hmmmmmm.

Four day weekend?  Yes, I think I will.

Hoping for some of these:

over this

I LOVE SPIEDIES.

Been thinking hard about my training lately and where I want to take things.  I've made my back squat goal already - and I know I have more in me.  I pulled 265 for two deadlifts today and it felt decent - I'm hitting 300 next week.  I've brought my Fran time down substantially.  I can run much faster than I could when I was running all the time.  I look pretty damn good in little-ass shorts and knee socks.

(Not quite as good as Sly does though).

I feel happy and healthy and lean and focused.  So now what?  Get super-SKRONG?  Try to lean out and get super-fast?  Switch my focus to oly and maybe do a competition?  Run another half?  This whole "being athletic" thing is still relatively new to me, you know.  Aside from high school cheerleading, I haven't done any kind of competitive athletics since I was a kid - and when I was a kid, I was pretty slow and fat.  When I went to college and got in shape, it was very different - it was an hours-on-the-elliptical, eating-fat-free-cheese kind of "in shape."

So...food for thought on this long holiday weekend.

PhillyGuy and I had planned to go to the 8am session at CFCC this morning and then head to the new Green Eggs Cafe on 13th Street for breakfast afterwards.  But then I woke up, looked at my clock that said 7:19, and said "F this noise."  The pups and I went for a nice leisurely walk and I chilled in bed with my laptop and coffee for a couple hours, before we finally got moving and headed to breakfast around 9:45.

Beef bacon and blue cheese frittata:

PhillyGuy's steak and eggs and side of bacon in the background.  He had the far superior breakfast this morning.  The frittata was pretty disappointing - it wasn't bad, but it was very bland.  The blue cheese was very mild and had almost no tang, and the bacon-to-frittata ratio was unacceptably low.  Iced coffee was tasty, though, as were PG's rosemary potatoes (I stole one of those and a piece of his [meh] bacon).  I'd probably come here again on a gluten-binge to try their red velvet pancakes, but it's definitely not worth the crazy wait on the weekends for eggs.  Give me Mixto any day.

Log:

Thursday May 24: clean & jerk. 63x2-83x2-93x2-103x1-113x1-118F (uh why?)-118x1-123x1-128F-128F-128 clean only - failed the jerk twice, since I just couldn't seem to keep myself from trying to push press it, and, well, I can't push press almost 130lbs.  5lb PR for the clean and the jerk.  No metcon (yaaaaay).

Friday May 25: deadlift, peak of 2. 145-185-215-245-265.  posterior chain for days.

Fran - 21-15-9 thrusters (95/65), pull ups.

6:30, as RX'ed.  16-second PR.

Morgan and I battled that shit out - she is a squatting machine and absolutely beasted through the thrusters.  Glad she was there, honestly, because I probably would have been much slower without her in the corner of my eye.  I was COMPLETELY certain I was going to spew mediocre frittata everywhere mid-thruster, but I kept it down.  Note to self: at LEAST two hours from eggs to working out.

happy long weekend everyone.

More Grilling

and a confession.

First the grilling. One of my favorite summertime meals - spiedies.

While PhillyGuy manned the grill, I chopped up a bunch of brussels sprouts and half a sweet onion, tossed with olive oil, kosher salt and pepper.

While those roasted up, I made myself a fairly simple salad.



Romaine, red pepper, cucumber, and some olives mixed with chunks of feta and an olive oil/vinegar mixture that I picked up at the grocery store. Since I didn't bring my favorite vinegar to make a salad dressing, I relied on the oil from the olive mix to flavor the salad - which it did just fine.

I topped my salad with a bunch of spiedies.



For those unfamiliar, these are an upstate New York (well, Binghamton area - which is really not at all "upstate") tradition. It's just marinated chunks of chicken breast, but I can't quite replicate the marinade at home, so we stock up like crazy whenever we visit PhillyGuy's parents.

And now the confession.

This entire vacation, I've been scared to run.

This is kind of embarrassing. I brought plenty of workout clothes. Duck has a great path running along the main drag which is perfectly shady in the mornings. I have my shoes. I have my industrial-strength sports bras. My knee hasn't been bothering me at all, and I've been routinely running a couple times a week - not much, maybe 3-4 miles of intervals or repeats at a pop, but still.

Every day on vacation, I've told myself that I am going to start the day with a run. A short one or a long one, it didn't matter - I intentionally left my Garmin at home, figuring it would be a nice break to just put on my shoes and GO without worrying about time or distance.

And every day, I get nervous and make an excuse as to why it's not a good day for a run. Why am I nervous? I honestly don't know. I usually don't feel like going right away when I wake up, and then later in the day, when I DO feel like going, I talk myself out of it, rationalizing that it's gotten sunny and hot(ter), or that my husband wants to hang out. As if I couldn't even do 30 minutes or so, or as if 75 degrees is unbearably hot for a run.

I don't get this at all. I'm trying not to put too much pressure on myself, and hoping that I just snap out of it in a couple of hours or days or whatever. But I don't like this feeling, at ALL.

Whew. Got that out. Now to enjoy our last day of vacation.