Monday, March 24, 2014

Busy Day

I had a very busy day in which I did very little that was actually productive. Since kiddo is on spring break, his biological mother dropped him off at our house this morning before 8 am. I am by no means a morning person but I got up and packed a lunch for fiancé and then made breakfast for kiddo and I.

We spent a little time straightening up the house, and a significant amount of it was spent looking for my primary set of car keys. I keep my house key, my HID card for the gym connected to my primary car key fob and have a backup car key fob that has nothing else on it. In a moment of laziness sometime in the past couple of weeks I decided that the backup was closer and I wasn't locking the door so I just grabbed the backup and off I went. I haven't been able to find my primary set of keys since and it is driving me crazy! I really don't want to go pay another $10 for a gym HID card so that I have 24 hour access because I'm sure I will find the keys right after.

Anyway, about 10 am, kiddo and I had to hit the road. I work an hour and 40 minutes away from home but I only work about 4 shifts a month anymore so it isn't a big deal and it's nice to work in a smaller ER but when I have to attend mandatory training classes that only last 1 hour and are only scheduled during the week my kiddo is on spring break, it isn't so convenient. My parents live about 40 minutes south of my hospital so I asked my stepdad to hang out with kiddo while I drove to the hospital and did my training class and then drove back to them.

After all of that was said and done and I had retrieved kiddo, I had a 2 hour 10 minute drive to make it back home and my kiddo informed me about an hour into the drive his belly was bothering him. While he was with his biological mother this weekend he had an episode of vomiting and general yuckiness so I stopped in at the closest Wal-Mart to pick up some medicine and we stopped to grab a bite to eat. Obviously kiddo was not as interested in eating but he nibbled and we took his dinner with us.

The weather in my hometown was beautiful, 50 degrees, sunny and just spring like. The weather at home was 32 and snowy and by the time kiddo was ready for bed and read to and tucked in, it was dark. I decided to spend some more time trying to get my garmin connect mobile working before I headed out. I still wasn't able to sign in, it would let me create a new account but it wouldn't let me sign in with any of the logins I was able to make. Finally fiancé deleted the Garmin Connect Mobile App, reset the settings on my iPhone, and reinstalled the app. After that it took a couple of attempts to get the watch to fully sync to my phone but we did accomplish it! After all that stress I definitely needed a nice walk to help me relax. I sent fiancé a link for the live tracking and set off. A couple of things we didn't realize about the live tracking is that the link doesn't send until you actually start the activity and it runs about 3 minutes behind what I am actually doing. But it did make me feel a little safer about walking outside, in the dark, by myself.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Wow. This week has really flown by. I'm sorry I haven't posted any this week. My poor kiddo has had a really tough week at school, I worked a couple of shifts this week, and fiancé had a couple of nights where he had to work late. Our family has just had a rough week.

Both fiancé and I did keep up with our excerise this week and managed to walk 7.38 miles this week. Fiancé did very well with his diet and has managed to lose 11 pounds since we started. I have not been doing as well with my diet and I am only down to 210 pounds. A total of 4 pounds lost. I have reset myfitnesspal to lose 1 pound a week instead of maintain my weight. The trying to do it on my own just wasn't working out well.

Our wedding is in 10 weeks and I'm hoping to be under 200 for the wedding which is just a touch more than 1 pound per week.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Week end

After my first med/surg shift at my new hospital, I've only ever been an ER nurse before, was well a little boring. Since I hadn't slept well the night before and after my 15 hours I didn't have the 25 minutes in me for my walk. I ended up going to bed right after I made it home from work.

Since Friday was a rest day I just decided to make Thursday my rest day and I did my 25 minutes on Friday. My fiancé and our kiddo made it family walk and did our 25 minutes together. Kiddo still needed about 12 miles by the end of the month for his "marathon" so we knocked out another of his miles. We waited until about 6 pm and the weather was just beautiful. 

Saturday was another beautiful day and since fiancé and I both needed our 35 minutes and kiddo needed 11 miles so we headed out to the local trail and went for a nice walk. We headed out and even got to see some of the Clydesdales our on walk. I ended up with a little more than 2 miles for my 35 minutes. After we finished our walk we headed home for a while and then spent the evening with my family for one of the younger cousins birthday parties. Since I have to work another day shift tomorrow I'm headed to bed pretty early since I have to be up at 4:30 am.

Overall for the week I did ok on my calories but I went over on a couple of days. I have copied the chart of my calories for the week from myfitnesspal. The red line represents the amount of calories daily to simply maintain my weight. According to myfitnesspal I am 921 calories under my weekly goal so I am not hoping to have a huge weight loss on the scale. I'll weigh in tomorrow morning and see what my overall damage is for this week. 


I work tomorrow but it is also a rest day so I likely won't have anything to report apart from my weight. I may or may not post tomorrow, it depends on how my day is at work. 

Hopefully next week I'll be able to keep all of my days at least under the daily goal line next week. I have about 2 hours worth of walking on the schedule for next week so that should help out.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Two day Recap

So it definitely has gotten much colder here in St. Louis but thankfully we didn't get any more snow. I'm not going to lie I've never big a huge fan of winter but this winter has just been ridiculous. I guess I am not the only one complaining though, the blogosphere has been full of people whining about this winter.

Anyway on to happier things, I did my 25 mins yesterday and my 15 min walk today. I just stuck to the neighborhood for both for quick easy completion. I find the more elaborate I make the plans, the less likely I am to actually go do it, funny how that works huh?

Overall I'm feeling great, and I'm itching to get back to running. The whole time I am doing my walks I just keep thinking that if I just had a set distance instead of a time I could just run a little faster for a little while and I'd been done so much faster but I don't want to rush this.

The plan I have for my fiancé and I is essentially a 7 month marathon training plan so that we both ease into a consistent workout routine and stick with this whole plan. As for my fiancé, he to has so far stuck with the training plan as well and has been trying to do better with his food choices. His main motivation though is primarily "not to look fat in our wedding pictures".

As for the wedding, it's only 80 days away. I guess I better get to work on some things in that regard too...

Monday, March 10, 2014

Finally a Warm Day!

Today was the first really nice day that St. Louis has seen in a long while. After all of the snow and cold temps have kept me and my family stuck inside. I wanted the pools to be open so bad!

After I spent some time taking my dog to the vet for his shots and a check up, I came home to drop off the dog and strapped on my Garmin and my heart rate monitor. Since I only had a 15 minute walk on the schedule I figured it would be easy to just walk through the apartment complex to my bonus kid's bus stop. It ended up only being 3 minutes and I was early for the bus anyway so I walked up and down the block until I hit 15 minutes. I ended up getting 0.79 miles completed.

The plan says 25 minutes for tomorrow so I will actually get in more than a mile. Since I will have to get the kiddo off the bus again tomorrow I might just leave early again tomorrow and walk around the apartment complex again. This place is huge so I can definitely get the time in and it's hilly too so I get a little extra workout in from that.

After I got the kiddo from the school bus and made it home I decided that it would be a nice treat for him to get to go to the park after school since it has been so cold and he has been stuck inside so much lately. Since he is doing the Go! St. Louis Read, Right and Run Marathon I figured it wouldn't hurt to walk a little bit to get in his miles. I knew that there is a park a little more than a mile from where I usually park so we headed out.

We ended up walking about a mile and a half to the playground and it had a merry go round! Please someone else tell me they had this on their playgrounds when they were kids. I guess they have been removed from most playgrounds, are they to dangerous? I loved the merry go round as a kid! Bonus kid had never been on one and so we spent the bulk of our time playing on it. It was a blast and I'm sure it burned some extra calories.

We walked a little further down the trail so that we could use the pedestrian trail over the interstate which was apparently not as cool as he originally thought, so we headed back towards the playground and down to the public library right below it. We spent a little time reading books until dad/fiancé joined us at the library and ended up taking us back to my car.

I made a lasagna for dinner tonight and actually went through and added up all the calories that I put into so we would know approximately what we where eating in total. While I was making the lasagna  the boys went to the store and bought us patio furniture! We have a small backyard off of our townhouse and the fiancé has been wanting something besides our grill out there for a while so now we have patio furniture.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Bike ride

Well, this week is the first week of the training plan that I put together for my fiancé and I. It is starting out with just short walks and then progressing into run/walk intervals after about 7 weeks. On Sundays there is no walking but I did want to get out and enjoy the beautiful weather so we decided to hit the local greenway on our bikes.

I had a minor snag in the plan prior to actually starting biking and had to make a quick trip to the local bike shop to have some air put in my tires. After that we both headed out with ambitious plans to ride 13 miles. Caleb's bike isn't a road bike like mine and probably still needs some adjustments to be truly comfortable for him so I ended up leaving him behind for a bit. We stopped around mile 5 and had lunch and then took off again.

I was feeling pretty great so I did the full 6.5 miles out and turned around, when I caught him after I turned around he went ahead and turned around. I ended up taking a break for a bit to see if he would catch back up with me but he didn't and I was mean so I went ahead and made it back to the car. I put my bike on the bike rack and decided to walk to catch up with him.

My legs were close to dead! I tried to run and found that I wasn't going anywhere fast and my heart rate was pretty high so I just walked. I walked back to the car with him and was so happy to just be done.

While the Garmin forerunner 220 doesn't have a bike setting I found that since I have the heart rate monitor the only real downside is that the watch tells me I set a new running record. It was easy to adjust the classification on Garmin Connect.

Does anyone else have Garmin Connect Mobile and had any trouble logging in with their Garmin Connect account? I can't get my account to log in on the mobile app. I emailed support this evening so we will see what they say.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Shamrock Shuffle 5K

6:45 came very early this morning, but we both managed to get out of the house and make it to the church that was hosting the run. The only problem was that the race started almost a mile from the church. The race was through a subdivision and was an out and back. 

The morning was colder than the weather man had told us and my poor fiancé was freezing. Since it was a small race and it was the first time time this group had ever done a race there were some definite areas for improvement. The flyer gave the church as the address for the race so thankfully there were plenty of people walking toward the race start for us to follow. They did announcements with a bullhorn and also had a guy playing the bagpipe. These two things shouldn't have been going on at the same time, but they were and it made it difficult to hear the announcements. Since the parking lot was so far from the actual race start they decided to wait 10 extra minutes to start.

After we finally started, besides the cold, windy, overcast day, the race wasn't horrible. It was hilly and the roads weren't closed down to traffic but thankfully what little traffic there was was more than happy to drive around us and we all just stayed on one side of the road. The local police department provided several officers to help out with the course which was very nice. 

We ended up walking a little more than we ran but overall we finished about a minute faster than last months 5K. Overall it wasn't a horrible race but if they are going to do it again it could definitely use some fine tuning. My garmin data is below and I'll post a review of my garmin now that I've run with it tomorrow.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Signing up and Spending cash

I spent some time looking at races and signing myself and my fiancé up for some. I some how last night convinced my fiancé to let me sign up for yet another marathon to give it one more shot. Plus I convinced him to sign up for the marathon also. So now we're both signed up for the Rock N Roll marathon in October. 

The Rock N Roll marathon series puts on a decent race, especially for first time runners, it was my first half marathon, and I think that 7 months to train is more than enough for the both of us. I'm not saying we will Boston qualify at the end of the race, nor am I guaranteeing that fiancé will want to ever do another marathon after that but we will finish it!

I also signed us up for a local 5K tomorrow. We did the Mardi Gras 5K so I figured it would be fun to do a Shamrock Shuffle, plus they are giving out medals and fiancé likes his funning bling!

I'm excited because it will be my first chance to use my new Garmin Forerunner 220. That's right, I've been slacking. I've set up a training plan for the both of us starting on Monday since neither of us have really stuck to our training plans and we could use a fresh start. 

As for tomorrows race I will be setting up one of my favorite features of my Garmin, intervals! Since neither of us are in the best cardiovascular shape so we are going to run for 0.10 of a mile and then walk for 0.15 of a mile.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Garmin Forerunner 220

Well after the demise/sale of my Garmin Forerunner 610 I was left without a fancy running watch. Since I hadn't been running I put off getting a new watch but had been drooling over the forerunner 620 for a while.

After comparing features on Garmin's website and spending some time thinking honestly about how I would use the watch and just how much I would use the watch and all the features, I decided to get the Garmin Forerunner 220 with heart rate monitor.

I ordered it late Thursday night and I received it on Saturday. I was as happy as a kid at Christmas. I opened everything up and being the good girl that I am I put it on the charger at first. Once it was fully charged though I started spending time figuring out all the new features and setting up the user profile. Then I started figuring out what all I wanted on my data screens.

The Garmin forerunner 220 has a lot of data to share, I was overall very impressed, during a run you have 2 data screens, each with 3 fields, a heart rate screen that shows both my heart rate and what zone I'm in and it also has a clock. I have the first data screen set up to show distance, timer and calories. The second screen shows lap distance, lap time, and lap pace. I am not sure I will keep these set up this way but the Garmin offers plenty of options for the fields on the data screen.

I was concerned that I would be disappointed that I hadn't gotten the touch screen but honestly I am not finding a problem with it thus far. I honestly wasn't a huge fan of the touch screen when I had the 610.

I really like the large face, although I will admit I was worried about it being to big or uncomfortable on my wrist since I have a smaller wrist. It seems to fit my wrist well and it feels more comfortable and flexible than my old 610 did.

I'm really looking forward to getting out and using it but tonight just wasn't that night. I was tired and my stomach has been bothering me for a couple of days so I decided to opt out of my long run. I have officially given up on doing the marathon in April. I think my fiancé is going to do the half with me and we will be taking it VERY VERY slow and easy.

I was in no way compensated for this post, I purchased the forerunner with my own money and all thoughts contained within this post are my own.