Archive for the ‘running’ Category

Posted on March 1, 2010 - by Ashley Jackson

In Like a Lion

I can’t believe that today was a beautiful day, in the mid-50s, and tomorrow it’s going to snow again! North Carolina has some of the craziest weather…

Last night I pedaled away on my recumbent bike for a half an hour while eating a homemade peanut butter cup and reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was a bad child and never read the Chronicles of Narnia, although I’ve enjoyed the first two movies. I got about a third of the way through it before I went to bed at 10PM. Then, for some reason, I woke up at around 4:15AM, with my alarm not set to go off for another hour. After about fifteen minutes I realized I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I jumped out of bed and set about doing stuff…including unloading my dishwasher and putting away my clothes drying rack. It was so so so so nice to  come home to a clean apartment on a Monday afternoon…

…so anyway, I decided to go to work early, ’cause I was up. I got there at 6AM and ate my breakfast while reading e-mail and doing the sorts of things one can do while eating a Pure bar, a Chobani peach Greek yogurt, and three-quarters of a cup of Leapin’ Lemurs cereal.

Why so much for breakfast, you ask? I didn’t go to Whole Foods for my beloved Liberte yogurt over the weekend, so I grabbed some Chobani to eat for breakfast. But Chobani has about 100 calories less than Liberte. So I ate some delicious gluten-free peanut butter and chocolate cereal to add some more calories.

Speaking of peanut butter and chocolate…I started getting hungry around 10AM, since I’d eaten breakfast early. Look what was hiding in my bag…

Protein! In the form of a chocolate peanut butter cup! Yum.

I went for a lunchtime walk on a crazy convoluted path through campus because of some construction that’s being done on the trail. Afterward, I had some sausage, lentil, and spinach soup.

It doesn’t take the light too well, does it? Still good, though. I will add this to my potato-free soup file.

A little while before I left work, I started feeling hungry, so I got two little mini Snickers out of a coworker’s candy bowl. I checked the ingredients list to make sure they didn’t have wheat in them, and then double-checked online–hey, they’re gluten-free! So are M&Ms…mmm…

It somehow came about that I haven’t had wheat since last Tuesday, when I ate those four Girl Scout Cookies, and while I’m not necessarily trying  to embark on my I-Will-Eat-No-Wheat-For-Two-Weeks experiment…well, if it’s already been almost a week, why ruin it with some candy? I’ve noticed that my eczema doesn’t look as bad as it did, but I have no objective way of measuring that unless it clears up completely.

Also, one day I’m going to eat the rest of the Girl Scout Cookies.

After I got home from work I changed into my running clothes, threw my chef’s jacket on over top, set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes, and set about putting away the dishes I’d washed last night and washing the ones that were in my sink. Then I ran away! For 32 minutes! That was One Hour Runner Week 5, Day 2, if you’re counting.

My legs were tiiiiired after that. Still are. But I found the strength to make tacos…

…and I will confess here and now that I usually put a picture of three tacos up, but I generally eat five at a time (half the box). However, tonight I ate only the three you see here, and they were scrumptious. I was in taco heaven. Perfect tacos!

I also had a side of grapes.

And now, because I don’t have to clean my kitchen or my living room or my bathroom, I am going to take this glass of Crystal Light and this peanut butter cup and go sit on my exercise bike in the living room, with my lilies in bloom, and ride my bike while reading my book. Because I can.

Posted on February 28, 2010 - by Ashley Jackson

Going MIA

I’m here, I’m here…and sitting in a mostly clean apartment! I’ve spent a good majority of this weekend working on cleaning and decluttering, and I’m happy to say that not only are my living room and dining room still clean, but now my kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are as well. Whoo-hoo! Well worth staying mostly away from the Internet all week. Now to keep it up…constant cleaning takes up so much of my time that I’m curious about what I’ll have time for when I only have to clean for a few minute a day! I’ve already added some new blogs to my GoogleReader and picked out a couple of books to read…

Friday was only a partial day at work. I got there (not early like I’d planned, but on time!) and broke out my breakfast while reading e-mail. I mentioned earlier this week that since I started counting calories on workdays, I’ve been getting really, really hungry, but that I thought it was more related to how I was loading those calories, not to how many I was getting. So instead of eating a Liberte yogurt for breakfast and then having a snack later in the morning, I went ahead and had my yogurt along with a Pure cherry cashew bar.

And what do you know…it worked! I didn’t start getting hungry until around 11AM, when I was heading out to meet Jamie for a lunchtime walk.

My lunch was a giant salad topped with cheddar cheese and another piece of albacore topped with sour cream and seasoning. Oh, and cranberry-walnut-gorgonzola dressing.

I’m sure I must’ve grabbed something between lunch and taking Heath to the vet, or gotten something shortly thereafter, but I didn’t take a picture and I don’t have my food log with me (it’s such a long walk to the living room)…oh well.

Heath’s trip to the vet ended in him being muzzled while a tech held him down for his shots and so that the vet could look in his ear. I don’t know what’s with him, but the last couple of times  he’s gone to the vet he’s been very tense. I think he remembers the time I took him there to get his nails clipped, when he spazzed out big time. It’s so weird, because he’s so friendly to strangers normally. He wasn’t being aggressive, just cowardly.  The vet squatted down in the floor for five minutes and tried all manner of tricks to coax him over to her, and the most she could do was look in his eyes and pat his coat. And even that took some cajoling. He did lick her a couple of times, but she was trying to tell him that she was just going to look in his ears and it wasn’t going to hurt, and he was sitting sideways refusing to look at her, and I said, “Um, I think he doesn’t believe you.” And he didn’t.

Oh well. He’s on medicated eardrops twice a day for the next two weeks for his now-chronic ear-gunk situation. I had to buy more treats at the store to appease him…

Heath and I took a nap shortly after arriving home on Friday and didn’t get up ’til late…just in time to see Team USA win a medal in the short track relay. I reheated some of my soup from earlier this week, then watched My Sister’s Keeper, then went back to bed…

…then got back up, got on my exercise bike for 30 minutes, did some cleaning, wrote out a grocery list, ate more soup, and went to the store. Then I came back from the store and took Heath on a 30 minute jog, then rested for about 5 minutes after I got back and went immediately into the 30 Day Shred, since I hadn’t done it Friday night. Whew!

My reward for all this? Nachos…

MMMMMM.

Did some more cleaning afterward, and admired this week’s flowers–Asiatic lilies!

All the bouquets at Harris Teeter were $4 this week, so I decided to go for the lilies. Almost got the sunflowers, but there were only three  to a bunch and I figured hey, why not get the most bang for my buck…

I went to sleep early again, then woke up midmorning and tried to watch Twilight. Unfortunately, the DVD was so scratched that it wouldn’t play (something that rarely happens with my Netflix choices, but does happen on occasion), so I decided to check out what was available on Netflix’s instant services. And that’s how I wound up staying up until 5:30AM watching Supersize Me.

I went back to bed after that, slept in, then decided to make the tasty-sounding soup my mom linked me to yesterday. She was very clear that if I enjoyed this soup, I had to give her credit on the blog for pointing it out to me, so…here you go, mom.

Sorry for the poor picture–it doesn’t do the soup justice, but it’s hard to get a good picture when there’s steam rolling off your food. This is sausage, spinach, and lentil soup–crazy easy to make and crazy tasty, too. Just cook up a pound of Italian pork sausage, then add six cups of water, 16 oz of salsa, a whole chopped up onion, a bag of spinach, and a cup and a quarter of dried lentils, cook for about 30 minutes until the lentils are done, and you have awesome soup. So awesome that my first act upon finishing my bowl was to scoop some into a jar to take with me for lunch tomorrow.

After that, I set about cleaning some more. I remembered something I heard on Hoarders about there not being a point in keeping sentimental things if they’re buried where you can’t even find them, so I decided to stick every picture I found on the wall in my hallway. It needed some color, anyway.

Most of them are of dogs, mostly of Heath…I need to order some more prints off Snapfish so I have more recent photos!

I also found this picture of me at my highest weight from the summer of 2004. We went on a cruise and I was being menaced by a pirate at the dinner table!

I’m not sure how much I weighed in this picture, but it was around 170 or 175. Around this time I was wearing size 16 jeans and was determined not to go any higher than that…and I didn’t, but I didn’t go any lower for another year or two, either. Since I had an empty nail in the wall in my kitchen, I decided to hang this up there as a reminder of how far I’ve come!

This is me today, getting ready to take Heath for an afternoon walk.

151 lbs and trending downward…whoo-hoo!

Before we went for our walk, I decided to make some chocolate peanut butter cups! I made full-sized ones this time. They’re crazy simple to make…

…even simpler if you forget to put the brown sugar in like I did. Didn’t affect the taste much at all, though–I’ll probably leave it out in the future.

After we got back from our walk I had to taste test one.

I tried to spread out the chocolate on the tops before I put them in the fridge, but to no avail. I was worried they’d be too peanut buttery because it looked like there was very little chocolate…

…and then I discovered that the chocolate had just sunk down into the middle. Awesome.

A while later it was dinner time, so I served myself up a plate of various goodies on my nice clean bar!

Steamed salmon and asparagus, a plum, some co-jack cheese, and carrots and tomatoes with Greek yogurt dip.

Pretty and nommy. And I ate it on my nice clean dining room table, while the US/Canada hockey game played.

Now Heath and I are both winding down for the evening…

Unfortunately, my downstairs neighbor (who is hardly ever home when I’m home) has been here all day, and I won’t do my exercise DVD when I know that someone is in the apartment below me. So I’m skipping that for this evening and will try to fit it in tomorrow along with my run. For now, I’m going to go finish putting together my breakfast, lunch, and snacks for tomorrow, and then I think that I will do something relaxing, like read a book while enjoying the present cleanliness of my apartment…

Posted on February 23, 2010 - by Ashley Jackson

Long Day

I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night/Monday morning, but I couldn’t ignore the line of my fitness chore chart that was still blank, so I had to get up when my alarm went off at 5:40AM Monday. Actually, I got up at 5:30AM, and since I wasn’t due at work until 6:45AM, I got to experience what it’s like to actually have time to get ready in the morning! I didn’t have to rush to get dressed, I put eyeliner/eyeshadow on (that’s the first thing to go when I’m in a hurry), and I did weird things like take off my nail polish and hang up some coats. I might have to make this a habit…in fact, I got up at 5:40AM this morning, too!

It was nice (both mornings) to be able to just grab my bag and my nalgene bottle out of the fridge and go to work. No flying around trying to find things to pack. I had a Liberte yogurt for breakfast yesterday morning. When snack time rolled around at 9AM, I dug into a big bowl of carrots and tomatoes, accompanied by a double serving of hummus.

I’ve tried the hummus that you can get at Harris Teeter and didn’t like it at all, but this platter I got at Trader Joe’s is really good–all four kinds!

During my lunch break, I took a walk. It was raining. I came back in looking like a drowned rat, but assured myself while I was drying my hair with paper towels in the bathroom that I was totally hardcore.

I warmed up with the rest of my curry for lunch.

Looks disgusting, tastes great…can’t wait for my latest Penzey’s order to get here; I ordered some new curry seasoning, among other things…

Afternoon snack was some cheese and half of an apple.

Since I got to work at 6:45AM, I got to leave at 4:15PM. Yay! By the time I got home it was very foggy, but in the mid-50s and cloudy. Perfect time for a run! I planned to go out for a 30 minute run, since the first three weeks of One Hour Runner are all 30 minute runs. But even though my run was slow, I felt pretty good about it, so I decided to tack an extra 5 minute onto the end. I ran for 35 minutes, which means I can start Week 5 of One Hour Runner tomorrow (30/32/38 minute runs). I expected to be sore today, because my 5K times have both been slightly above 40 minutes and I was sore for days after, but no such bad luck…

After my run I decided to make a huge salad in a small mixing bowl.

Lettuce, sunflower seeds, cheese, tomatoes, bacon, mushrooms, and raspberry gorgonzola walnut dressing. It was extremely tasty and I wolfed it down, but I guess I didn’t have enough protein in my salad (though it had plenty of calories). I took a nap after dinner and woke up hungry at 9:30PM. I had a few chocolate-covered almonds, packed my lunch bag, and fell back to sleep around midnight, but I was still kind of hungry…

This morning, I got up at 5:40AM (yay!), and got to work at 7AM. I had another Liberte yogurt for breakfast–they’re one of the few things I can eat so early in the morning, and they’ve got 230+ calories each.

For a mid-morning snack, I had some grapes.

…they didn’t taste so great after being squished in a container and refrigerated. Remember, kids, don’t store your grapes in the fridge (unless you have to because you washed them the night before and you need to put them in your bag so you don’t forget them).

My hunger from last night started coming back around 10AM so I broke out some of the lunch goods in my bag. It was around this time that I noticed everything I’d brought, with the exception of the yogurt, was finger food. The better to eat while working…!

I had some salami and cheese…

And some Nut Thins. I made little sammiches! Nut Thins don’t taste a thing like crackers and they look like Tostitos Rounds, but they taste pretty good for what they are.

I went for a walk (with Jamie!) during lunch. It was a nicer walk than yesterday’s. Tomorrow, of course, it may snow…

Sometime after the walk I broke into my carrots and hummus for the day…

The green hummus is cilantro parsley, and it’s very good!

Late in the afternoon I was still hungry, but it felt more like a craving than actual hunger. I decided that today should not be a wheat-free day and busted out the Girl Scout Cookies in my drawer. Lemonades! Yum. I ate four. They were delicious, especially since I hadn’t been eating them non-stop for days.

I put in 10 hours of work today and got home around 6PM. My first order of business was to get some soup going on the stove. While it cooked, I did Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. I can already tell a difference–I almost made it through both of the anterior raise segments today. Yay!

After the Shred, it was soup time.

Ye old veggie beef soup. I had three bowls, as usual…if I was still hungry before I started eating, I’m not anymore…

The thing I hate about getting home at or after 6PM is that I only have a little bit of time to do anything before it’s time to go to bed so I can get back up and go to work again in the morning. But at least I actually went in at 7AM today instead of lazing around and rushing into work at 9AM. Yay…