Zippymama's Birthday Season

As my friends and I say, we have now entered my birthday season. I mean, why celebrate on one day when you can celebrate the whole season? They were so wonderful to show up and surprise me with a little party in Powell on my birthday day this year. There is nothing better than feeling secure in the love of an amazing group of friends and family.

My birthday season and the beginning of school are busy times, but I am trying to keep up with my normal routines. In fact, I am implementing a couple of changes to my regular workouts.

First of all, I was thrilled to have my first one-on-one yoga training session with Maria Tarantino. She is helping me fine tune my practice, work on alignment and delve more deeply into yogic philosophy. She gave me several pointers in our first session that I have already been able to apply in my home practice. I am so excited to have her as a mentor!

I am also changing up my running routine. I was totally inspired by Brad Hudson's book, Run Faster and his discussion of his coaching methodology, "adaptive running". I would really like to apply his principles to my training regimen to help me reach my speed goals - but the training cycles are all geared to culminate in a "peak race". Unfortunately, I am beginning this at the end of the race season, so my "peak race" won't be for many more months. So instead of starting my true 5K goal time training schedule right now, I am using his plan for a Level 1 10K runner in order to slowly build up my weekly mileage and integrate some of his methods into my workout schedule without the pressure of attaining my goal time at the end.

I watched Jillian Michaels on one of the morning talk shows today - she is fierce! What an inspiration .... one day I hope to be a force for fitness in my own small way!

Today's workout:
40 min. easy run (4.33 miles @ 6.5 mph)
25 min. resistance training
60 min. yoga