Austin, 3M Volunteering & Weekend of Good People!

January 31, 2012 by · 4 Comments

Ok, so we left you with our “Seven Things Friday” and we figured to recap our weekend we’d let you see how we did on those seven things, so here goes.

1. We are going to AUSTIN today after work!! Wheee!

Well we did and we made it back safe & sound!  Though we are still trying to work on the whole teleportation thing so we don’t have to endure the hours in the car!

2.  So that we can volunteer at the 3M Half Marathon!

We had two volunteer shifts over the weekend and our first was Saturday working packet pickup.  We walked in and were immediately put behind computers next to each other to help check people in.  Those 4 hours fa-lew by!  So many happy runners coming to pickup their bib, chip and awesome swag bag!

It was so sad hearing stories of people who thought they were registered for the race, but their registration really did not go through or they thought they’d still be able to get a spot, but it was sold out.  Definitely a lesson in registering ASAP and double checking your confirmation!

Then we were up bright & early race day morning to help pass out medals.  Along with other volunteers, we unwrapped 6,000 medals for the half & half relay which took about an hour and a half or so.

We had good timing because the first person to finish came in completing his half right around 1:07.  The 1:40 to 2:15 finish time frame was the when the BIG rush came in.  It was awesome!  Seeing the finishers’ faces and being able to congratulate them!  Some people were so excited that they even asked Teal if it was time for a smooch.  Then there were tamer moments like when Beth put a medal around a man’s neck and he wrapped his arms (stinky, sweaty and all) around her for a hug.

The whole time we were looking for our friends who were out there running to finish.  Our first familiar face was from C-Stand [we can’t stop calling you that :)]!!

Pretty positive it was those crazy pants that gave her a kick ass (sorry mom, we used the a word) PR!! Way to go lady! 😉  But really, Courtney, you killed it out there WAY TO GO for real!

Just a few minutes later in came Courtney a.k.a. @cisforcourtney who was easily spotted by us in her purple tank, Teal  yelled out to her and she came running over to us!  It was so cool to put that shiny medal around her neck!  You’ll have to check out her bloggy blog to see how awesome her PR was!

We also got to see and medal Lesley (@RacingItOff) and Tricia (@TriciaRunning) after their beer race 🙂  You ladies awesome! We have managed to see Lesley at a handful of races in Dallas, but it’s never for thaaat long. We have got to fix that!

We should mention we saw a couple of familiar faces from New Years Double out there too! Each of us spoke to one of them briefly – other NYD runners would know him as the marathon winner of New Year’s Eve and her as the half marathon winner of both days!

It was neat to be there and see the entire spectrum of runners out there from an 11 year old boy running his first half to a 62 year old woman crossing off “run a half marathon” from her bucket list.  She was so proud of herself, as she should be, because she could tell her kids that run marathons she had completed a half marathon. LOVED that!  We were there to see the 30 year old first finisher cross the finish line to the 69 year old who was the person to run across that finish line and regardless of their time each of them had such a sense of accomplishment to them!  Just further proving running is really for anyone with a goal!  Such. A. Great. Experience!

3. We are SO excited to get to meet Courtney & Luke!

Obviously you know we saw Courtney at the end of her race, but we first got to FINALLY meet her and Luke during our packet pickup shift! Who doesn’t love meeting someone and being handed over de-licious goodness in the form of a s’mores cupcake??  We also got to hangout with them for a little bit Saturday night too at this cute bar – Dive Bar.  While it was fun to hang with them that night it was at a bar where it was hard to talk and all hear each other, so we were grateful for the opportunity to see them Sunday afternoon too at Austin Java!  Courtney & Luke, you two are awesome!  We loved getting to see you, spend time with you and we can’t wait for the next time!! 🙂

You two are wonderful and we WISH we lived in the same city as you guys!

4.  We are officially signed up for the ZOOMA Austin Half on March 31, 2012!!

Yep, we still are!! 🙂  THAT didn’t change over the weekend, so you should sign up if you STILL have not…AND we still have a coupon code good through TODAY!  You know you wanna!!

5.  Neither of us have actually run in Austin and you know what? We are going to change that this weekend!

OOPS!! Yah, we didn’t!! Wait, we saw a bunch of runners, does that count?? Guess we’ll change that when we run ZOOMA!

6.  We canNOT wait to get coffee at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – have been dreaming about it since our last trip to Austin!

Yep, we went there! TWICE!  One trip there we might have gotten more than one drink! 🙂  It is safe to say that we are also a fan of their breakfast food there! We would have made a third trip there but we cheated and went to Austin Java.  Brigid to answer you question the other day – when we go there Teal gets either a sugar free caramel latte or vanilla latte and Beth tends to stick with Hazelnut.  If we are remembering correcting all of their drinks with milk are made with non fat milk.  And now we are dreaming about them again…..

7.  We really wanted to post 27 things…

Aren’t you glad we didn’t post 27 things this time either?? 🙂

We also would like to say thank you to Mary Alice for once again letting us crash with you!  And thanks to Mandy & her cute little munchkin, Meranda for meeting us for dinner Saturday night!

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Seven Things Friday

January 27, 2012 by · 7 Comments

1. We are going to AUSTIN today after work!! Wheee!

2.  So that we can volunteer at the 3M Half Marathon!

(source)

3. We are SO excited to get to meet these two:

 You know also known as @runthetrailsCO & @cisforcourtney

4.  We are officially signed up for the ZOOMA Austin Half on March 31, 2012!! We have a discount code good through the 31st for $5 off the 5k or $10 off the Half! Let us know if you want to join us and we’ll let ya have it! 🙂

5.  Neither of us have actually run in Austin and you know what? We are going to change that this weekend!

6.  We canNOT wait to get coffee at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – have been dreaming about it since our last trip to Austin!

7.  We really wanted to post 27 things because, uh, duh – today is the 27th! BUT we thought that was excessive and that we wanted to keep our readers around! 😉  Thanks for hanging in there with us! 🙂

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[Not Entirely] Marathon Running Weekend Part 2

January 26, 2012 by · 1 Comment

Last year we both ran the Too Cold to Hold race together and just on whim decided to do it again. Beth mentioned wanting to run and Teal of course agreed. It’s not too hard to persuade each other to run something around here! You might recall Teal’s recap of her 5k on Saturday which started out at 36 degrees and in keeping with the craziness that is Texas weather, we were again not too surprised that our run started out Sunday morning at 52 degrees and ended up with a high of 78 for the day. Definitely NOT Too Cold too Hold!

We really were not all that prepared again for this race and had to discuss directions again.  Whoops!  Hopefully this direction problem isn’t turning into a trend. 🙂 We got to the park and made a b-line to the port-o-potties as usual. We ran into one of Beth’s Fiancé’s friend’s Hanes who we didn’t know would be there!

We waited around and met/chatted with many of our twitter friends and even met some new people in real life! SO good to meet Lee a.k.a. @runneronabudget and his son, Angel out there! Bonus for sure and really chatting with them was the only really highlights of this day.

We started out the race together as we both basically decided to run this race as a training run and not a true race since we have been a little off in our training. Beth had run about 9.5 miles on Saturday and Teal around 7, plus both of us did yoga, so our legs were in no way shape or form rested.

The race was in a word “normal”- nothing new or different and no real problems besides this dude who kept swerving in and out from us. At one point he basically cut Beth off weaving, would run backwards, look back and weirdly smile and randomly cheer for people whilst running backwards.  We couldn’t decide if he was running tangents or dizzy or what…We have no clue what he was doing but kept us entertained for a while due to he weirdness. 🙂

Around 4.5 we got the BEST surprise! This race is kind of boring because there are literally no spectators besides finished runners at the end so we were both pumped to see Heidi and Brian cheering us on around the turn around. This pumped us up and made it a little easier to keep running.  We made it a point to wave and cheer on our fellow North Texas Runners in an effort to pass time and keep from being bored, and of course be supportive.

A post race pic of our cheerleaders! The Luebs are awesome!

Teal and Beth split at about the 6 mile mark which made the last 3 miles a drain. At around 9 Teal saw Heidi again and she ran her in right up to the finish line! Such a great cheering surprise for a relatively routine and regular race!

Afterwards we hung around to celebrate Michelle’s birthday and eat with our running friends at Fuzzy’s! We got to here all about Greg’s upcoming 100miler at Rocky Raccoon in Huntsville and hang out with their precious girls, an all over great ending to the day!

Frunners!

Shout out to Mama C the awesome picture taker…we stole two pictures from you and the term frunner! =)

Love this photo! Marci and her age group award...a lil Ninja!

Frunners at Fuzzy's!

It was also SO good to meet Michelle a.k.a. Drum at this race!  We finally after a long time of chatting it up on twitter we saw her for two seconds at White Rock Mary but actually got to meet this weekend!  Also, a shout out to Stacy it was SO good to meet you too and hope that we see you again soon..you know not just on twitter! 🙂

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Wordless Wednesday No. 16

January 25, 2012 by · 7 Comments

What do you think? Suggestions?

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Slow Cooking Goodness

January 24, 2012 by · 4 Comments

As we mentioned in our Cleanse Recap that Beth recruited her sister to do the cleanse with her, and after a couple days of eating pretty bland food Kate decided to research recipes that would work for the cleanse.  Ironically enough Kate found a recipe on Tosca Reno‘s website which Teal had introduced Beth to her books this past year!  If you don’t know who Tosca is, well, she is the author of the Eat-Clean Diet series as well as a model, spokesperson, media personality, motivational speaker/wellness consultant and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner.  Even if her recipes aren’t ALL for you there is a lot in her books/cookbooks to look over, draw inspiration from and just experiment with on your own personal preferences.

Beth conveniently bought a crockpot for Kate for Christmas which allowed us to try out Tosca Reno’s Slow Cooker Mexican Chicken recipe from her website!

Top is all the ingredients in the crockpot and the bottom is the meal on top of brown rice ready to eat!

(source)

This meal is definitely a realistic clean eating alternative for you, your family or to have for multiple meals in one week!  We made the entire recipe two times throughout the cleanse.  The first time Kate was so gracious to share it with Beth & Brent and the second time it was made for two meals each for Kate & Beth.  If you would like to give this recipe a try here is a direct link to the recipe.  Let us know how you like it and if you experimented with it at all!

What is your favorite crockpot meal?  Have you found a lot of healthy eating crockpot meals?

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[Not Entirely a] Marathon Running Weekend Part 1

January 23, 2012 by · 5 Comments

Twitter Road Race:

You got to love the weather in Texas! On Friday it was a warm almost 80 degrees and Teal woke up on Saturday morning to a chilly 36 degrees. Teal headed out early on Saturday before work and completed her #TwitterRoadRace early. The first mile was terrible. Her lungs were burning like crazy the entire time. She was kind of worried about running with a lot of speed- stupid foot, but ended up finishing in 28:38. Fairly slow considering but overall not too bad. For Teal this is the first time she had even attempted to run outside since the New Year’s Double. Had it not been for the road race she would have never set foot outside because of the cold. Yep—so glad we don’t live up north and have to deal with the snow. It was so encouraging to know that others in the running community were out doing the same thing and based on twitter many dealt with way worse conditions. Once finished her ears were ringing and she basically wanted to go back to bed. Is that bad??

Beth has a relatively new standing “date” with her trainer on Saturday morning’s at 10:00 a.m. and with a jammed back day of stuff to do decided to have the morning to do what she wanted before that workout. After workout she was off to meet a new client/Bride to pick up her wedding invitation envelopes to address, then pick up her Too Cold to Hold race packet and try and make it back home to run before yoga.  Beth made a first attempt at the #TwitterRoadRace but stopped because realistically it was cutting too close to her next thing to do.  She ended up doing her 5k AFTER we did our trail run at NorthShore.

 

Results of the Road Race:

Teal –

Finished 185th out of 347 runners!

Beth –

For whatever reason her results didn’t get counted. Boo! 🙁  Beth ran her 5k in 26:38 and would have tied @RunfosRunner for 122nd place.

 

Northshore Trail Run:

We both met at Sunstone Yoga at 1:30 to fit in a quick yoga session before heading out to the trail.  Neither of us really knew where we were going and ended up getting lost like 5 times before actually making it out there. We have both lived in Dallas forever, if not our entire lives, but were completely backwards in terms of where we were supposed to turn. 🙂

 

We ended up making it the trail with a little over an hour to run. We showed up at the gate and the man was like “you guys are ambitious.” Whoops… We started out the trail walking a little bit just to see how it would do and picked up running about a .25 mile in. The trail was not crowded, perhaps because it was so late in the day. It was very nice and open, much different from Erwin Park. We didn’t have to dodge as many trees and limbs like before. Here are a few pics of our route.

We changed it up a little and talked the entire run, totally not normal for us! Mostly about wedding stuff and just the weekend coming up and managed to make 2 miles in about 30 minutes. It’s crazy how much slower we are when running trails. We started heading back and both of us were kind of paying attention to time but not that well and apparently our talking made it hard for us to remember where we came from. Just like our drive in we had to turn around a couple of times. The sun was really starting to set by this time and we had again taken the wrong route back. Apparently we were having major directional problems Saturday. As we were running back on the shore you could see the park ranger man in his truck waiting around by our car. We ran the last stretch and managed to get to the car literally 2 minutes before the 5:40 cut off. 4 miles on the trail was very nice! We really liked this trail and seriously want to run it again, next time with more time of course!

 

Getting out there late and running until right up to the park closing gave us some gorgeous views of Grapevine Lake when the sun was setting! Completely worth it!  We’ll have the 2nd half of this weekend up in the next couple days! 🙂

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Marathon Running Weekend…Well, Not Entirely..

January 20, 2012 by · 4 Comments

But we do have a number of runs/races to tackle this weekend….Twitter Road Race, Northshore Trail Run, and Too Cold too Hold – ooooh my! We are up for a busy weekend and have definitely added a little variety to running. So with that said we’ll give you a little breakdown of just what we will be doing.

1.Twitter Road Race: You guys know how much we love twitter and our twitter running community so we jumped at the chance to sign up for this first ever  Twitter Road Race. This idea is the brain child of @seedouglasrun and you can check out the details on his blog here, but basically this is an opportunity for twitter runners all over the country and even the world to run together! So many times we want to change things up and run different locations, places, and meet new people but that is not always possible. This is a great way to connect to more runners too which we love!

So how exactly does a Twitter road race work? We asked the same thing but basically we will choose a spot to run in around our neighborhood and complete a 5k. We will be running alone for this 🙁 BUT we will both run Saturday morning! Once completed we will tweet our run using the #TwitterRoadRace and give our results to Doug! It’s that easy and best of all it is FREE.

It is not too late to sign up either just go to this site and register and then you can race “virtually” with us too!

2. Northshore Trail Run: If you have followed us for a while you might have seen our first ever trail run post/pics. We have not ventured into trail running again so we thought would give it another shot. We have decided to branch out and are going to head out to Lake Grapevine Saturday afternoon! We will run the Northshore trail and according to the website is a favorite for area trail runners and says there are basically “rocks, roots and ups and downs”. We are hoping to get in at least 4 miles and we will def take pics and update you on how this goes.

(source)

3. Too Cold Too Hold: On Sunday we both signed up to run Too Cold too Hold. This was the first race we ran together last year (not counting WR ½  December 2010)and really love these events. We signed up for the 15k and plan on making this a good training run and not necessarily racing it. We are off our game a little still and are getting back on track to run our Disney Princess Half at the end of February. Can you believe we are this far through January already? We also wonder if the weather being like it is if it will actually be cold that day.

How many miles do you plan to put in this weekend?

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Wine, Wedding & What Not

January 19, 2012 by · 6 Comments

So from our Wordless Wednesday post yesterday if you assumed we had a FUN Saturday night at our wine dinner party then your assumption was correct! 🙂

Pretty much everyone that came has already made an appearance on this blog, so if you’ve been hanging around the LIAR blog [yes, we just abbreviated our name, ha] their names might sound familiar to you!

Beth, Heidi, Teal, Kate & Mandy

Doubt we could have gotten them to pose for a picture together so we got the boys in deep discussion 🙂 L to R: Bitner, Brent, Michael, Josh & Brian (sorry it's your back) oh and cute little Meranda!

Also, please remember this was the day after our cleanse! 🙂  We had a lovely dinner with crockpot roast, twice baked potatoes, asparagus salad, a pasta dish with butternut squash and nuts.  But special mention should be given to the dee-lish appetizers we started with pears & melon topped with prosciutto and a balsamic glaze and tomatoes & mozzarella topped with the same balsamic glaze.  Are we making your mouth water yet?

Most of the food

It was a wonderful night of good wine, good food and great friends!  Now we just need to plan the next Wine Dinner Party!  If you’re a wine lover here were all the wines we had to choose from that night. Ha 🙂 Also, if you remember back in October when Teal went to Sonoma for the weeekend well then she brought the 2007 Allure Meritage from Williamson Wines and 2007 Topel Pinot Syrah both from that trip!

 

The wine dinner was also a perfect night for Beth to tackle another wedding item – get a flower girl!  Mandy & Josh have THE most precious little girl – bias? No way! She is! Ha  If it’s possible for someone to adore a child before she’s even born then that’s exactly how it was for Beth.  Little Meranda was the first kid born to one of Beth’s best friends, so that probably has something to do with adoring her before she was born.  But she’s going to be the cutest little flower girl in Beth’s wedding! By the time the wedding is here Meranda will be 3 years old! Oh, how time has flown by!

Beth has also asked two more ladies to be apart of her big day as Bridesmaids!  Last week she sent flowers to her soon to be sis-in-law and it actually was perfect time!  Lindsay had kind of had a crummy week and hopefully she meant it when she said the arrival of the flowers Friday afternoon and asking her to be apart of the wedding made her day!  So lucky to be gaining an awesome sister-in-law who is the same age!  Just a couple nights ago Beth asked her sister-in-law Tiffany to be a Bridesmaid.  Tiffany has officially been apart of the Lynch family for not quite a year and a half, but it feels like so much longer! She just fits right in! The fun thing is that she and Beth are the same age too!  Beth, her sister, Kate and Tiffany try to once a month go out for sushi and it just so happened that the sister sushi night was coming up, so Beth knew that’s when she’d ask Tiffany.

A fun fact about Tiffany is that she’s a quarter Japanese.  Since fortune cookies are actually based on a Japanese cracker even though you mainly get them from a Chinese restaurant they are originally Japanese [looked it up on wikipedia, people!] Beth knew that’s how she had to ask her!

 

Beth's brother, Scott and sister-in-law, Tiffany

The same night as sister sushi night Beth asked if Tiffany if her oldest boy, Wesley could be the Ring Bearer.  Wesley did such a good job at Scott & Tiffany’s wedding that it’s like he’s a pro already!  Bridesmaid dresses have also been picked for the most part! 🙂  Are those allowed to be shown? Haha, the Bridesmaids get their choice of style and Beth picked the designer, color and fabric for each dress!   You are not going to get an update on if there is or is not a caterer for the wedding because there are still 12 days left in January to work on that one. 🙂

Have you noticed we are a little obsessed with the diptic app for putting multiple pictures into one picture?

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Wordless Wednesday No. 15

January 18, 2012 by · 2 Comments

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Teal’s Foot Update

January 17, 2012 by · 8 Comments

Ok so I finally bucked up and went to the doctor about this stupid foot and it turns out I was right all along. Here is a reenactment of our convo since you guys couldn’t be there with me 😉

Dr: “ You know you have Plantar Fasciitis right?”

me “Yep, that is what I thought, but was in denial”

Dr. “ Well great, how much running have you been doing since the pain?”

me: “ Well, ummmmm, well sooo… I ran the White Rock Marathon, and then the New Year’s Double and a couple of other shorter runs in between when I could walk”

Dr: “Well I bet that hurt.”

(source)

The bad news is I have a “classic” case of Plantar Fasciitis, but the good news is there is not a stress fracture or joint damage. He said that because I have had this problem for such a short period of time (about 6 weeks) that I should be able to get it under control. You guys might have seen that I followed a bunch of the things on this post from right after the race and things have been going well. The doctor, as a matter of fact, said that that was EXACTLY what I was supposed to be doing. High five for me – operation stop stubbornness really has paid off a little.

I love this doctor so much. He is also the one that looks at my knees in case you were curious. He said that I CAN keep running but it will be painful at times. He said that PF is mechanical and therefore (on me at least) he said that it is not “dangerous” pain and he stated that as long as I keep it “in check” that I will be ok to keep running.

By “in check” he means a couple of things:

1– ice immediately after exercise especially longer runs for at least 15 mins

2– stretch like crazy, the calves, Achilles, and then arch

3– ibuprofen

4– cross train when the pain is above a 5 on a scale of 1-10.

All doable!

My worry was that I would run myself into a heel spur, which to me looks nasty and he said that my chances of that were veeeerrrry slim! I love him because he said you can run and tells me exactly what to do to be able to continue to do that without beating around the bush and is 100% honest.

He brought in his physical therapist guy who was also AMAZING. He showed me some stretches that I hadn’t seen or done before which was very helpful. After taking me through the stretches he was like – What the heck have you been doing? Your foot is as stiff as a board? He came in and moved my foot around a ton and was like – if I would have seen you before the marathon or before your double I would have told you NO WAY. Whoops?

He gave me this fancy boot that I get to wear to bed at night. SEXY I tell ya, and I’m a little worried that it might scare my dog, but nevertheless I will wear that bad boy until this foot feels better and I will attend the physical therapy. They said I would only need to go once or twice because the real work is done at home and with consistency. I have a follow up in a month so I’ll keep you posted but I am excited for the semi-good news and glad that it is solvable and manageable.

I have learned the importance of stretching! I think I learned it very late but I am sooooo going to get better at this stretching flexibility thing. Yoga will help this too. Oh and on a side note, I was in yoga the other day and just looking around (totally not what you should be doing) but there was this HUGE, I mean HUGE, musclely firefighter dude in the back who he was completely not flexible at all. He couldn’t even do some of the basic moves and I thought to myself that yoga really puts the whole idea of strength and flexibility into perspective and exactly why we need BALANCE! Yoga made him look like a complete weenie. I’ll keep this in mind the next time I want to skip stretching.

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