Sunday, September 2, 2012

Parties, Cake and Speed Work

Today has been a great day. I got to spend the day with family and great friends.

The hubby got to stay home today for a change, so we enjoyed some family time. Little man decided he did NOT want to sleep in today, so we were up and at 'em pretty early. ;-) That gave us lots of time to watch cartoons play and have fun. Then little man and daddy went and had some guy time, and I went with my mother-in-law to a baby shower.

We had a great time hanging out with family and friends, and celebrating a good friend and her new baby boy! He is so precious, and his big sister was so excited to help open presents. We are just so excited that their sweet family has grown again. And of course, the party included lots of goodies, and cake :-) BTW- it was the cutest cake ever and it would have been evil to not have some.....and it was SO worth it!

Since I didn't eat so healthy today (possible understatement of the year), I decided I needed to make up for it with some serious exercise. When I got home, little man and daddy were still out doing "man things" (their words, not mine, lol!) so I headed out for a run.

I recently saw on (I think) the Runner's World website about a "100 Step Fartlek" that is supposed to help decrease your mile time. Since I can always use some help in that area, I decided to try it. Also, to be quite honest, I have been getting a bit bored/frustrated with just a normal run. Here's how it works (disclaimer: please know that I did not think this up on my own, I got it from somewhere on the web, and I think it was Runner's World....or Pinterest....haha):

10 minute warm-up
10 steps hard running (counting each time the right foot hits the ground, or the left foot, just use only one to make sure you get the full number of steps and not half)
10 steps easy running
20 steps hard running
20 steps easy running
and repeat, increasing each time by 10 until you reach 100
5 minute cool down
The instructions also included that one you master this, you can then continue after the 100 and start over backwards. So you would start with 100 steps hard running, 100 steps easy running, 90 steps...all the way back down to 10 before the cool down.

I thought I might try to do the increasing and then the decreasing steps too, but I got to 100 and knew that was it for me! Lol!! I am still proud that I made it all the way to 100! Here's what my Garmin said after the run:

 
 
I know that my overall pace wasn't all that great (10:44 min/mi), but look at that max pace!! 6:18!!! That's the best I've ever had. Previously, my best had been roughly 8:30 or something like that. Wow! That made this run one of the most fun in a long time. I think I'll have to do runs like this more often.

After my run, I did 3 circuits of my strength training routine, and a short yoga sequence (14 minutes). Whew! Momma was one tired girl.

I'm not even going to tell you what I ate today....it was just not great, and we'll leave it at that :-P But hey, hubby made dinner, so I'm not complaining one bit about that!! ;-)

How do you deal with going off target on eating? Do you make up for it with exercise or do you let it slide? Also, what's your favorite run routine?

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