Rethinking things

Lately, I feel like I'm always starting with, "I was so tired this morning, I really didn't want to run, but I did anyways"... it's getting old. Today, I actually woke up feeling pretty energetic, which was nice! I wasn't even dreading my run.

Today's scheduled run was a tempo run--20 minutes easy running, then 20 minutes at a "comfortably hard" pace, then 10 minutes easy. I put The Biggest Loser on my computer so I could watch it while I ran. I did the easy run at 6.0, then when it was time to pick a tempo speed, I decided to go with 7.0.

On Monday, I was feeling so crappy that my 3-minute sprints were at 6.5, and that felt tough! So I wasn't sure if I could hold 7.0 for 20 minutes, but I figured I could always reduce speed if it felt too hard. It ended up being the perfect tempo speed--hard enough that I wanted to reduce the speed, but not so hard that I couldn't physically keep going.

After about 7 minutes, I told myself that I couldn't look at the treadmill until after the last person on The Biggest Loser weighed in (4 people had weighed in already, and I needed an incentive to not look at treadmill every 30 seconds). If you watch the show, you know how long they drag out the weigh-in!

Finally, after the last person weighed in, I had less than 2 minutes remaining until the 10-minute cool-down. When I finished, I felt really good--like I had pushed myself today.

After the treadmill, it was time for my FINAL day of the Wii Active 30-Day Challenge!! I was a little nervous that yesterday's workout hadn't saved again, and I wouldn't be able to complete the challenge, but thankfully, it was good to go.

The workout was a variety of all kinds of the exercises I had done over the past 30 days. When I was done, I don't know what I was expecting--balloons, and streamers, and a party? But it just said:

I'm very excited to have finally finished it, though. For those of you that asked, the game didn't make an impact at all on my weight or body fat percentage. But the main reason I was doing it was to strengthen my leg muscles so that I don't get injured while marathon training (as well as to finally finish the challenge, something I'd started dozens of times before).

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For the past few days, I've been rethinking giving up meat from my diet. I haven't had meat in over two months, and it was going great for a while, but lately it has just made me stressed out. It takes a lot of planning to get a healthy vegetarian meal on the table, and I am just not willing to put that much time into it right now. I really should have thought ahead and planned to try it when the kids are in school.

I don't miss eating meat at all (except maybe tuna fish, which is weird!), but I miss having endless meal plans that I know my family likes. Trying to please my family AND not take up so much time planning meals, AND eating vegetarian myself is just too stressful for me. So I think I'll go back to doing what has worked for my family the past couple of years as we became healthier. We've never been huge meat eaters, so we'll probably still eat vegetarian meals half the time, and include meat the other half.

I'm glad I tried out eating meatless the past couple of months, though, because I discovered some great new foods! My favorite being tofu. I'm really surprised how much I enjoyed it when I baked it and added it to a stir-fry. And Eli absolutely loves it, which is a shocker to me.

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Tomorrow is Jerry's and my nine-year wedding anniversary. As of right now, we have no plans. I don't think we'll have a baby-sitter, and I have a doctor's appointment for a physical in the afternoon. But who knows, plans could change tomorrow ;)