Cto5K progress

For each of these three workouts, my goal was to run at least one 10-minute mile. Sadly, it did not happen. My fastest mile was 10:25.

To be fair to myself, I'm old and not really in running shape [yet] and the fastest mile I've ever run was like 9:38, seven or eight years ago.

I wasn't built for speed.

It occurred to me last night that if I can't run a sub-10-minute mile, I'm not going to complete a 5K in the half-hour time slot during the final week of the training program. Which is fine, I guess. I'm making good progress and am a whole lot faster than I was the first week!

Photo op fail

For someone who is, as my husband lovingly likes to say, glued to her smartphone, I found myself unglued late yesterday morning, leaving the blog much poorer in photos today.

I set out to take a long walk early, phone in hand, and decided – on a whim – to do Day 1, Week 1 of a Couch to 5K app I'd downloaded a while ago. (Because I'm whimsical like that. Also, thanks for the inspiration, Gingerzingi!) Due to operator error, I ended up doing 20-ish minutes instead of the full 30, so I started over when I got to the turnaround of my out-and-back loop.

I'm going to find a new app and start over AGAIN, though, because the one I picked (because it was highly rated and free) doesn't give me all the cool stats Gingerzingi's does. (Or at least I can't figure out how to find them. I tried.) I am so inspired by her progress and would love to watch my speeds improve as the training advances.

Naturally I had a GPS application going, too, to track my total miles/speed, which ended up being 6.87 miles in 1:48:03, for an average pace of less than 16 minutes/mile.

By Nicubunu (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/3.0)
or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/
copyleft/fdl.html)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Running two GPS apps simultaneously seriously drained the battery, however, and I had to put it on the charger as soon as I got home. Thus, I couldn't take it with me when I hopped in the car to go pick cherries at a neighbor's who invited me to clean out his trees. If I wanted to.

Free cherries? When organic cherries are selling for $8 a pound at Tiny Kroger? I'm on it, doggone it!

There were many photo ops during this adventure. I could have gotten an up-close-and-personal view of the upper branches of a cherry tree from my 20-foot-high perch in a front loader. I could have shown you the carpet of cherries on the ground below the trees, after all the wind we had yesterday. I might have gotten an artsy-fartsy close-up shot of a single perfect specimen.

After a good 45 minutes balancing myself in that front loader, I was so stiff I could barely move, and my bucket was more than half full. My neighbor then said I wasn't leaving until he'd pitted them! Um, sure, I'll let someone else pit two gallons of cherries, thankyouverymuch. Turns out he had one of these:

It had belonged to his mother, but since he's the only family member with cherry trees (his mom, aunt, two cousins and a brother all live within a mile of each other – this is West Virginia, after all!), he confiscated it from her kitchen and put it to good – and speedy! – use before sending me on my way.

My two gallons yielded three quarts sans seeds and stems, and I am one happy cavewoman. They're in the freezer, ready for some kind of paleo-friendly crisp or cobbler this winter.

Vickie asked yesterday in a comment how many bananas I eat. According to LoseIt, bananas are my number-two favorite food (eggs are first), and I've eaten 75 of them in the past six months, 53 since beginning the paleo plan three months ago.

I don't know if cavewomen ate bananas or not, but this one does and will continue to do so. Portable and easy to eat, bananas are perfect for those of us beginning Year Two of the Denture Adventure. Heh.

A side note: A year ago right now, I was drinking campfire coffee brewed on the grill, we'd been without electricity for more than 12 hours, four of our pine trees had fallen over in front of our eyes and it would be another eight days (during a brutal heat wave) before the Mon Power crews made it out to the Middle of Nowhere. May we never have another derecho. And may you never experience one, either.

Up, down, up, down, the same! Again!

It's Tuesday, and since I was being a crankyass last week and didn't/couldn't/WOULDN'T report my weight-loss results, I guess I'd better do so today. Since Tuesday is when I usually 'fess up.

I have finally gotten back to the lowest weight I've been since the first of the year, meaning I've lost nine pounds in 13 weeks. If you'll remember, I'd previously lost nine pounds in five weeks, and then again in 11 weeks. So here I am again, at some kind of critical barrier. For me, anyway.

Would it KILL this body to just go ahead and drop ONE MORE POUND for an even 10?!?

But enough about that.

I've been using a BlackBerry app called Great Trainer to help keep track of my walks, but it's not available for the Android market, so I'm using something new. Skimble works about the same, but I haven't figured out if it will "tell" me, via chirp or voice, when I've reached a certain distance. Since I walk the same route most days anyway, it really doesn't matter. And it's kind of fun to use a new app; this one will track/record a LOT of activities.

I'm also investigating features in various Couch to 5K (C25K) apps. While I don't have plans to run a 5K any time soon, I remember how much I liked the discipline of the training experience when I was preparing to run my first half-marathon. And I especially liked sticking little stars on the chart when I completed each training run. 'Cause I'm a kindergartener like that.

I think I might be at a good point to use running (okay, jogging/walking fast) as a weight-loss tool. Training for the Country Music Half completely stalled what had been pretty steady weight loss in 2007. I had thought I would continue losing, but training affects different people differently, and I'm one of those who ended up rewarding myself for all those long, hard training runs.

All winter I've been doing the elliptical and walking steadily, using free weights at the gym, doing intervals on the stationary bike … all of these things are good and helpful, but now that spring is here it's time to kick it up a notch. A C25K plan would do that.

With the addition of the somewhat physical part-time job (which is all standing, walking and lifting, but nothing strenuous), I should be burning quite a few more calories than I do sitting on my crankyass in front of the laptop.

Now we'll see if the theory translates into real life results.