Runs for Cookies

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 06:00 PM PDT

Ahh, July. Only two more months of listening to my kids fight non-stop with each other before school starts back up.

Thanks so much for all the great book suggestions! I am a super slow reader, so those suggestions will probably last me a lifetime. For those of you that asked, I am on Goodreads. It may look like I don't use it very often, but the truth is, I just don't finish very many books. I start new books all the time, but if it doesn't hold my interest enough for me to want to continue reading it rather than watch TV or read blogs, or other distractions, then I just don't finish. The perfect example of a book that held my attention is The Hunger Games. I absolutely LOVED that series!

Why does it look like his half is bigger?! I was SURE I took the bigger half...

Going out on the boat for the fireworks on Saturday turned out to be pretty fun, but I ate way too much junk. I let myself get too hungry before we left, and when we stopped to get snacks, I made some poor choices--chips and cookies.

Jerry and I split a huge cookie, and once I took a bite, it wasn't very good. I shouldn't have finished it, but that is such a bad habit of mine! I wasted those calories on a cookie that didn't even taste good.

That night set me back this week as far as my weight goes. As of yesterday morning, my weight was the same as it was on Wednesday, despite the fact that I ate pretty well from Wed-Fri. I'm back at it today, so hopefully I'll at least see a little drop when I "officially" weigh in on Wednesday.

My mom bought "cheese" in a can for the kids. I've never understood the appeal of that stuff! It looked so disgusting, but my kids think it's awesome. They thought they were cool to spray the cheese right into their mouths. Yuck!

The fireworks display that the park put on was actually pretty impressive. Jerry and I sat together on the floor of the boat to watch, and it was nice to just be together. Thankfully, the kids had a good time so they weren't complaining non-stop, like I expected. The sunset was gorgeous, too:

We got home a little after 11 p.m., and Jerry had to work on Sunday, so we went right to bed.

Today was technically the first day of my running "break". Remember how I said I was going to take a whole week off? Well, I only lasted until 2:00 pm today, lol. I started to feel a binge coming on, and I knew that if I ran, I would stay on track. So I promised myself that if I felt my knee hurt in the slightest, I would stop.

I had to do the dreadmill again, since Jerry was at work and the kids were here with me. I turned on Season 10 of The Biggest Loser (Ada's season) on Netflix--the marathon episode. It was different to watch it this time, now that I kind of "know" Ada (even if it's just by phone and Internet). It was such a motivating episode to watch while I was running! Seeing her run her fastest mile on the treadmill and then run a 4:38 marathon was super inspiring. Watching that made the time on the treadmill fly by for me today.

Today's run was scheduled to be 50 minutes easy with 8 pick-ups. So I set my Garmin for 5 mins 30 seconds of running easy, and then a 30 second sprint... repeated 8 times, and then a 2 minute cool down. I did my sprints slower than last time. I did the first one at 10 mph and it just felt too fast--my muscle cramped up a little, so I took it down to 9 mph and 8 mph for a couple of them. It looked like this when I was done:

After running, I felt a million times better, and my knee didn't bother me at all. Lately, it only seems to hurt when I run outside. So I successfully avoided a binge, which is a big accomplishment!