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While Running for Haiti…

| cheriarmour

…I almost forgot that real life goes on.  I wish I only had to focus on this blog, and collecting my funds, but regular life presses on!  The good stuff, the bad, and the heinously disappointing.

And to say that this week has been an epic emotional roller coaster wouldn’t even begin to touch the surface of what I’ve been going through.

I couldn’t get out of bed this morning.  And I had to say to myself , “Self!  These miles aren’t going to run themselves.”  And while it was physically challenging at first, I just told myself to put one foot in front of the other til it wasn’t hard anymore.

Well I came home to two things that put a little smile on my face.

Appreciation

 

If you’ve been following along, you know the nail polish thing is borderline problematic.  But a shade I’d ordered came in the mail today, a full two days before it was scheduled to, and Mercy sent me a little package with a certificate of appreciation for me!  My name’s on it and everything.

So call me corny, call me pathetic, but I’m going to be admiring the heck out of my new certificate and nails!

Yoga for runners

Image | | cheriarmour

Yoga for runners

It has been wonderful, as I have gone on this journey, to see how many wonderful friends have stepped up to help me out! Meet my beautiful friend, Kerry Marchionni.

Kerri is a new friend. I met her through my job at Fleet Feet, and she’s a delight to work with. Kerri is graceful, understanding, and makes you want to be a better person. It’s rare that you meet someone like that in life.

Kerri is an accomplished yogi, and has graciously offered to donate her proceeds from this Sunday’s ‘Yoga for Runners’ to our cause. If you’d like to go, it happens at Fleet Feet Raleigh, Sunday, January 6, 2013 at 10:15am. Click through the photo for a link to RSVP 🙂

I made a horrifying discovery at Food Lion the other day…

| cheriarmour

I was in the breakfast aisle, when I happened upon a newer flavor of Pop-Tart.  Frosted Confetti Cupcake.

Confetti Tart

 

I’m repulsed because generally, I eat pretty healthily, and I cannot wrap my mind around what would possess Kellogg’s to do something like this to our kids.  Like our kids don’t have enough problems without being given a Confetti Cupcake flavored Pop-Tart.  Sorry about global warming, wars, our national debit, and gun violence.   Have this Pop-Tart, and allow me to further ruin your life!

On the other hand, runners really love to eat and drink.  Runners love beer, bread, and dessert.  Anything carby is like runner’s ambrosia.  So maybe Kellogg’s is onto something genius with this?

So obviously, after my stomach stopped roiling, (like three days later), I got to thinking I might buy a box, since they were on sale.  I secured a good home for the box after I ate the one, and went for it.  So I look at the nutrition facts.  Bad deal.  There are 190 Calories in one.  Curiously, two come in a package, so god only knows why they package it that way.  Pull it out.  It looks sorta like a confetti cupcake, so its gotta be moist and good right?  Wrong.

I was dead. Wrong. I bite into the pastry (if it’s not blasphemy to call it that), and it tasted like they filled it with the frosting that comes out of the can.  After it’s sat in your fridge for a few days months.  I kept going.  Still dry.  Still tasted like fake cake.  I just consumed 190 calories of something that tasted like it was made in a test tube, Kellogg’s sorry conceptualization of what cake is thought to taste like.

Please note the approximate length of the ingredients list...I'm frightened for what I've consumed...
Please note the approximate length of the ingredients list…I’m frightened for what I’ve consumed…

Generally, my nutrition posts on here will consist of posts about gels, Gu’s, waters, electrolytes, and all of that, but I just couldn’t  resist!

So have a little laugh at my expense, and don’t you friggin dare buy one of these idiotic excuses for a breakfast pastry.

New Year’s Weather…

Image | | cheriarmour

New Year's Weather...

I hope the weather wherever you were was better than ours. Here, today’s weather absolutely blew. The silver lining? Today was one of the first days in a while that I didn’t need to wear gloves on the run – it was warm enough! And I have to admit, running in the drizzle made me feel a teeny bit more hardcore than I normally do.

Music to Move By (Monster Post)

| cheriarmour

As I was driving home from my parents’ post-Christmas, NPR featured a story on the best songs of 2012.  I was interested because it kinda tied in to this post, on the music that moves you.

Let me disclaim this post by saying when you run or lift, DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT under any circumstance, work with your headphones on full blast.  There are creeps running around who look for folks who aren’t paying attention who would gladly hurt you.  It’s also a good way to get injured – sometimes when you’re listening to your favorite song, it’s easy to miss the first twinge that could signify the start of a worse injury.  When you put your earbuds in, lower it a few notches so you can pay attention to what’s going on around you, kay?

Also, I alphabetized this list for you.  SO MAKE IT WORTH MY WHILE AND READ IT!  That said, this monster post is a compilation of the best songs of 2012, the suggestions of some runner friends, and what I have on my playlist that makes you want to get up and move!

James Brown – Living in America
80s Music – General genre
ACDC – Thunderstruck
Anything by Muse or Girl Talk
Anything from Space Jam
Beastie Boys – Sabatoge
Beyonce – Get me Bodied
Chaka Khan – Ain’t Nobody
Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Diddy Dirty Money – Last Train to Paris
Duran Duran – The Wild Boys
Dyland y Lenny – Pegate Mas
Eminem – Lose Yourself by (The version featuring the Selected of God chorus)
Eminem – Til I Collapse
Eric Prydz – Call on Me
Imagine Dragons – It’s Time
Kanye West – Power
Karmin – Brokenhearted
Ke$ha – General genre
Killers – All These Things That I’ve Done
Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
Lecrae – Hands High
Lil Mama – Lip Gloss
Major Lazer – Anything Goes
Muse – Uprising
N.E.R.D – Rock Star
P!nk – Blow Me (One Last Kiss)
POP – French Montana
Public Enemy  – Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
R. Kelly  – The Worlds Greatest
Rage Against the Machine – Bulls on Parade
Rich Boy – Throw Some D’s on It
Robyn– Show me Love
Sean Paul – Birthday Suit
Soulja Boy – Speakers Going Hammer
T.I – Top Back Remix
Taylor Swift – We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
The E.N.D. (entire album) – Black Eyed Peas
The first Wu-Tang Album
The Roots & John Legend – The Fire
Timbaland – Carry Out
Wale  – Slight Work, Legendary
Ying Yang Twins – Dangerous

Muse and Eminem are trends.  Get on that, man, apparently these guys fuel a lot of workouts.

One Direction gets their own section on here.  Live While We’re Young is the kind of tune that will take you from 5-15 miles in a matter of minutes.

**As an aside, if you find yourself horrifically bored, try this!

Get the free Pandora app.  The only annoying thing about it is that there are some ads, but when you’re running for like two hours, SafeLite ads don’t seem so crazy.

Set the app to the Katy Perry Station.  You will be entertained for DAYS.  Not kidding, it’s the best!  Kimmy (my dear sister) also says the Big Sean Station is poppin.  Whatever gets you moving, hopefully you’ve added a few new tunes to your list!**

New Years Resolutions

| cheriarmour

First and foremost, Happy Birthday to my mother, who will kill me if I post her age or a photo of her here on a public forum. Rest assured, she is an attractive lady…I didn’t make these good looks on my own knowwhatimsayin?

Then, Happy Independence Day to Haiti! We gained our independence 208 years ago from France! Woop woop! And onto New Years!

I’m not sure how I feel about things like New Years Resolutions.

I think it’s because I thrive and succeed on setting little baby goals for myself, and then accomplishing them in a matter of weeks or months. It’s how I started running and working out and losing weight, and that’s what I’ve found works for me. When I set huge, elaborate goals, I feel like I may be setting myself up for failure, so I set them, and then break them down so I can check on how I’m doing in a month or so. It’s how I’ve gotten better at almost everything I’m good at.

So my baby goals for 2013?

1. Spanish! I’m super annoyed I didn’t learn it as a child, because it makes communicating very difficult and I think my adult brain is far too dense to be conjugating verbs. Nevertheless, it’s something that needs to be done. I think it’s absolute ignorance that I have not done so already.
2. Positivity.  I can be extremely sarcastic, and a few years ago, a friend of mine interpreted that as me “always being angry”.  I made a conscious effort to, even when I’m not feeling like it, say nice things.  I try not to text, Tweet, or Facebook nasty or negative things, and I try to smile a lot more.  I promise, it has made the hugest difference in my happiness.  I’d like to continue on that path.
3. And finally…drumroll please? Housekeeping.  I am the worst housekeeper on the face of the planet.  That’s not to say that my apartment looks like a pigsty, it’s just to say I have to move mountains to keep it clean.  I’m like every normal person not featured on Hoarders, I like things neat, smelling fresh, and orderly, but to keep in that way is a feat of titanic proportions.  And then I have these friends like Alexa and Kelly, and you walked into their duplex any time of the day and it looked gorgeous and always smelled wonderful.  Jealous.  I’d like to work more at maintaining order around my home.

What’s your New Years resolution?

RIP Hibernian

| cheriarmour

When you run through any city, you sort of get to know it. Hibernain is an Irish pub that’s part of the permanent landscape of Raleigh. I’ve both run by, and drank there often.  The bartenders are great because they’re literally the only bartenders in the city who won’t give me a hard time about drinking Michelob Ultra on Mystery Beer Night.

The last time I was there was on my 25th birthday, with my run-date, Shawn. We had a blast, and have since talked about going back to relive that evening.

Last Wednesday morning, around 10:30 am, Hibernian burned to the ground in a fire that was suspected to have started in the kitchen. I’ve since re-routed my run by there to be able to pay my respects to the little pub down the street from my home. I was heartbroken to see this.

Hibernian

Between the noise and the smell of that night, it felt like going to a wake.  The inside was compltely burnt and everyone who walked past would double back to see what’d happened.

The owner says that they’ll rebuild, and when I ran by today, despite the smell of burnt plastic, there was already a Cary developer who’d hung a fence and signs.  I’ll keep my tradition of running by til they’ve rebuilt.

For now, let’s raise a Mich Ultra to the memories lost in old Hibernian.  2000-2012

Mercy Swag

| cheriarmour

I’ve had the wonderful pleasure of working with Mercy Corps to raise this money for Haiti.  I wish I could work in their office, because the folks there have been nothing short of incredible to work with.  They’ve worked tirelessly to build me up and to support me as I raise this money for my country – and I came home to a wonderful surprise yesterday.

UPSI walked in to a UPS Package…did I order something that I forgot about on Amazon?  Probably not, my bank account is certainly not looking that fly.  Let’s just open it!

Letter

 

 

 

 

 

So I dumped the contents of the package out and the first thing that fell out was this beautiful letter.  It read, “Hi Cheri, Thank you for all your efforts to help people in need in Haiti! I hope these materials will help – let me know if you need more! Best, Carlene”

SwagI dumped everything out of the package and found Mercy Corps swag for days.  Key chains, magnets, literature on Haiti, a calendar, and  little more literature detailing what it is that Mercy does in addition to their honorable work in Haiti.  A few goodies to give to folks who donate!  It made me feel so good to feel like I have this organization behind me.  Beside my incredibly positive interactions with them, having them support me through every step of my journey makes my heart smile 🙂 I’m so darn proud to be working with them!

My dirty secret…

Image | | cheriarmour

My dirty secret...

I don’t consider myself supremely girly. I like to shower and burn candles. But working at the gym, it’s almost counter intuitive to apply makeup and perfume.

So here’s my dirty filthy secret. I friggin love cosmetics. Namely nail polish, eyeliner, and perfumes. The other stuff, I could take or leave. I don’t care if I’m running 5k or a full marathon, the thought of being photographed without at least one coat of colorful nail polish and just a spritz of the parfum du jour makes me want to throw up.

So before every race (and sometimes before I teach), I get up a little earlier, throw some eyeliner on, and make sure my nails aren’t chipped, as I’m convinced that my decent racing times are not due to my training, but rather, my choice of nail color. At least if I’m going to be sweating buckets, my nails will be looking fly, right?

(If you find yourself shocked or offended by the sheer volume of polish and perfume I have, consider this. I lost my original collection a few years ago in a tornado that destroyed mine and my roommate’s home. So this collection is what I’ve managed to build back, and not nearly as glorious as the original).