Catching Up - February & Mardi Gras

Hello hello!  I am back in action for March after a fun, exhausting weekend in St. Louis!  We have so much to catch up on so let's get started...

Last Week's Running:

Tuesday - 4.25 miles OUTSIDE

Wednesday - 2 miles

Friday - 4.17 miles

Total - 10.42 miles

So the week wasn't very impressive, but I have to say that at least Tuesday and Friday's run were a good pace!

When I got to St. Louis on Friday, Angela and I went for a run at Queeny Park.  She told me it was a super hilly park and it was exactly that.  The loop we did was just over 4 miles and it was rough.  Most of the first mile was flat, except for one huge uphill.  Right when we got to the top, the Garmin buzzed that we did that first mile in 7:45.  We were both shocked because it felt very relaxed (except for when we had to power up the big hill).  The 2nd and 3rd miles were a combo of both up and down - 7:35 and 7:44.  Then the 4th mile was mostly flat, and we took it nice and relaxed at 8:01.  I was beat by this time and glad I didn't throw up my lunch because we ate only an hour before!

We were having some selfie-taking issues, but finally got a decent one and at least it shows off the success of my teeth whitening!  Also it was sooo warm!  We were wearing pants and long sleeves, but felt like I could've taken off the long sleeve top if I needed to (I had a short sleeve top underneath...it's not quite sports bra only weather yet.)

February Running Recap:

Total Miles - 92.77

Total Runs - 19

Average Miles per Run - 4.9 miles

All in all, I think the total mileage for the month was OK.  It's definitely not where I want to be, but when I compare to previous Februaries, it looks pretty strong.  Given the fact that the entire month was basically on the treadmill, I guess I really can't ask for much more.

Total mileage was significantly higher than January!  But average miles per run was lower (it was 5.5 in January).  But, 2 of the February days were two-a-days, so my average miles per day would be higher.  On another positive note, it looks like this was my highest February mileage:

I can't really guarantee that this is 100% accurate because I know I fell off logging my runs a few random periods at a time, but I would say this is probably accurate for February mileage.  I know for sure I logged my runs consistently in 2013 and that's the year I really want to compare to now!

 

But enough running talk for now, here's How I Rang in March:

Mardi Gras in St. Louis!  St. Louis has the 2nd biggest Mardi Gras celebration, behind New Orleans of course.  Liz and I started our morning with a trip to Starbucks and the grocery store for bagels (and to get cash back so we'd have money for the day).  Around 9:30am, the drinking games started and the rest of the day was probably the most fun I've had in a really long time!

We made it down to Soulard (the St. Louis neighborhood with the big Mardi Gras parties) in the late morning and met up with my brother, his girlfriend, and cousins Kevin and Katie.  It was quite the family affair :)

Sunday was a day of recovery and the weather in St. Louis was perfect for staying inside.  We did get out for lunch though at a cute little restaurant called Winslow's Home.
Next up on the social schedule is St. Patty's Day in Chicago!  I can only hope March will bring more warmth and more running miles (it's a direct relationship...I'm about finished with the treadmill.)

I'm also really hoping to have my new blog up and running this week so stay tuned for that!

Did you/are you celebrating Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday this weekend/today?

How was your February?

Two Really Great Sandwiches

I wrote a post awhile ago about the most delicious turkey sandwich ever.

That was by far the best sandwich I ever made myself.  I'm fairly new to sandwich making, actually.  I used to be an extremely picky eater, so the extent of my sandwiches was peanut butter on toast.  Occasionally I'd get a turkey sub from Subway.  But basically, I never brought a sandwich to lunch when I was in school.  I couldn't have peanut butter on toast because I couldn't toast bread at school and I didn't like regular peanut butter sandwiches - they are a weird texture.  And I just wasn't a huge fan of lunch meat, and again, the bread would just get soggy and gross.

As I've mentioned before, my eating habits expanded in college.  I had my first grilled cheese as a sophomore in college and now I really really love grilled cheese.

So anyways, the point of this post is that I had one really great sandwich this past weekend (from a restaurant) and one that I made for lunch yesterday that I feel like I need to tell you about so you can try it.  I also had a grilled cheese from Panera and that was really sub-par, so I will not say anything more about that one; this post is only for really good sandwiches.

Dresell's Public House Farm Egg Sandwich

House back bacon, blue & cheddar cheese, tomato jam, house chips

This is hands down the best breakfast sandwich to grace the Earth.  I was thinking though...it's main competition previously in my mind is the McDonald's Egg McMuffin.  I'm not sure I've had many other breakfast sandwiches.  I don't even know where to start by talking about this heavenly creation, but I'll break it down.

Farm egg - A deliciously running over easy egg.  I think it had pepper on it too.  They even made Erin's with just the egg white.  They were reluctant to at first, but since she had just ran her first half marathon and was wearing her medal, they complied with her request.

Sandwich - Brioche bread, so soft and fluffy

House back bacon - Not normal bacon; it was more like Canadian bacon/ham

Blue & cheddar cheese - I love cheese

Tomato jam - I do not like jam, so I ordered my sandwich sans jam.

House chips - These were perfect chips.  Little slices of potato-y heaven.

Homemade Salami Sandwich

Toast w/ butter, lettuce, salami, tortilla chips

Sounds simple, right?  Well the secret ingredient is the butter.  I really don't know if this is a common thing, maybe it is?  In August, when I was in WI with my family, my cousin Katie and I were making salami sandwiches one afternoon for lunch.  And she buttered the bread of her sandwich.  This was wild to me, but she swore by it so I tried it.  And it was wonderful.  So I did that again when I made a salami sandwich for lunch on Monday.  Other than that, it was actually just a basic sandwich.  I probably should have added cheese, but oh well, I'll make it even better next time.  And of course, a side of tortilla chips.

So the moral of the story is: If you live within 1,000 miles of St. Louis, go to Dressel's and eat that sandwich.

What is your favorite sandwich from a restaurant or that you make yourself?

St. Louis Half Marathon & Weekend Happenings

This past weekend was the Rock 'N Roll St. Louis Half Marathon!  I ran the whole thing with my brother's girlfriend Erin and it was her first half marathon ever and I'm sure she wants to keep doing more and more.  Look how happy she was:

I didn't get to St. Louis until late Saturday night, but the Cardinals World Series game was still on, so Erin had made some pasta for me and we watched the game.  Unfortunately, it looked like the game was going to go into extra innings and we needed to be up super early, so we turned it off in the 9th.  Apparently the game ended (with a Cardinals win!) shortly after we hit the hay.

So, race morning.  We woke up and got ready to run!  We had bought matching Lululemon tank tops, but it was a bit too chilly for that.  I advised Erin to eat a bagel and some GU Chomps energy bites and I did the same.  When we got to the start line, I needed to grab my bib and t-shirt since I didn't make it to St. Louis in time to go to the expo.  But that was surprisingly quick and then we jumped in the corral and it was time to go within a few minutes.

The first few miles of the race were through downtown St. Louis, which was cool because it was sunrise and we ran towards the Arch and then around Busch Stadium.  We were each wearing coats over our running clothes because it was so cold at the start, but took them off around mile 2-3.  Luckily, we knew we'd see Katie around mile 5 because the course went right by her SLU apartment.  We ran to her, gave her a quick hug and our coats and continued on.

I was very colorful...and cold.

The race really wasn't that eventful.  Erin had hoped to maintain at 10 minute mile, but we were going much faster staying right around a 9 minute mile.  One of the later miles was even 8:40 and I think she was shocked at how fast she was able to go considering she hadn't trained this pace!  We were even chatting and having fun taking some pictures and videos.  And I will have those videos for you in my next post hopefully...they were taken on my iPod that I was running with, which I left at home today.  Anyways, there were some pretty killer hills, but we maintained a solid pace and finished in 1:56:45!!  Woohoo congrats Erin!!  Erin's mom also ran her first half marathon and finished faster than the first place marathoner!  (That was the goal.)

The pace was fairly comfortable for me, but having run only 2 3-miles runs in the past 2 weeks since the Chicago Marathon, diving right into 13 with those hills did my knees some damage.  They are fine now, but they sure hurt for the whole day.

My cousin Kevin had a funny tweet this weekend:

That's kind of how I feel about blogging.  I feel like a failure if I don't have photo proof of everything I did to show here.  But I can promise I really did go out to dinner with Angela and Liz on Sunday night in St. Louis.  And we were so deep in conversation and sat at the restaurant for so long after paying, that the obvious choice was to move our party over to the nearby fro yo place.

We had such a great time catching up with each other and talking about running and dorm food...and how we ran so much that we could eat so much dorm food.  And then we started reminiscing about the good ole days at UD.

I wasn't driving back to Chicago until Monday, so in the morning I went to breakfast at Einsten brothers with my 2 Billiken cousins, Katie and Kevin.  We had a great time catching up and talking about the upcoming holidays and of course, the event of the summer that we CANNOT wait for - the first Smith cousin wedding.

How was your weekend?

Do you like to take pictures documenting everything you do?

The Courage to Start

I have been given the task of creating a training schedule for my friend (my brother's girlfriend) Erin's first half marathon!!  I'm really excited for this, for multiple reasons.

First of all, I am thrilled that she has decided to take on this commitment! I encourage everyone to start running :) Erin texted me maybe a month or 2 ago and said she was going to do a half marathon in St. Louis. This week I was looking up the dates for future Rock 'N Roll races and saw that the St. Louis event is on October 27th. I texted her to see if this is the one she was planning on running and she said that she wasn't so sure any more. I managed to convince her that she could and that I would come to St. Louis that weekend to run with her!

Another reason I am excited for this is that I kind of get to act as her "coach" and make her a training plan! I love running and am glad I have this opportunity to help her get into it more also. And it's an item to cross off her bucket list! So, I started working on her plan, and find that it's much different making up a plan for a new distance runner (she runs/works out regularly, but she has never ran more than 2 miles at a time) than when I try to come up with plans or workouts for myself. She gave me an indication of what pace she can run, but it's hard to judge what others are capable of as opposed to what I know I am capable of or what might be just a bit to much. It will be a fun challenge. Maybe what will be more fun is making her a training plan for her SECOND half marathon after she gets through this one and wants to go faster!!

Woo go Erin!! - "The miracle isn't that I finished. It is that I had the courage to start."

I'm not quite sure if I'll register for the race or not. I don't like paying for a race that I won't technically be "racing." All these races get expensive! But I'd get a t-shirt I guess, that's always a nice perk.  And a medal.  Even though I was looking up some future races, I decided not to commit to anything until after the Chicago Marathon. But I think this would be a good chance to visit St. Louis (and all my friends and cousins there) and help Erin run her first half marathon! I have lately been thinking that my running has always been mostly competitive, whether with myself or with others, and I have not been having as much "fun" with it as I should (although starting this blog has added fun to my running!) The Chicago Marathon will be a "compete against my own self/PR" race still, but also should be loads of fun to run with Angela wearing our amazing matching outfits...which I will maybe reveal later this week...so get pumped for that! Anyways, I think deciding to run this race with Erin and help her get through it will be a great experience!

On a somewhat related note to training plans, I made a training plan for myself for the Chicago Marathon way back in June, but haven't been doing the greatest job at sticking to it...that's the hard part, isn't it?  But now, as of tomorrow, there will be 7 weeks left until the marathon.  That gives me 4-5 solid weeks of training before I have to taper.  So I'm going to make them the best 4-5 weeks yet.  And to help do so, I'm going to go back to posting the plan week by week here.  I kind of fell out of that habit when I was just running however I felt instead of following my plan.

I did some damage at Dick's this morning. They really rope you in with their coupons. I think these are the shorts I'll wear in the marathon. They'll go nicely with the matching singlets I alluded to above. Also, 13 new pairs of socks!! At Christmas, I got like a million new pairs of socks and threw away all my old socks because let's face it, they almost all had a hole or were just old. And somehow in the last 8 months, all of THOSE pairs managed to get holes. So, time for another sock purge.

On the schedule for tomorrow is 18 miles! That will be my longest training run yet, but I've had a few runs of 15-16 that have gone well, so I think it should be manageable. And I will have Mac to run with instead of my last couple long runs that have been done alone.

What is easier for you - making a training plan or sticking to it?

How often do you have to buy new socks?