take it and run thursday – strength and flexibility (and winners)

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This week’s Take It and Run Thursday: strength and flexibility. Yuck, is all I have to say. Well, and what follows in the next two paragraphs.

First, strength training is one of my least favorite activities on the face of the planet (just before stretching, incidentally). I will share my little anecdote from years past though…which may inspire me to mend my ways. When I was a sophomore in college, I began running consistently for the first time. My only goal was to lose weight (and of course I wanted to run faster because I am competitive with myself). Strength training became a part of the routine when two things happened; first, I hit a plateau and was advised by multiple people that strength training would help, and second, Gold’s Gym (where I belonged) began offering strength training classes. No brain work, no counting reps, no keeping track of anything. My kind of strength training. I started to lose weight again…and my running sped up. Now, I occasionally make it to the strength classes at 24 (my new gym), but I really rely on my favorite video, Turbo Jam – Turbo Sculpt. I love it…I just need to do it more often. So, my goal for this week: do strength workouts three times before next Thursday.

On to flexibility: I’m sure it’s important to stave off injury. I am not flexible. I was actually discussing flexibility with my brother and sister-in-law this weekend. I had just returned from my fabulous run with Christy and was attempting to stretch. Well, I suppose I was stretching. It’s just no one watching me would have thought I was. We are about the most inflexible (mainly physically, but you could probably apply that to other areas) family on the face of the planet. When I cheered in high school, I had to do the splits everyday (seven days a week) in order to not lose the ability to do them. As I am not in the practice of kicking my legs in the air these days, my flexibility is basically non-existent. So, goal number two for this week: do my yoga video one time. Yes, just once. I am all about realistic goals.

Thank you, Runners’ Lounge, for inspiring me to do better. If you want some actual advice or information about benefits, I’m sure you can go there and read other people’s much more informative posts.

And now, for our winners from last week’s contest:

  1. For the person who guessed my number 2 song first: Janssen.
  2. As for the random winner from the comments made (chosen by one of my student employees): Beth.

Mixes will be in the mail on Monday!

leaving las vegas

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Basically, it was a weekend full of Hope and Tannon. We had a little “photo shoot” to get some good shots for the baby announcement (I’ll post those once it is done). My favorite pictures are the following two…both showing Tannon entertaining his “baby sister”. It was so fun to watch. The best moment, not captured, was Monday night. I was holding Hope and she started to cry (no…I didn’t pinch her) and Tannon, looking very concerned, pointed to his dad (my little brother) and said, while pointing from one to the other, “Daddy. Baby.” Justin quickly rescued Hope from the mean auntie and all was well with the universe.


Tannon has also hit a phase of not loving me. Fortunately, I find the whole thing quite amusing. Whenever I tried to talk to him (except for when I was saying goodbye as I headed into the airport…weird) he would put his hand up, with his arm extended (as far as it could reach) toward me, turn his head away from me and say, “NO!” If I decided to keep talking, the “NO!” became “No way!”, which of course made me laugh (because I’m the mean auntie) at which point he would start walking away from me, looking for his mom or dad, while the tears began to flow. I seriously think kids are so great. Like toys for grownups (at least when you are the auntie and not the parent).

running with friends

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So, I have lots to post about from this weekend, but since I would also like the pictures to go along with the post (actually, the pictures will probably be the post), it will have to wait. What I do want to write about was my running this weekend. First of all, I now officially hate snow in the winter. California was an ideal place to grow up. It cooled off in the winter, but to get to snow, we had to drive a few hours. Perfect.

When I knew I would be headed to Vegas this weekend, I got in touch with Cropstar. She is one of the three women with whom I will be running the Canyonlands Half Marathon in less than three weeks (in case you are wondering, I will probably die running this half marathon). She graciously drove to meet me up in my brother’s neck of the woods (or desert, as it were) and off we went. Can I just say how fabulous it was to be running outside at 7:30 am in a tank top? It was fabulous! A little chilly to start, but I warmed right up.

Sadly, I think my nano battery is dying, so I had no music and no Nike+. Happily, I had Cropstar to keep my company and her Nike+ to tell us how slow fast we were running. She was a champ and let me run as slow as needed. We ran a total of 6.28 miles. The farthest run I’ve done all winter. While it was not my fastest 6 miles ever, it did make me feel a little better about running 13.1 in three weeks (a little).

On Monday, I decided to try running without music. I just wanted to see what it would be like to run without any idea of how long (distance or time) I had been going. I was inspired by my friends over at Runners’ Lounge.

Inspiration aside, it was awful. It was 30 minutes (which I knew when I got back to J’s) of me listening to myself breathe, thinking about how miserable I was. I can now say that I’ve tried it and so I feel completely justified in never doing it again. Sure, if there’s someone there to talk to, I’ll leave one headphone out…and I even enjoyed my run with Cropstar without music. But no music and no company = no running for me.