What's the Rush?

It's Wednesday, hump day for many people. For me it is the start of a crazy busy five days, and I have about five minutes to tell you about it.

So, for people who NEVER get invited to do anything, this is a week of showing us how wrong we can be.  Between the four of us who live in this house, we have three parties and one sleepover we are invited to. I will let you guess who is going where, because really that doesn't matter. What does matter is that we have a lot going on.  Add to that two karate classes, one yoga class, gift buying for two different kids, food making for one event, and skiing on Sunday, and I think I will be ready to sleep for twelve hours straight Sunday night - after Dowton Abbey and Sherlock, of course.

Somewhere around all that I plan to fit in two treadmill sessions and at least one rowing session.

Speaking of which, I just finished my first walk/RUN on the treadmill since starting my heart-rate-monitor return-to-fitness routine.  I actually was able to run a bit at 12:30 pace while staying within my prescribed, inflammation-avoidance zone.  Of course, by "staying within" I mean I bounced a couple beats high when I ran and a couple of beats low when I walked.  It's turning out to be really hard to keep in the zone I need without erring either too high or too low. If nothing else, that is what makes this approach to exercise frustrating. More on that in another post, however.

The good news, though, was that I got to RUN again for a little bit.  Generally, as far as I could tell, I was managing about a one minute run to one minute walk.  I did that for 35 minutes.  So, with warm up and cool down and a bit of walking at incline at the end of the run/walk, I got in 50 minutes of quality exercise and 3.4 miles.  I followed that up with a bit of stretching and some upper body weight work.  (I have not done arm weights in about two years, but it suddenly sounded like a good idea. I'll let you know if it was in the next day or two.)  I will also be very curious to see if my leg backslides at all in the next couple of days.

By the way, while on the treadmill, I listened to a great Ultrarunner Podcast interview with Candace Burt, who recently came in second female at H.U.R.T. 100.  She is also the race director for the new Tahoe 200 Mile Trail Race coming up this year.  Anyway, good listen if you have the time.

Of course, I decided to celebrate my run/walk by negating all the calories I had just burned with a piece of vegan banana-walnut-chocolate-chip cake with chocolate ganache that I baked last night.

My daughter was thrilled by the idea of the cake, since - as she put it - I never bake cakes.  However, I don't know if she was thrilled with the cake itself, bananas and nuts not really being her thing.  My son just licked off the frosting being no kind of cake lover at all.  The husband thought it was okay. He's not a huge cake fan either, but as he stated this wasn't really cake and it wasn't really banana bread; it was somewhere inbetween. I took that to mean, he wasn't wowed either.  I thought it was okay, but as with a lot of vegan baking the texture was a bit dense. Ah well, back to the drawing board, I guess.

Healthy lunch today will be a smoothie!

Happy Running!