Continue reading »]]> This weekend has been pretty busy. It snowed most of the day yesterday, and it’s been freezing. Definitely a departure from the mild winter we’d previously been having. Because of the temperatures, I ended up spending a lot of time inside working on putting together training plans for Team Challenge Brooklyn since I recently found out that I’ll be working as the Run Coach! Getting the plans coordinated has been a lot of work, but I’ve loved every minute of it. It feels so good to be doing something I enjoy so much, and to be doing it as a job is an added bonus. I am really excited about this opportunity, and I can’t wait for us to get the season started on February 18.

Team Challenge Brooklyn participants will have a choice of three different half-marathons: Virginia Wine Country, Kona, and Napa to Sonoma, all of which are going to be amazing races! We’ll have about 16 weeks from the beginning of the season until the Viginia Wine Country half–plenty of time to get ready to run. I made sure to put in options for runners of all levels, including those who might want to opt for a run/walk program instead of a training program consisting solely of running.

I also figured I’d make a variation of the Virginia Wine Country training plan available to anyone who wants it. It’s designed to be pretty flexible, and you can run 4 or 5 days a week depending on what’s best for you–if you prefer a 4-day-a-week schedule, I recommend using Sunday as either an additional rest day, or an opportunity for some cross-training.

Half-marathon Training Program

You can download the training plan here: Half Marathon Training (at least I think you can, if I’ve made the right assumptions about how technology works…which is not something I’d suggest taking for granted). If you do decide to try it out and you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Hopefully, this will be the first of many plans I post here.

Continue reading »]]> If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s deciding that because I’ve missed out on part of something, or the designated beginning of a project or program, I’ve missed out on the whole thing and there’s no use trying to catch up or follow along at a different pace. Good old black and white thinking, right? It always finds some way to bestow special blessings upon those of us who practice it. I  tend to get so entrenched in the idea that things have to be done a certain way that I forget that in the majority of cases, I have the freedom to be much more flexible than I’m allowing.

Image via Wikipedia

A few weeks ago, I signed up for Yoga Journal‘s 21-day Yoga Challenge, and patiently awaited the first email on January 9. Of course since I hurt myself on January 8th, by the time the Challenge started, I was unable to participate. Since then, the emails (and the practices they contain) have been piling up in my inbox and I’ve been lamenting the fact that I missed the chance to get on board with the whole thing.

Except: duh. The emails are sitting right there. The videos are still accessible on the Yoga Journal website. If I want to start the challenge whenever I want, who’s to stop me? And wouldn’t it be better to start late than not to start at all? I know, it’s a total revelation over here.

So here we are, back feeling better, and ready for Day 1. The first practice is a Morning Sequence with Katie Holcombe, which I plan to start in the next couple minutes. I know what you’re thinking: a morning sequence at 7:34 pm? Is the whole world taking crazy pills? To which I say: I don’t know, maybe. It would explain a lot.

Continue reading »]]>  

Image via Wikipedia

Last week I mentioned the fact that I tweaked my back somehow while doing a bootcamp session that past Sunday. I made a goal of doing what was best for my body, and not pushing myself to work out as long as my back continued to hurt. And so until yesterday, when I did a yoga practice, I’d been about as sedentary as one can be while living in New York and relying on public transportation to get around.

My back is feeling better, but boy am I ever in a funk. I felt so good coming off that week of consistent running, and it sucked to get derailed by an injury. Exercising consistently has always been a key factor for me when it comes to keeping depression at bay, and not having the option to get my run (or anything else for that matter) on really bummed me out. Needless to say, I am really happy that my back is feeling better and that I can get back to running this week. Feeling this crummy (physically and emotionally) is just no good.

I’m even happier, though, that I didn’t end up with a more long-term injury. Hurting my back served as a major wake-up call, and was a reminder that for years I’ve been getting off easy in that I’ve really neglected doing any strength training, and ignored developing the muscle that could have prevented an injury like this one (or a more serious one) from side-lining me. I think that when you’re a runner, it’s easy to get a bit complacent, and figure that since you’re doing pretty solid cardio (and doing some decent work on your quads, calves, and hamstrings), you’re in good shape overall. Chances are that if I’d spent more time working my core and my glutes, I wouldn’t have had to take last week off at all. Let this be a lesson to us all!

So, time to hit the weights, right? I’ll still need to take it easy this week given that the last thing I want is to work my way back into another injury, but I’m aiming to incorporate some dedicated core work, and maybe a strength training session or two (this is at least something I will be working toward if I don’t end up fitting it in this week). I’m trying to find a strength program that I think will work for me, so if you have any suggestions for beginner programs, let me know! In the meantime, I want the week to go something like this:

Monday: rest

Tuesday: 4 miles/core

Wednesday: 4 miles

Thursday: yoga/core

Friday: rest

Saturday: 6-8 miles

Sunday: 4 miles/core

Pretty simple, nothing fancy. I’m aiming for about 15-20 miles, although more than anything I’ll be trying to keep tabs on how I’m feeling. Hopefully I’ll be able to do enough to get a bit of an endorphin kick–something to shake me out of the doldrums I’ve been in the past few days.

My goal is to do three core workouts, and to run at least three times. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that this will be an improvement over the past seven days!

Continue reading »]]> One of the benefits to being a member of the BlogHer publishing network is that you have the chance to do occasional book reviews, which can be pretty interesting. When I got an email from BlogHer in December about Why Women Need Fat, I thought it sounded like something that might be relevant to my blog content, and decided to opt in on doing a review. In the interest of full disclosure, I am receiving compensation for this post from BlogHer; however, the views and opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and entirely honest.

Image via Amazon.com

Why Women Need Fat: How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Excess Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing it Forever was published in December, 2011, and is written by a MD and a PhD. The fact that both authors are men makes me wonder why they refer to “us” in the subtitle of the book, and touches on one thing about the book that got under my skin as I was reading it: the focus is exclusively on women, and I’m not entirely sure why. A lot of the information the authors discuss, and the “surprising solution” they propose, is applicable to anyone. It’s true that there is an extensive amount of information on women as child-bearers, but I’m not honestly sure why the book couldn’t have been written for an audience of both men and women. The only thing I can really think of is that there’s greater sales potential in marketing a “weight loss” book (because even though this book kind of acts like it isn’t one, it really is) to women rather than having it appeal to both women and men.

All that said, the gender dynamics in this book were weird. Like I mentioned above, there is a huge focus on women needing to have a certain amount of fat (and a certain type) in order to bear healthy children who will develop large brains. The authors devote so much of the book to this discussion that as a woman who is choosing not to have children, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Obviously I am aware that the ability to bear children is unique to females (well, in most species, anyway), but in this book it felt at times that the message was that if you’re a woman who doesn’t want children, you’re not really a woman. I’m sure this wasn’t deliberate, but the authors’ emphasis on women’s weight and its relationship to child bearing made it seem as though women have few other roles to fill in life. As I read through this part of the book, I couldn’t help thinking about how weird it was, and how uncomfortable it made me. It was just so gendered.

The central idea in the book is that the American diet, with its heavy reliance on processed foods and vegetable oils (particularly corn and soybean oil, which are in nearly every processed or packaged food available in stores), is responsible for our excessive weight gain. Their theory is that the weight gain itself is due to the imbalance of Omega-6 fatty acids and Omega-3 fatty acids that arises from a diet high in vegetable oils; essentially, Omega-3s are good for us, and Omega-6s are bad. Vegetable oils contain huge amounts of Omega-6s, and the more Omega-6s we have, the less effective our Omega-3 fats become. In order to return to normal weights, we need to lower the amount of Omega-6 we consume, and increase the amount of Omega-3, in order to bring the two fatty acids into balance. This can be done by eating more whole foods–fruits, vegetables, nuts, grass-fed meats, and dairy products–and by limiting the amount of processed, packaged food in our diets. The evidence they provide to support their argument is compelling, and the section of the book in which they go over this information is really interesting.

Beyond that, however, a lot of the material in the book is really repetitive. I consider myself pretty well-informed when it comes to nutrition and the way our bodies process different sorts of foods, so it may be that someone who is less familiar with information of this nature will find a lot of the information in the book helpful. To me, though, the book could have been boiled down to a long article, with the crux being the information about Omega-3s and 6s, and a suggestion about how diets could be changed to achieve the necessary balance. Instead, this book is 304 pages long, and gets a bit boring because you feel like you’re reading the same thing over and over. Something said on one page will be said a page later, but slightly rephrased. After a while, it gets a bit tedious. In addition to that, it bothered me that a book that contains so much useful information, as well as a section on why dieting doesn’t work and why your body has a set point when it comes to weight, also had a lengthy section on how you can lose weight by adopting healthier eating habits. The main focus of this portion of the book was not on rapid weight loss, but on a healthy return to the body’s “normal”/set point weight, so at least there wasn’t as much of a “lose weight now! here’s the key to being thin forever! your life will be amazing if you just lose all that pesky fat!” as a lot of other diet books have. I wish, though, that there had been more of a message about focusing on health and feeling good, and less on losing weight. But I guess it’s weight loss that sells, not health and wellness.

In many ways, this book is just another bit of damning evidence against the corn and soybean industries. To a certain extent, the authors aren’t really saying anything new; Michael Pollan and documentaries like King Corn, or Food Inc. have been promoting a whole foods approach to eating for years now. But that’s fine, since we need as much information on how disgusting processed foods can be as we can get. Hopefully in another few years, the information in books like this one will be standard knowledge, and we’ll all be leading healthier lives as a result.

If you’re looking to learn more about the effects of processed foods on the body, or if you’re interested in the authors’ theory about Omega-3s and Omega-6s (which is interesting), then I’d recommend this book. If, on the other hand, you already know a lot about these issues, you could probably skip it without missing much.

To read what other BlogHer members are saying about Why Women Need Fat, go here.

Continue reading »]]> For those of you who don’t know, I left my job in publishing at the end of November for an opportunity that seemed like it would be exciting, challenging, and stimulating. It didn’t work out, and in mid-December, I decided the best thing for me to do would be resign and put all my efforts toward looking for a new job. So that’s what I did. Being unemployed has been hard. It’s tough on your self-esteem, it’s hard when you’re a person who craves structure (like I am), and you can only spend so much of each day emailing your resume around and trying to craft original cover letters. That’s why I decided to look into volunteer opportunities.

I found the Healthy Parents Fellowship through Idealist, and was drawn to it because of its emphasis on community and the idea that health education has to come from within. Its aim is to work closely with a small group of parents, and equip them with the resources they need to educate their communities about healthy lifestyle choices. There’s direct involvement, and one-on-one contact; this is something that a lot of health education programs don’t necessarily have a chance to implement.

This year will mark the launch of the Healthy Parents Fellowship, and along with Catarina Rivera (the visionary behind the program) and other volunteers, I’ll be part of the pilot program. It’s really exciting to have the opportunity to be involved with something with so much potential.

Right now, we’re trying to raise money to help fund the program. Our goal is to raise $2500, and we’re 30% of the way there. We need to meet our goal by February. As with all donation-based endeavors, every little bit counts, so if you have any change rattling around in your pockets (or, you know, bills that are taking up too much space in your wallet!), consider making a donation!

I plan to blog more about the experience of working with the Healthy Parents Fellowship as soon as we get the program started later this month. In the meantime, you can learn more about the program and make your donations here!