Author: cheriarmour

Ya missed me? This post is so jam-packed with goodies, I can’t even stand it!

| cheriarmour

I took a few days off from writing, and it drove me peanuts.   But I logged the events of Thanksgiving break in my head so I could keep everyone filled in on the events, which were events a-plenty.

Wednesday, before the holiday, I skipped the run (I know, shame on me,) because I went in for an endoscopy after work to figure out what was going on with my stomach, which you’ll remember has been acting really nuts since my bout with a stomach bug in September.  It was an upper endoscopy, so as far as prep, it just required that I fasted for a bunch of hours.  Rude.

I went in, stripped down to a sexy gown, and they started me on an IV.  The whole process was fairly non-dramatic.  I was wheeled into a room, laid on my side, given oxygen and the process began.  First the Lidocaine to numb my veins, and then the Propofol, and next thing I knew, I was out.  I woke up a really short time later – apparently, while I was under and they tried to shove the camera down my esophagus, I started flailing, pulled my IV out, and they had to pull me out of my sleep to reset the IV.  It was no big deal, and next thing I knew, I was out, and Austin was ready to take me home.  But not before in a haze, I told the nurse that “I looooove him,” and “did you know we were getting married?”

The final verdict? Gastritis.  The lining of my stomach was inflamed and has kicked acid up into my esophagus, which was burnt up too.  The morning of Greensboro, nerves and something I ate the day before probably aggravated my already-raw stomach, causing me to throw up.  Which burnt my esophagus even more.  Yumz. They did a biospy and I should know what’s causing it and what I need to do in the next 10 days or so.  I’ll keep you posted.

Hospital

Thanksgiving Day.  It was awesome.  I woke up, went for a slow and steady 4 miler (I’m streaking til New Years Day), cleaned up my house, and headed down to my parents’ for the holiday.  I cooked, and it was so lovely to spend the time with my family.  That evening, I was able to trick my brother into watching Pitch Perfect with me.  Score.

BroFriday morning, me and little Derek suited up for a run – and I will be gosh darned – the kid can run!  He’s a cross country star, and 18, so truthfully, the run consisted of me chasing him around Waxhaw, NC, which he regarded more as a casual jog.  My hamstrings were mad at me afterward, and I will definitely have to utilize him more for those speed workouts.

DressWe went wedding dress shopping.  That is all I can say, and this is all I will show you because I’m keeping dress negotiations top secret.  But my mom and I had a blast shopping for dresses.  She did try to negotiate a tiara and a set of silky gloves out of me, but I’m not budging, much to her chagrin.

CarAnd in the single greatest moment of the holiday, possibly of the year, my brother offered to drive us to Harris Teeter to buy my dad seltzer, and we needed to, since I drink up all his seltzer every time I go home.  Anyhoo, my brother drives a Benz.

Fancy?

Well, it’s an ’87, and when he started it, he had to pump the gas like a madman before we could get moving.  Then, when we arrived to the Teet, we had to leave it running while we ran inside.  Hood.

Brosky

And finally, I finished out the weekend by enjoying a dinner where I spent my 16th birthday, Kristopher’s in Matthews, NC, with Austin, the husband-to-be, and Derek, my brother.  It was so fun, so delicious, and an excellent way to wrap up the weekend.

Thanksgiving was awesome.  It was a lovely visit, and I finished out the weekend by running, running a little more, and working at the running store, which always puts a smile on my face.

How was your Thanksgiving Holiday?

Shopping on Thanksgiving Day. Don’t do it.

| cheriarmour

Christmas Eve 2011, I was working at Whole Foods Market, in the bakery.  It was nearing 6 pm, and the store was doing what was called a “soft closing,” where you sorta close, but you let anyone who comes screeching up in the parking lot come in, for fear that they will write you a bad review on Yelp.

I peered over the counter, wearing my antlers as a pretend signal of good tidings, when really, I wanted to murder everyone who was shopping, including a woman on the cell phone, who was leisurely strolling through the aisles.  Like it wasn’t 6pm on Christmas Eve, like simply because I was being paid an hourly wage, that I didn’t deserve to get to go to Midnight Mass with my family, sleep in, and wake up leisurely to open presents with my family.

Instead, around 6pm on Christmas 2011, I was hauling a clear bag full of old bread and bagels to the dumpster in the ran, and shivering in a chefs coat while last-minute Christmas shoppers milled about.  Close to 7, I finally filled up on gas, and I’d made it to my parents’ house by 10:30 pm. On Christmas Eve.  My parents were already asleep, and I only had a few hours the following day with my siblings before I had to head back for my shift in the coffee bar.

If you shop on Thanksgiving Day, you are a jerk.  Plain and simple, I’m not sorry to say.  I have had the unfortunate opportunity to have to work on holidays, on holiday eves, and on the day after holidays and it always sucks.  Each time I had to show up at my parents’ home at an ungodly hour, or each time I left while my siblings were still sleeping or spending time with relatives, I began to resent my work, and swore that I would quit my job the next day.  I never did, I needed the money while I looked for full-time work in my field, but it made me resent my job and truly hate people more than I care to admit, temporarily.  The “hate” feeling returned with each holiday I had to celebrate by doling out lattes to stressed party hosts.  And I really do dislike it when I feel so angry towards others – it’s not at all healthy.

“Well if you don’t like it, just make sure you ask for that day off! Target said on TV it’s only the employees who really want to work that day/night.”

First off all, no one, even the person who lives only with his or her cats,  wants to bundle up so they can stand on their feet all night and serve you.  It’s barely fun on a regular day, and super unfun on a chilly holiday.  And that’s not exactly how it works.  When I worked bakery retail, and in the coffee bar at Whole Foods, and the same went for when I worked in a restaurant for my stint in graduate school, you’d get your choice of which holiday you want off.  If you get the days around Thanksgiving off, you won’t get days around Christmas off.  Maybe you’ll get the days at New Years.  It’s all a trade.  But the choice is only which holiday you’ll work.

Please, please, please, before you leave your plates on the counter and run out on Thanksgiving night, think about the folks who are having to leave their families to ring you out.  Not only did they have to leave their families, they hate you, and they’re hoping that you slip and break that flat screened television you dragged them out to purchase.  The employee break room is intermittently filled with folks snacking on lame, stale holiday treats that management put out for them as an attempt to boost morale, but guess what?  It isn’t working, and they’re seeing red with every e-reader you buy.

So regardless of what some of these retailers choose to do, don’t make it worth their while – avoid shopping on Thanksgiving and let them know that our families are a little more important to us than cheap electronics.  That’s what shopping online is for, anyways.

Race Etiquette Question

| cheriarmour

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone!  If I’m a little sporadic or spotty this week, forgive me – it’s Thanksgiving week and I’ll be making my way down to Charlotte AND my fabulous upper endoscopy is this week.

I can’t lie to you, I’m kind of pumped for the potential blogging that can come from me being under the influence of Propofol.  But anyhoo, I have a question for you guys, as a lot of yous embark on your Turkey Trots this week.  What is the proper etiquette on wearing your race shirt during a race?

I ask because I whipped out my Greensboro Marathon shirt for the first time on Saturday, complete with misprint (the shirt reads ‘Greensboro Half Marathon’ despite the fact that I vomited through 26, not 13 miles of bliss), but I saw some folks (not a lot, but enough), wearing their shirts at the race.  I don’t put a shirt on until a race is completed, the same way I wouldn’t try on a wedding dress even though I worked at a wedding dress shop (it’s true) because I feel like it might screw up my luck.  But what do you guys think?

That time I tried to go apartment-hunting.

| cheriarmour

I drove past this place today while running an errand for work, and the horrors just came back again and again.

A few years ago, I was super new to Raleigh.  So I set about the task of finding a place here, using the only platform I was familiar with to do so. Craigslist. (Seriously, if you’re moving to a new place, don’t only make sure that you visit the place, but also go off of word of mouth. I cannot stress to you how important this is. Luckily, I always ended up with super cool roommates, and my only rando Craigslist roomie I had turned out awesome, and our time together was only cut short by a tornado.) But I digress, that is another story for another day. Anyhoo, so this place called Westgrove Towers had been advertising a butt-ton on CL, so I’m like “Okay, anything with the world ‘Towers’ in it is fancy, and that’s where I need to live.”

Tower

So, this is the picture they kept advertising with. Idk, the sky is blue in it. It kind of looks like a hotel. How bad could it be right?

I literally walked in to the biggest murder scene of my life, minus the murder.

    • The advert, and the man at the front desk was bragging about how close you were to “shopping”.  By shopping, he meant a run-down K-Mart with a parking lot big enough for you to park your Winnebago in, and the $1.50 movie-theater. Other than that, I’d be forced to cross a 4-lane highway on foot to reach civilization. Listen now, before you get all up in arms, I’m perfectly aware that there are nice K-Marts, and dollar-theaters but this, this was not one of them.
    • The lobby was really dim.  Not in a fun, romantic way.  In a creepy murder way.
    • The room they showed me….

So, for some reason at this point in my life, I’d become enamored of this idea of living in a studio. I felt like it was very hip and cool, and that I would stylishly roll out of bed, my hair perfectly imperfect, a sort of Shakira-Lauryn Hill hybrid, and I’d step into my fringed moccasins, wrap my pashmina around my neck, and glide across the room to pour myself a latte, which I’d obviously brewed in my single-girl espresso machine. Plus I think the studio was all I could afford.

So I remember taking this Alfred Hitchcock elevator upstairs in this “high rise” and we step into the studio apartment. It literally looked like a motel room that you could rent by the hour, if you know what I’m sayin’. The apartment was their showroom, and the bed was saggy, it might have been a pull-out, and the furniture was all made out of that particleboard stuff, all furniture that had probably fallen off the back of a Big Lots truck. I tried to mask my horror as Miguel motioned around the room – it smelled of stale cigarette smoke, and the back lighting made the room look even worse. I forced a smile, as Miguel took me down to the front office, a room lit only with fluorescents, and pitched the “high rise” to me. He complimented my figure, told me I looked like a Zumba teacher (well duh bud), and shook my hand before we parted ways. He even emailed me like a month later to follow up!

I ran, not walked, out of this place, and called my father immediately, almost in tears about what I’d seen. And today, as I drove past Westgrove Tower, I giggled at poor little 21-year-old me, looking for her single-girl studio.

The Christmas Creep…

| cheriarmour

My dear handsome Austin does this thing where he records the first incidence of Christmas anything in his phone, to see if Christmas is creeping up earlier year after year, like they say it is.  Generally, the phrase “Christmas creep” refers to the phenomenon that is Christmas literally creeping up earlier and earlier each year.  Sort of a marketing/consumerism thing.  As a total side note, the Christmas creep doesn’t bother me at all, I quite enjoy Christmas any time of the year.

Fun fact: This is the best x-mas album ever, and if you grew up as a black child in the states, this and the Temptations x-mas album were a main staple of any holiday.
Fun fact: This is the best x-mas album ever, and if you grew up as a black child in the states, this and the Temptations x-mas album were a main staple of any holiday season.

But when I say creep, I’m talking about the pounds.  Conventional “wisdom” used to tell us that the average adult person in the United Stated would gain anywhere from 7-10 pounds during the holiday season.  But according to the Times, that number is closer to 1 pound, which doesn’t sound so bad, except that typically, we hold on to this pound for the rest of our lves.  So for all of the holidays that we do over our adult lives, we’re supposed to just hang onto that pound?  Over 20 holiday seasons that’s 20 pounds, for those of you who aren’t too math oriented, which is well above the +/- 15 you get when you’re at your ideal weight.  Total yikes.

What can we do to avoid the creep and avoid feeling like a slob kabob after December 31st?

Tons.

    • If you overdo it, go here.
    • If you know you tend to overdo it, create a plan of attack.  Take a teeny bit of everything, and not a lot of any one thing.
    • Walk. Walk walk walk walk walk after a big meal.  It just…works.
    • Drinks.  If you indulge, stay far away from the creamy, sugary alcoholic bevvies, and stick to simple, low cal bevs.  I get made fun of all the time, but I truly think Michelob Ultra is sorta refreshing, and I love a vodka and soda with lime.
    • Dessert. SKIP IT.  (Totally kidding).  But same rule as the food.  Take a little bit, and realize there will still be more pie the next day.
    • Get some sleep! Seriously.
    • And stick to some sort of workout schedule.  It can be really nice to sneak away from family for like 40 minutes for this.  A few years ago, I took the family dog for 5 miles on Christmas.  No one really missed me, plus I didn’t get knocked too far off my workout goals.

For me, to combat the poundage, and to avoid falling off the fit wagon, I plan to do a running streak between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, similar to the one I did between Memorial Day and the 4th of July this past summer.  It’s at least a mile a day, every day, for however many consecutive days that is.  I suck at math so that’s like….34 days right?  Someone get back to me if this is wrong…

Okay, okay, enough about my birthday.

Image | | cheriarmour

Okay, okay, enough about my birthday.

I promise, I’m not one of those birthday extravaganza people who feel like I should get a bounce house for my 26th birthday party. I recognize no one cares about that day after like, age 21, but this was too good to share. On my birthday night, I went to a local bar with my sister and some friends, and we ran into a group of older gentlemen, ready for their night on the town. One, to whom I made very clear I was happily engaged and excited to get married, and not at all interested in anyone but my future husband, could not get enough of me, and honed in, especially once I mentioned to someone else that I just completed my second marathon. What ensued was the best picture to ever be captured by man.

My sister’s boyfriend managed to catch the guy not-so-subtly checking out the goods in a photo. I’ve censored it, but enjoy!

One of the really, really annoying pitfalls of being born with this adorable name…

| cheriarmour

Is that no one can seem to spell it correctly.

There comes a point during every phone call with a doctor’s office, the student loan people, or the people at the dealership who do my oil changes when they ask me how to spell my name.

Me: Okay, it’s Cheri. C-H-E-R-I.  And that last name, it’s Armour.  Like the hotdog. A-R-M-O-U-R.

Man/Woman on Phone: Okay, so that was Terry, and you said A-M-O-R right?!

Usually at this point, I drop the phone in frustration and regain my composure just in time it calmly repeat it to the person on the other end once more. Sometimes twice.  And you can hear the admin eating his or her lunch in your ear.  Ugh.

This is how my general practitioner has taken to spelling my name. Time to find a new GP...
This is how my general practitioner has taken to spelling my name. Time to find a new GP…

So I’ve been trying to do like one-ish wedding-related thing a week, so that I’m not overwhelmed at showtime like I’ve seen a lot of friends get.  I averted our first wedding “crisis,” (Elon move-in is the same weekend as our wedding, and all of the hotels on the exit are full), and I reserved a hotel about 20 minutes away, in Greensboro for everyone.  The hotel was super helpful, and is somewhat affordable for my guests, and after I reserved it, I patiently waited for the confirmation email to come.  It never did, and instead, I get a call from a woman in St. Louis, Missouri, who tells me she’s been getting all my emails for years, and that she always thought they were spam.

Until today.

Today, she got one of my wedding emails, which had my phone number attached, so she decided to give me a call to let me know that 1, she’s been knowing all my bidness for years, and 2, congrats on the wedding, they’re printing up rate cards for you to send out with the save-the-dates.

Thank you lord for nice people who also share a similar name to mine.  And Learn. To. Spell.  

I knew this blog was nearing a year old…

| cheriarmour

So last week, I went ahead and delved into the archives to find out when I’d launched this thing, and it was a year ago, November 19, 2012, that I launched the blog.

For those of you who sort of fell into reading my blog, the way it started was as an idea that’d actually come to me when I was running.  I’m Haitian, and in January of 2010, Haiti was stricken with a huge, huge earthquake, that devastated the capital, where my mother was born.  My idea was a simple one, run, run, and run, and have folks sponsor each mile (or give a lump sum), all the while, documenting my progress on this blog.

Archive

The idea went so swimmingly that I raised the money, and kept the blog going, well after time for donations had closed, and in time capturing my first and second marathons, my engagement to Austin, and in general, the awesome highs, and occasional lows of young adulthood, with generous helpings of working out

So a year later, and many runs, bags of epsom salts, running gear, recovery brewskies, 2 marathons, a few halfs, and a billion laughs along the way, blog is still here, and ready to rocket into more workouts, more running shoes, and more activity as we embark on year 2 of this incredible running journey.  Here’s to more selfies, a wedding, more running, some races, and a sick, healthy body.

Shape Mags Cover Girl!

| cheriarmour

Happy 26th to me! I survived the weekend, managed to steal away for a birthday run,  and I was beyond delighted to see who December’s Shape Magazine’s cover girl was. 

Presenting….

Mary J
I saw Mary J. live with my sister a few years ago, and even then, she looked fantastic – she rocked an all-white outfit, danced, and made 40 look like the new 16.

Mary J. Blige!  First off, I’m glad she seems to be rebounding well from this…

But seriously, I am so happy to see some diversity on the cover – not just racially, but she’s not a fitness model, she’s over 40, she’s black, and she takes care of her temple.  If that isn’t inspiration, I don’t know what is.  From crispy chicken to that hot bod, I will be running an extra mile and lifting a little extra weight this weight in Queen Mary’s honor.