In which, Bonster returns for the bagillionth time, and is a couch potato.

Hello friends, it's been almost a year since I blogged on here and a lot has happened. Life-choices/goals wise it's been pretty great, I graduated from college, passed the NCLEX, got my nursing license, and got my first job as a real-life nurse. Exercise-wise, it's been not so great. I've been pretty sporadic, I went to the gym occasionally and tried to eat healthy, but with everything that was going on fitness sort of got shifted to the back seat.
But, since I don't believe in quitting and I really want to be able to run and enjoy it, I'm going to start over. This time around I'm going to have an actual plan instead of just doing whatever I feel like. My goal is to run a half marathon in a year from now. Sooner if I can but I'm not going to kill myself over it.
To start, I invested in good running shoes. Up till now I've never had good shoes and I end up just going for what's cheap and seems to fit. The problem is I have weird feet. They are wide and hard to fit, and my arches are super flat, which can cause all sorts of pains when I run without supportive shoes. The problem is I HATE supportive shoes. I don't like that bump in the middle that makes my foot arch like it's supposed to. After a lifetime of walking around with the inside of my foot flat on the ground, it feels weird to lift it up. Except if I don't have arch support this happens:

And that's not good.. Thus, instead of guessing what kind of shoes I needed I went to the Road Runner sports store with my friend where they measured my feet and took a video of me running to see what happens when I run. Then they made personalized recommendations based on my feet. Apparently I should be wearing a size 10.5 D stability shoe. Which obviously never occurred to me to try because I'm not entirely sure what that means. So they brought me some shoes to try out and I ended up with these:

Brooks Aderenaline GTS 14.

They fit just right, and they are pretty dang comfy. The only problem is they have arch support so I don't particularly like how they feel but since that's what I needed it works for me. I haven't gone on a real run with them, I just jogged around with them after I bought them, but so far they seem to be working out pretty great. I'll probably talk more about them once I've run a few miles in them.

So after I got shoes I needed a plan. I decided to do what my sister is doing and start with a couch-to-5K plan. Once I can comfortably run three miles (which according to the plan will take about 10 weeks), then I will find a good half-marathon training program and have at it. 

I decided to do this because historically when I start running I push myself too hard too fast and end up getting really sore, taking a break for a few days, and then those few days turn into months. So this time I'm going to pace myself and start at the beginning and work my way up gradually. To start I mostly just want to get in the habit of running at least 3 days a week. 

The plan I will be following can be found here. It starts with three short runs per week and builds up to four longer ones by the end. It seems pretty doable :) 

So that's the plan, hopefully a year from now I will be running circles around my current self!

In which Bonster returns and joins a gym

Hey everyone, I'm back!!
I know you all missed me right? Okay probably not. But I got sick of not working out and blogging helps me keep on task so here I am :) It's been four months since last I blogged, and it's pretty much been four months since I worked out (I know...awful right?). Well, that's not entirely true, I went for a little jog or took my dog for short walks here and there, but nothing too regular or strenuous. I just got so immersed in schoolwork that the time was flying by and I lost track of my fitness goals. BUT, worry not, I haven't given up. On the day after Thanksgiving my brother told me that the gym he goes to was having a great deal, so I joined!! I have only ever been to a gym once in my life and I just did the cycle with my friend so we could watch the CMAs (which was super fun) but I was still a little scared to join the gym. But I decided to do it anyways, and so far I love it!! It's great because when I'm at home and I try to work out I always know that right in the next room there's a fridge full of food, and right upstairs is my lovely bed. The gym, however, is full of equipment and people working out and no food or beds or temptations to quit. It's so much easier to be in the work-out zone when I'm there, especially when I work out with my brother! He usually works out for an hour or two pretty much every day, so when I go with him I definitely have to pace myself and not go too hard to quickly. Or if I'm feeling lazy I just take a separate car so I can leave after 30-45 minutes. Either way I kinda feel super awesome when I go. Granted pretty much everybody at the gym is running laps around me, but if I stick with it then six months from now I'll be right up there with them!
So far I've only worked out there three times (but I only joined last Friday so it's acceptable :). The first time I did an hour with my brother, we started with the Elliptical. We went 20 minutes and I thought, hey this was a nice work out, my heart rate is up, I'm sweating, looks like I can go home right? Wrong! Apparently it was just a warm up. So then we spent 20 minutes stretching, and then we lifted weights and did lunges and those platform-stepper things and I finished on the bike while he ran on the treadmill. Then I had a really hard time walking up the stairs for the next two days. Then we went again on Tuesday night, and did pretty much the same things but with a little less stretching and a little more lifting, and he worked out for about an hour longer than I did. Then today we went again and he tried to teach me how to play racquetball, which I pretty much fail at, but it was still fun and a great work out! My face hasn't been this red in a long time!!
So that's about it, I'm pretty stoked to belong to a gym and I'm ready to get back on the working-out bandwagon. Also, in honor of my new gym membership, I bought work out pants. From Wal-Mart. For 9 bucks. And I LOVE THEM. They are so light and comfy :) I think I will wear them every day from now on.
That is all. :)

On Being Home, Family, and Push-Ups :)

Hey guess what? I'm back!! I spent an awesome month in Idaho with my brother and his family and even though it was super amazing and I'm going to miss them all terribly, I was pretty happy to be home. I missed my family and friends like crazy!! And now I have about a month left of Summer vacation before I start my senior year in college!! So crazy. Anywho, I will spend a lot of this month working and saving up money for school, but I also want to spend it working hard to get in shape and improve my running! Which brings me to some awesomeness:
1. Remember the healthy-habits competition in my last post? (If not, see last post :). Well we didn't end up tabulating points or anything, but I'm pretty sure if we did my sister-in-law would have beat me by a long-shot :) But it did give me the incentive to watch what I ate and stay active while I was up there, and I actually ended up losing a couple pounds which was a cool bonus. We were keeping track of points for the first couple weeks but then things got a little crazy with the new baby and all that jazz so we sorta slacked off on that. But we all decided that we would try again in August, even though I'll be back home. I'm not sure if they're actually planning on doing it, but I'm going to try and do it on my own in any case :)
2. So apparently whilst I was gone, the rest of my family decided it would be cool to be healthy too, so when I got home everyone was in health mode! My mom and some of my brothers have been working hard to eat healthy and exercise and have been losing weight and getting fit! Another of my brothers who lives out-of-state has been working on getting in shape with his wife and they have both been doing awesome! She has been running and he has been taking a Krav Maga class (Israeli self-defense, so awesome!). He was already a black-belt in Tae-Kwon-Do, so now he knows about a bagillion ways to kick butt :). So it's pretty awesome that everyone in my family wants to be healthy because it makes it so much easier to stay on track when everyone else is working towards the same goals!
3. I did 50 push-ups this morning!! The aforementioned brother who kicks butt is visiting with his family, and this morning he asked me if I wanted to do sit-ups and push-ups for an hour. At first I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't, so I thought, aw heck why not? (It should be noted that currently my muscles are screaming a very good reason why not, but I didn't think of that till later). So we turned on a Harry Potter movie and warmed up with 20 Hindu squats, and then alternated sets of 10 sit-ups and 10 push-ups. I decided to do knee push-ups (otherwise known as the "girly" kind, but hey, I'm a girl :), but he did the real kind. I didn't keep track of how many sit-ups I did, but it was somewhere in the 50-60 range, and then my push-ups total was 50. I was pretty impressed with myself because I have zero upper body strength, but as you would expect my brother creamed me and did 100 push-ups. Because he is crazy awesome like that. After we finished I felt like Jell-o, but he felt like it was time to lift weights and have a boxing lesson. Both of which we did. So now I feel like oober-Jell-o, but at least I know how to punch someone in the face correctly, and I can feel all the pride of accomplishment of having done more push-ups and sit-ups than I have done in a very looooong time. :)
My goal for this coming month is to keep working out every day and get back into running. I also will probably throw some pilates in there because I recently remembered that I love it.
In other news, I discovered the truth of this statement this morning around push-up number 27:

Yay for Pinterest. And push-ups :)

Idaho!

Guess what?? My brother and his wife (who live in Idaho) had a BABY last week!! And guess what else? I came up to stay with them for a month so I got to meet him! And guess what? He is so cute!! I'm so excited to be up here not only to meet him but to get to hang out with my brother and play with my niece and nephews! It's great!! And as a bonus I get to spend some time in my much beloved Idaho (the state of my birth!) Anywho I'm super excited. And since this is a running blog, I guess I should talk about something fitness-related, so here goes:
Upon my arrival at the home of said brother and family, I found out that he and his wife decided to have a healthy-habits competition in which each of them set 4 goals, (3of them fitness related and 1 spiritual one), and they get a point for each one they accomplish everyday, and then they will weigh themselves at the beginning and at the end of a month, and I'm not sure how they'll calculate pounds and points or whatever, but it sounded great so I decided to join in! My daily goals are as follows:


1. Exercise for 30 minutes 
2. Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables
3. No eating anything after 7pm (this is an especially tough one for me!)
4. Read scriptures 15 minutes per day.

Mostly this is what I've been trying to do for a while, I'm just stepping it up a notch! So far it has been going well (for the whole two days I've been doing it :). Yesterday around 10:15pm I realized I hadn't done my exercising or my scripture reading so I combined them and did squats and sit-ups and push-ups while I read my scriptures. It probably would have been pretty comical to witness but luckily everyone else in the house was asleep :) Today I did a little better and got my exercise out of the way before dinner. I cycled on bike machine for 20 minutes and then did a couple laps around my brother's property which is built on a slant so there's a lovely hill to run up, which almost kicked my butt. But worry not, I defeated it in the end :)

Weird

So for pretty much my whole life I have hated running. It's too hard, it hurts, and it is just not fun. But guess what? I've gotten to the point where I absolutely LOVE IT!! Which is weird for me. Don't get me wrong, it's still too hard, it still hurts, and most of the time it makes me feel like I have to throw up, but somehow it still feels amazing. This is the first time in my life when I have somewhat-consistently gone running on a regular basis for a couple of months, and it makes me so happy that I can actually make myself get out there and crank out a mile or two anytime I want to! I never thought I would be a runner, and really I will never run marathons or anything like that, and I'm definitely not where I want to be yet, but it still just feels amazing to be able to do the little bit that I can do now.   :)

Personal Best

When I woke up this morning I decided I was going to break some kind of personal record. My record for distance is two miles and my record for fastest mile is 12:38. I wasn't feeling up to running more than two miles so I decided to go my fastest mile. So I hopped on the treadmill and started to run like crazy. I had to slow it down a couple times because my heart started to freak out and my lungs decided they needed a mini vacation, but mostly I was going over five miles an hour, and for part of it I was even up to 6 and 7 miles an hour, which is pretty great for me because I usually stick to about 4.5 or less. I wanted to quit around .7 miles but then I said, hey self, are you crazy? You are almost there. So I kept going till the end, and my finish time was 11:53!!! Which is officially the fastest I have ever run a mile in the entirety of my life, which is pretty thrilling. Of course it's hard to find it thrilling at the moment because I am shaking and I feel like I need to throw up, but in a few minutes, I will probably do a victory dance! Or maybe just go watch some victory television :)

Anniversary

Today I realized that one week ago was the three-month anniversary of me beginning to run (except let's be honest, I sort of skipped a month in the middle). I also realized that after all this time I'm still only doing a mile every time I run. What is that about? It's not that I can't run more, it's mostly that I get bored after a mile and I quit, which is lame. So this morning I decided to go two miles, and I did! I think I could have gone even farther if I hadn't started sprinting around 1.5 miles, but it's fun to sprint so I did it anyways, and now my face looks like a tomato :) My next goal is to be up to 3 miles by next Saturday, which will be as far as I've ever run at once in my entire life, so that will be fun. Then I'll try and work up to 4 miles by next month. :) !
In other news, here is my favorite Pinterest meme of the day:

So true!