The Workout That Wasn’t

We’ve all had them.  Day’s where we have big plans for a work out or an activity that you look forward to all day.

A good run, a hike, bike ride?  Good class?

And then for whatever reason, things just don’t happen as planned.  That was the story of my little work out this afternoon.

Good Intentions

After yesterday’s Morning arm routine followed by an evening sculpt class, I woke up sore and exhausted.  Like I mentioned in my previous post, my plan for the afternoon was a nice leisurely hike through my favorite area of the front range.

I woke up, did a brief morning yoga routine and even enjoyed a nice 2 mile walk at lunch.  All warming myself up for an afternoon hike.

Welp, mother nature put a wrench in those plans with scattered storms.  Rain in the mountains is not something I like to mess with, so I decided to lace up my shoes and try and make it out for a run before it got too bad outside near work, even though my legs were beat.

Nope, two laps of the park near my office and right around one mile later, the rain came with a vengeance (and my car windows were down a bit, upps).  I made it back to the car hoping that I could get some miles at home.

Bathroom selfie

Once again, less than a mile in, mother nature decided to continue messing with me and brought more rain.  This time nice enough to be dripping inside of my sunglasses.  Awesome.

At this point, I decided enough was enough, and that someone was telling me I need to take it easy today. And to be completely honest, my tired legs weren’t willing to push through any more obstacles.

Two more miles for a grand total of 3 miles for the evening.

I wrapped up the work out with some 8 minute abs (time 2) and called it a day.

What was intended to be a nice hike turned into a very wet short and slow run that my legs didn’t want to do, with some core work thrown in for good measure.  Oh well. . . you can’t win ’em all, right?

Dinner

At least dinner wasn’t a let down!  On the menu for tonight was grilled tacos, one of our favorite staples.

In the mix tonight was:

• Grilled onion
• Grilled peppers
• Grilled squash
• Fresh homemade guac
• + Corn tortillas char grilled.

I’m actually most impressed with my experimental homemade guac.  I found some “ripe” avocados at Whole Foods yesterday, and figured I needed some healthy fats in my diet, so why not?   The avocado worked out perfectly in my little homemade creation!

Fresh Guac

• One avocado, cut and smashed
• One garlic clove, pressed
• 1 tablespoon of cayenne pepper
• 6 small cherry tomatoes cut into halves/quarters
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Just mix it all together and serve!

YUM YUM  I wasn’t really feeling anything for dinner tonight, but the mix of fresh ingredients and grilled goodies definitely satisfied my confused taste buds.

Missed Pictures

And just for good measure, the pictures that I forgot on my cell phone yesterday

An awesome and TOUGH sculpt class that left me quivering

Delicious sushi from Whole Foods

Happy Thursday Everyone!

Tell me about your last work out that wasn’t.  I can’t be the only one, right?

Homemade Granola Bars

I mentioned in my morning post that I am working on eating less processed goods and more WHOLE, REAL foods.  Generally speaking, I do pretty well with this.  I eat a lot of fresh fruits and veggies, good lean meats, and fresh baked breads in my daily diet.  BUT, one area that I am particularly weak on is bars.  I LOVE bars of all kind.  Ever since I started running and using them as pre-run fuel, it was true love.

Welp, while I’m all about balance, my obsession with bars has gotten a little out of balance.  For me, it isn’t eating the BARS that is bad, it’s the processed nature of such bars.  So — something I am working on this week is creating my own bars that I can snack on, hopefully finding that I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by not getting the prepacked variety.

I want to start with some of my favorite recipe inspirations for you guys, via my favorite bloggers and pinterest.

Easy No Bake Peanut Butter Granola Bars from Fannetastic Anne 🙂

http://www.fannetasticfood.com/recipes/no-bake-peanut-butter-granola-bars/

These take 5 minutes to prep, have PB as a primary ingredient, and are stocked with seeds. My kinda bar 😉

Oatmeal Dark Chocolate Granola Bars Fannetastic Anne 🙂

http://www.fannetasticfood.com/recipes/no-bake-peanut-butter-granola-bars/

Oatmeal and dark chocolate?  I need this in my life.

Almond Energy Bars via Carrots’n’cake

http://carrotsncake.com/2014/03/almond-energy-bars.html

These just LOOK beautiful and crunchy!

No Bake Peanut Butter Bars

http://unsophisticook.com/no-bake-peanut-butter-bars/

I’m drooling. . .

And these are just a few of my favorites, friends.  The options out there are ENDLESS.  I started working on some baked goods last night via some free continental breakfast oats — and will be working through out the week trying to perfect my own little recipe 🙂 ❤  The ingredients I’ve been using so far include:

• Peanut butter (duhh)
• Rolled oats
• Brown sugar and maple oats
• Trail mix (raisins, M&Ms)
• Applecause

These are my must have’s basically, but I’m looking to add more seeds and crunchy goodies moving forward!  Hopefully by next week I’ll have a recipe to share with you guys 🙂

Question of the Afternoon:  Ever make  bars yourself?

Trying Something New In The Kitchen

Good Morning and Happy Thursday/Almost the weekend.

And a Good morning sunshine from Gusman and our Thursday morning walk.

I forgot to start my MapMyRun application when we started, so it’s showing a little shorter than normal. . . but today’s walk was our standard hilly loop.  Just enough to get my legs refreshed after a TOUGH workout last night.

Workout Last Night

I had a tough day at work yesterday and needed to blow off some steam when I got home.  What better way to do that then get a quick sweat on?

I had remembered seeing a really good Boot Camp style routine Julie’s PBFingers.com that sounded like the perfect sweat fest to do the trick.

To do this routine, you did three minutes at each square, with 30 seconds rest in between.  The only thing I switched up was square 9 (60 seconds of: shuffles bear crawl and backwards run) to a second RUN section because our small apartment gym doesn’t quite provide the space for those work outs.

When I finished this routine, I was shaking and had completely forgotten about my work frustration for the time being.  Perfect-o.  Thanks, Julie 🙂

Dinner

It’s a good thing I got a good sweat in, too, because Zach and I had fun Pinterest inspired dinner plans for ourselves last night.

http://www.playfulcooking.com/pasta/arugula-gnocchi-spicy-brown-butter-sauce/

We’ve been wanting to switch things up a bit in the kitchen so we decided to go big last night and try our hand at gnocchi.  Arugula gnocchi to be exact.

While it was definitely challenging, and we will do a few things differently next time (mash the potato more, less flour), overall the end result was delicious and I think we’ve got new confidence in ourselves and our cooking!

It took about 45 minutes for our large potato to boil, then we removed the skin and began mashing.  Unfortunately Zach and I do not have a masher OR gnocchi maker, so we had to make do.  I left the mashing to the strong man, and started work on the arugula addition.

One large handful of arugula and one egg yolk blended together in the food processor.

We added the “dressing” and potatoes together then slowly started integrating one cup of all purpose flour. We actually didn’t end up using all of our flour (maybe next time 2 potatoes), but the dough came together surprisingly easily.

We rolled the dough out into one large log, and then cut it into 5 smaller pieces.

Each piece then got rolled into a smaller log and cut into the small gnocchi pieces.  I then handed Zach the little pieces and he forked them to put the final “gnocchi” tough.

After they were done, all we had to do was bring a pot of water to a boil and boil the gnocchi until they began floating (we did ours in two batches).

Once they were all floating, we added them to an already prepared pan of 2 tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of oil, garlic and chili pepper for a final crisping of the pasta.

We served ours with parmesan and side salads

For a nice, complete and overall pretty delicious meal.

Like I mentioned, this was our first attempt and we didn’t do things perfectly.  We also didn’t have all the ingredients the actual recipe called for so we had to make a few changes, but overall I’m proud of our first attempt.  Please click that first picture (the pretty one) for the actual pin and recipe!

For those of you that are scared to try something like this in the kitchen, don’t be!  We opened up a bottle of wine and just had fun with it!

Time to get to work 🙂

Question of the Morning: When was the last time you tried something new in the kitchen?  What’s your favorite thing to prepare?

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