Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Time Keeps on Slippin'.....

The last couple of weeks have been hectic around here.  With illness, out-of-town shenanigans, new training programs (mine and husband's), and gulp birthdays, we've had our hands full. 

Today was little Miss Lily's first day of "real" school.  She had half day 4K last year, but now she's legit.  A backpack, a lunch card, and school fees = big kid.


She was SO EXCITED.  No first day jitters at all.
 
She was completely taken with all things Kindergarten. Her main concern was going back tomorrow, namely, if she would be allowed to.  She practically fainted with glee when I told her she'd be going every week day.  I'm glad she likes school.  I always liked it.  The glasses make her look so much older!
 
You may remember that we have been potty training the boys.  Overall, it's going well.  Pat is pretty much trained, to the point that he knows how to work the system to get the rewards.  Rewards include stickers for urinating without wetting underpants and suckers for poop that lands in the toilet without hitting the pants.  Stickers have lost their appeal.  He will pee completely independently when he has a mind.  Suckers?  He fucking loves suckers.  So much so that he has figured out how to poop out just enough to get the sucker, then wait a bit, and repeat.  He can poop on demand!! 
 
 
I poop, Mom.  Me poop sucker?
 
Charlie is less consistent.  He can to the whole toilet business, but can't seem to be bothered with the whole "go right to the bathroom when it's time" thing.  He has better things to do.
 
Like jammin' on his axe.
 
The picture is a bit blurry because he can't air guitar without dancing.  Charlie is a dancing machine.  When he strums the cardboard guitar (lovingly made by his Daddy), he mimics (mimicks? mimmicks?) the sound of picking guitar strings. "Ding da ding ding da ding ding!"  He will totally do duelling banjos if you play one of the other cardboard guitars (we have 4).  It's awesome.
 
Last Friday was my birthday.  I turned gasp 35 years old.  Pretty much feels like 34 and 33 and all those other years.  I pretty much always look the same and anticipate I will continue to look pretty much the same for another 15 or 20 years.  When you're sort of non-descript looking, you age well, I guess.  Here's a picture of me getting ready to go out for my birthday. 
 
I know.  I look like a total asshole.
 
By way of comparison, here's a picure of me after my 2x(6x400) treadmill speed set tonight
 
Still pretty assholey.
 
 
Hot damn my life is exciting.  I got a 45lb Olympic bar for my birthday from my dear husband.  He always knows just what I want. 
 
Whew.  Now that the internets are all up to date, I can snarf down some sugar detox carrot cake pudding (spoiler alert-it's carrots milled with spices) while I watch Jon Stewart and head off to bed.  CrossFit in the morning after Lily is off to school!
 
Oh, and have I mentioned the husband and I are going to run Ragnar Tennessee?  Because we totally are.  I'm addicted to that shit.
 



 



Suck it, Sugar.

Well, after a super-fun Ragnar, I came home to what I thought were allergies and all the fun that goes with it.  Sneezing, congestion, fatigue.  Guess what?  It was a miserable head cold instead.  I was down for almost 4 days, with barely enough energy to work much less work out.

My CrossFit coach was so worried when I didn't show up for a week that he emailed me to make sure I was okay-isn't that nice?  I cuss at him and wish he was dead 3 hours a week, and he misses me.  Clearly he has abandonment issues.

I crawled out of my illness and back to the gym on Monday.  I left feeling totally spent, but really happy to be back at it.  Tuesday I went out for my very first FIRST training run (see what I did there-stupid runner humor).  It was a speed session I'm supposed to use to determine my various training paces.  I did a 1600m warm up @ 11:03, then 3x1600m with a 1 min walking cool down between them.  I was sort of flabbergasted by the splits:
                                                                      8:29
                                                                      8:42
                                                                      8:35
I almost barfed after the last one, so I walked 800m to cool down instead of running another 11.  Still, these times kind of freak me out.  I can't believe that I ran sub-9s.  Especially 3 of them.  I know, I know, FIRST training has a goal of getting each split no more than a second or two off the others, and these were a much wider margin, but they were all in the same neighborhood, even if they don't exactly share a stoop.

What does this mean for me?  Well, my targeted split for speedwork is supposed to be the average of the three miles + 15 seconds.  So that's....let's see....carry the two....the square root of Pi....8:35...+15...
                                                                      
                                                                        8:50

Fuckballs. 

The tempo run I was supposed to try the whole "warm up, then faster, then slower, then faster, then cool down" thing out on?  Cancelled due to the twins conveniently getting croup.  You know what croup is?  A tiny little stupid mundane virus that causes a small child's vocal chords to swell up so much that they emit a loud barking cough.  Their case was mild (no scary breathing, no ER visit), but croup gets worse at night.  Much worse.  They barked their little heads off all night long for three long nights.  Let's just say I was too tired to to much of anything pretty much all last week.  No CrossFit, no tempo run.  Fail.

I went out on Sunday for my planned 10K loop from home.  I was supposed to run 10:15ish miles based on the instructions in my training plan.  Nice and slow and easy.  So what did I do?  I felt good, so I just ran how I felt.  I should have heeded my brain when I looked down at the 5K mark and saw 27:01, but no.  I listened to my stupid legs.  Around mile 4.5 my guts started in "Ummm...hey, lady?  I'm having a problem down here."  My legs said "It's a side stitch!  Run through it!", so I did until just past the 5 mile mark when my stomach started screaming "OH MAH GAH I'M GONNA BARF".  Those 5 miles were done in 46:40.  The total time for my 10K?  1:05 and change.  Ouch.  I almost tossed my cookies in the front yard of a house I run by every week.  On a Sunday morning.  They would totally have known it was me.  Shit.

Oddly, that time still beats my PR for a 10K (I've only ever run one-5 years ago).  Weird.

In the midst of all this illness, I found myself straying from the Paleo straight and narrow.  I put sugared creamer in my coffee, mixed too much honey into my tea, ate a few too many Paleo brownies, and even ingested an enchilada and a cookie.  The effect was frightening.  That sugar?  It was like fucking heroin.  I felt completely out of control around it.  If I didn't believe all the Paleo hoopla about modern foods being feats of engineering designed to fuck you in the head to the point where you couldn't stop eating them?  I believe it now.  It was scary.  The sugar cravings came back hardcore...I became consumed with them.  It got hard to pass by the donuts, I wanted froyo and pie with a can't-stop-thinking-about-it fervor.  I was marginally successful in denying them, but I caved more than I'd like to admit.  So what did I do?  Found the 21 Day Sugar Detox by Balanced Bites.  I'm on day 4, and feeling pretty well.  I find myself only truly craving fruit (which, aside from green apples, is a no-no during the detox), which I'm taking as a positive sign.  The crap food desire has subsided.  Reset button pushed.

Suck it, sugar.

They say this thing is good for weight loss, but I'm not really too concerned with that.  I don't particularly need to drop weight.  I wouldn't cry if I got below 160, but I'm fine with hanging out at 162-ish.  I'm hoping the ramped up protein consumption will help me do some fat-to-muscle conversion, though.

I do crave bacon.  Good thing bacon isn't off limits.

A bunch of other stuff happened over the last week (I turned 35!  Lily's first day of Kindergarten! Pat learns to poop on demand!  Charlie masters air guitar!), but I'm out of time.  Lucky you, you'll get to read about it later.

Do any of you fight sugar cravings?  Have you thought about detoxing (or have you done it)?