News from Boot-Camp Bryndis!

I’m injury free and back on track with my running. Did a fantastic 8K run on Monday as prescribed in my training plan. Went for the run thinking that I would just see how it feels, walk a lot and just take it easy, but I just felt great the whole way through and was even somewhat surprised when it was over. Went on a second run yesterday, felt great in my body, but had not taken the weather into consideration before I went out. I started just past 11am and it was way too hot. We are in the midst of a heat wave here in Scandinavia and I sure got to feel that in every fibre of my body. Stopped after 6.2K in a 8.2K run, and walked the rest home having already walked a great deal during the run. So today, I’m waiting for it to cool down a little more before heading out for my 6K tempo run. It is already almost 10pm so I’m not sure if it will cool down at all (temps are still in the high 20s), but as I don’t have to get up early tomorrow, I suppose a midnight run will be perfect. The perks of being on summer holidays! Saturday I will have a long run, and I’m planning to go running in the woods north of Oslo. Should be around 13K run. Can’t wait.

Earlier today I was watching the Forks over Knives documentary, and finally managed to find my vegetarian project motivation again. Yeah! So, now I’m back on track towards veganism. No meat, no fish and no eggs. They call that lacto-vegetarian. Lacto meaning dairy. I still have a couple of pieces of chicken in my freezer that I will eat before I’m 100% back on track, but basically feeling very good about it. I guess I needed the break to give my head a little breathing space to process everything. Changing one’s lifestyle isn’t an easy task and there are going to be bumps in the road and I’m just happy to be over this bump, at least for now. We will see how this progresses.

One of my biggest challenges these days is my serious jelly addiction. The photo below shows my fix. My drug of choice!

 That moment when you open the bag, and you don’t know if it’s a bag with lots of yellows and red ones and just a few black ones, or if there are more black ones. Combining the colourful ones with the black ones, OMG, it is pure heaven. So good! Now, there are three main reasons as to why I should not eat my jellies. 1) NO ONE SHOULD EAT JELLIES! No one!! There is nothing good in them. Nothing at all! You should not eat them and you most certainly should not give them to your children. They are only bad for you. You could just as well have a smoke or a joint or give your children some cocaine. Seriously! This is some horrible stuff, people. Do you know what they put in them? Really? Disgusting, horrible, sickening stuff!!! I still just love them. 2) As a person training for a half-marathon and a person with a full marathon ambitions, and a person working hard on losing weight, eating jellies is not a good thing. I’m sabotaging my own hard work by succumbing to my sweet tooth. Not that I’m eating this everyday. It’s like every 3-4 days, I just have this insane cravings and I just can’t resist. Very weird! 3) As a vegetarian, I obviously should not be eating jellies as they are made from ... (it is too disgusting for me to talk about it here, youtube it if you must!).  Anyway, this is my life at the moment. Fighting the jellies!

Love being on vacation. Even if I’m not travelling much. Just spending my days watching running documentaries (in the last few days I’ve watched Spirit of the marathon, Run for you life, Running on the Sun:Badwater 135, The Ultramarathon Man and Running the Sahara, plus a couple of documentaries on Everest, as well as some films featuring crazy running/climbing people). Lots of motivation there. I also bought two marathon training books for my Kindle and am finding even more motivation there. Got a love having all the time in the world to do just what you want. I hope you are all enjoying your summer as well.

Positive thinking ...

I’ve recovered from my bad mood which I was in because I managed to injure my back last weekend and now I have to take a rest from running (and working!). My doctor gave me some nice pills and told me to have an active rest, which means walking, stretching and swimming if I can manage that. She also said that some careful strength training is OK, as long as I don’t use heavy weights. Just be careful but active was her advice. So, that is what I’m doing. I’ve been going on short walks around my house and have been stretching, but it is still very painful so I’m taking it very slowly. And I’m trying to look at the bright side, now at least I’m determined to keep up with my strength training, focusing on the core muscles. I’ve been too lazy lately and I guess this was a good wake-up call in that regards. No use crying about spilled milk, as they say, so I will just use this experience as a good learning curve and will move forward from that. Hopefully, within a week or two I can be back on track with my training and things will be OK. I have summer holidays from Saturday so I have plenty of time to rest between workouts. Always look at the bright side of life, people.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBiLNN1NhQ

June was an amazing month. Out of 30 days, I ran/walked on 15 and rested on the other 15. 50% is not to shabby! That’s pretty awesome, actually. I did over 100K in that month. Can you imagine that? I am so proud of myself, what a fantastic achievement. In total, I’m up to 461,5K this year. Running and walking. That is pretty cool. 

On my photos above, pink is running. Orange is walking. Green is strength (and you can see how lazy I’ve been!). Blue is rest days. A lot of blue in March and April as I was fighting with my knee.  July will probably be very orange and blue but I will manage to put enough pink in there to keep me on track for my half-marathon in August. There simply is no choice! Can’t wait to fill out the next 6 months. This method of keeping track of my training is working very well for me. It is such a motivation to fill in the days and I’m such a visual person so this makes total sense to me.

Well, back to licking my wound. Have a great month, I just love July and hope you do too.

A few words ...

Obviously, I’m not the best blogger out there, almost two months since my last blog. But, here it is.

As my most avid readers might notice, I’ve changed the name of my blog. I’ve decided to celebrate my 40^th birthday next year by running a full marathon, but let me talk more about that later. I’m taking a break from vegetarianism and back to eating meat and fish. I was just missing salmon too much! And feeling irritated and stressed out about everything and nothing and just not in the zone of not eating whatever I want!! We’ll see how that goes, I still have becoming vegan on my 10 year plan and as we all know, the road to success if filled with bumps and mistakes and wrong turns but that is what makes the journey fun and interesting. I’ll keep you guys posted.

I just love this photo of me, my best running photo so far :)

My half-marathon training is going very well. I’m up to 25-30 km a week in 4 runs (most of the time) and my longest run is up to 12 km. I’m focusing on increasing my distance and not looking at speed at all. I run quite slowly and with current speed I should finish my first half-marathon in 2.5 hours. That is not a very good time, not really. Still, it is better to run slowly and finish than not to run at all, right?  After I finish this half-marathon in Reykjavik, I'll have one months to prepare for my second half-marathon here in Oslo, and plan to use that month to do speed training and lot of strength.

My legs feel fantastic and my knee is fine for the most part, but I still keep icing it after each run as a preventive measure. I’ve been suffering from shin splints but it seems to getting better, at least I hope so. I got some compression calf guards that are supposed to help prevent muscle fatigue in the calves as well as shin splints and am using heat creams and stretching to prevent this from becoming too painful, and it seems to be working. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I need to get more organised with my strength training, have been too lazy lately, and am wondering if I should get a gym membership to motivate me to lift weights. They say that the best way to prevent injuries and getting faster is to become stronger so I need to get myself going again with strength training.

Anyway, I hope you are all enjoying your summer and keeping active.

Bryndis

I love May :)

Beautiful beginning of the lovely month of May. The sun is shining outside and I am feeling optimistic and happy inside, although still a little dizzy ;) Exciting times ahead regarding food and diet issues. I was inspired by a story of a family that removed sugar from their diet for a whole year and thought that this is something I would like to do. Then a cousin of mine and friend on Facebook created Sugar-free May event, and so I figured I would begin with that. One month without sugar. Today is the first day! I am not doing 100% sugar-free. I will remove added refined sugar, which means no sweets at all and no cakes. No bread or buns with sugar. No yogurt or other dairy with sugar. Nor with artificial sweeteners. So no Coke Light! Serious stuff! But I am not removing all sauces and pesto and stuff like that which often has added sugar. Not now, anyway. And of course I am eating fruit. Lots of fruit! And I will allow myself to drink Herbalife sportdrinks (for my runs) and if I need extra energy for my longer runs (my half-marathon training is starting for real very soon) I will eat some energy bars or things like that. And my vegetarianism is going very well which is both surprising and fabulous at the same time.This is very exciting and I am feeling super optimistic and positive and energetic in the beginning of the fantastic month!

My running schedule has gone all over the place these last few weeks. My knee keeps acting up again and again, as well as travelling and inner ear problems causing me not being able or interested to go for many runs in April. Only about 5 runs in a whole month. Not good at all. Now I need to get going, although still quite slowly because of my knee. Will see a physical therapist soon if this will not get better. According to my half-marathon training plan, I need to start the “serious” training soon, within a couple of weeks. Still only three runs a week, two shorter ones plus the long one on Saturdays. I have also ordered a work-out DVD that will help me get more structure in my strength training. I am quite excited about all of this, and ready to get started. Have ambitious weight-loss plans as well, but we will see how that goes.

These months, I have been very busy working on the new me. I have been reading and listening to people like Brian Tracy, Robin Sharma and reading a lot of stuff regarding change and such things. I’m doing yoga and meditation, although the “stressed” me is not very good at meditation (not yet!). I am working on 10 goals for 2014, and am already on my way regarding few of them. I am really enjoying it, the process of getting to know myself better and looking at myself from different perspectives. And it is interesting to realise that different people see me in such different ways. And how differently I see myself in different situations. I am actually a very different person in private than I am at work, and very different from how I am in my academic life. That is the “me” I like the most, very confident and happy and certain that that is what I want to do with my life. Now I’m just working on transferring that confidence and certainty into all other aspects of my life. How exciting J

Have a great May everybody!
Namaste :)

Progress report from snowy Iceland :)

Happy Easter everybody. I hope you have enjoyed your Easter even half as much as I’ve enjoyed mine. I’ve been here in serious relaxation, sleeping, eating and running now for one week already with one more week to go. It was totally what I needed! I even think that the snow (yes, you read it right, SNOW!) that is here has helped me to stay relaxed. So fantastic.

My meat and fishless lifestyle is going very well. I haven’t been missing fish at all, which was very surprising, and the meat cravings are minimal. I thought it would be so very hard to spend Easter with my parents and my mum’s delicious cooking, but I managed very well. Had lots of support from my lovely sister and found delicious alternatives to my mum’s leg of lamb and smoked lamb etc. So, I’m one happy vegetarian.

I’ve decided not to run in the Sentrumsløpet, which is next weekend. My knee is not fully recovered and I don’t want to risk hurting it more. I need to start my half-marathon training in mid May and just have to keep my cool and take things slowly for a little while longer. I have been running quite a bit lately and can feel that my form is getting better and better so this stupid knee is very annoying. Oh, so very annoying! So as of today, my race plans for this season are the iForm race in mid May (10K), Women’s run in mid June (?K), Reykjavik marathon in mid August (21,1K), KK Mila in early September (10K) and Oslo marathon in mid September (21,1K). Let the games begin ... or something like that.

Chocolate greetings from snowy Isafjordur