Weekly Eats: Adults Only Edition

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  If there's one thing I can tell you about this week, it did not suck.  Our calendar was light and airfare to our favorite Gulf Coast beach was cheap, so we did what we do best and headed away for an adults only long weekend.

This vacation was extra special because it's the same place and almost exactly the fifth anniversary of our first ever vacation as a couple.  That first vacation was my reward after the grueling summer when I took the CPA exam and also when I found out that I had passed all of the exams.  For my husband it was his first chance to have a few days with absolutely no adult responsibilities whatsoever since stepson #1 was born.  For us as a couple, it was the realization that good things lay ahead.

We follow a very strict agenda for our vacations:

• As soon as the first ray of light hits, which is around 7 this time of year, I go for a short beach run if I feel like it and if I wake up naturally then anyway, no alarm clocks.  Followed by a cool down dip in the ocean.
• Hubs wakes up just as I'm getting back and cooks us both breakfast.
• Hit the beach and set up our beach umbrella and chairs. 

• A marathon session of lazing around, reading, swimming, and tandem inner tubing ensues

• Head back inside around mid day for lunch and to get out of the sun for a while
• Repeat morning beach drill until dinner time
• Go out for dinner
• Watch brainless TV in the evening hours
• Bed

Vacation Eats Highlights
Breakfasts: folks, I married into this.  Eggs, bacon, and toast cooked by my favorite chef.

Lunches: leftover pizza from the Italian place that we went to on our first night.  Hubs had turkey and cheese sandwiches.

Dinners: ran the gamut from an Italian place across the street, a beach patio bar, Panera on the one night that we didn't feel like going out, and finally a fancy dinner of filet in bourbon sauce on our last night.

Workouts
I'm somewhat casual about working out on vacation, which means that workouts still happen but less than they do at home.  20 miles total with 3 weight workouts and some seriously gorgeous views.

Monday: 4 miles including 5 x 8 seconds hill sprints, weights at lunch

Tuesday: 6 miles with 7 x 400 @ 5k pace/400 recover.  I picked this workout from a certain popular half marathon training plan.  I made it through the workout I felt it in my legs afterwards and not in a good way.  On to plan B next week, which will be time rather than distance based intervals more similar to what I've been running all summer.

Wednesday: off for travel

Thursday: beach Fartlek run!  This was my first stab at a tempo workout, and one of the suggestions that I've seen frequently is to start with 1 km repeats.  I was not ambitious with this one since the beach is much hotter and more humid than home.  1 mile warmup, 2 x 1 km at tempo with 2 minutes recover, plus cool down = 3.5 miles.  I was really happy that I was able to hold the tempo pace on the beach.  Body weight workout at night.

Friday: easy beach run of 3.5 miles.  Plan A was to run 3 miles as an out and back, but once I got back I kept going until the end of the beach which gave me the extra half mile.  If I had been at home I would have done hill sprints, but there are no hills at the beach and that's a legit excuse to skip them;-)

Saturday: easy 3 miles, with strides in the last mile plus a few photo breaks, body weight workout at night

That cool down dip in the ocean afterwards tho...if you're not a runner it's worth becoming a runner just for that.

Sunday: off and excited to catch up with my running buddies on the Weekly Run Down.  I'll be heading over to Kim and Deborah to check it out.


Watching

• Dave Chapelle's latest special on Netflix
• We finished Philip Marlow, Private Eye
• And then we just got silly and went through a bunch of RiffTrax (same folks who did MST3K).  All I can say is that Billy Ray Cyrus, Sean Astin, Stacy Keach, and Bruce Campbell have done some things to pay their mortgages.

Reading
The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah, I am late to the party here and yes it's a good

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware.  I'd heard some negative reviews on this one.  Sure I'd rate it lower down on the scale of Ware's books and it took me a while to buy into the Gothic Haunted Smart House setting, but I really enjoyed this one so IMO don't believe the haters.