the regan parks' half marathon training plan*

*Not a training plan at all, not even in the slightest. Please be not as dumb as me.

• Have friends mention the race and then stupidly sign up before you really think about what training means
• Sign up for a training plan. Follow week #1 of it.
• Have your youngest child stop sleeping through the night. Realize that holy shitballs, it's hard to get up for a run at 5am when you just managed to get the child back to bed at 4am. 
• Continue to receive training plan emails, laugh at the distances you're supposed to be running.
• Go to the gym, run 20 minutes on the treadmill, feel like you're going to suffer a heart attack.
• Sign up for a Turkey Trot thinking a race sooner will motivate you to get out of bed at 5. 
• It won't
• Run the 5 mile Turkey Trot, think "5 miles wasn't so bad," rework your training plan. You have less time but it's still doable!
• Sleep in every morning. Go for runs but never ones that are more than 3.1 miles.
• Go to Disney World the week before the half marathon. Abandon your diet and stop doing all exercise. Give your mind a workout by coming up with excuses to tell your running partner to get out of the race.
• Acknowledge that there is no getting out of the race, pick up your packet 
• The night before do some carb loading:
• Also sleep on the couch the night before to ensure you get a crappy night's sleep
• Wake up at 5am on race day, feel like you're going to puke
• Drag yourself to the start line, don't look your running partner in the eye for fear she'll know you didn't train and your plan involves dying around mile 6.
• Run. Don't die. Walk a couple of the biggest hills (which are all in the final 3 miles, what the hell?)
• Cross finish line in 2 hours 40 minutes. Be amazed that your stubbornness just carried you 13.1 miles.

 

I paid money to run before the sun was even up. Sometimes while I'm doing these races, I look around and realize how stupid us runners are but then I get excited that I've found my people.

sugared

We are currently on vacation in Disney World where there is a lot of this happening:



Followed by a lot of this:

I'm pretty sure that look says he's either about to go into a diabetic coma or hork off the side of the stroller.

Oh, I'm wrong, he's going back for more icing


I hope your Valentine's Day was as sweet as Truman's.

second post, same as the first

When we last discussed the shrinking of my giant ass (and hips and thighs and middle area) I told you about my juice cleanse. I got quite a few emails asking if the juice cleanse made it impossible to leave the bathroom and I am here to tell you that is not the case. It's not a colon cleanse; you aren't told to chug salt water. In fact, the founders of the cleanse urge you to get a colonic because some people tend to get a bit backed up during the process. But, yeah, there wasn't a chance in hell I was going for a colonic.

After my three days of juice I moved into a meal plan from Snap Kitchen. The plan was 1200 calories for 21 days and I was hoping to teach myself some good eating habits and to learn be content on that amount of food. I'm not going to say it was hard because how hard is it to not cook anything, not research nutritional info, not grocery shop, just drive to a store and collect your bag of meals? Not very hard at all. But like any regimented plan, it was hard to resist temptation and not pick at Truman's leftovers or steal a cookie while packing his lunch.

My 21 days have passed and, much like the juice cleanse, I'm surprised by how once I got into the swing of it, the whole thing really flew by. This brings my total weight lost since January 9th to 13.6 pounds. From here I'm moving into a combination Weight Watchers, low calorie, Eating Well diet. I'm working out a lot, like 5 to 6 days a week and I'm literally tracking every step I take with a Fitbit. I've joined an online Blogging Biggest Loser group which really helps keep me motivated. There is nothing like having to email pictures of your scale to someone to make you want to get that number down as fast as possible. I've also developed an addiction to food blogs that focus on low point or healthy recipes. If you have a favorite I would love to hear it so I can bulk up my reader a bit more.

So there you have it, The Most Boring Blog Post Ever®, but what can I say, I'm pretty damn proud of myself. I do expect the weight loss to slow down since I'm on my own now for meal planning. I also figured the first 10 to 15 pounds would come off easily because they were very recently put on. My next immediate goal is to not gain any weight when we go on vacation this weekend. Here's hoping you can eat healthy in Disney World.