Happy Birthday, Jamie!

OK, first things first: the other kid got his day, so I have to give a shout out to Jamie, my first born:

He turned 15 last Saturday! It’s so hard for me to believe that my sweet little baby boy is almost ready to start driving. 😮  Then again, that’s never going to happen if he doesn’t start focusing on school and get his head out of his… Well, he is a teenager after all, and honestly, as they go, he is a pretty good one.  For his birthday, he got to play lacrosse, which he loves.  Unfortunately, their team isn’t doing all that great, and since he plays offense, he stands around a lot. The coaches had them playing pretty high-level teams for the first several games, so hopefully it’ll get better when we get into our normal league games. Still, he’s had a few opportunities, and although he hasn’t actually scored a goal yet, he’s had a few good shots:

He’s loving it, and I’m enjoying being on the sidelines to take pictures. Except for the part where it’s cold and rainy for outdoor spring sports. 😛

After his game and then his brother’s hockey playoff game, we went home and celebrated.  I let him pick whatever he wanted, and he requested that his dad make pad Thai for dinner. It was only Jason’s second time making it, and the first time was kind of a slapped-together recipe, so I was curious to see how the real thing would turn out. He did a good job!

Okay, the picture stinks, but trust me, it was good!  I honestly liked the first version of the meal better, because it was totally homemade, where as this one included a Thai sauce from a jar, which seemed really fishy to me. (Fishy as in tasting like fish, not fishy as in odd.) I’ve never actually had pad Thai before Jason made it at home; is it supposed to have fish? 

At any rate, although it was good, I was a little worried that it would not be a smart choice for the night before a half marathon. I’m not known for digesting Oriental food very well, but thankfully, I didn’t have an issue. The race went well, as noted in my previous post, and I ended up enjoying a delicious Italian dinner Sunday night.  Between the race, my need for sleep afterwards, and then cleaning the house, I actually didn’t eat very much Sunday.  I had half an English muffin before the race, a banana and two cookies afterwards, and then dinner. That was it!  

My points were a little messed up, however. I had eaten over my daily allowance Friday and Saturday, which were days that I had zero exercise (since I was resting up for the race). This caused me to have to dip pretty far into my weeklies, which I normally don’t use.  Since I’ve gained back a couple of pounds, I’m back up to 28 weekly (when I got down to 122, I was down to 21 weeklies), and I ended up using 21 of them between Friday and Saturday.  I knew that running 13 miles would help me make up for those. Or so I thought….when I logged in Sunday afternoon to see how many points I had earned (one of my favorite things to do after a long run), I was stunned to find that I had only earned 18 Fit Points. Say what?! That’s how many I earned for my 9 mile run the week before… when I ran much slower! 

The Weight Watchers app imports fitness data from my Garmin, which calculates calories burned based on my heart rate. When I went to check my calories burned, I discovered that my 13.1 mile race, which in the past has earned me nearly 1300 calories each time, only earned me 840 calories this time.  Well damn! At I first I was really pissed, but then I figured out what had happened. I remembered there was a point around mile five when I felt my heart rate monitor was too low, so I pulled it up. I checked my average heart rate, and it did seem low for the effort I had exerted. I suspect that my readings were inaccurate for the first five or so miles, and that’s what caused the low calorie burn.  I had previously assumed that Weight Watchers was strictly importing the time data and basing my points earned off that, but clearly it does some sort of formula based on time and heart rate. Which is good to know, but unfortunately, worked against me on this one.

But I’m pretty math savvy when it comes to things that are important to me, like money and food, ha ha, so I looked back at a few of my past half marathons and averaged out the calories burned, and then for the heck of it I plugged in a “hard intensity” 2 hour and 7 minute run into the Weight Watchers app (I think a PR qualifies as hard intensity), and I figured out that 27 points was much more accurate. so, yes indeed, I added in some mpre running minutes to make up for the extra nine points. 😉

Now, with all that said, I know in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter. On Monday, my week reset, so those points were technically lost to me. However, I took Monday off work to recuperate, and since I hadn’t eaten my fill on Sunday, I gave myself permission to just eat with enjoyment on Monday. This was my view for the afternoon:

Of course I had my cappuccino, and If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may recognize that as a Monica’s cinnamon roll. Monica’s Bakery down in Monroe has the best, biggest cinnamon rolls on the planet, and they’re only $1.75! You can see my cat eyeing my treat; I did not give him any. 

I definitely did not count points or calories on Monday, but that left me in kind of a dilemma: Monday is my weigh-in day. I did weigh myself on Monday morning, but then I ate without reservation for the rest of the day, and I knew that Monday morning’s weight was not going to be a true reflection of my post-race eating. Still, I promised myself some time ago I would only weigh in once a week, on Mondays! I waffled back and forth, but then I decided that I needed a truly accurate representation of having “fallen off the wagon” there for a couple of days, so I broke my rule and weighed myself Tuesday morning. And then I wished I hadn’t.

Well, that sucks. But I do feel pretty confident that it’s just a temporary gain. I’ve been right back on track since Tuesday, and I’m feeling pretty good. I took Monday and Tuesday off from any exercise, and I even slept in on Wednesday, but on Wednesday evening, I was feeling like a sloth, so I went out and ran 3 miles after work.

I really hate afternoon running, but on the bright side, it’s a rare post-run selfie with make-up. 😉  No, actually, it did feel good to get out and prove to myself that I still can run. I will admit there for a couple of days, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to do it again. 😉 I’ll be back at it again tomorrow morning, and although I don’t have anything race-wise on the horizon, I’m looking forward to just running for fun and fitness, and definitely not doing any speed work for a while. 😛

Thanks so much for reading!