Running Towards a Goal

Today I started with a bowl of blueberry oatmeal.

I used left over steel cut oats with blueberries, some Cinnamon Vanilla Sunflower butter, almond milk, and a little Agave.  I love having some left over oatmeal in the fridge, it makes weekday morning breakfasts easy.

So I'm little dazed about signing up for another half-marathon last night!  I had originally planned to take it slow getting back into running after my knee injury and was planning to see how things went before I committed to anything.  But the truth is, I'm totally itching to get back into training mode, and have been for months now.  Running has become a big part of my life.  I am longing for that long distance high again that I had with my first half marathon.  I'm going to the half marathon I signed up for with Kelly, which is the big reason I signed up last night.  She brought up this race a while back, and I've been tossing the idea around for a while.  Last night she mentioned the race again, and this time, without over thinking it, I just decided to go for it.  Before I knew it, I was all registered.  Yikes!! 

I have 11 weeks til the race, which is a lot more than I had when I trained for my first half marathon (about 6 weeks).  Although, with that one, I was regularly running 5-6 miles when I started training, so I didn't have quite as far to go.

I plotted out a training plan on Runner's World Smart Coach today.  I'm excited to get started!

I thought all day about going for a long run tonight.  The weather is hotter again this week, but my plan was to wait til about 7pm and go then in hopes that it would be a little cooler.

Once home, I decided to make a batch of roasted red pepper hummus while I was killing time.  I used the same basic recipe as the link, except, I couldn't open a giant jar of artichoke hearts I have from Costco. After about 5 minutes I gave up and made the hummus minus artichoke hearts :(

I had a couple bites with some plain pita chips.  Still yummy, but it's better with the artichoke hearts, in my opinion!

 I walked the pup, came back to drop him off, and headed out for my run.  I've been saying for a while, that I never know my exact mileage, because I'm without a Garmin Forerunner.  I've also had two Amazon credits to use towards one (I dumped a huge container of change into a Coinstar and got credits :), but have been waiting til I knew I was good to go with my knee before taking the plunge and making the purchase.  I think I ran between 4 and 5 miles, but don't know for sure.  It felt good :)

When I got home from my run, I grabbed my credits, immediately went on Amazon.com, and ordered a Garmin Forerunner 305.

I feel like I can't really train for another half marathon without this.  Last time I was lucky to have Jen and numerous friends with Garmins run with me a lot and keep track of mileage for me.  Most of my friends are running their own big races this fall and I think I'm going to be on my own a lot more for this race.  I need to know how far I'm going, and if I want to work on speed at some point I will need this.

I'm pretty excited, this is some big stuff happening right here!

After ordering my Garmin, I whipped up a quick dinner.  I'm the queen of turning one leftover thing into something else.  I used the last of my mexican soup as a topping to make a mexican pizza with on a tortilla.  I added spinach and cheese and baked it in my toaster oven. 

Admittedly, this was a little bit of a FAIL.  I didn't spray my foil with non-stick spray, so my tortilla stuck to it, and I basically had to dump the thing upside down to get it off the foil.  I did a pretty good job salvaging it and topped it off with some cilantro.  It tasted good, and that's all that counts, right?

Off to dream sweet dreams of a smooth half-marathon...