Running Questions: A Long Run Fuel Recipe

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long_run_fuelFor the last few weeks I have been dabbling lightly with the best pre-run routine for long Sunday runs. I’m acutely aware of the need to fuel up before heading out but I’ve also become more in tune with the amount of time it takes for my body to wake up and go through its own routines.

I’ve tried drinking coffee, not drinking coffee, not having breakfast, having light breakfast, and drinking lots of water regardless of the rest of the routine. I believe I’ve finally found something that works (thanks in part to the oatmeal suggestion from @crossn81). Part of the trick to the long run recipe is to start the day before.

Knowing ahead of time that I would be burning well over 1,000 calories on my 20 mile run, I let myself indulge a little on Saturday. In addition to high fiber banana bread for breakfast and a well-endowed PBJ sandwich for lunch with sides of carrots and dip plus a granola bar, I enjoyed some mid-afternoon hot chocolate to fulfill a sugar craving and also keep the calories flowing. Dinner was high in protein and veggies with chicken stir-fry and I downed a bowl of kettle corn popcorn while watching a chick flick later. Saturday also including drinking lots of water. The rest of the recipe? Continue reading →

Finding (And Keeping) Balance

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BalanceI just caught myself saying, as I have many times before, that “there aren’t enough hours in the day.” I often think if only I could function off of 4 hours of sleep and could be totally productive during all my time awake that I might really get some things done. But alas, I am a 6-8 hour sleeper for sure. I guess the question becomes not how to find more hours in the day, but how to maximize the time you do have.

For example, I am finally getting to today’s blog, but only have a few minutes because I want to dash off to the gym for a quick run and Pilates class. I started my day around 7:30 a.m. and feel very good about all that I got done, but I was really hoping to rearrange the kitchen furniture tonight in addition to getting in a load of laundry. I was also supposed to sign up for Scuba lessons and do some research for a family event, neither of which got done today. Continue reading →

Fighting The Snooze Button

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Snooze ButtonI recently wrote about the traveling I’d be doing and my fear of not being able to keep up with my training schedule for the mere three days I’d be out of town. I scoped out the hotel’s fitness room and mapped a run as well. Fortunately, my roommate and friend also at the show is a runner as well and was equally gung-ho about getting up and running on the first day of the boat show.

We set her travel alarm clock, my cell phone alarm clock, and I picked out a great radio station to wake up to on the room’s alarm as our last resort. You know how you wake up every hour before a flight paranoid you might sleep in and miss the flight all together? I did that with the running alarms. I was so worried that we’d sleep through them that I was up essentially all night. By the time the last alarm went off, all I could do was hit snooze. Continue reading →

The Law of Layers

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Cold Weather SceneI am a fairly patient and tolerable person; it takes a lot to get me riled up and I tend to like most things. There are only a couple things I truly hate: mosquitoes and being cold. I would take being hot over being cold any day. When I’m cold I feel like I can’t function, I usually scrunch my shoulders up to my ears which ends up hurting, and I’m liable to lose my usually positive spirit if I’m freezing. For these reasons, I avoided cold weather running for years.

This winter, however, I decided to buck up and power through the cold. It helped that I had set my running goals so I was already motivated. I also started reading a lot about how to properly layer and followed the blogs and tweets of runners out there in much colder climates than what we experience in Maryland. Thanks to some fabulous Christmas gifts and a mini-shopping spree of my own, I built up enough running gear that I could very easily layer up for even the coldest temps. Though the Maryland winter so far has been relatively mild I pushed myself through 30 and then 20-degrees, down into the teens, and my coldest run was in 9-degree weather. Continue reading →

Want to Stay Motivated? Tell Someone

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Share Your GoalsWhen I first decided I wanted to run a marathon in 2009 I set my sights on the ING NYC Marathon in November. I still have my heart set on doing that run, but I also thought it might be wise to run one sooner so that I would know what training was all about and to make sure I could do it. I knew the B&A Marathon was March 1st and because it’s local, that seemed like a good choice.

I told my husband and a couple friends that I was planning to train for the marathon and if it was just too hard I’d at least run the half marathon, a distance I’d already done so knew it was achievable. I outlined my training goal late 2008 and got started. I also recruited a training buddy and we will run the marathon together. Though we don’t train together we check in after every long run to see how we did. I told more of my family and a few more friends of my plan. By the time New Year’s Eve rolled around I blurted it out to everyone I knew and soon after I even started a blog that included my marathon proclamations. Continue reading →

The Travel Hurdle

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Treadmill RunningTomorrow I have a flight at the crack of dawn down to Miami for a boat show. In my previous career I traveled often for work to boat shows across the country and would be gone anywhere from five to 10 days which is plenty long enough to interrupt exercise routines. My best friend who I worked with and I always packed our work-out clothes in the hopes that we would actually use them and there were a few rare times that this actually happened. During those trips, I was not quite as focused as I am now on training so maybe a more dedicated mindset would have made a difference in my motivation to stick with a work-out routine while traveling.

I will only be in Miami for 3 days but if I’m to keep with my training schedule only one of those can be an off day. I’m mentally preparing myself to get up earlier than normal so I can hit the hotel’s treadmill before the boat show madness begins. (I would prefer to be visualizing myself running on the beach, but this will not be an option due to the hotel’s location, so treadmill it is.) Continue reading →

My Running Questions: Introduction

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After more than 11 years of running, I am glad to finally be grateful for how running makes me feel and for what the body can be trained to do. I’ve learned a lot from this marathon training but also from reading articles, blogs, forums, and checking in with my training partner and running friends on a regular basis. Perhaps the thing I’ve learned the most is how much I still have to learn. It goes without saying that you never stop learning, and almost every run presents me with a new question about the sport or training and I definitely enjoy discovering the answers to my questions.

question_markOne of the things that stumped during my first long runs was how tired I became soon after the run was over. I consulted a runner friend who is also in trainer training and she immediately identified for me that I was not fueling up on runs longer than an hour. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t hungry or thirsty during those runs; my body needed energy to keep going. I was sapping all my energy while running so I had nothing left to power me through the rest of the day. Her advice matches everything I’ve read since which is that on runs longer than an hour you should have water and/or gels to fuel you up. Now I know. I carry a fuel belt with me for those long runs and while a little cat nap afterward is still rewarding, I can make it through the rest of the day without needing to crawl back into bed. Continue reading →

Pura Vida

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dsc_0224Pura vida, pure life in Spanish, is a mindset, a way of living, a goal, an experience, something to create, something to share. Pura vida came to life for me and my husband on our honeymoon in Costa Rica where we first heard the phrase. Pura vida was a greeting, the answer to “how are you,” a toast, a beginning and an end to each day and we reveled in it. Costa Rica, all the people we met there, the volcano and cloud forest we explored, the hiking we did, the surfing we tried, the nature we immersed ourselves in was all eye opening to what pura vida feels like. All our senses were heightened to the sights, smells, sounds, and lifestyle around us. We tried new things from food to language to exercise, challenged ourselves in our surroundings, and felt rewarded in what we learned and contributed to where we had been. The pura vida mindset that we embraced in Costa Rica is one that we hoped to hold onto back in the “real world.” Continue reading →