Good bye 2011, Hello 2012!

It's a bittersweet goodbye to the passing year for me because 2011 has been the most amazing year of my life so far. However, as many awesome things this year has brought me I can only imagine how much more I have to look forward to in 2012. I have done things with myself I never knew were possible and I hope to continue surprising myself and others with just how much I am capable of making out of my life. ♥ Happy New Year!!

NSV... I ran so far today!

It may not seem like much to those of you who have been running for forever now, lol. But today I ran(jogged) for the longest distance I've ever done at once without stopping to walk in between. I did 4.37 miles in 57:59. My average speed was 4.5 mph and I burned approximately 578 calories. I believe I also ended up running the fastest mile I ever have, too. My first mile was done in 13:01, 2nd in 14:01, 3rd in 12:54, and 4th in 13:14. My minimum speed was 2.5 mph and my maximum speed was 6.6mph! Woosh!

I feel like a rockstar.

I also stayed around 1200 calories easily today, score!

Oh and I got some cute new bras and a few new sports bras. Today was full of win. ^_^

End of the year Giveaway!

Just because I feel like it! lol... So I got this awesome little book for Christmas called A Taste of Chicken Soup to Inspire a Woman's Soul. It's just that, a taste, of the actual book, Chicken Soup to Inspire a Woman's Soul. It has a few of the best stories and is mostly aimed at Middle Aged women with families, etc. Though I'm only 26 I still found it a good read and very inspiring and totally teared up a time or two. I thought wow what a great little read, but I've only had it two days and already finished reading it, now it's just going to sit around my house collecting dust for years... then a lightbulb went off in my head and said hey I know just who I can share this with! You guys!

I thought I could do a giveaway and let one lucky winner receive this special little book... but then another idea popped in to my head, kind of stemming from Katie's idea to pass around her Garmin. I would like for this book to get passed around!

So here are the rules to my give away.

1) To enter you must be a follower of my blog and leave a comment below with your favorite inspirational quote. :)

2) If you win, then take as long as you want to read the book and share it with your own friends and family, but then I would greatly appreciate if you could host your own giveaway with whatever rules you'd like, just be sure to include this rule - the winner must hold a giveaway when they are done to pass on the book to someone else. Then ask them to also be sure to include this rule in their give away. And so on, and so on... hopefully this ensures that many people will be touched by the stories of this book! ^_^ ( I think I will include a short note to whoever wins, and you may want to do the same for the winner of your giveaway and pass along the notes like we've been doing with the Garmin. ) Take a picture of you with the book (and notes passed along). I want to see where it travels to and would like to make a post updating my readers on where my book has ended up throughout time... :)

3) Winner will be chosen at random on December 31st at 10pm Central time zone using random.org

4) You may earn an additional entry by any of the following ways but must post a separate comment for each extra entry earned.

- Share this post on Twitter

- Share this post on Facebook

- Share this post on your blog

I survived the holidays, did you?

Looky here... I'm alive and well. hahaha, what about all of you? Still kickin or did you let them beat you?! I did some binge eating on Christmas Eve and Christmas day since we had two huge family get togethers those days, but I managed to only go up 2lbs and am already back down 1 of those lbs. Today I sit at 176, which is lower than my last update here :) but I actually made it back down to 175 as of early Saturday morning. I'm sure by tomorrow or the next day or so I'll have made it down past that! ^_^ I found it really easy to get back on track yesterday and today. Did some working out yesterday morning and then ran around Six Flags all day yesterday with my family and my 3 nephews. Today I worked out and then went for a run also. I believe I'm sitting somewhere right around 1200 calories and am done eating for the day now. So yay! I'm not worried about New Year's as a holiday because I never go out and party for that. lol. I usually just stay home with some sparkling grape juice and watch the ball drop on tv.

Had a fairly good Christmas this year. My son loved all his toys and clothes and things. I got some new recipe books and also a brand new camera finally!! I can start taking pictures of myself again with the self timer feature, lol. Speaking of which... I completely forgot to post an update for my 11 months mark on the 15th of this month.. eek! It's a pretty cool camera though, it's even waterproof up to 10 feet so I can take it to Hurricane Harbor with me next summer and out on the boat when we get back on the lake.

In other news... my friend Stormy is hosting her very first challenge called the Spring Chick Challenge. It seems like a really good and easy way to keep yourself accountable and meet lots of other fellow bloggers in the process so I definitely recommend you all go sign up! I already did! ^_^

Katie's Garmin is here!

Yay!! So some of you who are also friends with SlimKatie may remember when she mentioned back in the middle of August, on this post, about possibly sharing her Garmin Forerunner 205 since she also has the 305. This way some of us could like do a trial period for about 2 weeks and see if it was something we may end up wanting to buy ourselves someday. I thought it was a great idea and of course signed up right away! ^_^ So far the Garmin has traveled from Michigan to New York, to Quebec, to Tennesee, to Texas, and now I'm the second person in Texas to get it. Everyone wrote a little note after using it and before sending it to the next person saying what they liked or didn't like about it, etc... I can't wait to write my little note and send it on it's way! lol... after I'm done checking out all the cool stuff it can do of course.

It arrived yesterday and I left it on the charger all night since it was too dead to use right away. Today was my first time using it. I went out and jogged for most of 3 miles, though towards the end of my run I slowed down to a fast paced walk instead because some dogs were chasing me and I didn't want them to bite me. lol. Then for awhile I got lost in some music and was just beboping down the road wiggling my hips the rest of the way home instead of worrying about a good pace. lol. Here is what my first workout says...

That's a time of 52:46 with my average pace being 16:02/mile, I did 3.29 miles and according to the garmin I burned 675 calories. Now I also was using the cardio trainer app on my phone during this run and it says I only burned 460 calories. Those numbers aren't even close to each other so I don't know which is more correct. I did not enter in my weight or anything for the cardio trainer app on my phone though, I've been meaning to look and see if I can somehow... but I did enter in my weight and birthdate, etc on the garmin so I would like to think it's the one that is right. Especially since it thinks I burned more. haha. But I dunno... I guess I'll have to actually get a heart rate monitor someday if I ever really wanna know. Eventually one day when I'm not poor I'll have to look in to that. lol.

As far as everything else goes, I am doing well counting calories again and am a couple days binge free. It feels good and the longer I go without overeating of course the stronger my willpower gets over those food items. My dad was just baking some peanut butter cookies in the kitchen as I got back inside from my run and so I after pausing for a second thinking oooh one would be nice, I thought no way because you won't stop at one and so I scurried my butt back to my room to write this blog and check facebook, etc. :) I'm proud. lol. Small steps at a time... I am back down to 177 lbs today after spiking up to 181 just yesterday. So needless to say, today I feel great. lol. I think in no time I will be able to get over this hump and down out of the 170s for good. I'm really looking forward to 2012, not only so the holiday food will be gone, hahah, but becuase this new year is bound to be even greater than the past one has been and 2011 was pretty damn awesome! ^_^

Plateau no more!

I think it's safe to say that for the last 2 months now I've been stuck going up and down in the 170s. There are tons of legitimate excuses I could offer as to why I haven't been steadily going down, but I won't even bother. It's a waste of my time to sit here and try to justify why I haven't been going down and keep seeing the same few numbers over and over again. Well yesterday I got a big smack in the face and saw that 180 number again for the first time in months. The scale read 180.4 and my heart sank. I knew I hadn't been eating anywhere near as well as before or exercising hardly any these last few days so it was inevitable to say the least. I consider myself lucky to have not seen that number before now. After wallowing in self pity and more food yesterday... ugh.. yes I totally binged and comforted myself with food. Horrible decisions in retroscpect and even at the time I was doing it. I was hating myself and trying to convince myself to get up and do anything else at all. But eventually by late afternoon I talked myself into getting up and going for a run. As far as I can remember, this was the first time I made time for running since having ran my race 2 weeks ago. I'm sooo glad I ran yesterday but very disappointed in myself that I let so long go by since my last run when nothing was really stopping me but myself.

I've decided to put my foot down today and start counting calories again. Obviously I fail at listening to my body... well not really. I mean honestly, I could feel that I was already full while I continued to eat other things out of boredom or comfort, etc. I just need to eventually work more on my will power and determination to not just settle for looking good. Sure I look great right now, the best I have in my entire life pretty much. I'm smaller than I was in middle school. But I'm still not as healthy or fit as I could be and I'm not trying to halfass my way through the rest of my life. I want to live cleaner and show my son how to do it right from the start. I want to go back to school to become a personal trainer someday and I'm not getting there by giving up on myself after what seems like enough to other people. So back to counting those calories again and having a much stricter limit on what foods I eat and when I am eating them. Back to not eating after dinner time, etc.

I'm sorry to my loyal readers who've probably wondered where I've been since I haven't posted in the last 2 weeks. Everyday I look at my blog and think man it's time to update it... but I hadn't really had anything worth saying and so I didn't. I think it's time to face facts though and stop hiding from myself and everyone else. I doubt I will hit goal of 150 before the year is up on January 15th, but I am going to damn sure try to get as close as possible before then!

I will start P90x today finally. Been putting it off way too long. I need something like this to get me going though and pushing my past my self imposed limits. Here's hoping that does the trick. Expect a post from me sometime soon about how day 1 went.. :)

I want to leave this picture on everyone's mind as we try and finish out the holidays strong... It sure helped put some perspective on things for me.

My first race!

So I know many of you have been patiently awaiting me to tell you all about how my race went on Saturday. I've been meaning to blog about it, but it just seems as one thing after another has kept me too busy to take the time to make an entry! When I started this blog I was hoping to keep it as a daily thing and now it is becoming more like a weekly thing. I really don't want to give up on this though and am going to try harder to at least do a couple posts each week!

Anyways... my race went great! I was very nervous and excited and a million other emotions leading up to it the few days before, and especially the few hours. I found out that it was supposed to rain on race day and began to worry immediately that this would affect my time or that I would slip and break something or any number of other things. I knew right away though that I was going to have to prepare myself to run anyways because a little water wasn't about to stop me. The night before my race, my mom said that since her and my dad were asked to watch my sister's kids this weekend that they were just going to stay home with the boys and my son to keep them out of the bad weather and let them play here together. I was a little sad about that but I just said okay and left it at that. I really wanted my son to be there cheering me on and it would have meant a lot to have my mom and dad there, too. I picked up my friend Ashley and brought her with me and my brother who lived in the same city the race was held in just drove over and met us there so luckily I did have some support.

As I stated recently, my only real goal for this race was to run it in under 40 minutes since that's what my time seemed to be here jogging around my neighborhood. Well when I ran across the finish line I saw 37:26 and knew I had blown my time out of the water! Of course I didn't start at the starting line when the timer went off to begin the race I was way in the back of the pack, so once I got home and checked my official chip time, I saw that I actually did it in 36:17!!! :) I cam in 165th place out of 310 who were timed (over 4,000 ran that day) and was 72nd out of the 175 females. Not too shabby for my first race I don't think!

There was a health and fitness expo going on nearby after the race and so of course I stopped by there and got to check out lots of cool gear and other neat information, etc. I'm glad I'm broke, otherwise I would have spent a lot of money there. lol. I did find out about another race there though and am really excited to check it out. It's some sort of 5k Color run where you start out wearing a white shirt and every k you get a certain color of powder thrown at you! By the end of the race you are so colorful and at the finish line there are tons of people there throwing all of the colors at you! lol. The video they showed me of it looked like so much fun. It's in February so not too far from now! Here is the website... they have it in all different cities so maybe there is one near you soon! http://thecolorrun.com/

Anyways here are some pictures from just before my race...

These are of course proofs I stole off the internet of me actually crossing the finish line! :D

and this is a video taken moments after I finished running by my brother, lol. He was trying to get me to advertise the water i was drinking. haha. You may notice I give my friend Ashley a high 5, too. :D

and pictures from after finishing and then checking out the expo...

Yeah so it was all in all a great run and I'm so glad I did it. I did far better than I expected and after announcing my times I found out that some of the people who were part of the reasons I wanted to try running in the first place did their first 5k in quite a bit longer time frame. Not to say "haha I did better than you did at first" but wow I am really impressed with myself after learning that! lol.