July 28, 2015 Mary8 Comments

What I’m loving right now

My Summer holidays are already four days in and right now I am loving…

…being able to mix and match my salads at lunch.

On Friday our new fridge freezer arrived and it has been amazing being able to have fresh fruit and dairy once more. I was getting fed up of daily visits to the shop for milk and there was one evening last week where all I really craved was a cheese salad sandwich but I had to make do with butterless toast instead. A poor substitute!

Salad items in the fridge I’ve been having my fill of fresh fruit and vegetables ever since.

…having the internet back!

You don’t realise just how much you rely on the internet until you don’t have it any more. For me it wasn’t just about entertainment (blogs/social media/netflix…) but also vital admin house things like transferring money or finding the phone number for our solicitor.

I’ve had the internet back for all of a couple of hours so far and have already caught up with so much during that time. My recent daily ritual has been to either fill my laptop bag with all my fully-charged electronic devices and take the fifteen minute walk to McDonalds, where I would sit in the corner of the restaurant and nurse a milkshake until my laptop battery ran out. Or I would sit out on the grass a little way in front of our row of houses where there was a BT WiFi hotspot. (Not preferable when wet though!)

A friend sent me this earlier today and this was totally me last week! Haha!

…being able to run during the day and not having to schedule my run in at a precise time when our (now joint) car was free and when I wasn’t rushing off elsewhere. I ran Thursday at club as I normally would have done in the evening, but on Friday it was during the middle of the morning and again yesterday. There’s something nice about not having to rush out to get somewhere for a certain time and not being on a time limit for when you must return.

…having a project to work towards.

As I mentioned the other day, most of the rooms in our house are either bright red, yellow or orange. Some are even a mixture of all three colours! Red, orange and yellow are not really the colours we would have chosen for our house and it could really do with a freshen up – lots of the layout of the house needs adapting, both the kitchen and bathroom will need redoing completely and we have a long-term plan to extend into the garage as well. Upstairs in the bedrooms the main issue is simply the colours or peeling wallpaper, so we are tackling this first of all and whenever I’ve had a spare half hour (or seven!) this week I’ve been stripping wallpaper or pulling away dado rails.

Of the four bedrooms one of them now has the majority of the wallpaper removed and another has had a first coat of paint applied. We’re getting there slowly but I like that again there is no rush but that I can complete it a little bit at a time.

…snuggles with my Bella cat.

Bella has been super snuggly since we moved and I only have to sit or lay down for a second and she has jumped up onto my lap or my back for a cuddle.

…she’s pretty cute though!

…cake!

My Mother-in-law made Dan and I a cake for our upcoming anniversary which she brought round on Sunday afternoon and I’ve enjoyed a little slice each day since!

What are you loving lately?
Is your house filled with bright colours or have you stuck to more neutral tones?

July 28, 2015 Mary8 Comments

July 27, 2015 Mary8 Comments

Running talk

On Saturday morning I headed to Northampton parkrun. The evening before I had been in two minds to mix things up and try out a new parkrun course but the free WiFi hotspot outside our house wasn’t playing ball and so without directions I thought it probably best to stick to what I knew!

I wasn’t sure how to pace the parkrun. Standing on the start line a few minutes before it was due to begin I was still debating just what to do. Should I run a really easy pace and cruise round to the finish?…Should I run at a steady pace?…Or should I pace to heart rate as I would if I was aiming for a PB? With Grim 70 this coming Friday I really didn’t know what to do for the best, and then I glanced up to see my friend from work had placed herself just in front of me on the start line so I offered to run with her instead. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to make all the decisions yourself! 😛

Lindsay hadn’t run for a few weeks and just wanted someone to keep her going round so we set off at a steady 10:30mm-ish pace. I could comfortably chat away yet encourage Lindsay round the course.

I’m not quite so sure Lindsay saw it as very encouraging though, or comfortable! I let her have two walk breaks but made her run the rest of the way! Running with Lindsay at Northampton parkrun We made it to the finish line in 34:15. I was in 268th position and 93rd lady over the line.She must have a little trust in me though as she has asked me to come up with a plan for her to help her to get to the 10k distance. Her only prerequisite was that the plan didn’t involve skipping! I’ve stressed to her that I’m not qualified to put anything together, but have come up with a rough guideline for her which includes 3 main running sessions each week. One incorporating some hills, one slow and easy run building up to the distance and one parkrun each week to be run as a tempo run. On the other days I’ve added in walks, core work, swimming and workout DVDs to try and build her strength up to cover longer distances. I quite enjoyed coming up with a plan for somebody else actually.

The weather was lovely on Saturday morning – nice and cool. It was similar on Sunday morning when I left the house at 7:45am to go and marshal at our club race; the Welly 5. However it didn’t stay that way and all marshals and runners ended up absolutely soaked and shivering by the end of the race!

By the end of the morning I was sporting three t-shirts on top of each other underneath a jacket – trying to keep warm and dry! The Wellingborough 5 t-shirt I received for marshaling was nice though – I headed out for a run in it this morning and the medium fit perfectly.

(Excuse the headless pic! I find photographing myself impossible with my phone!)

For the race on Sunday I was out marshaling on the front road with two other runners from our club. Our job was forever changing; Firstly, we stopped cars turning into the Old Grammarians (OGs) HQ itself – pointing drivers to the car park on the other side of the road instead. Then we held back runners until the road was shut for the race start. This was followed by manning the edges of the road and ensuring no excited spectators got in the way of the runners, and then lastly we turned to face the other direction ready for runners to head back towards the OGs so that we could steer them in the right direction. This is my usual marshaling spot and has been for the past two years, although there are usually just two of us. I used the extra marshal to my advantage though and this year I took photos of both the race start and also runners heading to the finish line – with the aim of photographing everyone out on the course. Our local parkrun has recently had a photographer at the runs most weeks and it’s been really nice to look through the photographs afterwards. (Usually anyway. There are some questionable faces I’m pulling in some of my photographs!) Turns out another runner from the club, Gary, had the same idea and so there were lots and lots of pictures from the race all over social media yesterday afternoon.

This guy is the eventual winner of the race. This is 1/3 mile past the start line and you can see the massive lead he already has on the rest of the field! He went on to win in 24:43 – more than two minutes ahead of the guy in second place, and running sub 5minute miles for the whole race. Mental.

After the race I had a long chat with a couple of the guys also running Grim on Friday. There will be three from our club running the 40 mile distance and three of us running the 70 miles. I am the only one who has run the 70 before, and Kev, who pulled at mile 40 last year has decided to run the 40 with his wife as preparation for his 100 mile race the following weekend. Seriously amazing! Between us we made a collective decision to take much more than we will need as it’s better to have too much than not enough. Gary’s family will be popping in during the day to see how we are getting on and Dan will stop by after work. I’m sure that either will pick up anything that any of us feel we need by this point and bring along. Last year Dan received a desperate phone call begging for chocolate milk and oranges which he delivered to me at the 40 mile point! It was great chatting about the upcoming race though and it got me all excited for what is to come later in the week.

I arrived home from the race (soaking wet!) to my parents-in-law who had stopped by to drop in a bed for our spare room and to look round our new house. They had made us an early anniversary cake and also brought Bella a present of a gift bag filled with four different packs of Dreamies. Bella could not get her head in that bag quick enough!

We gave her a few and then Dan put the bags up high in the kitchen. Apparently not high enough though as Bella managed to scramble up and get one of the bags onto the floor overnight. This morning Dan came up to show me the Dreamies treat bag that he had found on the floor ripped to shreds. Bella by this point had let herself into the bathroom and was licking the tap in the bath. Dan thought she might well be feeling quite high from so many Dreamies in such a short space of time! Luckily there have been no ill effects and she is currently curled up on my lap as I type this but the remaining three bags of treats have been hidden away out of sight. It’s like having a naughty child in the house!

How do you manage to take pictures of yourself for your blog?! Someone please teach me!
Do your animals go crazy for treats? Bella will do anything for a handful of Dreamies!
Do you tend to overpack for races?

July 27, 2015 Mary8 Comments

July 23, 2015March 21, 2019 Mary6 Comments

Plans for the Summer

My Summer holiday began today and it did not come soon enough! I have been on count down for the last fortnight at school, just waiting for the end of term!

Every year since my first as a teacher I have filled my Summer holidays with fun things. Six weeks sounds like a really long time but most years there aren’t many days where I don’t have something planned out to do or somebody to see.

Last Summer was spent preparing for my wedding and then jetting off on honeymoon. I can’t believe that in a fortnight Dan and I will be celebrating our first wedding anniversary! This year really has gone so quickly.

For our anniversary, Dan and I are spending a night away in Stafford – our uni town and where we first met. We’re hoping to head to some of the bars where we headed on our first dates and visit some of the places that we did all those years ago back in 2007 when we first got together. We’re only going for one evening – partly to save money and partly because we don’t want to leave Bella in the new house for too long, even if someone was to come round and check on her.
I am sure that she will love it here when she has fully settled, – we would not have made the decision to move if we thought that she wouldn’t like it. On advice from others we have decided to keep her in for the best part of a month before letting her outside to explore and I don’t want to unsettle her further by us spending several days away. She has begun to settle already and although she hasn’t cried to go outside, she enjoys spending her time on the windowsills…

…and exploring underneath the back of the kitchen units…

…hopefully soon to be stripped out!

A lot of my Summer will be spent working on the house, mainly over the next few weeks. I’ve packed away DVDs, books and ornaments into boxes in the garage for the time being so that I can really get stuck into wallpaper peeling and paint stripping this week, without a multitude of boxes in the way. It is so lovely to sit down and be able to type this blog post on my laptop at the dining room table with lots of space around me in the room.

Bella has enjoyed me being at home today and has joined me in the dining room this afternoon as the sun came through the window. I can see this becoming a regular thing over the holiday!

Next Friday is the Grim Reaper 70 mile ultramarathon. I ran the event last year, although a lot more people attended than are looking to do so this year. Runners received race day details via email earlier in the week and it appears that just 28 runners have entered, with only 8 of those being female entrants. A couple of friends at club have asked me just lately if I am ready for the event. I think I am. I’m not nervous. Although my mileage has been nowhere near as high as it was at this point last year, I have been running strong just lately, and knowing that I have completed the event before is a big mental boost as well. I feel much more experienced when it comes to knowing how to tackle longer distance events this time round. And, if it all goes to pot on race day I won’t beat myself up. I know that I am capable of the distance and have proven so before. I’ve had a good season so far this year, ticking off a few PBs and I would like to see if I can achieve another over 70 miles. But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.

Something else I can’t wait for is being able to get back in the kitchen. Our old kitchen was really tiny, so it’s been lovely having a large kitchen to prance around in over the past few days.

It needs a complete re-model though as things just haven’t been thought about very practically at all.

This set of drawers behind the door really annoys me. Not only has it not been laid flush to the wall (as it was too long) but the glass door between the dining room and kitchen is free to bang against the cupboard knob handles – potentially smashing them if too much force is applied! You have to first shut the door to the dining room fully before you can open the kitchen cupboard door to see what is inside.

Unfortunately, as the most expensive item on our to-do-list I don’t think the kitchen will be completed over the Summer holidays, but at least I will be able to start cooking again. It was getting rather old living off of Co-op snacks and leftovers. I’ve got lots of Pinterest recipes I want to try out!

I would also like to spend more time on the blog over the Summer. The design has been bugging me for ages and there are so many little mistakes that need tweaking. It really annoys me every time I visit AHM but I just haven’t had the time to be able to sit there and fiddle with the design until I have it looking the way I want. We still don’t have the internet at home at the moment (currently looking like it will be next Tuesday now before we do have it) but the large grassy area along our road and just infront of our house falls in a BT WiFi hotspot which I discovered last night, so I can at least write and read blogs on my tablet again now. It’s probably a good job that our house isn’t 50m further over, as otherwise I would be distracted by the internet when I’ve actually still got quite a lot to do, but it is nice that I can access it now if I need to. I took my laptop out earlier to bring up my ‘new post’ page before returning indoors to write this post and then I shall head back outside to publish it. I don’t fancy sitting outside on my laptop squinting in the sun for an hour!

What plans do you have for over the Summer?

July 23, 2015March 21, 2019 Mary6 Comments

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014 Mary10 Comments

Coaching and delicious food

On Sunday as soon as I returned from A&E I was looking at local running coaches in our area. I want to be improving and getting quicker and that’s something I’ve not really seen this year. I believe that my head power has improved (counting to 100 over and over again for 5 hours at Mablethorpe!) but I haven’t necessarily gotten any quicker and if I do at some point in the future want to run a 100miler (yes, I just said that!) I know I need to improve my speed so that I’m not pulled at mile 93 for being too slow. (How awful would that be?!) I have no interest at ‘racing’ any distance below half marathons but getting speedier should help my marathon training/ultra times in the long run. Or at least, that is the idea.

A few hours later though and I was checking our club Facebook page only to see that we were getting a new coach, one who was going to implement some training specifically towards a 10k. This had me very excited as Group 5 and 6 at our club have traditionally been for more ‘fun runners’ whereas the higher groups have always had more targeted training. A lot of the runners in the bottom two groups run more for the social side and to keep fit, they aren’t fussed about improving too much. But that is not the case for everybody and I have been desperate to work my way back up to Group 4 again. I have been moved up to it twice. The first time was just before Milton Keynes marathon in 2012, and again just before Milton Keynes marathon in 2013, but recovery from both marathons meant my speeds were not as quick as they could have been and I’ve ended up moving myself down each time again.

We’ve been told that the 10k can be extended into half marathon training sessions, which ultimately I would like to extend into my spring marathon training.

I also received a call from Joe of #ukrunchat last night. Way back in July I won some coaching from #ukrunchat on Twitter. Because my wedding was quickly approaching and I was concentrating on preparing for the Grim Reaper 70mile race at the start of August, we put off the training until after I returned from honeymoon. One thing followed another and with us both being quite busy it wasn’t until last night that we finally got round to speaking properly and starting to set targets for the coming months. I’m really excited about this.

I probably wouldn’t have gone running last night had I not been keen to find out more about the training changes. We only ran about 4.5 miles as we spent the first 15 minutes discussing the next couple of months of training but my upper legs were still a little tight from Saturday night. We climbed a serious amount of elevation that night!

To walk I was a little jolty but to run my legs just slipped into a rhythm and even though I tried to hold myself back a lot I still found myself running sections at 9mm. I was just enjoying it! I shall have another rest day today though as we’re off to see our niece in Wolves who turns one next week. Tomorrow night, provided I make it back in time our club are holding a spooky Halloween run at our local park followed by pumpkin soup and hot chocolate so that will be a nice easy fun run and then I shall probably take Friday off as well. Although it is my birthday and I would quite like a birthday run…

Yesterday was so lovely and sunny for the end of October. I left Bella flat out on the lounge floor, every half hour or so moving herself a little bit further round and headed out for lunch with my friend Jenny.

It was so nice and sunny we decided to sit outside at the Woodford Mill Tearooms.

I hadn’t seen Jenny since the wedding so we had lots to catch up on which meant that it took me forever to eat my chicken caesar wrap with chips.

And when she suggested cake for dessert I knew I’d struggle. Stupidly I went for possibly the most sickly and filling cake there is…red velvet cake!

I’d never had red velvet cake before, despite ogling at plenty of pictures on Instagram. It was alright, but so incredibly sickly. I was glad I’d gone for a glass of water to accompany it rather than my first thought of a hot chocolate. That would have been just a little too sweet for my liking!

Other than the cake I’ve been eating some delicious meals at home just recently. I’ve been loving omelettes for lunchtime. This one was red pepper and mushroom, although it’s more of an omelette hash, as I lost the bulk of the omelette just at the turning moment. Doh!

And I really fancied pasta the other night (this never happens – I’m really not a pasta fan) so I made up a tomato sauce to add to some pasta, topped with some cheese for protein and produced a kind of pizzabread/flatbread on the side which I topped with garlic. Delicious!

Bella was a pain after club last night. (But a sweet one!) She has been very lovey just lately and wants to spend all her time with me. This includes sitting on my laptop and basically making herself as in the way as possible.

After club last night I leapt in the shower and was pretty tired so thought I would catch up on Twitter from bed. Bella had other plans, choosing to sit on my laptop on my legs. Two minutes later and the screen was the wrong way round! Dan picked her off for me but everything was now sideways!

Luckily, as an ICT teacher having worked four years in a state school you know the little keyboard shortcuts such as how to turn a screen on the side (how is this ever useful?!) as kids are forever leaving their computer screens this way to be annoying for the next class.

What should I dress as for the Halloween run?
Do you run/work out on your birthday?
Is your cat a ‘laptop cat’?!

October 29, 2014October 29, 2014 Mary10 Comments