Morning Traffic Alert

Today is my day off. I usually get a day off during the week if I get the pleasure of working on Saturday morning. What a trade! I can do all those weekend things during the week without the weekend rush.  It's nice.  Today I plan on doing a Costco run and a trip to REI to buy a cycling jersey. I haven't been on my bike all season. How stupid am I?! I decided to get some riding done this morning.

It's going to be a hot one today. I got up at 5am...on my day off. Who does that? I do because it's going to be near 100 this afternoon and I was really aching to get some mileage in.
Knowing lastnight that I was going to be getting up early, I prepped my bike for the morning. I didn't want to give myself any excuses to get out of the ride. The only thing I had to do this morning was fill my water bottles and hit the road. I did dottle around for about a half hour trying to get myself to wake up and get some breakfast into my body. Thank god I remembered I didn't have a trail pass, so I had to get out the checkbook and pay the DNR for use of their trails. Of course there was no one on the route to check to see if I actually had my pass. Oh well. Now I'll have it for next time.

The Badger State Trail passes just west of my neighborhood giving me very easy access. From the trail head to the south, the trail is all limestone, to the north from the trail head, it is paved. So I headed north towards Madison. The trail becomes the South West Commuter trail as it gets into Madison proper. I hit the Madison line right around 6:20. There weren't that many people on the trail at that point and crossing some of the major roads wasn't too time consuming. For those of you that know Madison, I hit trail traffic right after the trail passed Odana Rd. I was amazed how many people were commuting into downtown from outlying areas. I really wish I had the ability to do this and not show up to work completely sweaty. (I have a retail banking job and there is no shower in the building, so there is no way for me to be presentable and appropriate when I'm meeting with customers if I bike to work.) I actually hit a Thursday morning traffic jam on the SW Commuter Trail once I hit Camp Randall (this was my turn around point).

According to my Garmin, I rode 19.6 miles before my Garmin's battery died. That will teach me to charge it overnight before. Ooops! If you want to view my Garmin info, you can do so HERE.

Looking East from Seminole Hwy

Overall, I believe I did about 23 miles of riding. Thats a good first ride for me. I didn't have any flats, like last year's first ride. 

The other point to this ride was to see if it was something I could complete before going to work. There is a 12 mile out and back that I could do it under an hour. This is definitely doable to before work. I have no excuse not to. As long as I can get back home before 7, I should be able to pull it off easily.

Ps. So far no pain from my SI joint yet. That is always good news.

Trigger Foods

Wow, I find that it really takes me a lot to get motivated to write. Does any one else have that same problem? It feels like working out to me. I have a great streak of writing and I'm so very motivated and then I hit a wall of laziness and have to force myself back into the grove of things. I have found that, also like working out, that music helps motivate me to write. It's like a positive trigger.  Which is a great intro into my entry.

What are your trigger or trigger foods? According to Weight Watchers, a trigger food is a specific food that sets off a course of overeating where control is lost and excessive amounts are consumed. I don't think mine are all food triggers. I have mental triggers too. I'm slowly starting to figure out my triggers and how to work around them. I have three main triggers:

1. Breakfast
2. Stress
3. Sugar

I'm sure there are others but these are the ones that pop into my head the easiest at this moment. I'm just going to touch on each briefly and then talk about what I am doing to avoid these triggers.

Breakfast
Breakfast sounds like it would be such a positive time of the day to start off right. Well, if I find an excuse to not eat breakfast at home, I usually compensate with a breakfast on the way into work, usually McDonalds or something else. I have to eat breakfast. If I don't, I will be lethargic the rest of the morning and will only be able to think about how hungry I am. Last fall, I managed to go a number of months with eating breakfast at home.  Eating at home was actually my first goal in a series of goals that sent me all the way through the new year. I ate home for breakfast every day for three months. I am doing that again. I did my clean eating grocery trip after work last night. I was sure to pick up some Kashi and shredded wheat for breakfast.

Stress
We all deal with stress in different ways.  Some people smoke, some scream, some just go for a run, and some just eat. I'm in that latter group. If I am stressed, and I espcially will notice this at work, I will come up with an excuse to skip over the meal I brought from home and will go out for lunch. Usually it is Subway but other times it is fast food or Chinese take out. And I don't just eat a little to satisfy the craving, I eat a lot. I haven't quite figured out how to overcome this one yet. If there are any ideas, I am willing to listen.

Sugar
Sugar is probably my only true trigger food. I love sugar. If you give me a choice for candy, it's always the non-chocolate candies that I will reach for. Now don't get me wrong, I do like a little bit of milk chocolate here and there. But non-chocolate is what really gets my taste buds going. (My mom and sister probably think I'm from some other family) I love sugar! Jelly beans are an all time favorite along with those sugared gummy oranges. Delicious.  This is an easier thing for me to control if I just put the work into controlling it. Usually a piece of fruit will satisfy the craving. I have learned that I need to keep something quick and small around me to reach for instead of the candy.  I do love to reach for grapes or apples. Watermelon is my favorite fruit and food. I just wish I could have it all year round. Hubby and I are currently working on our third melon of the season.

So what are your triggers and how do you deal with them?

One Choice at a Time

Last week I registered for the Marathon Weight Loss Challenge  with Jess (and 1000 of her closes web friends) last week. There are goals of losing 26.2 lbs in 13 weeks or 13.1 lbs in the same amount of time. Do you get it? I was shooting for 26.2 lbs, and maybe I still am, but last week was a horrible week. It was a week of no planning and ALOT of eating out. It was a week full of excuses. It was a week of a one pound gain.

So what happened to that marathon challenge? Excuses and lack of control happened. I remember saying at the beginning of the week "Oh, I'll just stop at McDonalds for breakfast because we are out of milk and there's nothing to eat." There was oatmeal that I could have made for breakfast that day. *I did have oatmeal the rest of the week because I remembered it being there* There was atleast one meal every day last week that had some excuse attached to it. I let my excuses drive me and it drives me crazy.

I really need this weight loss to work out for me. I am taking control over it now.

While driving back home from a visit to my family in the Twin Cities this weekend, I was trying to come up with a plan to take control.  Sure, I have ultimate weight loss goals but I had to think about what happens each and every day.  It's all about the choices I make, down to the minute. I make the choice to get out of bed at a certain time so that I can make it to work, I decide whether or not to wear glasses that day, I decide if I want to dry my hair or just throw it into a pony tail.  I make the choices! I made a little choice today that had a big impact on the rest of my day. As my fingers were struggling to open the package of Nibs I had purchased, I got frustrated and put the candy down and went to the fridge where I pulled an out an apple and ripped off the little sticker.  It was easier to "open". The apple satisfied my sugar craving and the candy is still sitting on the counter at work. I openly hope that the cleaning crew decides to take it because I don't want to deal with it in the morning.

Almost two years ago, I wrote another blog entry about choices. You can check it out HERE. I would have thought I would have taken my own advice and I probably did for a little while. Jen, over at Priorfatgirl, uses a similar mantra of "One Bite, One Decision".  She actually wears a pink bracelet that reminds her each time she reaches for some food of the decision she is making.

Just like I give my staff at work a bank product or service to focus on that week, I am giving myself a focus this week. I'm focusing on my choices. Not the big choices. Just the little teeny ones. I'm hopeful those teeny choices will reap HUGE rewards!

Tough Decision

I really haven't been around much here for multiple reasons. After my big half marathon race at the beginning of the month of May, I stayed away from blogging for a little while. Maybe I just needed a break. The night after that race, I had some severe pain right above my pubic bone. I had experienced this same pain after each of my training runs that were longer than eight miles. I figured it was just an overuse injury and that I could get passed just like all my other random aches from when I started running. This was different. It just kept getting worse the longer the mileage got. When I was asked to rate this pain by the doctor, I put it up at about an 8. It was very very painful. She diagnosed it as a problem with my Sacroiliac Joint (SI) in my lower back.


She gave me a referral to PT and asked that I make an appointment and told me not to run until my appointment. I listened to her for the most part except I wasn't have any pain anymore. So the day before my PT appointment, I did run, only four miles but I did run and I did have pain. Well, there wasn't really pain while I was running but more of an overall weakness. When I met with the physical therapist, she measured and looked at my hips and my back. She literally pulled on my left leg. She moved and stretched me and pulled my leg again. I felt like bliss when I walked out of there. She agreed with my primary. My left hip sits a little higher than my right hip which causes the misalignment in my back which causes the pain over my pubic bone.  She wants to see me for 8 weekly appointments. She doesn't want me to do any exercising that hurts and recommends I don't do any long running for the first four to six weeks of our appointments. This made me really have to think about my marathon training.

From today, I am 16 weeks out from the race. This is plenty of time to train for a marathon. If I take out the six weeks maximum she said it would take to fix me with various exercises and strengthening, that puts me at 10 weeks but with minimal running over the next six weeks.

Over the past two weeks, my hubby and I have been road tripping all over the Rockies and west. I've had a lot of time to think about things and really more about this marathon in October. I figured out that I am not doing this marathon for myself. I find it very hard to write this because I feel like I am letting other people down. I really can't be afraid of my readers judging me. This is something I need to do for myself at this time. I've talked to everyone close to me about my dilemma and they are all supportive of my decision to not run the Twin Cities marathon this fall. I feel like I have strayed too far away from my original goals.

There was a reason I started running and that was to lose weight. I've been running and I haven't been losing weight. Sure, I've gotten more toned and I actually look thinner, but all that weight is still pounding on my bones each time my feet hit the pavement. I am changing my goals for the near future. I am still going to be running, just not focusing on the training for a marathon. I hope to push that off just a year and do the race next fall instead.

So what do I do now? I get my hips fixed, track my food, eat healthy and whole, run shorter distances faster. I plan on training for the Minneapolis Duathlon. I am looking at doing the Iron Girl Duathlon again. There are so many more women I know doing it this year. And I will definitely be at the Twin Cities marathon to cheer on my friends that will be completing it this year without me. I appreciate everyone's support over the past many months of training. I plan on doing another half marathon possibly in the late fall if it is OK with my doctor.

I'll be posting in the future about my weight loss, eating whole, various recipes, and still running.