So, one of the amazing perks of my new job is that during the day, when I’m working, I can typically take some time off and work out. I’ve taken advantage of this in my first week, but surprisingly lately, the workouts haven’t included a ton of running. Part of that is because of the temps here in North Carolina – the last two days have been beautiful, but on the whole, the summer has been oppressively humid, and it makes it really really discouraging when you look down at your watch, and you’re barely keeping it together for a 10:00 minute mile. (The other part, is that with as much lifting as I’m doing, sometimes it’s hard to get the run in on big heavy lifting days.)
So over the past few days, it’s cooled down a considerable bit (it’s kind of hung around in the mid 80s for a while) and because of this, and the fact that I’m sort of sick of feeling like a slow poke according to my watch I’ve taken to doing a few “naked’ runs. I keep my phone with me for safety’s sake, but no GPS, and only the time to kind of guide me to know how far I’ve gone.
Honestly, it’s been a little nice to just run, and get back to why I ran in the first place – because it felt good and felt natural. Yesterday, I was running during work, and I just got to look around, enjoy some sunshine, and not get locked into the suck that your GPS can be.
So this week, I challenge you to run naked like one time. I know a lot of you guys are in your first weeks of marathon training, but take one of those days and just chill out!
I know it’s really early to call it, but I think I love my job.
So last week, I had my first official day of work here in Raleigh as the Group Fitness Director of the YMCA here in our area. I’ve said this before, but I’ve had my eye on this position for a while, and it seemed as if it sort of just fell into my lap in May when I got a call to come interview again for the position.
So now, I feel as though I’m living in a dream when I get to go to work at a place I’ve been dreaming about for the last two years.
My first day there was a doozy, I arrived and immediately got to work teaching a modified fitness class to bunches of kids. I was literally so amped after that day that I couldn’t sleep that next night, and nearly overslept the next day in the office.
Over the next few days, I have been in my new office, meeting people, sending lots of emails, going to tons of meetings, and taking a TON of fitness classes so I can meet my staff and evaluate their classes.
So today, at my first director’s meeting, I participated in a tradition where as a director, I had to sing the song of my choice at the first meeting, while the rest of the directors cheered me on. Another director hollered as I was standing in front of the room, “SING SOMETHING THAT WAS ON THE FIRST CD YOU EVER HAD!”
And immediately, I busted out into Christina Aguilera’s amazing second single, ‘What a Girl Wants’.
My first CD.
So years ago, I had this little grey boom box, and my mom had some kind of subscription service, and allowed me to pick a few cds out of it. One of them was Destiny’s Child – The Writing’s on the Wall, and the second was Christina Aguilera – Christina Aguilera. To say that I was obsessed with both of CDs wouldn’t do what I did with them justice.
via Wikipedia.org
Peep the horrid makeup and the zig-zag part!
via Wikipedia.org
Peep the cornrows! Hellow, late ’90s!
And yes, that’s Mrs. Carter down in the front.
I can, to this day, sing every song, starting on the write note, and kill all the ad libs without skipping a beat. Since then, Queen Bey kicked everyone out of the group, has gotten married, and has a kid. Aguilera is engaged and pregnant with baby number two. Try that one one for making you feel old!
So….obviously, I haven’t been around for a few days which was probably really truly concern to all of you because ya girl can talk. But between starting my brand new job, which I will talk about in another post, getting myself married, and passing my certification in Body Pump™ it has been really hard to brush my teeth, let alone sit down in one spot, get to a computer and pour out out.
So let me pour.
So the last you heard of me, I was just finished up after my first day at the Les Mills Body Pump™ training process, but I didn’t get too deeply into it cause I wanted to keep you on the edge of your seat until today, so I hope that it worked.
So like I told you the other night, I drove down to Wilmington on Friday night, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’ve been to a lot of different fitness trainings, but right off the bat, this one seemed different because it spanned over two days, and Les Mills had actually sent us music, a live class video, and choreography notes, as well as two of the songs that we were told to prepare for a presentation.
When I got to the student recreation center at UNCW, the training began promptly. I was really surprised, rather than there being a room packed out, the group was intimate, and every single one of the folks there was incredibly in shape. A lot of the trainings that I’d gone to had a whole smorgasbord of folks, from the ultra fit to the beginners, so it was interesting to be in a room full of folks who, for the most part, had either been taking classes for a long time, or had been teaching other formats for some time.
Suze is the little atomic bomb down in the front. But check out all of these folks, how awesome do they look?
So the training started promptly, and we started with some business, and moved right into our first class of the release, and of the weekend. Our trainer, Susan was this teeny ball of energy, and she taught an awesome class with a sparkle in her eye, and immediately, the hooting and hollering started from the group. We were already hurting, but we already were feeling so together, that we were whooping up a storm. It was awesome.
Again, we went into business – Susan broke down some choreography and choreo notes for us, and we quickly ducked out for a lunch break. After lunch, we started “studying” the tracks we were going to present to the class, and toward the end of that first day, we took the class a second time, each of us taking turns to teach our tracks, and supporting each other. The skills that all of us came to the training with were really impressive – though all of us left that day with feedback given to us that we needed to work on, we all started from a really solid foundation.
After Susan let us go for the evening, I found some food at a burrito barn, and chilled with a beer and with ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. My feet were killing from doing the equivalent of two 60-minute Body Pump classes, so I decided to head to the beach to walk on the sand so that I could get a little circulation into the nooks and crannies and my poor feet. Fun fact: I hit Flaming Amy’s again after day two, because it was the only place I had the energy to really hunt out. Plus it was reallllly cheap.
I did a vegetarian burrito and a $1.25 beer. Perfect way to end the day.The beach. I was really missing my husband-to-be at this part.
Day 2
Day 2, we immediately started by taking the class again – and again, each of us presented our tracks. Where there were certainly areas to improve on that first day, it was clear that all of us had absorbed some of the feedback that Susan had given us the day before, and there was vast, vast improvement on the day before.
I’m going to keep a lot of these details to myself because the challenge was so incredible, so so incredible, that I will let you guys that want to go off and get your Body Pump™ cert see for yourself what it was about. I will say this. I actually got a little choked up once we finished the challenge, and I had such an incredible sense of accomplishment, one that rivaled the sense I got when I finished both marathons.
Finally, after some more business, we took our fourth and final class, which we all took turns teaching our last track.
And sooner than I would have liked, we were done. Susan called us out one by one to let us know if we passed or not (I passed!) and we all gave each other hugs and promised that we would keep in touch. The way the process goes is that I am currently doing a lot of team teaching, and within 60 days, I have to send Les Mills a vid of me teaching, and being competent.
The weekend was a beautiful, painful, sweaty, hardcore weekend of fitness magic, and I am so grateful to have done it. Seriously, if anyone is thinking about doing this training, you HAVE to do it, and please please, send me questions if you have any about the training!
I cannot believe these legs pumped out so much weight! Go me!
I’m becoming a big fan of the Hungry Runner Girl, Janae, because she’s so freaking positive. It’s funny, I’ve seen a few things written about her online, and the overwhelming “complaint” about her, if you even want to call it that is that she’s too positive or that she gets too excited about the littlest things. I can relate to her – I actually had an associate at Barnes and Noble physically back away from me when I expressed my excitement that they had the Gavin DeGraw album in stock. Okay lady, let me be happy, kay?
Anyhoo, so HRG posts yesterday and posed this question:
How long did it take you to fall in love with running?
The truth is, I don’t really know.
Sport Photo mailed me this blast from the past from my first race in 2011. I’m not sure what possessed me to sign myself and my boyfriend (now almost-husband) for the race, except it sounded really really cool, and I think I saw in ad in one of the women’s fitnessy workout mags that I’d been reading like a Bible.
Austin so sweetly agreed to to the race with me, an obstacle 5k in Virginia, and we drove up there after a shift at the Whole Foods Bakery. Yes, I know. I’m a fitness director, and I worked at a bakery my first gig out of graduate school. But I like my sweets, and I love Whole Foods so it worked.
I ran that race. Finished in decent time. Felt great afterwards, and within about a year’s time, I was running my first half-marathon.
There was never a moment where I was like “aughhh this is awesome,” but I guess I always just liked the way it made me feel. I also loved the way you could kind of click into cruise control for a long run and just…run. Like after a while it didn’t feel like death on a stick, but it just felt like a state of being, as natural as anything else did. Sure, there were still some runs that made me feel like vomiting on on the side of the road, but the vast majority of the runs just felt…good!
So all that to say is, I just don’t know when I started to love running. I’m not particularly fast or fancy, but it feels natural to me, and it feels like the kind of workout you can seriously do anywhere, and burn the most calories/stress off without killing yourself.
So yesterday, this bikini that I ordered finally arrived at the house.
I’d been in need of a new bathing suit in forever – the last bikini I bought was this adorable pink number that I’d managed to randomly snag at the Target like two years ago.
My stepmother-in-law gave me a gift card to Victoria’s Secret, and after I searched high and low, I picked this:
It seemed like the suit would offer me adequate coverage, all while being really cute. Plus, I was able to pick a pretty big top, and the color was fine. So it finally showed up, and I put it on and it was HORRIBLE on. Absolutely horrible. The bottom was cute, but the top wasn’t supportive at all, and my boobs were literally hanging out of the bottom of the suit.
I live close enough to the mall that I was able to run over with the invoices, and browse what they had in-store.
VS Dude: Hi, welcome to Victoria’s Secret. ::motions to the package in my arms:: Do you have an exchange for us?
Me: Yeah, I bought this online, but the top isn’t supportive at all! I want to look around to see if I can find something.
VS Dude: Well this stuff isn’t that supportive. But we have stuff in the back. You should check there.
Me: Ok cool, I’ll do that. Do you mind hanging on to this package for me while I shop? (I figured I wouldn’t be as much of a shoplifting suspect if I wasn’t carrying a bikini around in a big empty mailing envelope.)
VS Dude: Uhhh. Yeah no. Will a bag work?
Me: Sure!
VS Dude: ::Disappears, never to be seen again::
So for the better part of an hour, I wandered throughout the Pink room in VS, and in this back room where all the big-boobed swimsuits hide out. I wandered near and far. And I found nothing. Finally, I left in an angry huff, with no bathing suit, and feeling distinctly as though something was wrong with my body.
I know rationally that there’s nothing wrong with my body, but in those moments, I was really tempted to call a good plastic surgeon and let him or her just chop my chest down to a size that would fit a little better into a VS swimkini. But, I’ve seen Botched, and I really shouldn’t have to hack my body, a body that can run 26.2 miles, lift, dance, and swim, to fit into a suit that rivals one I had when I was a flat-chested 12-year-old.
What I do need however, is to find a suit. A suit that I can wear a S/M on the bottom, and like a DD on top. Is that too hard to ask?
Where do you find your bathing suits, large-chested women?
Firstly, my trashy television watching has hit an all-time new low. As I write this, I am watching this horrible, terrible show called ‘Party Down South’, which is like the country version of ‘Jersey Shore’. The clothes are much worse, the accents are much harder to understand, and one episode featured the girls taking their credit cards and going on a shopping spree…at Plato’s Closet. [Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with Plato’s Closet, mind you, but generally when you think “shopping spree” Plato’s isn’t typically what comes to mind, right?]
I told you guys last week that I rolled out of work one day, only to have to beg a jump off my boss, because my poor car wouldn’t start.
So we replaced the battery blah blah, and I went on my way.
Wellll isn’t it the case with cars, I scheduled an oil change on Saturday morning, and $669 later, yes, you read that correctly, I have spent the weekend without the car, and I will drive off with new brakes, new rotors, and god knows what else. Also, one of the techs either drove my car around or accidentally dropped something on my hood because I am sporting a nice new dent on the front.
Blah. I hate car stuff, and I’m really thankful to have Austin to tell me when it’s time to go in, or when he can just fix something himself, but I already am really trying to be a budget person, and it’s really freaking hard when something always seems to crop up and wipe you.
But oh well. It’s certainly not the worst thing in the world to be without a car on the weekend of the 4th, right? I swear, in our travels this past weekend, we saw no less than a million people pulled over for goodness knows what, so I’m taking this weekend as a time to save on gas, see what it might be like to share a car, should we ever be in a place where we need to do that, and hang out around the house, where lord KNOWS I have things to be getting done.
And at LEAST it’s not the transmission like it was with my poor old Taurus, right! $669 is WAY better than dealing with a whole new car 🙂
The three-day weekend was perfect, but I’m almost at the point where three days was a little bit much for me because I laid on the couch nearly all day on Sunday, avoiding a smelly pile of laundry that needs to get done, and a dirty blender that has been in my sink all day.
As for my list of things that I wanted to do on the 4th, I think I achieved them all – the only thing I didn’t do was lay by the pool because the weather was unseasonably cool for North Carolina, and it was in the 80s all weekend – not blazing like I usually like it for pool days.
So on the fourth, we started the gorgeous day by doing NOTHING. Well, almost.
First, I ran the Raleigh Downhill Mile with Matthew, where I found some friends.
I was able to crank out the mile fast enough so that I could cheer that little cutie on.
Matthew is a dear friend and my supervisor (for like two more days), and it was so fun to do something other than track down clients on a Friday morning at the race. The girls raced first, so I was able to see him punch out a really impressive finish!
I cranked out a mile in 7:21. However, my last name is not Armack, so the only proof you really have that it happened is my Garmin. Which actually says I ran a 7:20 so HOLLA! One of these days I will maintain a pace like this over the course of 13.1 miles. A girl can dream, right?
We were able to hit a local fancy coffee shop for some post-race eats.
And post race, we hit the WRAL Sand Desk that they’d set up. How cool is that, right?
Once I got home, I laid on the couch, reading ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ while Austin loudly chomped on peanut butter and jellies. For hours, literally hours, Austin and I watched American Ninja Warrior while I fantasized about one day getting my upper body strong enough to fly through that course and make it up the Warped Wall. Maybe one day…
I napped, of course.
And finally we headed out to see some friends for the 4th.
The rest of the weekend was spent reading, napping, and running. We also meet our wedding officiant, which is a fabulous woman who we seemed to click with really really well, so it feels awesome to cross another thing off the list.
On a personal front, I feel like emotionally, I’m a mess. But I need to keep my eye on the prize, at the end of this emotional road, I get a new, wonderful husband, new pets, a new home, and a ton of time with friends and family, and that’s what’s important.
I’m sitting here, and I don’t really know what to do with myself.
After I taught my Thursday night Zumba class at the Y, I actually had time to hop on the bike and ride for a while, and lift because…I had nowhere to be early on Friday morning….because it’s the 4th!
I feel so fortunate. I am a global thinker, and I am going to love, once we get married, to travel all over with my hubby. But my parents both come from developing nations, and because of that, I feel like I have an appreciation for the States. I get really up in arms about politics here, about decisions the Supreme Court makes, about things I see on social media, and especially during elections – presidential and midterm, but once in a while, I have to step back and marvel at the fact that we live in a country where that sort of thing can do down, and you won’t get your head chopped off for voicing your opinion. Let’s not take that for granted.
So one cool thing about the 4th is that my agency is closed, meaning that I have Friday 100% off.
A day in the middle of the week off? YAAAS HONEY.
So in order for this day to be 100% successful, I have to make a list to make sure I hit everything to make this the best best best best best 4th day off in the middle of the week ever.
Things I will do on the 4th of July:
Give my hubby-to-be a kiss before I forget – the 5th of July is our 1-year anniversary of being engaged, and all I have is pee-in-my-pants excitement about getting to marry Austin. Eep eep!
Work on my blog, and go read some other blogs. The past few days, what with invites and all, I have not gotten as much time to read, and I’d love to catch up on some of my blogging babes. I have some really amazing chicks I look up to, and I’m so so fortunate to have them in my life.
Run the Raleigh Downhill Mile. It’s a race that consists of…one downhill mile. I’m not sure how fast I can do it – it may be really hot, and my poor tendon might not be feeling its best, but I’d like to gauge how I do a mile when I go balls to the wall for a mile.
Visit a newly-married friend! A friend of mine and her new husband bought a house, and we want to head over to her place to give them something for their nice, new house!
Nap. NO explanation required.
Do something wedding related. Idk what that is yet, but it couldn’t hurt right?
Download ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ on my Kindle. A librarian told me I MUST.
Go to the pool and socialize with young thangs drinking beer and chicken fighting with each other.
What are your plans on this beautiful 4th? Anyone experiencing any nasty Arthur weather?
Good morning! I’m so sorry for my silence yesterday, but I had to buckle down and get the wedding invites finished. They are done, they look beautiful, and I’m sending them to work with Austin tomorrow so they can just be DONE and out of my face.
And then, I will just focus on getting as much stuff done as possible until the RSVPs start rolling in.
But I realized today that I am getting married next month and I cannot wait. I am so ready to see all my friends and family, and most importantly, be married and get my swirl on with my man. So pumped! Eep!
Okay, so on Monday, I told you guys that my achilles was sort of bugging me, so I embarked on some pool running, which was actually really cool, despite the fact that it looks so so dorky. It feels like it paid off, because I was able to teach my Zumba class at Aradia on Tuesday, and then I woke up early Wednesday morning, and hit up the treadmill for a pre-work run. The tendon feels great, and I think I will just stay off the trails for the next few days while I let it decide what it’s going to do.
Dead Car Batteries.
So, I was running around, getting ready to go to work two mornings ago, and I kind of thought that my car was being lazy as it was cranking up. It sort of coughed, but it started, and I thought nothing of it.
Later that day, just before the World Cup game (ugh, don’t wanna talk about it,) I went to start my car up, and the battery was dead.
So there I am, on the day that felt like a million degrees, bumming a charge off my boss. Yikes.
So today, I made sure I got the workout in early, headed to the most unfun store ever (Advance Auto Parts), unfun because there aren’t any fun magazines there or good candy, and I bought a new battery, and the ever-handy hubby-to-be replaced it.
Whew! What a day.
But my battery is replaced, I ran today and didn’t die of heat stroke, invites are on their way, and I am delightfully sore. Life is good 🙂
I told you guys 
Overactive Blogger 