three things thursday
1. Last night's test run was a whopping thirty minutes of serious success. My legs feel a little beat up afterwards and my body in general feels like it has completely forgotten how to move all the parts in the right places at the right time, but other than some creaks, it was pain-free. It all feels very tentative but progress is being made. Insert adjective of your choice to describe incredible relief here. If I continue to bounce back, I'll have only missed two weeks of running, which while unfortunately timed based on my upcoming half marathon, is actually only a little blink, sneeze and you'll miss it, a tiny heartbeat in IM training. I also appear to not have taken huge steps backwards in my aerobic development through HR training like I feared, as I did not have to run 12-minute-miles to keep my HR under 145 last night. Super big chest bumps to my coach for that one (and for dealing with the emotional roller coaster that comes along with an injured and panicking athlete with a very serious potty mouth).
2. I've decided that I'm probably going to stay out of the Newtons until after CdA. While I love how comfy they are and felt great running in them, my continuing-to-be-super-tight calves are begging for mercy. I want to take the time to actually transition into them properly, and I really can't afford any more 2-3 week setbacks due to shoe experimentation. I spent most of the last two months rotating between the Brooks Ravenna and the Lady Isaac, so I think I'm going to stick with the Ravenna and throw in the 2160s every once in a while when my feet need some squishy loving. The biggest thing I'm sad about is that they don't come in a more blinding color.
3. Yesterday I tallied up how much we spent last month (February) on food for the two of us, and it wasn't pretty. We spent $802.89, and that doesn't count the things we buy at Target (across the street) because I couldn't pull that info out of our credit card bill. Of the $802.89, we spent $489.77 on groceries. We had one nice dinner out with friends ($85), one nice dinner out by ourselves ($55) and the rest was lunches/burritos/bagels/brunch and the like.
So, I'm a little horrified. Granted, one of us is training for a marathon and one of us is training for an IM, but that still seems quite excessive (this tally also did not include training nutrition). The poet and I talked about it at length last night and we're going to try and do a few things differently moving forward. It's probably a bit embarrassing, but the area of greatest expense in the grocery store is probably cheese, or even just dairy (cough ice cream cough cough). Most of the meals we cook at home include cheese in it somewhere, and often it's pretty expensive cheese - fresh parmesan, gorgonzola, etc. We're obviously not going to be able to cut out dairy entirely, because that would be completely insane, but we're going to try to be a little more aware about how much of it we eat. The second-largest (or maybe the largest) section that we spend money on is definitely fresh produce, and I have no problem with this or intent to change, other than to maybe keep an eye out for sales a little better. For this month, we've decided to not make a ton of significant changes yet but instead just track our budget as we go through the month. I think that simple awareness will help us make better choices as the month goes on, especially on those night when we're both zapped and it's so much easier to order $30 of Thai food than it is to get in the kitchen and cook. After this month, we'll talk about some changes we can make to get that number down. We are going to try to pick a number and stick with it for "budgeted eating out." We really don't go out that often, but it's clearly an area that we can improve on.
So share with me, blog friends. Do you have a monthly food budget? How much do you budget for how many people? How much of your budget goes to cheese?
2. I've decided that I'm probably going to stay out of the Newtons until after CdA. While I love how comfy they are and felt great running in them, my continuing-to-be-super-tight calves are begging for mercy. I want to take the time to actually transition into them properly, and I really can't afford any more 2-3 week setbacks due to shoe experimentation. I spent most of the last two months rotating between the Brooks Ravenna and the Lady Isaac, so I think I'm going to stick with the Ravenna and throw in the 2160s every once in a while when my feet need some squishy loving. The biggest thing I'm sad about is that they don't come in a more blinding color.
3. Yesterday I tallied up how much we spent last month (February) on food for the two of us, and it wasn't pretty. We spent $802.89, and that doesn't count the things we buy at Target (across the street) because I couldn't pull that info out of our credit card bill. Of the $802.89, we spent $489.77 on groceries. We had one nice dinner out with friends ($85), one nice dinner out by ourselves ($55) and the rest was lunches/burritos/bagels/brunch and the like.
So, I'm a little horrified. Granted, one of us is training for a marathon and one of us is training for an IM, but that still seems quite excessive (this tally also did not include training nutrition). The poet and I talked about it at length last night and we're going to try and do a few things differently moving forward. It's probably a bit embarrassing, but the area of greatest expense in the grocery store is probably cheese, or even just dairy (cough ice cream cough cough). Most of the meals we cook at home include cheese in it somewhere, and often it's pretty expensive cheese - fresh parmesan, gorgonzola, etc. We're obviously not going to be able to cut out dairy entirely, because that would be completely insane, but we're going to try to be a little more aware about how much of it we eat. The second-largest (or maybe the largest) section that we spend money on is definitely fresh produce, and I have no problem with this or intent to change, other than to maybe keep an eye out for sales a little better. For this month, we've decided to not make a ton of significant changes yet but instead just track our budget as we go through the month. I think that simple awareness will help us make better choices as the month goes on, especially on those night when we're both zapped and it's so much easier to order $30 of Thai food than it is to get in the kitchen and cook. After this month, we'll talk about some changes we can make to get that number down. We are going to try to pick a number and stick with it for "budgeted eating out." We really don't go out that often, but it's clearly an area that we can improve on.
So share with me, blog friends. Do you have a monthly food budget? How much do you budget for how many people? How much of your budget goes to cheese?