October 11, 2019

How I Escaped an Ice Cream Pig Out; and My Running Review: 3-3-3 Week 2

This morning, I was dying for a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby. It was my turn to carpool for school, and I thought I'd stop at the store on the way home to buy some and have a relaxing day because I've been so busy all the time!

I knew I didn't want to sabotage my efforts lately, and I tried to come up with reasons NOT to buy the ice cream. Right now, the only thing that I enjoy more than eating ice cream (this is sad, I know) is going to Lowe's and planning a new project, hahahaha. Thankfully, Lowe's is open so early. I chose to go there instead of buying the ice cream, and as I drove, I planned on what project I could work on.

Our laundry room is the last room in the house that I haven't redecorated, and it's going to be a total pain in the ass to work on. First, there is a hole in the ceiling that has been there since we switched to a tankless water heater. The drywall in that section is a mess. I always picture spiders getting into the house from that hole, too; not to mention, it's just plain ugly.

I'd recently bought a small piece of drywall to patch the hole. It was roughly a 10-inch diameter circle. I had no idea how to patch holes that big. I finally googled it and found super easy instructions (on the Lowe's website of all places). I cut out a square from the drywall piece and then used that piece to trace on the ceiling I cut out the hole in the ceiling (butchered is more like it--I didn't have a drywall knife, so I had to improvise).

Then I screwed in the furring strips and attached the drywall square into place. I was so proud when I was done!

I don't want to show photos until I'm done, and then I'll do a big reveal. This room looked the worst of all the rooms in the house. Tomorrow, I'll have to tape and mud all the drywall seams.

I took a photo of all the drywall dust from scraping off the textured ceiling. It's SO heavy! I don't understand why they put that on there. BUT, that was the last of it. It completely filled two plastic grocery bags. I have NO MORE CEILING TEXTURE! :)


(That's a 10" drywall knife, for size reference).

And when I was done scraping the ceiling, the area just outside of my laundry room looked like this:


Since I don't want my house being a huge mess again, I'm going to move this project along as quickly as possible.

I bought the stuff to make custom shelving when I was at Lowe's, and once I get the boring stuff done (taping and mudding), I can get to the fun stuff!

Anyway, instead of caving to the Ben & Jerry's I followed my own advice for keeping from binge eating and I found something else instead :)



The rest of this post will be rather boring. I like to provide that disclaimer before posts like these!

I explained what 3-3-3 running is last week (it's not a "real" running method; just something my friend Thomas made up to get me back into running). Literally, this is all it is: running 3 miles, 3 times per week, for 3 months. 3-3-3.

It's more about forming a habit than anything else. Once I got out of the habit of running, I can't even begin to describe just how hard it is to get back into it! I ran for seven full years, and then took a long time off--which I don't regret. I wanted to do what made me happiest, and running was not making me happy at the time.

Eventually, though, I started to miss it. I even wrote a whole post called "5 Things I Miss About Running (and they're not what you may think)". So, I want to get back into it, but all I can say is that it's HARD. Running at an easy pace used to feel so... well, easy!--and that was at a 10:00-ish minute mile. Now, to run at an easy pace, it's been in the 14:00's!

As I also mentioned before, I'm using the MAF (maximum aerobic function) heart rate training during this 3-3-3 running. The first two runs this week were frustrating for me. I literally couldn't run any slower, and I really didn't want to walk (I was on the treadmill). So, I lowered the incline by 1% to make it easier and bring my heart rate back down.

I feel like my running gait suffers a bit when I run so slowly, too. Hopefully, the MAF training will do its thing and I'll be running faster at the same heart rate soon enough.

I've been listening to several interviews with Dr. Maffetone about the MAF training, and a common question is whether you are supposed to subtract a heartbeat each time you have a birthday (since the formula is 180 minus your age).

I always assumed you did, and that's why my current MAF rate is 143 (because I'm 37). However, he says no--when you find a heart rate that works for you, you can stick with it until it's just not working anymore. When I was training for my 10K, I had phenomenal results with the heart rate of 146 bpm.

Starting next week, I'm going to increase the heart rate to 146 bpm (it's only a 3 beat difference, but I'm curious how it'll feel). This week, however, I stuck with 143 bpm for comparison's sake.

Anyway, here is the lowdown on this week's runs:

Monday - I chose the treadmill. Last week, I did treadmill on Monday and Wednesday, and then outdoors on Friday; so, I decided to do the same thing again this week (again for comparison).

I started the treadmill at 4.7 mph, hoping that I could maintain that speed. But I quickly realized I had to lower it because my heart rate just went up too high. (By the way, my Garmin isn't sensitive to speed changes at all. 4.1 mph might as well be 4.5 mph. Especially when I mess with the incline. I'll just look for a pattern over time.)

Wednesday - I was SO tempted to postpone this run until Thursday. I had told myself that I WILL run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week so that I don't procrastinate.

One of the boys on my cross country team refuses to run without constant walk breaks and water stops. He's perfectly capable of running at least two miles on his own, but he refuses to do it. So, I was thinking I would skip Wednesday and then wear running clothes to practice on Thursday and run with him--to make him do it!

It sounded like a legit excuse, but I knew that if I made an exception to my MWF rule, it would be the start of constant procrastination (or quitting altogether). So, I put on my running clothes, turned on an episode of 24, and hopped on the treadmill. The first mile went by rather quickly, but still--I had to lower the pace to 4.1-4.3 mph several times, and decrease the incline to keep my heart rate down.

Still, I got through the three miles while keeping my MAF heart rate where I needed it to be.

Today - I actually chose to run outside. It looked like it was drizzling a bit of rain, which sounded nice (after working with all that drywall dust!). So, I dressed in my running clothes and headed out. For some reason, it felt kind of easy today.

I didn't look at my watch at ALL during the run, so I had no idea what my pace was. There were very few times that it beeped because I was going too fast, so I just ran at a speed that felt comfortable (slowing if the watched beeped at me for high heart rate). And it felt slightly faster than before.

I was surprised when I was done. Finally--a pace in the 13:00's! (Well, since last Wednesday.) Here are my last six runs:


My heart rate has been nearly identical for every run, but my pace hasn't been consistent. (Except for Monday and Wednesday this week--my time was off by ONE SECOND. There is no way I could plan that if I wanted to! Today, my outdoor pace was about 40 seconds per mile faster than last week's outdoor run! I have no idea why. But it will be interesting to see if there is a trend!


4 comments:

  1. That's good to know that the MAF training doesn't have to go down every birthday. I've been heart rate training for about a year now and my easy HR is 150. I thought I was doing something wrong. My runs at this HR feel super easy (and slow) so I couldn't figure out why it was higher than it "should" be (I'm 40 this month so it should around 140). The only way to keep it this low is to power walk, and even that gets me up to about 143. Thank you for posting the info that you get, it really does help!

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  2. Thank you for sharing your story Katie - v interesting reads:) My problem has always been of discipline as I tend to yo-yo back to whence I came! I'm currently Kindle reading this book called Struggle Buster which says that I really shouldn't exercise (ie run, which brought me to your article) and should go back to a diet of what I ate when I was growing up even if its carb loaded. What do you reckon? Right now, I'm willing to try anything! Cheers - Kyle.

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  3. I'm looking forward to pictures of your finished bathroom! You did good to stay away from the ice cream. I'm afraid I caved on that recently!

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  4. I need to adjust the HR for this because I really just walk....between being 45(for only 1 more week) and having long legs I can not run at all not even slowly before the HR is way over 135.

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