torturous. None of it was in the shade and it’s now full-sun in Texas. We both crossed the finish line seconds apart! Upon finishing, the Junior Military kids handed us our medal and a sweet ending treat, POPSICLES!  Beth ran straight to the restroom and Teal went straight for the shade! We both sat for a while to cool off and ate our popsicles. Two to be exact! This was the first time we received popsicles at the end and they were A-mazing! As well as the cold paper towel handed to us!

The Junior Military passing out the medals


We both hung around after the race to wait for Joe to come in and to cheer on the other runners. Joe ran an excellent half and impressed us all. Teal’s friend Chris was unable to make it- he was supporting the youth at his church and had to leave earlier than expected. Being the trooper he is, he still ran is 13.1 miles that morning on his own! Great job! Because the race had a military cause, many service men and women ran the race. Some of them were even in their full gear -seriously impressive stuff. We watched one troop come in wearing full gear and his backpack on having run the ½! Another marine carried the flag above his head as he finished the last stretch. They really have great strength and energy!  I was whining about my shorts and a tank top being too hot for the day, and I only ran 6 miles. Many carried flags and military gear and it really was an awesome thing to see. It’s safe to say we will do this one again. It was only the second year of this race and overall the organization was great and the turnout was awesome! Great event for an awesome cause!

Results


Beth: Finished the 10k in 56:46, 6th in age group and 87th overall
Teal: Finished the 5k in 56:41, 5th in age group and 86th overall

So proud of how we did!

Filed Under: Races Tagged With: , , ,
«Previous Page