running

Food Friday – Paleo-liscious Brownies!

GLUTEN FREE EASY TO BAKE GOODNESS!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve tried a new recipe but I finally made some brownies that I found on Elana’s Pantry and I HEART THEM! As do the kids and some co-workers. Well I don’t know if the co-workers LOVE them but I’ve heard they do like them. The kids were like oooh you can definitely send these for school treats 🙂

I don’t have preparation pics because I was doing a gazillion other things and forgot! But it’s not a lot of steps and it takes very few ingredients. http://www.elanaspantry.com/brownies/

  1. In a large bowl, blend almond butter until smooth with a hand blender
  2. Blend in eggs, then blend in agave and vanilla
  3. Blend in cacao, salt and baking soda, then fold in chocolate chips
  4. Grease a 9×13 inch Pyrex baking dish
  5. Pour batter into dish
  6. Bake at 325° for 35-40 minutes

Makes about 24 brownies

It was a good treat for sure and I’m thinking I’ll make more this weekend and maybe share with the BOOM Box Beasts. Everyone loves treats 🙂 I have two WOD wrap-ups for y’all and they were not fun at all!

Yesterdays WOD didn’t seem to intimidating. I didn’t doubt it would be HARD but I surely didn’t expect it to nearly KILL ME! The skill/strength was 3 rounds of MAX REP KETTLEBELL PRESS! I’m a wuss I know this so bare with me. The KB’s bruise my forearms, bruise my deltoids and are awkward to hold! I managed to get 17 reps my first round on each arm at 25lbs and then 15 reps for a second round. I moved up to the 1 POOD KB for the last round and got 13 reps each arm. I should have moved up on the 2nd round but I was slightly SCARED of the 1 POOD (Russian for about 35lbs).

4/12/12 WOD OF DEATH!

Next was KB swings and Wall Walks. 10-1, so 10 KB swings, 10 Wall Walks, 9 KB Swings, 9 Wall Walks, etc. I did fairly well with the KB swings being 1 POOD swings. And the wall walks, although they look easy, they quickly tax your shoulders and for me personally brought on DIZZINESS fast! Not to mention my core is about as sore as ever. It hurts to take deep breaths. :/ Coach set a standard of getting your nose to the wall and to come down with restraint and not flailing around. I managed to get my nose to the wall each time and keep control but it was not easy. There was a 20 minute cap and I only managed to work my way down to 4 KB swings. With 20 seconds left there was no way I was getting 4 wall walks. It was disappointing and I was dying but I never thought it would hurt so bad! Hahaha. I lived and when I meet those beasts again, I’ll cry! Jokes, sorta. Hopefully I’ll be better at them!

Not our Box but as you can see you gotta get vertical on the wall AND touch your nose to the wall! WoOOOWEeeEEE! It's not easy!

Today’s happy day o’ fun was Skill/Strength: Dead Lifts, 3, 3, 3+1. Coach has been making us do math in the mornings. I don’t know if for punishment or his own amusement but I had to take 95% of my Max add 20lbs then take 80%, 85% and 90% of that. This results in what weight I should do each round of lifts. This equaled to 155lbs, 165lbs and 175lbs. I managed to bust out 8 reps on my last go. Not bad! At least to me not bad 🙂

4/13/12 WOD

The MetCon was a joy all in itself: RUN 800m, do 40 burpees (don’t die), RUN 400m, do 20 burpees (don’t puke) and RUN 200m, do 10 burpees (pray for survival). I totally killed this 800m RUN compared to Tuesdays run by a whole 3 seconds! LOL. It’s true. Then the 40 burpees came. I did 20 fairly well. I just paced them out nicely but the last 20 sucked. I didn’t stop, just didn’t go fast enough I suppose. Who knows. I couldn’t get a good deep breath to save my life! The 400 had to of been slow. I stopped looking at the clock. The set of 20 burpees was much better than the 40 but I was spent from the running. Fortunately by the time you get to the 200m run you know it’s almost done. I couldn’t breathe very well at all this morning but I was real happy to finish the last round of 10 burpees! Time: 13:42. I’m dead for the weekend. My body hates me!So hopefully I’ll get some nice recovery. Another weekend full of baseball for us with a forecast of rain 😦 Lets hope it waits till Sunday!

Have a FABULOUS FRIDAY the 13th! Make some brownies, they are good!

 

BOOMTASTIC!

At the BOOM Box and last night with the BOOMSTICKS!

Yu Darvish and Josh Hamilton 🙂 (Photo Credit: Brad Loper/SportsDayDFW)

So let me just say GO RANGERS! Thank goodness Yu got his pitching under control cause I knew there would be a lot of haters otherwise (I’m sure y’all are out there anyways). And SUPER THANK GOODNESS for all the HITTING! The BOOMSTICKS were out in full force!

4/10/12 WOD

This morning I wasn’t sure I’d be in full force for my workout just because it was a bunch of my weaknesses all bunched together! PISTOLS for Skill/Strength! AKA one legged squats 😦 I am no good at these. I have a tight IT band on the left leg and a cranky pants hip on my right side. I struggled very much on these today. It’s disappointing at best and I can only hope that extra mobility work and at home practice will save me with this RIDICULOUS movement.

This is WHAT a Pistol should look like.

MY next weakness is running! and deadlifts. I’m not GREAT at DLs but I’m not horrible either. The whole hip thing makes me have a butt thing which sometimes leads to a hamstring thing. The MetCon was 800m run, 25 deadlifts (@135lbs), 800m run. For Time OF COURSE. My initial 800 was right around the 4:10 mark. Not bad–not bad considering I HATE the running. I decided I wasn’t going to try and be a hero and I would break up my DLs into 5’s. I think this helped me out a lot. 135lbs proved to be hard but not impossible. I can’t clearly recall at what time I finished those but it was sometime between 6:30 and 7:00. I took off for my run and the HILL we have to run up got me good. So I ended up being much slower than my first 800. Don’t forget I just went pretty HEAVY (for me at least) on the DLs. My max is 185lbs. I felt good with this MetCon. I don’t think I could have pushed my runs any more without hurting my DL time. I feared fatigue coming on too fast if I went for too many DLs in a row which would have probably made me slow down too much. Time 11:21.

Happy Tuesday! Make IT BOOM-erific!

It’s an UNTITLED Tuesday!

I think I’ve completely run out of creative juices today and more so lately than ever. So I have nothing exciting to give you by way of a CATCHY Headline.

I was very proactive last night in my cooking and got 2 meatloaves made. One for eating right away and one for freezing for later this week! Who would have thunk it?!? I made food for later! Yay me. I also went ahead and shredded up some sweet potato to use for this mornings breakfast and maybe sides for dinner tonight. I typically just brush off extra work and focus on dinner for the night and possible leftovers for lunch. It felt good this morning to know I had prepped those sweet potatoes. Especially since it’s Big Test Week for the kiddos, breakfast was a little easier to get done.

As always I typically get good sleep but I love the warmth of my bed and hate to drag myself out of it! I was ready for the BOOM Box WOD till I looked it up and saw two 800m runs! EEEKKK! I don’t like running if you didn’t catch on to that until now, well…. now you know!

3/27/12 WOD

Our skill strength was Barbell Rows 4 sets of 10. Not so bad. You lie on the ground. Reach up to the bar that’s racked lower. You pull yourself up chest to bar. So it’s like a reverse pushup. The last round finally got me. I did 5 and 5 cause I was tired! Heheh. In between each round we worked on Max L-Sits. There was the option of using the boxes which gives you height advantage but I opted to use the 45 lb plates only. My max was an AMAZING 11 seconds 😦 NOT GOOD but I kept trying. I pretty much dropped to an average of 8 seconds. Those are something I never think about but definitely need to work on.

The MetCon was 800m Run, 30 Handstand GetUps, 800m Run for time. Yay fun. I ran my first 800 in 4 minutes. Not bad I suppose but not great by any means! The Handstand GetUps are just getting into a handstand with control against the wall and coming down with control. I did those just fine. I think I just moved too slow in general. Like I forgot it was for time! I didn’t take a look at the clock when I took off for my run but my overall time was 11 minutes. I should have picked up the pace on the handstands but I was just cruising for some reason. Overall not bad until I see the board tomorrow! Hahaha… sometimes the rest of the day totally blows my times out of the water! Good motivation to step it up. It’s just hard at 5 am!

Tonight is the Championship Game for the Cubs… Should be fun 🙂 Can’t wait. I got so excited I went out and bought all the boys Big League Chew! Hahah, I always want to be spirited and crafty but always at the last minute! Hehehe, I suck like that 🙂 So I just made them little “hoorah” gifts for fun. I’m a nerd I know.

Go CUBS!

So that’s all folks. I’ll be hollerin at ya later. Have a GREAT Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Mondays

I have a bad case of it. It most likely stems from the fact it’s spring break and I have to be at work while my kiddos get a week off from school. They always ask if I get spring break too but every year I have to disappoint them and say NO I don’t get days off like that. I have to “earn” my vacation by weekly accrual. So that’s no fun. Traffic was light so that helps but I definitely have a bad case of the Mondays! So bad I didn’t even want to hit up the BOOM Box for my WOD, but Ernie reminded me “if you want to get better, you can’t skip”. TRUE STORY!

Unwillingly I drove myself to the box. I was much better after I got stretched and warmed up. But I wasn’t quite ready for the mile run that was slated for the day. I HATE RUNNING. All you regulars know this and what a way to start off the week. ARGH! Before we hit up running we did Front Squats Deload. That wasn’t so bad. Still killer on the wrists but we did 5 (60lbs), 5 (65lbs) and 5 (70lbs). It went by pretty quickly and I’m happy to report I didn’t have any aches, tightness, etc. holding me back. It was also a light load so who knows.

3/12/12 WOD

Time for the run came too quickly. And today I was slower than normal. I just wasn’t feeling it. I know we all have those days but I was still disappointed in my time considering I’ve been keeping a mile between 8:10 and 8:30 and this morning it was 8:49! WTH! Slokey Pokey. But at least it’s done for the day. And hopefully we don’t have to run for a while! Hehehe. I’ll never enjoy running. And the day I do, y’all know it will be some kind of serious voodoo magic that came over me!

Our weekend consisted of more CrossFit with the Saturday Funday at the BOX. WE seem to always do a team WOD which is always ends up being a good time. I’m not sure everyone else agrees with me in that it’s a good time. There’s just something deranged about me that I enjoy all the working out! We had to do 3 rounds of 400 m run, 42 KB swings and 24 pullups. It’s so much easier when you share the load of the workout between 3 people! Except we all had to run the 400m :/ BOOOO! Hehehe. We then stick around and cheer on the remaining BOOM BEASTS to take on The CrossFit Games Open WOD. We are already done with 12.3! Only 2 left! Everyone did great. I wish I was more BEASTLY already so I could be competitive amongst the ranks. Coach mentioned this morning…. 2 weeks until we’re done and ready to train for next year! Ha, I need 3 a days or even 4 a days to make that possible! Maybe I’ll finally win that lottery and I’ll make CrossFit my job!

That will just have to be a dream for now as I don’t see that coming to fruition anytime soon! Hopefully my Monday doesn’t drag on forever and I hope yours doesn’t either. Have a good one!

I’m NO TRACK star but I’m feelin good!

It’s Friday Folks! Can I get a big WOOOOO?!? It’s been a super long week for some reason. But we made it, right?

Like I said yesterday, no meats to cook – Cause I’m a loser slacker forgetful person :/ So I decided on my way home I’d stop by Whole Foods and pick up some fresh items and cook for my Dad since he’s still on the mend. I had gathered up the few things I needed and got in line and low and behold… NO WALLET! I left it in my gym bag! Oh you can only imagine how irritated I became with myself. So I asked if I could write a check because I had my checkbook in my purse. SURE! So I write out the check and she waits for me to hand her my driver’s license. I looked at her and said I wrote down my DL number BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE MY WALLET that has my driver’s license in it along with my money! OH. Sorry I can’t take it then. WELL FREAKIN’ AWESOME, thanks lady! and I just walked away. Petty I know. Nothing to be frazzled over but for a good 15 minutes I let it get to me.

Moving on…. I ended up cooking my dad and kids some steaks he had out (not grassfed 😦 … heheh, I’ve spoiled myself), CANNED spinach (LOL cause he lives off canned veggies, I’m working on getting him transitioned to fresh) and some corn tortillas (he doesn’t quite get PALEO just yet). None the less he enjoyed his steak tacos as did the kids. And of course NO PICS! One day it will be second nature to photograph my stuff, I PROMISE!

1/20/12 WOD

Onto my WOD this morning… a RUNNING day 😦 Talk about fake it till you make it from yesterday! Skill strength was good. I got to really work on breaking down my Clean and Jerk and getting technique developed. So many darn things to remember. I really wish I had lifted previous to knowing what CrossFit was but I guess I wish I had been a gymnast too! Haha good thing about coming in with zero knowledge is that I can really gauge how far I’ve come. It’s great to watch my progress from pretty much nothing.

Our times. We took 3 minute rests in between and that is why the overall time is over 19 minutes.

And then the RUNNING. I did not want to run at all. 600 meters is far! Hahah, well not really but times 4 it is and I don’t like the running. I have not other choice but to suck it up and run. I did get 3 minute rests between which were wonderful and needed and I just re-iterate how much of a whiny baby I really am. I surprised myself with my times. My first run was 2:38. And what do ya know I got better with each run! 2:28, 2:34 and 2:25. Like the post title says I’m NO TRACK STAR at all but I know I used to not be able to run 400m in these times much less 600m. So YES I was feeling good! I’m getting faster and I’m not even trying 🙂 I know I’m trying in overall fitness but I am sure not trying in the running dept. Not intentionally. It’s amazing. Before you know it I’ll have a sub 8 min mile and I may learn to enjoy running….hahah well maybe I’ll get the sub 8 but I don’t think I’ll ever ENJOY running just to run.

It’s Friday y’all! And we have a busy weekend ahead. Ernie and I are volunteering at The Fittest Games down in Austin, TX. It’s the last in a trio of events that some local firebreathers have been competing at. An overall champion will be crowned so it should be a great event to attend. It’s also one of the final BIG events before the CrossFit Games Open. We were thinking it would be fun to watch in general and we figured if we volunteered it would be even better. Hopefully if I’m not too busy I’ll get some cool shots with my handy dandy iPhone and maybe a few stories to share as well. We will also hit up a comedy show tomorrow night because one of our favorite comedians Bill Burr is in town. What perfect timing! We get a nice little road trip, a CrossFit adventure and some good laughs all in the same day. I hope everyone has a GREAT weekend. It should be nice here in the state of Texas. I hope it’s nice everywhere else 🙂

I AM NOT A RUNNER

I am not a runner NOR do I aspire to be one. I don’t train to “RUN”. I don’t care to run. I don’t take casual runs around my neighborhood or local park to relax or blow off steam. Running is a big ol pain in the ass to me. You get the point, I HOPE!

So when I say I don’t like to run it doesn’t mean I don’t run when requested of me at either iChooseFit bootcamp or CrossFit Boom. I run. I just don’t like it. So Stephanie what are trying to get at? Why do you keep rambling?

Well 9 months ago I took my first ever conditioning type test and I was miserable and felt horrible and hated life. I was a chunk of a girl trying to get through one hell of a workout. Part of the test was a mile run. Yay fun! 1 whole mile and I thought I would die. UPHILL! Well part of the way uphill… it’s called Hamburger Hill and it’s a hill that I have not befriended. In order to make the “mile” we have to run up it twice… EVEN BETTER right? So I ran this MILE in 11:47 in March of this year. Not really horrible but not stellar by any means. This past July I took another conditioning test and low and behold I took off more than 2 minutes off my time. I ran the mile in 9:06! SAY WHAT? Amazeballs! Well, no test today but we timed our mile this morning and believe it or not even more time got shaved off. 8:36 MILE! Are you kidding me? I felt so good about that time you have no idea. 8:36! Yes me, the NON RUNNER who doesn’t train to run. That is the proof in the pudding (proper saying, not sure but it sounded good) that it just takes consistent physical training to get the job done. I know it’s not a 6 min mile or some magical “runner” number but that’s a number I’m damn proud of! Woohooo…. Thank you iChooseFit… Thank you CrossFit BOOM!!

So now I’ve got that out of the way I have more stuff to share! It’s a good day for blogging but maybe blogging overkill. So I’ll keep it short and just put pictures.

For dinner I had some chicken out to cook. Ernie was starving and really didn’t want to wait but I made him wait anyways. My dad took care of the kids dinner so I didn’t have to worry about them starving. Just Ernie but he lived and all was well. So I sauteed up the chicken with some coconut oil and yummo spices. While that was simmering away I made a mad dash to make FRIED RICE out of cauliflower. I kind of sort of followed this recipe from NON NOM PALEO but I didn’t have all the ingredients so I took what I did have and winged it. You can find the recipe at this link: http://nomnompaleo.com/post/3195098303/asian-cauliflower-fried-rice

"RICE", Onions and Carrots

Crispifying the Bacon 🙂

Chicken with Asian Cauliflower Fried Rice

 

Post dinner I decided to make a go for it with a new cookie recipe I found at elana’s pantry … http://www.elanaspantry.com/double-chocolate-mocha-cookies/

I used all the ingredients except for the coffee because I had none. After burning the bottoms of some of the cookies I was upset. But they still tasted ok for having some char on them. The next batch were burn free and delightful! Added bonus: kid approved! So overall another WIN!

Double Chocolate Cookies = GREAT SUCCESS!

 

Double Chocolate Mocha Cookies
2 ¼ cups blanched almond flour
¼ cup cacao powder
2 tablespoons organic decaf coffee, espresso grind
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon celtic sea salt
½ cup grapeseed oil
½ cup agave nectar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¾ cup dark chocolate chips

  1. In a large bowl, combine almond flour, cacao powder, ground coffee, baking soda and salt
  2. In a smaller bowl, stir together grapeseed oil, agave and vanilla
  3. Stir wet ingredients into dry and then mix in chocolate drops (or chunks)
  4. Drop dough by heaping tablespoonfuls onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet
  5. Bake at 350° for 7-8 minutes
  6. Cool and serve
Makes 24 cookies