Remember When I Complained About the Cold?

Ha ha, I sure do!  And now…I’m complaining about the heat. 😉

We’ve had yet another hot and humid Michigan week, and let me tell you, keeping up with half-marathon training has been quite challenging this month. I know it’s July in Michigan, and I should be used to it by now, but it’s hard not to complain. 😛

I got up as early as I could and ran on Saturday morning, the 16th. I went back to the Metropark, because it’s more exciting than running down my road. The sunrise was just kind of blah.

I probably shouldn’t say that, because every sunrise is great, because it means  another chance to wake up and view one, and praise the Lord for that!

It was cooler than it had been, but still humid, so I ended up going slower than I would like. But I saw a lot of rabbits and even half a dozen deer! Two of them were right in my path, including an adorable little fawn. It’s hard to see, because I couldn’t get too close, but here they are:

Awww, so cute, even if you can barely see it.  If only I could run with my zoom lens. 😉  I also got a nice picture from the bridge over the inlet that leads to the lake.

That’s one of my favorite spots on all of my typical running routes, because it’s just so peaceful.

As far as the run goes, I’m still following Katie’s heart-rate training plan, and last week’s long run was a total of 75 minutes, with the bulk of it in Zone 2. The last five minutes were in Z3, which was both challenging and enjoyable at the same time. It’s hard to find the motivation to speed up after you’ve already run for 70 minutes, but then again, it’s nice to have a little burst of speed after going slow for such a long time.  So, although the humidity slowed me down more than I would’ve liked, overall it was a good run. When I was done, I wanted to take a post-run selfie. A couple of days earlier, a few of my friends had posted some “muscle pose” pics of their sons, who are the same age as my son Jamie. These kids have definitely hit their growth spurt, and the testosterone is flowing freely. I jokingly took my own posed picture to show them that boys aren’t the only ones who can be “ripped”, ha ha!! 

I may not be able to bench press as much as those boys, and yes, I have loose skin that will never go away, but my muscle pic comes after running 6 miles, which I’m pretty sure they can’t say. 😉 

Afterwards, it was a busy day filled with shopping for Jamie’s uniforms (school starts in less than a month for him! 😮 ), then an attempt at fundraising for JJ’s team, and then grocery shopping. Oh but wait, I’m not done yet: then it was a graduation party and a hockey fundraising party. I was pretty exhausted by the time I got to the hockey party, which was actually a corn hole tournament. (Do people outside of Michigan know what corn hole is??)  Unfortunately, between the graduation party with all its delightful food, and the corn hole party, which included my own brownies, my eating choices were not stellar.  I tried to go easy on the main dishes to save room for the brownies, but my choices were kind of limited. I had chicken, macaroni and cheese (which I haven’t had in forever and by the way it was so good!!), along with some meatballs and an interesting Asian salad that I would definitely try again. 

I liked it so much, in fact, that I had seconds, along with the chicken and the macaroni and cheese of course. 

Not the healthiest of choices, I’ll admit, although I don’t eat the skin on the chicken, if that matters. But after that, I just could not stop eating the brownies. Kind of a funny story about the brownies actually: while we were grocery shopping, I told JJ to grab me two boxes of our typical Ghiradelli double chocolate brownies. Those are my favorite! But then, when I got home and I started to make them, I could only find one box. That was when I determined that JJ didn’t hear me say “two” boxes. Crap. I was in a hurry, because I still had to get to the graduation party, so I had to improvise. I searched through my recipe books, and was able to find a recipe that I could whip up quickly, thanks to the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook my mother bought me in 1994, the year I moved out of my parents’ house. 🙂 

I still reference that cookbook for just about everything!

I’m sure it will come as no shock for me to tell you that the brownies I made, using the cake-like recipe because I didn’t have the ingredients for the fudgey ones, plus the sour cream frosting, turned out ah-mazing, and about 1000 times better than the boxed mix! So the good news is, I have a new recipe! The bad news is, I ate a whole lot of brownies on Saturday. :/

And then I weighed in on Tuesday:

Yes, up a teeny tiny bit (.2 pounds), but I probably shouldn’t complain, because it could’ve been a lot worse!  Summer is tough, but I just keep telling myself that I’m doing better this summer than I was last summer, when all the stress of two different hockey team dramas was fueling my feeding frenzy. (Nice alliteration there, if I do say so myself. 😉 )  

My weight isn’t at goal, but at least it’s below my self-imposed “Mendoza line” of 124, unlike pretty much all of last summer.  And you know what? I’ll take it! 🙂

Thanks for reading!