Sorry I’ve been kindof MIA, guys. No excuse other than that I’ve been, you know, doing other stuff. Like watching new episodes of Glee and Grimm, trying to catch up on my goal of reading 48 books in 2012 (I’m 3 behind at the mo’), and attempting to wrangle some sort of order out of our perennial flower gardens. I am also training for this:
This, dear reader, happens to be a 5k mud/obstacle course at a local ski resort. I’ve done a regular 5k before, and I’m no stranger to hard work and/or mud…but I’ve never done an event like this. So, I am taking training very seriously, primarily because I want to give myself the best possible shot at completing the race without getting hurt. I’ve modified this Jeff Galloway training plan to include trail/obstacle runs and strength training, as well as treadmill runs. I’m in the 4th week and so far it’s working well. I train 6 days a week and have Fridays off (sometimes I do slow yoga on Fridays to help with flexibility). My only goal with this training plan is to complete it…I’m not looking to PR or win my age group or any such craziness (because those really are crazy, for me). I just want to complete the training plan I’ve developed, without making excuses, finding ways to weasel out of it, or modifying it to make it shorter or easier. And, I don’t want to finish the Challenge dead last. There. Those are my goals. Anything beyond that is just awesome sauce.
I’ve modified the way I eat, too. My last post was about my attempt at tracking calories for a week. That week was a total failure learning experience, for sure. I only counted calories for two days, and the activity filled me with so much anxiety that I had to stop. After some reflecting, I came to the conclusion that the primary problem was the program I was using to track calories. I was on SparkPeople initially. Unfortunately, the website design is too chaotic and overstimulating for me; add that to the already somewhat-stressful action of logging my daily food intake, and that’s a formula for giving up pretty quickly. Since then, I’ve found MyFitnessPal, which has a much cleaner, less chaotic (translation – less color, fewer graphics) design and interface; I find it more soothing to use and it doesn’t overstimulate my brain. I think Sparkpeople is great for some of us, but I’m glad I found MyFitnessPal. I am happy to say I’ve tracked faithfully for the past week and I am finding the tool really useful for reflecting on how mood, stress, and how I am feeling physically affect what I eat any given day. I did have one day this week where I ate waaay too much. 593 calories too much, to be exact. It was pad thai, which is my weakness! What can I say. I’m not feeling too bad about it, though, because MyFitnessPal tells me that the day before the Pad Thai Incident I ate 598 calories fewer than I could have, thanks to a day of heavy exercise. So, in 48 hours I figure it all evens out. That said, I don’t want to go over by that many calories again if I can help it…I could have saved half that pad thai and had a second opportunity to enjoy it the next day! Oh well, it’s all about learning, right? 
Anyhoo, I’ll be posting updates on how the training is going, as well as some recipes for the healthier, cleaner food I’m experimenting with these days. I plan to post some more no-refined-sugar recipes, as I’m going back to cutting out almost all refined sugar. (I’ll allow organic dark chocolate, for chocolate emergencies. )
Have any of you ever done a mud/obstacle race before?
