My First 5K

 I started preparing for a 5K in early May 2014. This was about my 3rd attempt. After I had Alice I “decided” I would go on daily runs and train for a 2K, start small. I had the race picked out and started running. It lasted about a week. My next 2 attempts lasted about 2 weeks and then I got pregnant again and used that as my excuse not to run.

May was different. This time I planned ahead. I gave myself 8 weeks to complete the Couch to 5K (C25K) app on my phone. I started running outside when it was nice at sunset and became addicted to the gorgeous views I was given while I ran. Then came the rain and I could’ve given up but I had already told so many people that I was going to run the Run or Dye 5K on July 5th that I was fully committed so I began running on the treadmill during naptime.

When I started out I was winded after the 5 minute “brisk warmup walk”. Yup, just 5 minutes of walking was all it took to tire me out but I was determined to run this 5K and reach my goal so I put mind over matter and pushed as hard as I could. When I got tired I would tell myself “run for one more minute” and after that minute I would say “you can push harder than that, how will you run ever run for 5K if you can’t even run 5 minutes, DO THIS!”. And every time my hands touched the treadmill Jillian Michaels (the one in my head anyways) would yell “GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY TREADMILL!!” I pushed myself during my training harder than I ever have and a week before the race I was running 3K straight in 25 minutes according to my treadmill.

Morning of race day!

When race day came around I was so nervous because I had never actually ran for 5 kilometers. Let’s face it 3K on a treadmill is a lot different than 5K outdoors on uneven terrain. So I set my goal time for 40-45 minutes. We waited for a long time out in the hot sun while they cleared the path of some obstacle or another and then even longer while they let waves of 100 people at a time leave the starting gate.

Feeling like I'm in a herd of cattle being round up...

Sidenote: I chose an untimed, low pressure race (Run or Dye) as my first race because I didn’t want to feel like I was being left in the dust by the other runners but ended up being slightly disappointed by my choice. At this point I discovered this “race” was more like a stroll in the park than an actual 5K. 99.9% of the group came out of the gate walking and then we slowed down from a walking pace to go through the colour zone. It was like walking behind a line of seniors with walkers blocking a mall hallway. I was trying my best to get around people but not succeeding.

After the first colour zone the group loosened up a bit and with some weaving from side to side and dodging trees beside the path I was able to get around the bulk of the group. It was about this time that I realized I should have chosen a more competitive race. I was flying past people and almost tripping over some as they walked into my path. Soon I gave up on running on the path and instead ran on the street or grass beside it. My confidence was building as I spotted other runners, some people were actually running this race after all, then caught up to them and passed them. It felt so great not to be the one that gave up at the start and decided to walk the whole thing. The old me would have either a) not shown up at all or b) started with the intention to run and then walked as soon as I saw everyone else walking.

I pushed harder than I ever have and only walked through the 5 colour zones. When I reached the end I couldn’t believe it was actually over. My adrenaline was pumping so hard that I felt as though I could do another 5 kilometres! I am so proud of myself for pushing through the pain of training and putting mind over matter to reach my goal of running a 5K. Not only that but I beat my goal time of 40-45 minutes with a time of 31 MINUTES!! 

Woohoo!

I may have conquered my goal of running a 5K but I’m not stopping there. My ultimate goal is to run a marathon. The next steps in my journey are to run a 10K in spring of 2015 and run the half-marathon (yup, 21K) in the Queen City Marathon in September of 2015. I can’t wait to share these experiences with you when I get there!!

All coloured up!

Alice was a bit bored by the end...

Pizza!

Sunday is pizza night in our house. It has been for awhile but has undergone some changes throughout the year. We started with take out pizza when we lived in town. It was a great way to end the busy weekend (I didn’t’ have to cook!) but left us all with that bloaty, greasy feeling. Ick! So we moved on and I started making homemade pizza. I had a recipe from my mother-in-law for your basic yeast crust and my hubby wouldn’t let me do anything different. I mean what’s better than mom’s cooking right? It was a good crust but doughy and I am not a fan of doughy. So a few months ago I decided to try my hand at a thin crust pizza. I tried out a few recipes that still involved yeast until I found this beauty!

This recipe is seriously so simple you will doubt that it can be called pizza crust… here it is:

- 2 Cups flour

- 2 Tbsps. Vegetable oil

- ½ Tsp. sea salt

- 2/3 Cup warm water

That’s it! Just throw it all in a bowl, mix, knead, do whatever you have to do to make it look like pizza dough (sometimes I add a bit more water to get all the crummies off the bottom of the bowl) and voila! No waiting, no rising, just pizza!

Roll it out so it looks like this 

HELPFUL HINT: I like to put parchment paper on my baking sheet because it makes cleanup easy and I can slide the pizza onto my cutting board and not ruin my baking sheet!

Top with whatever sounds good to you. I used salami, mushrooms, red pepper, onion, and of course a heaping amount of cheese! 

Bake at 450F for 15 minutes.

This is by far the simplest, crunchiest, tastiest, healthiest, and quickest pizza crust I have ever made! ENJOY!

21 Day Fix Review

As I’m sure you’ve gathered from this blog, I’m a Beachbody coach. (If you haven’t gathered this then you really need to explore around the blog a bit more… go on… this post can wait…) So naturally you would think that I would be promoting every single Beachbody product as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. This is not that kind of a post.

For the past three weeks I’ve been following the 21 Day Fix program. Here’s a quick overview: The 21 Day Fix is a program created by fitness trainer and bikini model Autumn Calbrese. It combines an easily laid out nutrition plan with 7 separate 30 minute workouts. You calculate your caloric intake, use the colour coded containers to ensure you are eating the proper amount of food for each food group, consume 1 Shakeology per day, and complete one 30 minute workout per day. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Here’s what I love about this program:

1. Weights - Autumn incorporated weights and tailored the timing to suit a weight lifting workout. When lifting weights you want to do reps with rests in between to rest the muscles. The timing and alternating of the exercises was perfect. I felt as though I would just reach the point of failure and then we would either rest or move onto the next muscle group.

2. Time – The amount of time that I needed to dedicate to getting results with this program was incredibly small. I could get my workout in before my kids woke up and once I set which containers I was going to use for which meals/snacks I just filled them and ate.

3. Portions – Something I’ve always struggled with is stopping myself from eating once I’m full. I find that if the food is especially tasty I will just keep eating even though I know I should stop. By filling the containers and not going back for seconds I was able to only eat my fill.

4. Results – Before the fix I was stuck at a plateau for one whole month! I had already reached my goal weight but had set a goal to lose 1.5” more off my hips… and I DID! Over just 3 weeks I lost 4 Lbs, gained 0.25” of muscle on each arm, lost 1” off my waist, lost 1.5” off my hips, and lost 0.5” off each thigh. IN 3 WEEKS!

And the part you didn’t see coming, what I didn’t love about this program:

1. Results – I lost more weight than I wanted to. Right now you’re all thinking: “hah! Lucky!” But in all seriousness… doing this program put me at a BMI of 17.6 (normal range is 18.5 – 24.9). This meant I was underweight. I kept expecting it to start going up because of muscle weight gain but it never did. In my last week I moved up to the next calorie range so I wasn’t operating at a deficit and I ended up losing 3Lbs that week. The nutrition plan is great for losing weight but just ensure you are aiming for a healthy weight and not losing more than you should.

2. Simple Meals – The containers are great for people who are looking to keep meals incredibly simple. They do, however, make it very difficult to cook fun and fancy meals. Some of my favourite dishes to make combine several ingredients and I don’t usually measure anything. If you like to cook extravagantly then you may find this to be challenging to follow. But it is only 3 weeks long…

3. Family Cooking – I don’t just cook for myself. I also cook for my husband and my toddler at the same time. I’m not a restaurant so I don’t cook each person their own single serve meal. The fix is definitely made for someone who is going to be making their meal and their meal only. Just try making a batch of chili and then tell me how many red, green, and yellow containers it is! There is a cheat sheet that has a few “homemade meals” listed in it and shows how many containers to count for each but I found that my “recipes” were nowhere close to what they were counting so I just guesstimated a lot.

4. 7 Days a Week – This is just me being picky but having just finished T25 which has 5 workout days on and then weekends off I was a bit bummed that I would have to give up my weekends off. But I did it and it wasn’t that bad, especially since Sunday was yoga which is practically a day off.

Well, there you have my two cents on the 21 Day Fix. Overall, it was a decent program. The results I got were 90% of what I wanted to get and buckling down for 3 weeks was not so bad. I gained a lot of knowledge about portions doing the program and have since left the containers in the dust but I do monitor how much of each food group I’m eating in a day. One other thing I’ve been tracking is how I feel. Doing the fix and using Shakeology has made me less bloated and not feeling sluggish like I normally did. On my week off I am making note of the foods that make me feel “icky” so I can cut back on them and feel good all the time!

If you would like more information on my experience with the 21 Day Fix just comment below or send me an email! If you are ready to commit to this program or any other Beachbody program, click here.

Tori Aspinall

February 18th, 2014 to July 12th, 2014

Berry Oatmeal Snack

There is nothing better than a warm, healthy, and yummy snack.  Here's a super simple one:

-Put about a cup (or 1 purple container) of mixed berries (I used raspberries and blueberries) in a bowl
-sprinkle with cinnamon
-top with 1/4 cup of oatmeal (1/2 of a yellow container) and 1 tsp of pure maple syrup
-add just under 1/2 cup of water
-microwave for 1 min, stir, cook 1 more minute
-ENJOY!

Turkey Stuffed Peppers

First of all I would like to say I am no expert in the kitchen! In fact I am the furthest from it and the majority of stuff that I attempt does not turn out even close to how I would expect it to.  Secondly, this was my first time attempting stuffed peppers and I did not follow a recipe or measure out my ingredients.  I am that "cook" that just throws things together and hope it tastes good... or smells good since I rarely taste my food until I actually sit (well stand and feed the baby) and eat... anyways onto the "recipe".

I knew that I wanted to stuff my pepper with some ground turkey but really you could use any type of ground meat.  Since I'm doing the 21 Day Fix I will be using the colour coded containers as a measuring system.  So I browned my meat and then measured out two red (protein) containers worth of it and stored the rest in the fridge.  I figured one whole pepper to be about one green container's worth of veg so I filled an additional green container with odds and ends like mushrooms, onions, and some diced tomatoes in their juice but you could really add whatever fix approved veggies you want.  Just toss the veg and some seasoning (garlic powder, chili powder, and cayenne) into a pan and cook it down.  You want a bit of the tomato juice so it doesn't get all burnt and crispy but not so much that it looks like hamburger soup like mine did... but if you happen to have too much juiciness going on just strain it out and keep on going!

Then I cleaned out my pepper while the meat was cooling.  It's easiest to not overthink this and just cut the top out and use a spoon to scrap out the seeds.  And don't forget to wash your pepper of course!  Next line a baking sheet with some tinfoil (easy cleanup!) and put your pepper on it ready for stuffing!  I just used my hands to stuff as much meat as I could into the thing and, even though it was slightly overflowing, I managed to get all the meat into it.  Top it with a blue container of your chosen cheese (I picked Feta) and cook at 350F for about 45 minutes or until the smell is tantalizing you, the peppers look wrinkly, and the cheese is all melty and delicious looking!  

My hubby and I learnt the hard way that this dish is not a "clean eat" so be prepared to get a little messy! You may want to opt for a bowl over a plate... just sayin'...

Conquering My Fear of Bottomless Water

You know that story that your swimming teacher told you about the monster that lives in the deep end of the pool that eats kids who are unsupervised… no? Well maybe my swimming teacher was slightly evil, but that’s what I remember from my swimming lessons. Needless to say I’ve developed a slight fear of deep water. It’s not because I can’t swim, I can doggy paddle with the best of them and win any water treading competition! It’s just the fear of something coming up from underneath and pulling me under. So when a friend of mine and her husband started their own stand up paddle boarding business my first thought was “I wonder if they will have lessons in a pool?”. No such luck. The lessons were going to be held on murky Wascana lake. Bleh! I was out, there was no way they would get me to go in that water!

Then I received a private invite for some of their close friends to come out to a “Try SUP/SUP Yoga” night for FREE. I had just started coaching with Beachbody at this time and had made a commitment to myself to start trying new things. I kinda locked myself into this before I even knew it. So I went. It was a Tuesday night. I was completely prepared to go for a swim. I wore tight clothes that wouldn’t hold too much water, pulled my hair back, put towels in the car. I was ready to fall.

We started with a dry land session of how to get on the board and then how to stand on the board if we felt we could handle it. My friends husband, Chris, saw the look of fear on my face as we prepared for the water and casually told me to “relax the worst that can happen is you fall in”. Yup, that’s what I’m afraid of thanks! And then we hit the water. The first part wasn’t that bad, I could handle 3 feet of water while paddling on my knees no problem! Soon everyone was starting to stand up on their boards and, being the new competitive me, I had to go for it. After about 10 minutes of tensing my legs, shaking, and grimacing, I finally started to relax and even to take longer strides with the paddle. Telling myself the water was only 2 feet deep (it wasn’t) was actually tricking my body into calming down and I started to enjoy my surroundings. It was a beautiful, calm evening around 7:30pm and the sun was just setting over the legislative building. It was gorgeous!

SUP Yoga with Kristal

After some practice we all headed over to a little cove for some SUP Yoga with Kristal. It took a considerable amount of core muscles (thanks T25!) to stay on the board while doing some of the poses but the view was spectacular. I was able to spend the peaceful moments drawing closer to the Lord and focusing my mind on communicating with him and his will for me. I don’t have much “down time” in my life being a busy wife/mom and this was truly a blessing. Some of the group headed back to the shore to wrap up for the night but I actually found that I was enjoy paddling so much that I went around the lake with a part of the group just because! 

Love the challenge of yoga on a board!

I am so glad that stand up paddle boarding was the first fear that I conquered because my success and enjoyment of this activity has shown me that maybe I’ve changed from my past self. Fears can be overcome and activities that I never thought I would enjoy can become some of my most favourite things to do.

This experience has given me the courage to try so many more new things. Including things that I’ve written off because of fear. Some things to look forward to in the future… long distance running, repelling down buildings, skiing, and many many more!

If you live in the Regina, SK area and are interested in learning to SUP (Stand Up Paddleboard), taking a SUP yoga class, or renting a board then give Chris and Kristal a shout at The Queen City SUP Shop http://www.queencitysup.com/