10 Miles to Catch Up

So did you all stay up to watch that football game last night? Not me! Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to, but those half marathon training runs don’t wait for football. It was a bummer, because I love football, and I would’ve really enjoyed watching the end of last night’s game. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll hear about it ad nauseam for the next decade or so. 😉

In other news, I ran 10 miles on Saturday. That was fun! 😛 My girlfriends and I met up at 6 AM and ran around their neighborhood a few times, doing one out and back before we sent Toddra on her way to go get ready for another 8 AM basketball game.  Then Jen, Ann, and myself went the other direction for another 5 miles to finish things out. Unfortunately for me, my watch decided to die after the first 5 miles. It seems that I have battery issues. 🙁 This makes me very sad, because I’ve only had this watch two years, and it shouldn’t be acting up this soon. It was fully charged when I left, but although I continued to try to restart it during our run, it would stay on for a little while, and then die again. This morning, I did a 38 minute-run, and the battery was down by 20% by the time I was done. Normally, a short run like that would only knock off about 4% of the battery, so it’s clearly having issues. I don’t want to buy a new watch right now, but I may not have a choice. *sniff* 

Luckily, Ann also has a Garmin, and I showed her how to download the run file so that I could upload it to my account. Because Heaven forbid I not have record of every single run! 😉  We did a nice, slow pace for the first 5 miles, and then we picked it up a little after Toddra left us. Overall, our pace was 11:59, which I think is perfectly fine for a 10-mile run. 

You might remember that my last post detailed all the food I ate for our anniversary dinner. I was in the hole by quite a few points, so that 10 miles helped to get me back to where I wanted to be. I actually ended up in the positive by the end of Saturday, because I came home and took a three-hour nap after my run (it was 14° when we went out, and the cold really sapped my energy), and then we had hockey and I barely had time to eat. It was senior night, and I was asked to take pictures, of course, and I was kind of nervous about it, so that diminished my appetite as well. 

By the time the night was over, we got home around 10:30 and didn’t eat until 11 PM. 😮 I know that’s really terrible, but on the bright side, we had put a roast in the crock pot, with carrots and potatoes, and it turned out delicious. So while I may not have been eating at the ideal time, at least I was eating good food!

Ever since I reinvigorated my Weight Watchers account, and discovered that they expect you to get in 3000 steps per day before they count any of your exercise, I’ve been motivated to actually get at least 3000 steps in a day (above and beyond my runs). Most days, it’s not too hard: between walking to and from the parking lot at work, as well as all the running back-and-forth taking pictures at hockey games, it’s usually not an issue. I love that my iPhone tracks my steps, and I’ll admit that sometimes I’ll even get up and walk around the office an extra time or two just to increase the number of steps. It’s kind of like a fun game. 🙂 

Sunday morning, I knew I would be spending the entire day sitting in front of the computer, finishing up the senior night pictures. This meant little to no exercise. And yet, I still wanted to get in that 3000 steps. So, for the first time in a long time, I decided to just go outside and take a walk. As I was walking up and down my road in the cold, it reminded me of how I actually got started on my journey to becoming a runner, back in 2011-12, (You can read all about it here on my blog in the archives.) I was shocked to realize that was five years ago! Since I didn’t get a picture during my 10-mile run because of the cold and the darkness, I did a quick walking selfie:

If you look around my blog, you’ll see plenty of similar pictures from five years ago. Some of them are pretty humorous; I was not as adept at dressing appropriately as I am now. 😛 

With yesterday being Super Bowl Sunday, I know that there was a lot of junk food being consumed. Back in the day, that was one of my favorite “junk food holidays.” I used to make mini pizzas, tater tots, nachos, you name it, if it was crap, I was eating it. I love a good Super Bowl party. But now I’m just an old married lady, with a husband who works just about every Super Bowl, so the game has lost some of its thrill for me. While the rest of the world was eating Super Bowl party fare, we were having white chicken chili with Italian bread. I did kind of longingly look at the posts of all the Super Bowl food on Facebook, but in the end, I knew I made the right choice. I did enjoy some wine, at least! 

Despite my 55-point day on Tuesday, I ended the week with four Fit Points to spare. I consider that quite an accomplishment! And I’m happy to say that my hard work paid off, at least a little bit:

About a half a pound down, but you know what, I was really worried earlier in the week that I was going to negate all my hard work from the week before due to my anniversary, so even a little loss is a victory!  That puts me only about 3 1/2 pounds from my goal, which is a lot better than 7 1/2 pounds, right?

Once again, I found that I was eating much less calories using the Weight Watchers plan:

And once again, that should not come as a big surprise. Weight watchers is forcing me to eat less of the things I really enjoy (sugar and carbs), or, if I’m not willing to give those up, I have to eat less of everything else.  I’m not 100% sure how I feel about that, but I’m not starving, I guess, so I’m going to keep doing Weight Watchers for the time being.  As I mentioned in my last post, the mind shift from “restarting” every day with calorie counting to “catching up” with Weight Watchers seems to have made an impact. Instead of just letting my high-point Tuesday go and starting fresh the next day, I made a conscious effort to try to earn back my Fit Points by not eating them all when they were earned. I’m positive that I would not have had a success on the scale this week without that choice.

I’ll leave you with two pictures. The first is a picture I took this morning when I made a little detour for work to try to get a shot of the sunrise.

The second is something I saw on Facebook that made me laugh out loud. I know a lot of people don’t like him, but I’m a Michigan fan, and I’m not going to argue the greatness of a Michigan alum. Plus, this is just damn funny. 

😉

Thanks for reading!