Do You Compete Every Day?

April 27, 2012 by · 2 Comments

As a follow up to our random Wordless Wednesday post the other day we thought we’d give those of you who do not know who or what Compete Every Day is some more background!

We found out about Compete Every Day first at Rock ‘n’ Roll Dallas expo and while standing in their booth Teal went “wait a minute! I know that model in the picture! She’s engaged to one of my co-workers!” Turns out one of her co-workers is also a model in some of the pictures! But really that’s besides the point. The point is Compete Every Day is a cool company based here in Dallas.

Ok, what are we competing for every day? might be what you are thinking right now! That’s what is cool about Compete Every Day….they don’t just mean compete for your fitness or to win race (even though that might be just what you are doing), but instead look at your life as a whole. What are the things you value most in your life? Family? Friends? Faith?

Or what is going on in life today that you are competing for?

And as a reminder to yourself you can purchase one of their comfy shirts, tanks, hoodies, shorts or even a wristband to remind you to Compete Every Day.

All the CED products we proudly own!

So why do we like Compete Every Day so much?

Well, you know now that we love what Compete Every Day means. We love local businesses with products that are worthwhile and unique. The connection was just a bonus. We have since then learned on our own that they have great customer service and super comfortable workout gear with a great message. We hope you’ll at the very least checkout Compete Every Day, but let us know if you do make a purchase!

Happy Friday!

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ZOOMA Zoom Zoom & a Boom Boom!

April 4, 2012 by · 9 Comments

Perhaps if we believed in signs we would have seen this weekend’s madness coming but alas we did not…..

As you may know  we had a race this weekend in Austin, the ZOOMA’s [women geared yet men are welcome!] race series half marathon. Because we live in North Dallas we were not able to make the expo so we had to have our bibs mailed, and due to uncontrolled matters Beth did not receive her bib. We were a little worried/stressed but we were able to get that solved [thanks to Tricia for helping us out!].  Teal, worried about chaffing as usual and really wanted to stop at Lululemon for a running skirt. So much so she was willing to try anything (and yes, body glide is not totally working). We stopped, shopped, and then sat down and ate dinner.  We actually didn’t leave North Texas until after 8. Whoops?? We arrived in Austin to literally crawl in bed to wake up in less than 6 hours.

We got up, realized we hadn’t prepared food wise for the race and basically were like – Whelp, what can we do? Not a good sign here for us. We had PB sandwiches and shared some Swedish fish left over from our Rock ‘n’ Roll race weekend. Haha.

The race started right on time and it is clear that neither of were really paying all that much attention because as soon as we crossed the start line we had to run up our first of MANY hills.

This one was not too bad, but we kind of looked at each other in a “oh lord, is this a sign of things to come?” way.  We knew the race was a “challenging course” per the website, but we really had NO CLUE what we were about to get into, we hadn’t seen or maybe missed an elevation map. So we were completely clueless!!

As you know we both had just come off of pretty successful half’s the week before at RnR Dallas, and it was clear within a mile that our legs were not feeling it. Teal looked at Beth and was said “I feel like a brick” Beth agreed. Crap! We kept running along, Beth decided for fun to keep track of the hills we ran because it was that crazy. After mile two, we had counted 9 hills. We are not talking little ant hills, these things were insane. We started walking up the 9th hill at mile 2. NINTH! Oh crap. We have 11.1 miles left.  13.1 had never seemed so long before to us.

We continued this,  “run down, walk up,”  business that we are both very sad to admit happened.  Because for us, it’s just personal preference for the two of us, but we aren’t run/walkers.  There was just no way! We can honestly say that we checked out mentally and our bodies were not there physically, which made matters worse.  Oh and maybe we can pour a little salt on the wound with this screen shot of our weather.

Stinking spring humidity in Texas is no joke. There was a breeze but yuck, thick air.

We decided that we would basically not let the 2:20 pacer pass up. 2:20! Good lord! What was happening?? The hills literally just kept coming. Some were so steep that EVERYONE around us walked. We honestly think crawling them would have worked just as well.  After the race our trust Runkeeper app informed us that this was our highest elevation EVER.  We have used Runkeeper for going on almost a year and a half now.

We had no clue where the course went but luckily we ran (haha!) into this lady in front of us who was running this course for the 4th time. We give her uber props! She said we had about 2 miles out and back then around the golf course on the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines resort. Ok! How bad could that be? Yah, bad. We made it down the 2 miles out and still just felt blah, we walked a little, ran a little, ran up a few hills, but then we were just both so mentally checked out that pushing anything was just terrible.

Beth had miscounted (yep, did we mention mentally checked out??) and thought we had 3 left just as we hit 9. She looks at Teal and was like 5k left. Right?  Nope 4. We walked. That is deflating!

We hit the golf course at around 11. This is a mental issue too.  We had to do a little “trail” running. We had to run on this mulch stuff that takes every ounce of bounce out of your legs. Teal looked at Beth and said “ I do NOT want to finish.” Luckily, Beth in her logic was like, “you don’t have to, but you’ll still have to go back that way.” UGH. Might as well finish at this point.

We did some more walking. Grrr!! and managed to run it in right around 2:20ish. This marks our worst half marathon to date for each of us. It was bound to happen, we know, but we were still a little blah about the entire thing. This marked our 10th half marathon but really you wouldn’t know it by how it went for us.

We hung out after and were luckily able to grab a glass of wine from the Barefoot Wine garden and met some nice ladies out there! Fun hearing other ladies’ running stories, but ultimately we decided to just get home to Dallas!

Oh, but wait, we consulted the twitterverse as to where in Austin we should get lunch so with the recommendation of a twitter friend we stopped off at Moonshine for lunch.  If you are ever in need of a place to eat when you are visiting Austin then store Moonshine in your memory bank!  And uhhh, we HAD to stop by an Austin Lululemon and uhhh, we were in Austin we HAD to stop by The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf!  Y’all, have we told you we love that place??

We pretty much passed the time in the car singing along to and every CD that Beth had in her car.  There might have been some dancing too….

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To PR or Not to PR, What Did We Do? [Part 2]

March 29, 2012 by · 16 Comments

This post should start off with the Rock ‘n’ Roll expo on Saturday because our day was made when we officially got to meet @KatieRUNSthis and @cajun_runner!  Both of these ladies are truly fabulous and we were so lucky to get to spend some time with them!

The one and only picture taken at the expo..ha

We left the expo and dined with our dudes at Breadwinner’s Cafe. MMMM!  A must visit place in Dallas if you are ever visiting from out of town! Anyways, race morning was upon us and we got down to the start line super early just so we could be sure and not stress before the race, used the facilities 🙂 (sorry Mom, we just blogged about that) and looked for people we knew!

We saw Mama C & Marci all fancy in the VIP tent pre race until we saw Katie that morning who hooked us up big time and before we knew it we found ourselves smack in the middle of the VIP tent as well!

Teal, Katie & Beth

Thank you SO much, Katie!

And then up walked Melvin a.k.a. @apa1906!  If you don’t follow Melvin on the twitterverse you need to march yourself over and click follow!  We have been twitter friends with Melvin for awhile now and missed an opportunity at the Hot Chocolate Run to met him, but he is such an encouragement to both of us!  We are so thankful to you for that!

From here you are going to get our race play by plays from both of us! 🙂  Enjoy and hope we don’t bore you to death! 🙂

Teal: It was not until we entered the corral that I started to get very nervous. I had joked all week that I was going to end up walking this entire thing and Kacie’s run, while not bad, hurt. My legs were shaking after the race and marked only the second real run since Disney- over 4 weeks ago. In case you were wondering I had taken a two week break and then really had really taken 2 more from running, but had done some shorter cardio.

We found the Luebs!

Miles 1-3

Teal: We met up with the Lueb’s (also known as Heidi & Brian :)). I had known Brian was working on running a PR and wanted to hit 2 hours. So really I decided that I could stay close to him for as long as I could and then I would be fine if I slowed down. I stayed with Brian until about 3 miles. Ha- so much for that! I actually felt good despite dropping back. He was hauling and those first miles were all around 9 minutes or less. I knew I would see people at 3 because Greg and his crew (ladies, She-Ninjas, what have you) would be there to cheer us on. I passed him at 3 and he told me I was only seconds behind Beth, Heidi and Brian. I got nervous. There is no way I will be able to keep this up but just decided to stay with where I was regardless.

Beth: My biggest fear for this race was starting out way too fast and bonking!  In the first 3 miles-ish of the race not only are those miles fast because hey, you’re racing but also because you have some nice down hills like when we ran right by Dealey Plaza.  We also ran by the Old Red where I’m getting married, but that has nothing to do with a downhill I just wanted you to know that. 🙂  The one time my runkeeper alerted me in the first mile to my pace was on that decline at Dealey Plaza and said I was going at a 7:45ish pace.  Errrr, tap the breaks, Beth!

Miles 4-7

Teal: These miles were still not bad. I knew that Kate and Brent and Michael would be at 7ish and decided to make that my next goal. I still was feeling pretty good but getting tired and hot and not to mention started to feel the ridiculous blister forming. The hill between the relay exchange stations is NUTS. I hated every last second of that part and remember thinking, I am so glad I ran leg two last year. That was a beating. It took me a while to recover from that hill.

This picture is where you play "Where is Teal??" Can you see her?

Beth: This whole section of the race had pretty constant inclines.  We knew this because we drove the course the day before and I knew that I would slow it down in this section.  That was my plan run the first three at a pace that wasn’t exhausting, slow for the hills and pick it back up for the last third of the race as I have gotten second winds after hill work. I knew there was a chance I could bust it out!  Plus I knew somewhere in mile 7 I’d get to see Brent, Kate & Michael!

Brent caught Brian in this picture too! I had NO idea we were basically running with each other. Ha!

Miles 8-10

Teal: Here goes my mind. I’m still convinced that I was going to end up dying and really I was not dying “lung wise” but my body (legs, things, calves, and feet) just hurt. I got to 9 and decided that due to just feeling blah that I would walk the water station. I had really only eaten like 4 Swedish fish at this point and was hungry but it took a lot of effort to eat. More than I was willing to give. I hate this and hate admitting it with a passion but I had to walk those stations. I was running pretty fast in general and was starting to feel the effects of heat and little training in between. It also felt really good on my blisters to stop and give them a little rest and walk on the side of my foot. At 9 I had literally had 4 cups of water and dumped one on my head.

Loading up Teal's pocket with Swedish Fish

Beth: And this is where things start to get hot! Neither one of us has mentioned yet that we have done zero, zip, zilch in the way of running in heat so far this year, so the last half-ish of the race was weather conditions we hadn’t been in since sometime last Fall.  It’s so funny to me that Teal and I both struggled with food out there…it’s like even though we aren’t together on the course we still have something that aligns with the other.  I had eaten a shotblock minutes before the race started and by the time I needed to start eating – yah, I just didn’t have the strength to pull the Swedish Fish out of my sports bra.  Yes, that’s wear I keep them when I’m running sans camelbak.  Overall I think I ate a grand total of 4 or 5 Swedish Fish. Hmmm, perhaps if I had fueled properly this race would have ended differently.

Miles 11-13.1

Teal: At 11 I was certain I would make it, but kept the plan to walk the water station because the in between parts where exhausting. You enter the park around 12.5 and then spend the next half of a mile running turns through Fair Park. BLAHHHHH! I wish they would change this finish because it really does suck. You can’t see it, it takes forever to run through there and based on other races that end there you finish as soon as you get in the park, which is so much better.

Beth:  These last few miles were not very shaded at all.  I had been taking water at the water stations but I was just getting to a point where I needed more water than I had.  It always disappoints me when I walk water stations because for me personally I don’t like doing that.  I say that like I’ve done that a bunch but I haven’t this might have been the 2nd half I’ve done where I walked, but I felt like I was going so slow carrying my water and drinking it I might as well just stop.  The last water station I walked all of a sudden I heard “Beth Lynch!!”  I turn and there’s Brian which was funny after the race realizing he was pretty much with me the whole time – how in the world did I miss that?  We entered Fair Park for the never ending finish that then just pops out of nowhere.  I tried to warn as many people as possible about that because, uhh, it’s annoying! BUT I finished in 1:58:13, sub 2 hour half marathon number three is in the books for me!  I didn’t get a new PR, but I am proud of that sub 2 hour for sure!  Big shout out to Brian for knocking like 19 minutes off his half marathon, you my friend have an awesome, new, shiny PR! 🙂

Teal: I finished and decided I was scared to look at my feet because the blister was either going to be the size of my entire foot or bleeding. As you can see it’s the size of my foot.

I finished in 2:06:31. Which I am completely not upset about. I ran hard and listened to my body. I honestly thought I would not finish as well as I did. Guess I have underestimated my body. I hope to be back on track now! The foot is healed (at least I think so) from the rest and I don’t seemed to have lost much!

Half Marathon #9 is done!

And shoutout to Chase who came out and joined us at another Rock ‘n’ Roll race!

cousin/friends, Chase & Beth and look Beth and the girl in the background have the same shorts on! Ha

And an even BIGGER shout out to Teal’s gym buddy Cynthia for completing her first half marathon!! You did awesome, lady!

Pre-race pic courtesy of Mama C!

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The Rest of Our Princess Weekend

February 29, 2012 by · 6 Comments

We both took off Friday from work, woke up bright & early to get our pack on before we headed to the airport.  When we were booking our flights we KEPT seeing that flights were cheaper into Tampa than into Orlando which we discovered was perfect because we could go to the beach!!!

We boarded our plane and literally talked to each other non stop for the 2ish hour flight.  Once we got off the plane and got our bags on the advice of our friend Robbie, we headed off to Clearwater Beach!

It was actually pretty chilly out at the beach, so we didn’t last that long out there.  We ate dinner at Frenchy’s South Beach Cafe which was pretty much across the street from the part of the beach we had settled down on, so we had a beautiful view at dinner.  After that we figured it was time to make the drive to Orlando, which wasn’t too bad we both were just really tired.  After getting checked in we pretty much got in our beds with our books and read until we fell asleep. We had to make sure the sleep two nights before the race was decent as we knew there was a good chance the night before would not be!

Saturday morning we woke up, read, and worked on our Fab Ab Feb goal before we headed down to the hotel gym to get in a few miles on the treadmill. We showered and off we went to try a restaurant that was new to us – Cafe Tu Tu Tango.

While Beth drank her Matisse Margarita and Teal drank her Michelangelo Mojito, we decide to claim carb loading with our meal selections. Ha, this is a tapas restaurant so we shared everything which meant the White Bean, Sun Dried Tomato& Artichoke Spread, Cajun Chicken Egg Rolls, Prosciutto & Mango Flatbread, Langostino Mac & Cheese and Oriental Marinated Steak Skewers. It was all dee-licious!  After lunch it was off to Wide World of Sports Complex to hit up the expo and get our bibs!

We didn’t stay too terribly long at the expo, but we both made sure to pick up a couple things of Nuun [grape for Teal & tri-berry for Beth]. How can you beat the price of $5 a tube?  Yah, exactly.  Beth got herself some new TOMS 🙂  We met Heidi & Brian for dinner at Portobello in Downtown Disney.  Those two weren’t lying when they said that place was gooood!  We may or may not have hit up Ghirardelli after dinner for a treat before checking out the largest Disney store ever and people watching.

We called it a night pretty early as we all had to get back to our hotels and clearly we had a race to run the next day which you read allll about yesterday!

After the race was over we found ourselves an Einstein’s and got bagels, went back to the hotel and began being lazy for a little bit.  Beth started tweet talking with some friends about how we reeeally wanted to go see Harry Potter World.  One of the ladies had been before and told us to quit dilly dallying as Harry Potter fans are crazy and the park would be crazy! How does she know this? Because she’s one of those people! Her words! Ha.  So @lastgoodnerve thanks for the push to go!  We bought tickets to Islands of Adventure at Universal in our hotel lobby and made our way there.  Harry Potter here we come!

We got in the park and we could see it!

HOGWARTS!

This is the part of the blog were you get an excessive amount of pictures so, um, ENJOY!  What you see as you walk up to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter …can you spot Teal in the picture?

the sign says "Please Respect the Spell Limits"

We were in HEAVEN for real! Our first stop was at the Hogwarts Express and we had our picture taken with the conductor. He was so fun!  He thanked us for coming from the country of Texas to visit him. 🙂

At this point we hadn’t had lunch so we were anxious to eat some sort of food so off we went to Three Broomsticks for a feast of roasted chicken, potatoes and corn.  Then we went to checkout Zonko’s and Honeyduke’s!

At this point it actually started to rain a little bit so we took that as an opportunity to go into Hog’s Head and try Butterbeer for the first time.  We opted for sharing one instead of us both getting one and not finishing them….yah, we didn’t even finish the one we were sharing.  It was good, different, but good!

Teal buying the Butterbeer in Hog's Head

Then we made our way up to Hogwart’s itself!  If we are being honest neither one of us is really that big on rides, but we went ahead and rode the Harry Potter and the Forbbiden Journey ride. Which is where we got to see the sorting hat while we were in line for the ride!  We should also take a break to mention that there is a bathroom that has Moaning Myrtle in it…..loved how much they put into this place!  Don’t worry we both made sure to check into Moaning Myrtle’s Bathroom on Foursquare. 🙂

We walked around in Dervish and Banges and the Owl Post.  We looked pretty much at anything and everything we could while we were there.  Since we weren’t willing to shell out $100 each for a cape we decided to trythem on and simply having our picture taken in them. 🙂

The ticket price into the park was totally worth it to both of us solely so we could see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter!  It was awesome and something we’ll always remember, BUT since there were technically some other parts of the park we decided to explore them too.  We had our pictures taken with character’s in Seuss Landing.

We checked out Jurassic Park.  Beth was excited about this because Jurassic Park is one of those movies for her fiance that when it is on TV he has to watch it which means she watches it or at least bits and pieces a lot.

run for your liiiife!

We walked through Marvel Super Hero Island just as Wolverine, Captain America, Spiderman, Storm & Rogue were making their grand entrance. We made our way through the Lost Continent, but didn’t really do much there. We did stop for a cheesy photo opp in Toon Town and sent pictures to the boys at home. 🙂

And then we found Popeye and Olive Oil!

We spent a little over four hours walking around Universal’s Islands of Adventure and by that time we’d seen pretty much everything.  Our legs and feet were killing us.  Yah, for the walking back to the car part of getting out of there.  We opted to order room service because we just didn’t want to be getting in and out of the car.  Thanks Zest restaurant at Sheraton Safari for having delish food for us to eat while we chit chatted, watched the Oscars, tweeted, and read.  We like to multi-task!  The next morning we read some more, packed up our suitcases and got on the road to Tampa.

We prepaid for gas when we got our rent car and we were bound and determined to use up that tank!  Hope they were able to drive our little Ford Focus to their gas pumps because it was seriously teetering a fine line of being completely out of gas. We are awwesome!  We checked into our flights and were kind of freaking out that our boarding passes printed out with no assigned seats – uhh, did you overbook and we aren’t going to really be on this flight??  All was fine until we got on the flight and had lots of turbulence.  Pretty sure we’ve mentioned it before but we had a bad flight together in 2006 that Beth has blocked out and Teal remembers very clearly hitting a patch of dead air and a drop.  Needless to say Teal has reservations with every plane ride, but she handled the turbulence on this flight like a champ!  We got back to Dallas and were ready to get our butts home except for when we got to Teal’s car it was uhhh, dead.  Thank you Airport Support for coming to our rescue and giving us a jump!  It really was a wonderful weekend full of so much fun stuff!

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For Good Luck

December 3, 2011 by · 2 Comments

Yesterday we hit up the White Rock Marathon Expo!  It was fun – we stopped by the New Years Double booth and saw Libby.  We ran into Lesley as we waited to trying on some shirts.  Then we saw Heidi & Brian as we were on our search for The Rock!

We had to rub the White Rock for good luck –

 

Oh and don’t worry before we left we made sure Teal was registered as a girl! Haha  We got our bibs and Teal’s said MALE.  The gentleman getting our bibs for us kindly asked her, “have you had an operation recently?” HAHA  You better believe she’s going to add that “FE” to the beginning of that and made sure the race people know that she is a FEMALE in the 25-29 category not a MALE.

Happy Saturday! 🙂

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