We’re now well into 2014, and since my last race I’ve gotten married, spent a week and a half in Mexico followed by two days in Kelowna for Christmas, followed by a week and change at work for year-end festivities (fellow accountants know what I’m talking about). Did I mention that lunch and dinner was provided during year-end… Buffet style? Good times for sure. And I have the gut to prove it!

Okay, it might not be THAT bad, but suffice to say that December and January were not friendly to my fitness, despite feeling motivated to set goals and start training for 2014. But that is all going to change, of course. Isn’t it?

In the past few weeks I’ve hit the track maybe once a week and run outside maybe twice a week. Swimming has been admittedly lacking, even though it is my weakness, and I am hoping that my cycling fitness comes back quickly since it is my strong suit. I’m not going to make excuses, even though I could. I’ve been lazy. Yes, I do workouts every week but definitely not with the consistency that someone with big goals should. Something needs to change.

With that being said, I’ve decided that my starting point is going to be to register for the St. Patrick’s day 5km run in Calgary. It’s a distance that I haven’t tried before, and I am interested to see how I would go on a shorter-distance race. For the next month I’m really going to focus on this, with a goal of going under 20 minutes. Maybe I should be more ambitious than that, but it’s a bit of an unknown for me and under 20 seems to be a pretty decent time.

On top of that, I’ve managed to get in about 32km of running this week, which included one track session that consisted of 4 sets of 5 x 200m on one minute (ouch), and three outdoor runs – one 12k run at my long, slow pace, one 6.5k run at a moderate intensity, and an 8k run at an easy-ish pace. The main goal for now is to increase frequency and mileage. Four runs in a week isn’t bad to start but my goal is 5-6. Edmonton winters make it difficult to achieve this at times – this morning when I woke up it was -26 Celcius with the windchill rated at -34. I’m not running in that! At the moment though, we’re only at -21 with no windchill so it’s looking like I’ll be able to get in my long run after all. Consistency is the key, and it looks like the ball has started rolling!

I also want to try to do a bit about food in each of my blog entries. After all – as runners, nutrition is part of the game and we do work up some healthy appetites with all of these workouts! This week we tried a recipe that Kim found on blissfulbblog.com called Creamy Avocado Pasta. I never would have thought to make pasta sauce using an avocado, but this is genius! I pretty much followed her recipe, but used regular linguini noodles instead of whole wheat spaghetti, and added in some chopped grape tomatoes. Delish! This one is definitely going into our regular rotation.

I think I was saying something about going for a run? Better go layer up before I convince myself that it’s nicer in the warmth of my condo!