What I Ate Wednesday: Recipes From My Friends

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Coco

For this week’s What I Ate Wednesday post, I thought I would share some terrific recipes from other bloggers.


These Baked Pumpkin Donuts from Jennifer at The Fit Fork were the first recipe I made in the donut pan that I got for Christmas. It is a bit time-consuming to make 24 donuts in batches of 6 at a time, but the results are worth it!

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When my husband referred to this Baked Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal from Madeline at Food, Fitness & Family as an “apple crisp” I knew I would be making it again. It is a simple recipe, and an easy way to have “grab-and-go” oatmeal for work–or “apple crisp” for a healthy snack.

Baked Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal

Tina’s Tortellini Sausage Soup is one recipe that I really missed during my vegetarian Lent. It was a big hit at my house–and was substantial enough to satisfy my teenage son.

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Laura’s Crock Pot Chickpea Curry was a perfect addition to my vegetarian recipe collection, and was a great hearty and spicy dish for an unseasonably cold March.

Crock Pot Chickpea Curry

Do you have any “favorite” recipes from other bloggers?
Link them in the comments!

Would you like to “run drenched” this summer?
Enter my giveaway for a Drenched 5K race entry here.

Posted in Food | Tagged , , , , | 20 Comments

Do You Want To Run Drenched This Summer? (Drenched 5K Entry Giveaway)

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Coco

I have told my friends who do those “mud” runs that “I don’t  do mud,” but when I got an opportunity to work with The Drenched 5K through Fitfluential, I knew I could channel my inner Tiger Lilly and have fun getting wet during a hot summer race.  (FTC Notice: Drenched offered me a free race entry for writing about this event.)

According to the organizers:

The Drenched 5K is all about bringing back those memories of summer fun.  Participants will run or walk from dry to drenched through “hot zones” and drenched zones which may include mist tunnels, sprinkler minefields, spectator “sniper” zones, bubbles, fire hoses, and a 75 foot slip n slide (optional) through the finish line.

I can prance through sprinklers, don’t mind dodging water balloons, and would have so much fun running through soap bubbles!

Drenched is scheduled to be in 10 cities during the  summer of 2013: Denver, Dallas Fort-Worth, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Jacksonville, Columbus, Atlanta, Phoenix, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. The DC area race is scheduled for July 13.

According to the organizers, the Drenched 5K benefits local Children’s Hospitals and fundraisers for local fire fighters.

Early bird individual registration is $40, but the people at Drenched have given me one free entry for any of their races to raffle off to one of my readers. The entry is good for any of their events, although registration is not yet open for Atlanta or Philadelphia.

Rafflecopter Drenched 5K Giveaway

Even if you don’t win the free entry, you can get a $10 discount by using the discount code: RUN4DRENCHED when you register at www.rundrenched.com. And, if your whole family wants to get Drenched, kids under 5 run FREE and kids 12 and under receive discounted entries of $30.

How do you like to stay cool on a hot summer day?

Posted in Fitness | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Training Log: Cherry Blossom 10 Miler (Week 5)

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Coco

It hardly seems right to call this a “training log” post, but because anyone can get sick while training for a race, I will share what I managed to do despite my constant need for a tissue.

CUCB LogoMonday
AM Dog Walk: 1 mile
Weights: ITB Rehab Routine and strength routine

Super SetsTuesday
Treadmill: 40 min, with two tempo segments–10 min @ 6.5 mph and 10 min @ 6.7 mph
I started to feel sick Tuesday afternoon: sniffling, sneezing, head throbbing.

Wednesday
PM Dog Walk: 1 mile
I felt like I needed sleep more than I needed to do my strength routine, so I did not workout in the morning.  I took Dayquil to get through the day at work.

Thursday
PM Dog Walk: 1 mile
I still felt like crap. While Dayquil was getting me through the workday, I didn’t want to cover up my symptoms to workout because my primary goal was to get better quickly to be ready for the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler next week.

Friday
AM Dog Walk: 1 mile
I was disappointed that my head still felt like a ball of lead, but felt too sick to feel antsy about working out. I still felt that pushing myself would be counter-productive in the long run.

Saturday
AM Dog Walk: 1 mile
On Friday night I still was not feeling well. I decided to sleep in on Saturday morning, and rearranged my Easter plans so I could go for a short run on Sunday morning. Saturday, my symptoms were intermittent, and I started to wonder if I am suffering from allergies instead of a cold. I crowd-sourced my dilemma on Facebook, and some friends suggested I try Allegra or Zyrtec.

I took a dose of Allegra on Saturday night, and it did seem to help, although when I woke up Sunday my head still felt heavy and my throat felt a bit sore. Still, I felt like I had to get out for a test run.  

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Sunday
AM Dog Walk: 1 mile
Neighborhood run: 5.5 miles; 51:45 min (Avg. pave 9:24 min/mile)

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So, my legs still worked and my lungs were OK, but my head still felt heavy.

I wanted to run at a comfortable pace without pushing myself. Instead of listing to my usual playlist I listened to NPR–the last segment of Backstory and most of On Being. I figured that without fast songs to push my pace, my pace would be more natural. Here’s my split times from Garmin Connect:

1 9:40.8 1.00 9:41
2 9:16.7 1.00 9:17
3 9:23.5 1.00 9:23
4 9:40.0 1.00 9:40
5 9:09.9 1.00 9:10
6 4:34.6 0.51 9:02

These split times generally reflect the hilliness of this route. My first mile usually is my slowest, since I am warming up and have to go up a hill almost right away. Mile 2 has a downhill segment, mile 3 is mostly flat, mile 4 has several uphill segments, mile 5 is flat, and the last half mile has two downhill segments. 

The big question now is what to do in these last few days before the race? I am tempted to do more than I usually do the week before a race because I did less than I had planned last week, but I am trying to remind myself that that could backfire. Also, despite taking four exercise “sick days,” I only missed one running day and only shortened my planned 6 mile “long run” by a half mile, so I didn’t end up that far off my training plan.

Because my work schedule is more flexible on Monday and Wednesday this week, I think I will go for short runs on Monday and Wednesday–and maybe Friday–and do my strength routine on Tuesday and Thursday. Monday will be another easy run, Wednesday will be a speed workout if I feel better, and Friday will be an easy run if I run at all. Saturday I will do one of my Rodney Yee programs.

The Cherry Blossom expo is hard for me to get to, so I signed up to have my shirt and bib mailed to me. They sent them out last week, so I have everything already.

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I love the color!

Have you gotten sick the week before a race?

How did you adapt your training program?

Posted in Fitness, Training Log | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Happy Easter!

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Coco

Allelujah!

The Lord is risen.

He is risen indeed! 

Happy Easter!

Posted in My Faith | Tagged , | Comments Off on Happy Easter!

Book Review: The Heavy By Dara-Lynn Weiss

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Coco

When I first heard about The Heavy by Dara-Lynn Weiss, I had mixed feelings about reading it. Would it bring back bad memories about my experiences as an overweight child? Would it rekindle my own food neurosis?

If anything, it helped me put my past in perspective and realize how far I’ve come.

A snippet from the official synopsis on Amazon:

When a doctor pronounced Dara-Lynn Weiss’s daughter Bea obese at age seven, the mother of two knew she had to take action. But how could a woman with her own food and body issues—not to mention spotty eating habits—successfully parent a little girl around the issue of obesity?

….

Compounding the challenge were eating environments—from school to restaurants to birthday parties—that set Bea up to fail, and unwelcome judgments from fellow parents. Childhood obesity, Weiss discovered, is a crucible not just for the child but also for parents. She was criticized as readily for enabling Bea’s condition as she was for enforcing the rigid limits necessary to address it. Never before had Weiss been made to feel so wrong for trying to do the right thing.

Overall, The Heavy made me sad. Sad for Dara-Lynn and her personal battles. Sad for what she put through Bea through. Sad for other obese children who are facing a lifetime of struggling with their weight.

The parts that made me cringe the most were the parts that could have been me if I put a child through what I put myself through in my early dieting days–favoring low calorie food over nutritious food, panicking if I exceeded my allotted daily calories, measuring my accomplishments on the scale. Thank goodness I kept those things to myself–and got past them.

The parts that made me mad were Dara-Lynn’s dismissal of the importance of exercise and the lack of guidance she seemed to get from healthcare professionals. By focusing only on the calories burned during an hour of exercise, Dara-Lynn overlooked the many other benefits–like building muscle, gaining self-confidence, and improving mood. I don’t know if Dara-Lynn didn’t get detailed nutrition advice from the nutrition counselor, or just didn’t follow it, but she should have been told the importance of whole foods, whole grains, and lean protein, and warned that, yes, many hundred calories of fruit a day might be too much for a child who needs to lose weight!

The parts that I agreed with relate to Dara-Lynn’s observations about how much our culture immerses children in junk food. From school lunches to play dates to birthday parties, we foist sugary, salty processed foods with little nutritional value on our kids from morning until night, and the few parents who object are viewed as paranoid extremists who need to lighten up. Hopefully the current attention these issues are getting will have a lasting impact.

Have you heard about The Heavy?

Have you ever been concerned about your child’s weight?

Posted in Book Reviews, Fitness, Food | Tagged , , | 11 Comments