Running for Two: Trimester Two

Running for Two: Trimester Two

May 27, 2014 by · Leave a Comment

I had to go back and really remember what range of time made up the second trimester for me which is kind of sad since I’m really still early on in the third trimester.  My second trimester was made up mostly of February, March, April and a little bit of May.  I was hoping to still put in at least another 100 mile month in either February or March, but that just did not happen.  February ended with 71.81 miles while March came in at 67.41 miles. During this time I had the fact that I was registered for Rock n Roll Dallas as my last half to run while pregnant as my motivation to get the miles in as much as possible.  A lot of my running at this point had become solo which was not really what I was use to and made for some lonely times out on the pavement.

photo 2 (1)

16 weeks 3 days pregnant

photo 1

an overall pace of 9:52 don’t be fooled by the garmin set to current pace

I had already seen somewhat of a decline in my pace (which was to be expected), but then the month of April came and not only did I find another pace decline but also an overall mileage decline. 🙁  For me personally April was one of the busiest months as far as work was concerned and then to try and motivate myself to run solo after long days at the office or just feeling guilty about how late Mr. H and I would be eating dinner if I ran before cooking for the night.  I really have never been an early morning workout person.  Pre-pregnancy I faked it for about 6 years with my Tuesday & Thursday 6:00 a.m. weights sessions at Private Training Zone.  But when you have a group waiting for you AND you’ve already paid for the sessions it’s easy to get your lazy behind out of bed.  During this pregnancy those weights sessions have moved from the a.m. to the p.m. because there is just no will power whatsoever to get up and especially not get up for a solo run.  I’m hoping that one day this may change. Fingers crossed.

WW 45 Beth

Back to April, my total mileage came in at a lame 16.96.  Talk about a drastic decrease!  But you know what?! I may have only gotten out there to run on four different days (one of them being a race), but that’s better than 0 days of running!

It was probably in this month as well that I started noticing when I started my runs that my legs just felt like bricks.  And the times when you would dig down deep and pull from your core for a run, nope, that wasn’t really happening anymore.  I found myself one day on the treadmill trying to bust out a mile but in the last tenth of the mile I bumped the speed up a couple of notches, got an ache in my stomach and had to stop.  I walked at an incline for 5 minutes on the treadmill before it finally went away and I finished out the last bit of that mile at a very reasonable pace.  My body just can’t do the things it use to with running.  All of this is such a HUGE lesson in constantly listening to your body and not pushing it past its limits.  I like to think for the most part I’m doing a pretty good job at obeying it.  It’s just a weird combination on run of feeling like your legs are bricks, your mind knowing you really can do this and your body just saying, “Nope, slow it down! We’ve got a baby to look out for!”  It is also pretty incredible the protective mode your body goes into!

25 weeks 3 days pregnant at the Running Moms Rock 5K

25 weeks 3 days pregnant at the Running Moms Rock 5K

Being in Texas we should be in a regular stint of just HOT weather, but we have been completely blessed with some amazing weather so far this spring!  Don’t get me wrong there have been some hot days, but then a little cold front comes through and we’ve had some mornings in the low 50’s.  The weather is just another aspect of this pregnancy that has spoiled me! Regardless, for the past month or so you will NOT find me outside running without at least a handheld water bottle.  Staying hydrated and taking care of my lil guy is a high priority to me!  Pretty soon if I’m still outside running my camelbak will make it’s glorious return to my runs.

While my numbers might have been down in April and they might not be much better for this month either, but as a whole I’ve put in (according to Runkeeper) 428.4 miles in this pregnancy. I am so very proud of each and every one of the miles! I don’t really have any goals going into the third trimester other than to get runs in when and while I can.  And in the times when I can’t run to make sure I’m getting other forms of cardio in as well!

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Wordless Wednesday No. 45

Wordless Wednesday No. 45

March 5, 2014 by · 1 Comment

WW 45 Teal

 

WW 45 Beth

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Workouts, Workouts, Workouts and a lot of Food!

May 21, 2012 by · 6 Comments

Happy Monday, everyone! 🙂  We thought for at least this period of training limbo for the two of us we would start giving you weekly recaps of workouts, soooo let’s just get started with last week…

Monday

Teal: Trained with Will and Fire 60

Beth: Off

Tuesday

Teal: Off

Beth:  Trained with Johnny at Private Training Zone and 4 mile run

Wednesday

Teal:  Trained with Will

Beth: Off

Thursday

Teal:  3×1 miles speed on treadmill 7.5mpg – plus weights (lunges, dead lifts, squats, repeated between mile runs)

Beth: Trained with Johnny at Private Training Zone, 2.76 mile run (1 mile on pavement and 1.76 on trails), and 5.35 mile hill repeat run

Friday

Teal: 4.20 mile hill repeats on Windhaven

Beth: Stadium workout

Saturday

Teal:  Fire 60, weights and 2 mile speed work at the gym (3 arm exercises repeated between 800m intervals on treadmill at 8mph)

Beth:  Trained with Stephen at Private Training Zone

Sunday

Teal: Off

Beth: 6 mile run

Other than that we had a great weekend!  We even spent our Friday night together with both of our dudes!  After reading a blog post by Army Amy we decided we HAD to try a restaurant she had recently been to that we have never heard of before.  So Friday night the four of us went out to One 2 One and tried a ton of food!  Maybe we should have taken a picture of ALL the food we ordered so we could all try a little bit of something from the menu, but if we did we’d probably be too embarrassed to post it. 🙂 Believe us it was A LOT of food!

Teal & Michael

Brent & Beth

How was your weekend – did you race? Or put in some miles on your own?

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Things We’ve Learned & Wished That We Knew Sooner

April 24, 2012 by · 13 Comments

As you may or may not know in 2010 was when we began our training to run our first half-marathon.  Both of us had run in high school and/or college, but never to the distance we would hit in our half marathon training.  The two of us and probably like a lot of people who train for their first half marathon followed Hal Higdon‘s guide.

 
Hal Higdon’s guides are great and perhaps there are some people out there who work their way through a number of his different plans.  We, however, did not and kind of decided to start looking through different plans (one of which was definitely Hal Hidgon’s) and piecing them together.  After all what works for one person might not work for another and it never hurts to try something to see if it works for you!

Throughout the not quite two years of us running together we’ve learned to appreciate aspects of our training, realized some things that needed to be added and why, so we shall share with you!

Weight Training

Both of us got personal trainers at a point where we each wanted to lose weight (You can read about Beth’s story here and Teal’s story here).  Boy are we thankful to Will & Johnny for helping us to get into shape, get healthy and teaching us a lot!  Weight training is very important as you need to build a base for yourself.  If you only rely on running to build your muscles then you are missing out!  Not every single race you might run will you actually feel yourself digging deep and using that core strength or pumping those arms hard to get to that finish line, but those are important parts of your body to work on strength so you have it when you need it.   With that said it’s important to find a balance with your weight training and make sure you are working every part of your body.  Build that strong foundation so you can be a stronger runner!  It was well into us running together that we realized we were at an advantage by already having trainers and having those weekly weights session.  We didn’t know where we would be in our running if we didn’t have them!

While yes, a trainer makes it so much easier to get your weights session in you don’t neeed to have one! Grab a friend that’s knowledgeable about weights and ask them to show you the ropes a few times or look into one of the many apps that’s how there and available to guide you through a workout!

If you would like more of an explanation of the benefits weight training please see this post from Runner’s World.

Tempo Runs

We just recently started to incorporate these into our workouts.  What were we waiting for with these??

What? There is lots to read out there about tempo runs and sometimes it doesn’t seem to be written in layman’s terms, or is that just us?  Part of why we probably did NOT do tempo runs for awhile was because we did not truly understand them.  A tempo run normally consists of running at an easy pace to start, let’s say we are doing a 4 mile tempo run, so you may run your first mile at an easy pace then for miles 2 and 3 you kick it into a higher gear. This higher gear is a hard pace yet if you were rate levels of hard you might have comfortably hard, hard, and extremely hard.  You want this higher gear to be at a comfortably hard pace so that you can sustain this level of intensity for the entirety of your two miles.  Once you hit mile 4 take your speed back down to where you were in mile 1 for a nice recovery mile.

Importance.  The idea behind a tempo run is to raise your lactate threshold. If you are at a point in your running where you are able to run the mileage you want in a long run but are ready to work on speed this is a workout you’ll want to add into your training schedule once a week to build speed and strength.  The one thing that really helped us in determining how to do a tempo run was by using the McMillan Running Calculator not only did it help with tempo runs but also discovering what type of speed we needed for all sorts of runs.

Hill Workouts

What? While yes there are races out there that you might register that are flat, flat, flat!  But that is simply not going to be the case for each and every race that you will ever run.  Those hills in your runs/races continue to help challenge us as runners.  The best workout we have found to make sure a hill does not defeat us in a race are hill repeats.  We’ll be honest they aren’t the most fun type of workout, but believe us when you finish a race with hills you’ll be thankful for the time you spent on hill repeats.  For us a hill repeat workout consists of:

1.  Doing your homework and find a hill that will work.  You might want a hill that is somewhere between .1 – .2 of a mile.
2.  Get a little bit of mileage in before your hill repeats, i.e. run from your house out to the hill
3. When you reach your hill if it’s your first time maybe try 4 or 5 runs up the hill and back down (but have a goal of working up to 10 hill repeats)
4. Get in that last bit of mileage back to your house
Importance.  We’ve recently heard a couple people say this and it is the absolute truth, “the difference between me continuing to run and the people walking up the hill in that race are these workouts.”  Even if you are not specifically training for a race that has hills in them, this workout is beneficial! It’ll build muscle that running on a flat path does not, help with your endurance and help you to get faster!  Throw this type of running workout into your weekly mix as well and you’ll feel a difference at your next race!

Tangents
Just for good measure we are throwing this one in this post.  And no we aren’t taking you back to geometry class either! 🙂 Or is it basic algebra?? Ha, math is hard, y’all! 🙂 There were plenty of times that we can remember one of us saying “ugh! My Runkeeper says I ran 6.43 in that 10k race!” and there were times when we’d finish our long runs together that we were asked “why did Teal run a further distance than you Beth?” TANGENTS! It’s about tangents!  We can honestly say we were taught this very valuable piece of information from reading katieRUNSthis’ blog!

The majority of races we have run together have a certified course so it has been measured and is exactly the distance the course claims it to be.  When a course is measured it is done so on tangents, so when there is a curved portion of your course the person who measured it did so on the tangents.  This is also why for instance when we go run our long runs or even if we run side by side during a race our mileage for that long run or race could be different because neither one of us is running the curves the exact same.  For the visual people out there, let us show you the tangents in visual form.

 

While you might have learned about tangents today know that at your next race you might do your best to run the tangents but still find that you have some extra mileage at the end, well, it’s hard to run the tangents EXACTLY.  As you have to be looking ahead and plotting out exactly how to run the next curve not to mention that there are other runners out there with you on the course that might keep you from running that straight line exactly.  All we can do is do our best!

We are no experts by any means! We read articles, blogs, etc. online in an effort to try and learn how we can improve our running.  We wanted to share some information that opened up our eyes, helped us to understand running more and that we think everyone should have the benefit of knowing!

If you already knew all of this, well, thanks for bearing with us today!  If you didn’t know all of this – are you going to be making some changes now to your weekly running?  Glad to know why there is extra mileage on those races you’ve run before?
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January Report Card & February Goals

February 1, 2012 by · 9 Comments

It’s that time to give you the good & bad of our January goals!

Teal:

1.  Attend a minimum of 10 yoga classes at Sunstone.  This is big time for me! I only had 25 classes last year. I took a huge break!  : A+ Crushed this! As of 1/31 I have attended 16 classes!


2.  Complete one extra day of weight training on my own.  I train with Will two days a week, but that is all the weight training I do.  I am scared of that side of the gym when I am alone, so I am going to buck up and start a progression of doing weights on my own.  Not that I am getting rid of Will, I just need to stop being a baby. C+: I only did my “extra” weight work out twice in 4.5 weeks but definitely feel more comfortable going to that side of the gym on my own.


3.  Lose 4 pounds. I am stuck! I hate it and want to be unstuck! F: besides losing my cleanse weight to get me back to my “normal weight” I technically have only lost .5lbs according to the scale I use with my trainer- oh how I love being stuck…

4.  Read a book for pleasure!  Graduate school has killed any fun reading that I once did.  I have chosen to read Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison. A-: Well, I finished literally today (or shall is say night) and the only reason I finished was because it was “due” today for the goal- I did however read another book in between this about food and wellness, so bonus points for that! And PS- I really did not like this book 😉

Beth:

1.  Complete 200 yoga classes.  The very end of January 2011 was when I started yoga and my goal all along was to complete 200 in one year.  I broke that goal into 50 classes every 3 months.  As of this morning I have 29 more classes to go!  A+:  Might have had to do 3 classes in one day to obtain this goal, but I DID IT!!! 200 yoga classes in 1 year!  The best part was I took my 200th class with my friend that got me started in yoga and went to that very first class with me, so she also got to go to my 200th class with me!  Shout out to the awesome @HeadPantsNow!

200 wristband bling from Sunstone Yoga

2.  Do a hill workout every week.  If I blew off a day in my training schedule it was always hills, and I know I will benefit from doing them SO much. C:  I only did two hill workouts…..

3.  Organize my room! I love organization, but for the past year I feel like I’m running from one thing to the next.  All the organizing I once did has gone out the window, and it really makes me sad that I now resemble a messy person. :( A+:  There was one weekend in our 10 day cleanse and that Saturday to distract myself I CLEANED!  Then it got messy again and I finally got the last bits organized.  I took before and after pictures, but y’all I REALLY do like cleanliness so I’m totally embarrassed to show these….

Before

Got rid of clothes, old magazines, bagged old running shoes to take to local running store & threw away a lot!

Final product...and you can see I still have one itty bitty pile on the floor :-/

4.  Find a caterer for my wedding!  This is the next big item I want to get crossed of my wedding to do list! B+:  My goal was to either have it completed or be well on the way towards having a caterer.  My venue has a preferred vendor list and the person I want to use is not on that list, so they had to get approval to be my caterer.  My venue has approved the caterer, I’ve had a lengthy phone call with the caterer, reviewed menus of their’s and given what we want and don’t want.  As of now I am waiting to get a potential menu or two then schedule a tasting!

We each have one last goal that we are both doing –

5. Complete a 10 day Advocare cleanse.  A+:  You all know that though because we did a recap a couple weeks ago!

We are both pretty proud of ourselves, obviously there are areas to work on and we will keep on working!  With that said here is what’s on tap for February for us:

Teal:

1.  Let’s try this damn weight/fat loss thing again- I’ll keep it at 4lbs. Wish me luck, perseverance, and calmness through the frustration. I know this will fix itself eventually!

2.  Paint my bedroom and hang the pictures – I have had the paint and the frames for our prints since the end of December and they have tortured me ever since.

3.  Read about and become more knowledgeable about Clean Eating, general good nutrition and Gluten. I have purchased Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis and Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. The goal is to read both this month.

4.   Make the foam roller my best friend and roll at least once a day, and complete ALL given Physical Therapy for my foot which includes stretching/tennis ball rolling at breakfast, lunch, and before bed and ice 1-2 times per day.

Beth:

1. HILLS! Do them once a week – for real this time!

2. Wedding Schtuff – Part A: Get outfits settled on (for both of us) & take engagement pictures!  Part B: Finish two of my three registries! <—Just want those things done and over with! Ha, is that a bad way to phrase it?

3.  Lose 5 pounds!  I’m taking engagement pictures this month, so a  few pounds off and working towards a smaller weight for upcoming races needs to happen!

4.  Clean the craft/guest/whatever room!  My sister and I have a guest room at our house and we each kind of have half of it to ourselves and then a teeny tiny twin bed sits in the middle of it. Ha, we are both former, big-time scrapbookers so we have got crafts galore in there!  This will be my next room I conquer!

We are once again doing a joint goal this month!  We have decided to….

5.  Both participate in #FabAbFeb:

Overall, Teal feels like if she took these grades home she’d be grounded.  What do you think?  And Beth is pretty happy with her grades but is ready to hit the mark in hills class. What do you think?

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Wordless Wednesday No. 16

January 25, 2012 by · 7 Comments

What do you think? Suggestions?

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