Stitchfix

Well I found something fun and exciting!  Stitchfix!

It’s an awesome site where you fill out a style profile, schedule a delivery, and the team at Stitchfix puts together a box of items based on your answers and size!  The clothes and accessories get sent to your house where you can try it on with all of your existing items.  After you figure out what you want to keep you put the other items into a priority mail bag they send you that is already addressed!  The best part of the mail bag?  You can leave it at your mailbox!  No need to go to the post office.  I don’t know about you, but that’s one chore I always dread!

I received my first box a few days ago and it was like an early Christmas.  I forgot to take a picture of all the items before sending them back, but it included two cardigans, a scarf, a dress, and a shirt.  I kept one of the cardigans that I’m really excited about.  It’s a long open cardigan in a stripe I wouldn’t normally get.  Hard to tell from the picture, but the stripes are thin black and electric blue.  I wore it for the first time when I chopped my hair off!

(the white on my hand is baby powder!)

(I need to take a side view so you can see its length)

(my new hair! I told my hairdresser “I was laid off, it’s a new year, I want new hair” and he did this!)

(most recent picture I have of my hair length… I was at a child’s birthday party).

Want to join in the fun?  Here is your exclusive invitation!  Let me know how it goes!  Don’t forget to enter the Secret Santa giveaway!

Whomp whomp…

It’s typical Jacquelyn over here.  Once I get started and excited about a new physical adventure, I hurt myself.  And true to me, I have no idea how I did it.

In college I woke up with my neck stuck to the left.  It took an emergency physical therapist appointment 4 hours to just get it looking straight and another  week to even be able to move it.

Another time I was out walking with friends and my knew gave out when I went to step up a stair.  I just completely collapsed.

I’ve never been able to pinpoint any specific moment before feeling the injury that I could say, “yup, that’s what did it.”

This time it’s my back.  My lower back had been bothering me for a few days, but I just attributed it to not stretching enough after running.  My legs were super tight and that really pulls on your low back muscles causing tightness and pain.  So when the pain got pretty bad I got down on the floor to do some stretches and went about the rest of my night.  As I was packing for a work trip my back completely gave out when I was squatting in front of my dresser.  I couldn’t get up for a while and finally made my way out to the living room to lay on ice.  An hour later it’s worse and my roommate is helping me go to bed for the night by carrying everything in so all I had to worry about was my own body weight.  The next day I called a chiropractor in town and he did some magical cracking and I felt pretty good.  All last week I took it easy.  I had to cancel a work trip and not go on campus because I couldn’t carry anything.  By the end of the week I had my second chiro appointment and felt a lot better so I decided to travel this week.

I think 90 minutes in the car did me in.  I made sure to get out every 30 minutes and walk around.  I also brought an ice pack and am being very conscious of my posture, especially when sitting.  But today while enjoying lunch I felt the familiar cricks in my back and realized I needed to get back to the hotel asap to ice my back.

This sucks.

My new best friend are my many ice packs and ibuprofen.

I thought I’d feel better by the end of this week, but who knows anymore?  If I don’t feel better next week I’ll have to rethink the 10k in October.  I don’t want to cancel because I am super duper excited to run a 10k in my town.

Any suggestions?  The chiropractor thinks I might have a herniated disk but I haven’t gotten an MRI so we can’t say for sure.  All I know is this is daaaaaaarrrnnnn painful.

What do you do when an injury holds your race training back?  

Back in the Saddle

This week I made my official return to training full speed ahead for the Runner’s World 10k in October.  Wednesday I set out around 7pm to do run 3.1 of the Couch to 10k app and when I was done I realized that it is now September.  I can no longer say that the 10k is months away.  It is only a month away.  And that scared me a bit.  It also, combined with my success in completing 3.1 somewhat painlessly, motivated me to get moving and I decided to jump ahead to run 5.1 for Friday.

On Thursday night, during a bought of insomnia, I fished out a calendar my Grandma got me as a housewarming gift last year.  I used to have it hanging in my kitchen in my old apartment to hide an ugly spot and every time I looked at it it reminded me of this wonderful lady.

And now it is my workout calendar.  I have it hanging right next to my bedroom door so that every time I walk in and out of my room, I see it there and it reminds me to get my ass in gear.  I wrote in pencil my training plan and hung a bright marker with the calendar that I’ll use to excitedly confirm the workout I did that day.  So far, for the two days it has been there, it’s been working and it still reminds me of my Grandma.  🙂

The success on my Wednesday run was a huge eye opener for me.  I realized that in order to be successful in this training runs I have to set myself up for success.  I can’t run in the middle of the day with full sun, or when it is 90 degrees outside, or without eating and drinking enough.  I basically have to plan for the run all day and I’m not used to putting so much devotion into something.  Completing these runs makes me feel like such a rock star because it shows me that I have done everything right.

So for Friday I wanted to make sure I was just as successful so I returned to the dreaded gym.  I like going to the gym to lift weights and take classes, but I hate doing cardio at the gym.  I have turned into a lover of outdoor running.  The sights, sounds, smells, the motivation in realizing how far you’ve run… you can’t get that at the gym.  Well… you can get some sights, sounds, and smells but they are not nearly as pleasant if you know what I mean.  The 5.1 consisted of a 5-minute warmup, then run 3 minutes and walk 2 minutes thirteen times for a total of 73 minutes.  I didn’t think I’d have that much trouble with it.  The Couch to 5k program had me running intervals of 3 and 2 so I thought it would be a breeze.  But the difference is the 5k program only had me running for 30 minutes at a time and this was 73 minutes.  Intense.  That’s all I can say.

Running on the treadmill was just as boring as I remembered.  Enough to make me want to quit several times.  I was bored, dripping sweat, bright red, my hips were starting to hurt, I felt like I was getting shin splints, people were staring at my funny, and I forgot my Nook to read during the walks. It was like a broken record of negative thoughts spinning insistently in my head.   I refused to listen.  At one point I even said “one foot, one foot, one foot” with each step I took to drown out the sound of my voice in my head.  Guess it worked because I dominated that run.  I might have looked a mess in the end, and I might still be in pain, but I won!

How do you plan for success in a run?