June Report Card & Our Goals for July

July 6, 2012 by · 4 Comments

Have you noticed a trend in us running behind this summer?? 🙁  Thanks for having patience and sticking around with us those that are!  Maybe it’s just a summer thing and come fall we will be back to our normal routines?? One can hope right? We continue to be freaked out by each and every new month that comes because well – time is flying people!

Teal:

1.  Clean out the garage which involves properly deposing of all old paint, chemicals, and random things you can’t through in the regular trash, donating anything that  should have donated a long time ago, if it belongs to my brother it’s going to his house, and then just generally cleaning. Why I pick June to work outside in the heat is beyond me but whatever!?

A+: this was so much easier than I thought. I just called the city, ordered the bag and left it on the front porch! The garage is cleaned out, despite an attack from 2 cockroaches, don’t worry the Orkin man has been out to fix that little problem too!

2.  So I graduated at the beginning of May!! Yay, but I have very annoying things that I have/need to do

  • Consolidate and move all my student loans to one place and get on a better plan to pay off faster. YUCK, YUCK, YUCK!
  • Register for the LPC exam and not cry when I pay the $300 to take it
  • Organize all the grad work that I did that I want, toss the old stuff, bind what I am keeping ( anyone have one of those spiral binding things?)
  • Organize, bind, toss, or give away my teaching stuff! I will be moving to counselor next year and have a billion teaching things to go through

B: Turns out I can wait until November to consolidate, so I will, can’t register for the LPC until October, paper are organized ( I used binders instead) and my teaching stuff is ready for my friend to have whenever I see her!!

3.  Follow my under 2 hour half marathon runkeeper running plan as close to possible! I will eventually run an under 2 hour half marathon if it kills me! Well not really, I want to live, but you get the point!

B-: I am not sure how to rank this, I have done most of the runs, I usually end up leaving one of the runs per week out because my body doesn’t do well with 3 relatively tough days in a row, by the third one my knee hates me and I would rather keep my body intact and not made at me than to run! However, I do feel stronger and better already so I’ll just keep working through July!

4.  Eliminate random eating. Raise your hand if you stand around trying to figure out something to eat and you find yourself eating crap in the process! ME!! This has to stop!! It’s not like am eating like crazy stuff, but it is mindless and when I finally figure out what to eat, I’m annoyed that I ate weird random things in the meantime!

F: I think I need to make a sign for the pantry and refrigerator. Not sure how to stop this habit. I bought a book – The Power of Habit… maybe just maybe that will help? Re-do in July!!


Beth:

1.  This time around my weight goal is simply: DON’T GAIN ANY!!! Ha, sounds simple right?  Well, this is my birth month and my parents are divorced so this usually means multiple celebrations with good food, good drinks and dessert.  So it’s a dangerous time of year for me. No weight gain in June!!

A++++++: I am still at the same weight! Wahoo! I survived all of the Birthday eating this month!

2. Yoga 2-3 times a week.  Ever since I finished my goal of completing 200 classes in a year I’ve been kind of a slacker, so let’s get back to yoga goals! It’s soooo good for me!

F: Yah, I didn’ t go at all. Fail, Beth, fail!

3.  Finish projects at Brent’s house.  I volunteered his house to host a friend dinner (like this one) towards the end of the month and I haven’t finished some art I started for the walls, since I’ll eventually move in there (you know when we are married) I had already left all of my racing medals, hook to hold them, awesome race bib board my SIL made me over there they just need to be hung up.

A: I finished my “home” picture I was making though I have a feeling the perfectionist in me will make me redo it at some point!

It says home in a bunch of different languages all of which are written on the canvas so I can always know.

I also got my medal hook and medals hung up – now what to do with the OTHER medals that are not on this hook??

I might kind of have a thing for the color blue….

I didn’t get my bib holder hung up because I decided that I wanted to change out the hooks that are currently on it to clips so that all different size bibs can hang for it, so that’s still a project! But I did get a shelf all spray painted and it sits below the medal hook in the office AND we got the guest bedroom cleaned up for now.  My purdy quilt Rebekah made me occupies the bed and I put up some other things around the room. I consider what I did at my future home a success this month!

4. Finish the two wedding projects I have ALL of the supplies for! :)

Looking back at this goal I am not exactly sure which ones I was talking about. HA!  But y’all I got A LOT of wedding schtuff done this month!  Some projects might not be finished but they are well on their way to being completed!  And there is one project for sure still sitting in the packaging, but it requires me sitting in the garage by myself for awhile to work on it which does not fully excite me hence the delay! 🙂  I am kind of afraid to show pictures of projects I am working on as I don’t want to give everything away on the internet and would like certain stuff to be seen for the first time at the wedding. 🙂

My reoccurring goals – Hills, well, I did 3 out of 4 weeks of hills in June and let me tell you that it is getting HOT in Texas!  As far as books go I am still on Target with my goal of reading 24 this year and read my 12th book this month, the recent release, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Could not put this book down!

(source)

And on to July goals!! Here’s also to hoping that our July Report Card is up on the blog in the first few days of August!! Wheee! HA

Teal:

1. Read Power of Habit, work on the stupid ” I am just going to stand here and eat random crap while I look for something to eat” problem.

(source)

2. Get my office ready at my new job. My contract starts July 30th and I would like to be more than set before I start working. I can’t work if stuff is not organized and finished so this is a must. Right now it looks like a war zone and crap is all over the place.
3. Run an avg of 25 miles a week.  This is close to the plan, not every week, but I am trying to still balance what my body decides it will do and my wanting to get faster and have more endurance.
I think 3 is enough for July as we have a late start and I will be out of my house for a little more than a week for training in Ft. Worth and Beth’s bacheorette party (wahoo!!) which makes just the balance of life harder! Here we go July!
Beth:
1. Read This Is Why You’re Fat by Jackie Warner.  I saw Dorothy talk about this book on her blog and immediately wanted to read it.  I’ve been a fan of Jackie Warner’s since she had that show on Bravo called Workout, so Jackie Warner book here I come!
2. Keep up with My Fitness Pal.  I don’t usually record what I eat on the weekends, and so this month I’m going to try hard to keep up with it during the week!  And this is a twofer – keep up with Daily Mile. I totally let that one go in June so keep up with my fitness apps in July!!
3. I have my own monthly challenge I started of doing dips and planks regularly, and have been keeping a record of it on a calendar I printed out.  Here’s to getting in 5 days of those at least each week!  I’ll show you my calendar at the end of the month!
Also, in other news…we LIED and we will reveal the winner of our Tone It Up Challenge Monday!! 🙂  Have a great rest of the month and hope you have some awesome things in store for it!
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Five Things Friday

June 29, 2012 by · 3 Comments

1. HAPPY FRIDAY!!!  So excited yet another weekend is here!!

2. It’s June 29th that means tomorrow is the LAST day of our Tone It Up Challenge for June!!

If you have been participating in our challenge then please send us a copy of your June calendar with all of your push ups and planks no later than Tuesday, July 3rd.  We will announce our big winner of the challenge at the end of next week!!  Good luck and thank you for participating!!

3. We might be a little MIA, but have no fear – we are still here!  Teal is teaching summer school, getting ready for her exciting new school year in a new job and keeping up with her part time job at Mower Medic!

4.  Beth is still doing the 9-5 job she does regular, her little side social media stuff for a business and planning away at that wedding!

5.  Because we can’t help ourselves we shall leave you with this….enjoy!

(source)

In the mean time thanks for bearing with us!  We promise we’ll return to a sense of normalcy around here soon and very soon! Have a great weekend! What’s on your running agenda?

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Up’s & Down’s & Johnny to the Rescue

January 11, 2012 by · 4 Comments

A few weeks ago you heard from Teal on her lifestyle changes that got her to the weight she is right now.  So I guess it would be my turn. 🙂  Probably like any girl I have my own body image issues, but I tend to blame the private school I attend on that to some degree.  It seemed like all the girls in my grade were skinny little stick figures and well there’s really no way my body can/will resemble that.  I have hips! Ha, they aren’t going anywhere and I’m still learning to love them.  With that said I had weight gains in typical points of my life.  I started college – hello ten pounds!

I spent two summers (2002 & 2003) in college working at a family camp as a counselor and a life guard.  We were SO active that the pounds just melted off.  Then I had a year in college which where I *think* I attempted to be apart of as many organizations as possible, hold positions in some of them and still be a full time student.  I look back at that year and still don’t understand how I survived it. Ha, but with that busyness came absolutely NO time where I was working out.  The pounds came creeping back.

Left: August 2004 Right: May 2006

My last year in college I had a lighter load than my previous years as I spent the majority of each week in a class room observing and/or teaching.  Because of that I spent little time in an actual classroom where I was the student and had homework to turn in.  The beginning of that last year I had a break up with my boyfriend and in about a week lost 10 pounds which was about what I’d put on in that previous busy, busy year.  Once I dropped those 10 pounds I didn’t want to put them back on, so I picked back up with my running.  Most days you could find me up on the 3rd floor of the Rec Center putting in 3 miles on the track and depending on the weather out running the streets of College Station.

Cancun Girls Trip in 2006 (with Teal) and this is literally the only swimsuit picture I have no qualms showing to anyone

When I moved back to Dallas the summer of 2006 I was determined to stay fit, so I joined a gym.  And just as quickly as I signed up for a 3 year contract I’d stopped going. 🙂  I hated that gym.  I won’t discuss what gym it is but this particular location I hated going in there after awhile I just realized the gym itself  was dark and dingy and just didn’t make me want to be in there.  I managed to stay at my ideal weight for quite awhile and it wasn’t until some of my friends and I had the brilliant idea in early 2007 of starting a weekly happy hour that the pounds started coming back.  In reality I had a combination of weekly happy hour and new relationship weight coming on. Well, in December 2006, a new gym had just opened up RIGHT by my house.  I went and toured it, liked what I saw and signed up with them!

So for 2.5 years I’d be paying for two gym memberships until my contract ran up with the first one.  Am I made of money? No, but I thought my health was important enough to sign up at a gym where I would actually go and be active even if it meant sacrificing somewhere else each month to cover the cost of the gym I did not go to.  I can still hear my cousin, who owns a few gyms, saying “You signed a contract with a gym? What were you thinking?”

One day I decided I’d try a spin class – I’d been to one in college taught by a friend, but before I knew it I was going to spin class every time Angie was teaching! I loved her personality, her music selection and enthusiasm to get us all working hard!  Angie’s husband singing and dancing around on the spin bike was just an added bonus to the hour workout.

After a class somewhere in late August or early September of 2007 Angie approached me and offered me a chance to go workout with her husband for free in one of his group training classes.  I was still in a rut with the weight I’d gained that year from happy hour and the new relationship that I was happy to take the opportunity.  So off I went that week either on a Tuesday or Thursday morning to workout with a group of ladies I’d never met before at 6:00 a.m.

Oh my gosh, we did so many lunges that morning – lunges with weights, now switch weights with the person behind you and lunge, walking lunges….lunges, lunges, lunges!  I am not sure I have ever been so sore from a workout in my life!

Then I was sold on working out with Johnny and I have been ever since that day!  See I was working out with other women doing weights with some cardio mixed in, and because it’s group you aren’t paying $75+ for a personal trainer although he does do personal training as well. 🙂  For the first year of working out with Johnny he was renting space from a gymnastic center and then he got his very own place just down the street in August of 2008.

Have you ever been to the Coppell location of Run On!, well, if you have then you’ve been next door to Johnny’s…more specifically Johnny’s Health & Fitness!  Actually right before Christmas JHF moved to the bigger space next door to help with their growing needs as a gym, so you can now find them two doors down from Run on! You can see me there pretty much every Tuesday and Thursday morning from 6:00 – 7:00 a.m.

Johnny & Angie really came into my life RIGHT when I was needing someone to help me get the extra pounds off.  Johnny discussed my eating habits and nutrition with me.  Ultimately I started drinking Premier Nutrition protein shakes on his recommendation, and I also incorporated a digestive enzyme pill into my everyday life based off of one of his recommendations.  What I can appreciate about Johnny’s recommendations is that if he wouldn’t do it, he’s not going to try and convince you to do it!  He gives it to you straight.  That’s also the approach he takes with his clients when he sees them slacking on their diet or not getting in the cardio outside of working out with him.  He gives it to you straight in this nice balance of here is the truth but not being a jerk about it.

(read more about Digest Plus here and Premier Nutrition Protein shakes here)

At this point I don’t remember how long into my training with Johnny it was that I had taken 12 pounds off.  Not only has he helped me keep my weight under control, but he’s also been a great resource to me as well with all of my running!  Because I know that he really wants to see each of his clients be the best that they can be!

I would be completely devastated if I were to move and/or no longer be able to workout with Johnny.  In my opinion truly good, dedicated trainers are hard to come by!  It’s also my opinion that the majority of trainers at big chain gyms are rarely going to push you the way Johnny pushes me and every single one of his clients.  I feel like I can say this based on trying out a workout with one of the trainers at my big chain gym I go to for spin class and other cardio machines.  Plus I know that for me having a personal trainer is just not in my budget so having a place where I can do group training is doable!

Johnny & me

I’ve made some great friends from my workout group and couldn’t even imagine where I would be right now if I did not have Johnny in my life!  If you live in the Coppell/Lewisville/Flower Mound area and are looking for a trainer check out Johnny’s Health & Fitness! I drive 15 minutes from Plano to workout with him.  I know other clients of his that drive from Dallas proper, Sasche and other places I don’t even know about to workout with Johnny. If you are interested in trying out a training class with Johnny get in touch with me!

Or you can check out his website here.

Follow Johnny on twitter.

Or like him on Facebook!

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