The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash

I went on a field trip with Kaiden's preschool class today and it was a lot of fun. We went to a farm and the kids got to pet a chicken, a duckling, a lamb, a horse and a goat.  They also got to feed some goats and tried to feed a cow, but the cow wasn't having anything to do with that.  The whole time we were there, I kept thinking of the story "The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash."  LOL  Kaiden's taking our copy of that book to school tomorrow so the teachers can read it to the class.  I got to meet some of Kaiden's friends and learned that he is really a mama's boy when we're with his friends.

After the farm we went to the park to eat.  Kaiden and his best friend really didn't feel like eating - they wanted to play instead.  I made Kaiden eat some of his nachos lunchable and then they ran off to play.  That stupid lunchable kept eyeballing me, so finally I caved and ate it.  I'd only brought a couple large bananas and they didn't do much for my appetite.

While we were there, my in laws brought Ben to the park because they were headed out of town.  The field trip was over and the kids were just playing, so we stuck around for awhile and Ben got to play in the baby swing.  The higher I pushed him, the more he loved it!

Once we left the park, I went to the gas station and got a chicken fried steak sandwich.  Well, actually I'd ordered a spicy chicken sandwich, but what I ended up with was chicken fried steak.  I'd never had it before because it looked and sounded disgusting, but it turns out it was pretty good.  Still wasn't what I wanted and probably wasn't any healthier than what I wanted, but it sufficed.

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Today is the last day of April, so I weighed myself to see how much I'd lost since the 5% challenge began on April 1st.  I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't quite reach my goal.  I only lost 2.8 pounds.  I started at 173.6 and I weighed in at 170.8 this morning.  I had kind of a rough weekend and a lot of ups and downs throughout the month.  I was doing really well for a while there, but I lost my momentum, which tends to happen a lot I've noticed.  :/

bummer

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I had two miles scheduled today but I hurt my tailbone last night so it was a little bruised.  I decided to take a rest day and run tomorrow instead.  I know, I have this schedule and I'm terrible at running when I'm supposed to, however I have made up every run I've skipped.  :)  I've successfully finished two weeks of training and logged 15 miles.  I still have 9 weeks of training and 99 miles left until the Firecracker 5k on the Fourth of July.

Aimee at Getting to 150lbs asked me a couple questions about my schedule, so I thought I'd answer it here just to make sure she saw it.  ;)  So here goes:  When I first started running, I tried to do Couch to 5k, but it progressed too slowly for me.  So then I just tried to wing it and run every day.  I created my own progressing schedule that increased a few 10ths of a mile every few days.  It began March 1st and ended April 1st.  By that time, according to my schedule, I would be running 3.1 miles.  However, I ended up injured (pulled a muscle in my back doing laundry) about midway through my month of running.  When I finally felt well enough to run again, about a week into April, I went to the high school track and just ran.  It was my first outside run and I rocked it.  I ran 3.1 miles straight in 43 minutes, 29 seconds.  You can read about it here.

After that, I attempted to just run every day or so, but I wasn't making any progress.  If anything, I was failing.  I couldn't run 3 miles again.  I had a hard enough time running 2 miles.  So I searched around online for tips to increase my endurance and get me on a schedule.  I found Smart Coach.  Since I knew my first race was on July 4th, I inputted all of the required information and it created a schedule for me.  It gave me 11 weeks to train.  I'm a control freak and I've found that lists and schedules really work for me.  If it's written down, I will follow it because I can visually see it and know it's something I HAVE to do.  I have copies of my schedule all over the place.  I also log all of my runs on my blog, on DailyMile and also in a small pocket calendar that I carry with me everywhere.  I sometimes have to move a day around for one reason or another, but so far I've done every single run that I'm supposed to do during the week.  I also tell everyone I know when I have a run scheduled and they don't let me put it off.  They encourage me to do it.

Hope that helps!  (By the way, my very first 3.1 miles was on February 28th and it was a run/walk [mostly walk because I had no energy due to low calorie consumption] and was done in 50 minutes.  I was so down on myself about that that I almost gave up on running because I didn't want to come in last during my race.  But I've improved so much since then!)

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Food Log:

• breakfast - egg and cheese english muffin, V8 (70)
• lunch - chicken fried steak sandwich, nachos lunchable
• dinner -chicken, potatoes, gravy and biscuit bake
• snack - bananas, snickers ice cream bar (180)

Awful.  :(