Weekly Eats: Mile Test Edition

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition, we tried a new dinner that the adults loved and the kids hated, and I finished the Women's Running 10 Week Speed Program with my fastest mile to date.

Breakfasts

Monday & Friday; breakfast potatoes & eggs
Tuesday & Thursday: breakfast burritos
Wednesday & Sunday: fruit, cereal bar, string cheese
Saturday: waffles c/o my hunky husband & chicken sausage

Lunches

Monday & Tuesday: sweet potato, black bean, and corn enchiladas
Wednesday & Thursday: salads from work catering
Friday: Costco beef bulgogi bowl
Saturday: veggie burrito
Sunday: snacks

Dinners
Monday (family meal): After a few weeks of strong meal planning, we kind of let things slide.  I made a batch of crockpot BBQ shredded chicken which hubs and I ended up eating in quesadillas last Sunday so we did a repeat for Monday's dinner.  The adults are thrilled with this meal but oh man it was too far outside of the kids' comfort zones.

Tuesday (family meal): the Dad classic, mac n'cheese and hot dogs (mine is a Trader Joe's chicken sausage).  For some reason I had taken the previous night's dinner kid fail a little too close to heart, maybe my family just wants to eat mac n'cheese and I should stop trying to expand our food horizons.  I had settled into this rut when an unnamed stepkid spoke up: "You know, I've never liked hotdogs".  So there you have it, there is no such thing as playing it safe at the dinner table.

Wednesday (date night): steak, mashed potatoes, zucchini, and portobello caps.

Thursday (fend for yourself night): quickie tomato & pesto flatbread.

Friday (family meal): a mouthwatering hamburger and fries (sweet potato for me, regular for everyone else)

Saturday (family meal): Costco orange chicken & egg rolls.

Sunday: our schedule is up in the air today, but the forecast says leftover orange chicken for stepkids and grilled chicken for adults.

Workouts
25.4 miles of running and two weight workouts.  It was the final week of this speed plan, or truth time.

Monday: for the past several weeks I've had so much energy on Mondays...not this Monday.  I dragged one foot in front of the other for 3 miles and got 4 x 8 seconds hill sprints in.   Weights at lunch.

Tuesday: last speed workout of the program.  4.8 miles with 3 x 4 minutes speed/3 minutes recover.  There was nothing particularly unique about this workout compared to all of the others but I was dragging.   I hit the paces and that's all that can be said for this one.

[P.S. I knew that two draggy workouts were a good sign for Thursday's speed test, I wasn't that disappointed]

Wednesday: off to rest up for the mile test.

Thursday: 4.6 miles including a mile test.  The program starts with a mile test which serves as a baseline and determines your training speeds for the plan, and the final workout is another mile test so that you can see your progress.  If I had followed the plan exactly I would have done the mile test on Saturday, but I moved it forward for a few reasons (I wanted to run it on the same weekday that I did the original test and I wanted to do a longer run on Saturday).

Before this summer, the fastest mile I'd ever run in my life was 9:40.  10 weeks ago my mile time was 9:48.  I took the same route as my original test but it was 10 degrees warmer and very high humidity. I mean, I expected to be somewhat better, but to be 32 seconds better at 9:16 in much harder conditions was more than I hoped for.

I have a lot more to say about the past 10 weeks, so I'll recap the program in a separate post sometime soon but the short version is that I think this (free) program did me a world of good, it was a nice shake up to my routine, yes I recommend it, and here's the link one more time.

Got my weights in at lunch.

Friday: 4 miles, hilly route including 4 x 8 second hill sprints.  It was a lot cooler than the previous day.  I was feeling good so I pushed the pace and my glutes took notice.

Saturday: 9 miles!  My glutes were tired from the previous two days of hard workouts, and I didn't have full range of motion when I did my warm up leg swings.  A smart runner would have taken an extra rest day, but the weather was on point and I was not about to miss out.  Predictably I was very slow but I felt fantastic and almost didn't want to stop and I will take that over a fast run any day.

Sunday: off!  While I get my rest day in, you know I'll be reading up to see what my friends in the Weekly Run Down are up to.  Head on over and visit Kim and Deborah check it out.

Watching

• On my own: How to Get Away with Murder
• With hubs: Philip Marlowe, Private Eye
• Family viewing: Innerspace

Reading
I finished Before We Were Yours (thumbs up) and moved on to With the Fire on High.  

P.S. If you leave a comment please feel free to include a link to your blog;-)