My first What I Ate Wednesday!

At last we come to it: the real reason I started blogging.  I'm pretty obsessed with What I Ate Wednesdays.  I saw my first WIAW post at Cutting Out Carbs, which led me to Peas and Crayons, and I've been pretty hooked ever since.  So, here's what I ate today: 

Breakfast:  Coffee and oatmeal

 Pumpkin Spice coffee, to be exact. My oatmeal contained: pumpkin, vanilla protein powder, pumpkin pie spice, pecans, and honey.  Clearly the talking-to I gave myself yesterday did nothing.  I listened to Nightmare Revisited again today, too...Oh, also in case anyone's wondering I put half and half in my coffee (usually about a tablespoon and a half per cup of coffee).


My Terrible Lunch:  Grossness.  Also a pear.

My lunch today was supposed to be tuna mixed with black beans and frozen veggies.  When I put this combination together, I said, "This will be fine, probably."  But it wasn't fine.  Not even a little.  I think the problem was that I microwaved it.  I think tuna is just not meant to go in the microwave.  It probably would have been okay if it had been room temperature, but I hadn't wanted to eat it cold for some reason and hot it was just no bueno.  I couldn't bring myself to eat it, even after it had cooled down, so I just had my pear instead.  And also these grapes:

I forgot to take a picture until I was most of the way done with them, but they were the bomb.

Snack #1:  Crunchy Peanut Butter Cliff Builders Bar

I ate half about an hour before I ran and half after.  I am here to tell you that this is the most delicious protein bar I have ever ingested.  I did a mini-comparison, however, and it seems to have more fat and sugar than most of the other flavors of this type of bar, which I'm sure explains it's heightened yumminess. 

Snack #2:  Cheddar cheese Quaker rice snacks

I came home to find that my boyf had eaten most of the bag for breakfast (I know, right?).  I figured I'd better jump in while I still could (also I was feeling snackish after my diminished lunch).  I had 9, which is half a serving.

Dinner:  Grilled chicken salad

I need to start off by saying that I LOVE my George Foreman grill.  It came with the apartment, and it's been awhile since I've been so pleased with an appliance.  All I have to do is stick whatever meat on there, close the lid, and leave it alone until it smells done.  It's always cooked perfectly (so far, at least) and I barely have to do anything.  Also in my salad: lettuce, cucumbers, black beans, leftover frozen veggies (peas and carrots and corn and such), and dressing made out of ranch dressing mixed with pineapple peach salsa from Target.

Snack #3:  Caramel Quaker rice snacks

 Good times.  Had about 13 of these guys.


And that's it!  I wish I could tell you that a whole lot of water drinking happened behind the scenes throughout the day, but it didn't.  I had a little, but probably not more than like a cup and a half at the most, even with my 4-miler.  I know this is bad.  I'm working on it.  Not tonight, though, because I left my water bottle on my desk at work.  I'll drink it tomorrow. As always, the goal for tomorrow will be to drink at least 6 cups of water.  This usually doesn't happen, but I'll make an effort!

It's Still August....

...but I really want it to be October.  I've been weirdly fixated on Halloween for the last week or so.  I had Pumpkin Spice coffee this morning, and I listened to Nightmare: Revisited on my iPod at work.  At the library last weekend I was very excited to find a book on spooky treats in the "Cookery" section.  I have to force myself to wait until at least September 22 to change the background of my computer at work to a fall scene.

Like this one!  Source

I'm honestly not entirely sure what my deal is.  The best I can come up with is that I'm prematurely overcompensating for the anticipated lack of fall weather here in Hawaii, sort of like a reverse SAD, if you will.  Autumn is my favorite season, and Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I guess I'm just not sure what they're going to look like over here.

Not that I should even be thinking about this yet.  As of yesterday, Kevin and I have only been here for a month.  I feel like it's pretty early for me to start pining for a change of season; as previously stated, it's still August.  It is NOT time for Halloween yet (although, I feel like I remember that some stores started putting out their Halloween candy at about this time last year, which is only ridiculous).

To look forward to: a friend of mine is tentatively planning a Halloween get-together which will probably involve watching Hocus Pocus (a.k.a. the BEST Halloween movie).  If this happens, I am 100% getting that book from the library and making some spooky treats.

I Googled 'disgusting Halloween food' and this is what I got.  Thanks, internet. Source. 

Adventures in Marathon Training

I ran my first marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2008.  My friend Chandula and I did a lot of our training runs together, which was helpful in terms of motivation (i.e., I was more likely to get up at 6am to run before class if I knew she was outside waiting for me).  Overall it was a pretty great experience; I moved way out of my comfort zone and accomplished something that I had never before even imagined I could do, and so far people have yet to stop being impressed with me (except for people who have also run marathons, but luckily for me and my ego there aren't too many of those in my life!).  But I hadn't originally intended on making running a long-term thing.  The marathon had been a fun challenge to work through, but in the following days when I was taking ice baths and hobbling to my classes because I could barely move, I told myself that I was done with running.

This turned out to be not particularly true, however, at least not for a while.  A couple of weeks after the marathon, my soreness had faded but my motivation hadn't.  Before graduating that spring I completed a half-marathon and a 10-miler.  When I moved to Boston for grad school I did lapse a bit but still managed to do a fun 5K, a 4-miler through Central Park at midnight on New Year's Eve, and an insanely fun obstacle race called The Warrior Dash. 

Never before had the world seen such bad-assery. 

After graduation, however, I pretty much stopped running.  I think maybe it was because I took time off from working out to focus on writing my thesis, and I just fell out of the habit.  I did eventually pick up other forms of exercise, but for the next year and a half I ran only very sporadically.  But right about the time I found out I would be moving to Hawaii, I saw a flyer for the Honolulu Marathon.  I decided right then and there that I was going to run it.  I remember the months right after the Marine Corps Marathon, when banging out a 5-miler seemed like nothing.  I'm definitely not there anymore, but I want to get back.

So last Monday I started training.  I'm following a 16-week training program that's outlined in The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.  This is the guide I used to train for my first marathon, and I really found it helpful.  It's really good for people who are completely new to running because the authors start right from the beginning, and they discuss both the physical and mental/emotional aspects of training for and running a marathon.

I thought that training this time around would essentially be a repeat of last time, but some new issues have come up that I need to work through.  Firstly, I somehow didn't consider that running in the morning might be difficult when I have to be up at 6:30 in order to leave my house at 7:30, unlike when I was in school and didn't have to be anywhere before 9:30.  Also, where I am it doesn't really get light until about 5:45 anyway (I don't like to run in the dark), so getting up earlier wouldn't do much for me.  Secondly, I live in a small residential area that's almost completely surrounded by highways and narrow, shoulder-less roads that are somehow supposed to be 2-way.  Not really pedestrian-friendly.  By doing things like running up and down several dead-end streets I've managed to fit a 3-miler, but that's about all I can do.  

The solution to both of these problems may be running at work.  I work on an air force base so there is plenty of room to run, and it may be easier for me to try to run after work rather than before.  This will take some adjusting because I greatly prefer to exercise in the morning before I get my day started, but doing this will probably making planning my training runs much easier.  I've also thought about getting up early and going straight to work to run there in the mornings, but that would require me to use the weird shower in the office, and I don't know how I feel about that yet.  We'll see.

In any case, the marathon is going down this upcoming December 9th, which also happens to be my 25th birthday!  And yes, I have questioned whether running for upwards of 5 hours is really how I want to spend my birthday.  But I think it is :).

Start

Hi!  Welcome to my blog :).  Over the past year or so I've become very interested in reading other people's blogs, and I finally thought maybe it was time to start one of my own.  I'm not entirely sure how it will go; I've always had trouble with things like journaling in the past, mostly because I never really felt like I had anything worthwhile to say.  On my bookshelves at home I have all of these beautiful journals that are completely empty because I thought they should contain something more profound than my normal, day-to-day thoughts.  I guess maybe I feel like blogging is less pressure?  Or something?  I don't know, whatever.  We'll see how it goes.

So, anyway, here's the deal with me: a little under a month ago I moved from Boston to Hawaii for a year-long forensic anthropology graduate fellowship.  Luckily for me, my boyfriend Kevin was in a position to make the move with me, so he's out here too (btw, if any of you are interested in gaming you can check out his blog, You are Likely to be Eaten by a Grue)!  We're settling into life out here, adjusting to the climate and  the 6-hour time difference between us and our families.  I've just started training for my second marathon, and I'm working on trying to make my eating habits cleaner and healthier (mainly, I've got a GIANT sweet tooth that I'm trying to tame).

So far, my intentions are to use this blog as a way to relate my marathon training and diet-healthifying (that's totally a word) progress, as well as to chronicle the trials and tribulations of trying to cook in my beyond tiny apartment kitchen.  There will possibly be some book and restaurant reviews thrown in every now and again as well, and probably also some random posts that have nothing to do with anything.  I'm a wild card, I can make you no promises :p.  But, I'll try to keep things fun, and hopefully the content will be interesting to someone besides just me!  Fingers crossed!