Brit Chick Runs

HELLO!

Oh, look at that. Another week passed by and I didn’t write a thing on here! Shockingly enough, I do actually like doing the Brit Chick Runs-thang, but boy, this week has just completely run away with me! Next week is no different: I’ve got THE major important interview for the primary teaching course on Monday (seriously, it’s a big deal. Life changing!), I’ve got an important meeting with my teaching assistant course assessor on Tuesday (& a buttload of work to do for that course too), Wednesday sees the scrapping of Meredith, my car (she’s broken), Thursday I’m working at school, and on Friday, I’ve got a second job interview (for the one I had the first interview for the other week). Phew!

Today, I ran just under 14miles – with a frozen & totally numb butt – rehearsed my speech / practiced interview questions / practiced the story I’m telling to the children, visited my grandparents and sorted Mrs Chika out. Oh, and drove to the school where my interview is being held, so I know exactly where I’m going at 8am tomorrow morning. Oh (again), and I got soaked to the skin – the last 30mins of my run were in heavy, disgusting HAIL! Don’t you love winter?

Needless to say, right now I don’t have many pictures to show you…BUT, how about a video!?

Click right HERE, my blossums, and you’ll see me in my running action! How ’bout that!?

And now, I must go back to working procrastinating. I discovered a lovely website this weekend: www.iwastesomuchtime.com – It’s the best site ever! Pinterest? Facebook? Twitter? BAH, so yesteryear! So yeah, that’s what I need to go do. Oh, and sit here and have mini panic attacks over my interview tomorrow, but whatever….

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Aussi: I keep seeing that 20 Questions survery poppin’ up all over the internetz, so obviously I have to jump on that bandwagon. Who doesn’t like answering questions about themselves and pretending they’re interesting people!?

1) What is one of your favorite ways to spend a Saturday?

• going for a walk with The Mothership
• playing with Chika in the school
• going for a really really long run (although technically, that’s done on a Sunday…but whatever)
• eating a massive bowl of oats
• drinking a cappuccino (I would do this everyday if I had the £££!)

2) List your top three favorite TV shows that are currently on TV. <— I added that last bit, because otherwise it’d be all, ‘Friends, SATC, Buffy…’

• Modern Family
• The Big Bang Theory
• Um…Rude Tube? You’ve Been Framed? Britain’s Got Talent (starting soon!)? Two and a Half Men? The list is endless! Grey’s Anatomy?

3) Would you rather be in pictures or take them?

Considering I hate 99.9% of pictures of myself, I’d hazard a guess and say I’ll be the taker.

Although I never say no to a Rabbit-Freya photo op

4) Why do you blog?

Cos I like to ramble, and I really suck at keeping diaries.

5) Share five websites that you visit regularly…

• Google Reader
• Email (hotmail, gmail)
• Horse and Hound
• Twitter
• Heatworld

6) If you could have lunch with one person from your Twitter list who would it be?

Ryan Gosling. Duh.

Though the second I find James Franco’s twitter, you bet I’ll be bumping Ryan from the table and placing The Franco in his place! (Yeah, I watched 127 Hours the other day, and now I’m in love).

7) List a few of your favorite snacks.

• cereal
• soya yogurt
• almonds
• Clif bars
• Luna bars (or any other random bar from my ever-dwindling bar stash)

8 ) Do you have a pet? If so, what kind?

No, no pets here.

I KID, OF COURSE!

I have:

Cat 1 – Rabbit

Cat 2 – Coco

Cat 3 – Ralph

Cat 4 – Kovac

Horse 1 – Chika

And I have a mouse that lives in my car. More on that another day.

9) Which three material possessions would you struggle to live without?

• my laptop (with internet connection AND all my photos on it!)
• my books
• my chocolate stash

10) What’s your favorite drink?

• Healthy answer: water with a slice of lemon and various superfoods added
• Honestly? Diet Pepsi. Coffee. x a lot.

11) Do you enjoy cooking?

I do indeedee, though I prefer baking. Double chocolate vegan muffins do be my speciality.

12) Do you have children?

Many.

13) What are your favorite hobbies?

• RUNNING!
• reading
• riding
• other things that begin with ‘r’
• baking
• hugging the animals (see question 3)

14) Would you consider yourself to be shy or outgoing?

I’m a bit of a loner at times, and I’ve always been considered shy, but I do have an outgoing side to me. I’m ‘shygoing’, or ‘oushy’

15) If you could change one thing about yourself, what would you change?

Just one thing? Oh boy, too much to list! I don’t think I could narrow it down to one thing :s

16) Who is your favorite actor/actress?

Ryan Gosling, James Franco, Rooney Mara, Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon Levitt (?), and the dad from Modern Family! I could never pick just one.

17) What’s the coolest thing you’ve done this week?

Read to a class of 28? 3 x 10 minute threshold run at 7.25 pace? Wash my bedsheets? I’m sure one of those activities counts as cool, somewhere….

18) Do you live near your family or far from them?

I live with my dear Mutti and StepVati, but my sister lives in Londres Town, which is about 2.25hrs on the train away from me. To me and my English ways, that is a long way. To American people, that’s practically next door.

19) List three of your talents.

• Running and/or riding
• Baking
• Planking with Rabbit on my back

20) What is your greatest attribute?

Um…ask me later?

Hmm…my dedication to my goals. If I want to do something, I’ll darn well do it and do it well! BO.

Annnnd that’s the end.

Be sure to check out the Women’s Running / Project 26.2 video! I’m the tall lady with the long blonde hair…

xo

Hello, lovely people! How’s it going?

I for one, am totally and utterly done in right now – meaning, I’m exhausted! I started today (Sunday) with a 12.6mile / 1hr45minute run, which was super – ZERO pain! Although the latter half of the run was tough, because I was running directly into incredibly strong winds. Winds + Freya = a drop of 15 secs/per mile! Sheesh. Talk about blustery. At least I survived. But yeah, the wind – and hills – have taken it out of me, and now I want to curl up in front of a fire, with a Rabbit-shaped kitten on my lap, a mug of hot cocoa, and Ryan Gosling stroking my face. #bliss

Alas.

I might have time to do that later, but first I want to write this post, do some child-primary-school-development-related research, study the primary curriculum in a bit more detail, and do general prep for my Very Important Interview coming up in one week’s time!!

So anyway, here are some random musings because my mind is frazzled and I can’t think of a cool theme….

1) Coco and Ralph – the ginger twins – now have collars with BELLS! They seem to have become masters at bird-catching, which is not ideal, because we like pretty birds over my way. The other day, I walked into the bathroom, and the bath was full of blood, feathers everywhere, and a bird with a head and a shredded (yes, shredded) body. It was like a scene out of some horrific horror film!

2) I started my teaching assistant course, which is good – it’s nice to engage my mind a bit – but it’s tiring! I get home on Thursdays at about 9pm, having not had dinner or anything. The first week it happened, I had nothing prepped, so ended up with this:

Chocolate banana oats with extra soy milk, and some tempeh, which was super quickly fried in soy sauce and then covered in nooch.

Random.

3) Talking of random: when I uploaded the photos from my camera onto here, I had this bowl of oats amongst the mix:

I have no idea when I ate it, what I made it out of, or why I thought it was worthy of a picture. Maybe it was because it’s in a square bowl…? Who knows, it’s a mystery. But either way, I obviously went through the trouble of taking the photo, loading it onto the laptop, making the sharpness better, and then waiting half a small lifetime for it to upload onto here – so I darn well was gonna put it in this post! Hurrump.

4) I got woken up multiple times last night by jingling outside my room. I guess that’s the cat way of getting me back for wrapping bells around their necks.

5) I really really like pinning things on Pinterest, and I really really wanted to put a picture in here of something I pinned recently, but I really really can’t work out how to do it. Anyone care to shed some light, or am I doomed to spend the rest of this post showing you pictures of oats?

6) Oats it is.

But, oats with crumbled cookie, coconut, chocolate chips and a side of Coco!

7) The second time I went to my TA course, I had dinner prepped for when I got home:

That, my dears, would be carrot-red lentil-peanut butter soup! My mum once made a carrot soup, and she added in a few tbsps of peanut butter into it – took it to a whooole new level, I’m telling ya! But for me and my runner ways, vegetable soup wouldn’t do it for dinner – hence the red lentils too. Protein, carb, fat, vegetable? Check check check annnnnd check.

I have a 3 x 10min threshold run on Tuesday! Holy smokes! 10 minutes is a long time to be running at threshold…but gosh darnnit, that run is going to be my bitch and I will attack it with a fury! Much like the fury I had today, during the windy run – do you know, at mile 10 today, I literally stopped and screamed like a caveman into the wind? That’s what frustration does to you. And I guess a hefty chunk of Emotional Woman too.

9) That’s a socca pancake.

Covered in delicious noochified scrambled tofu!

Yumm.

Gosh it’s been a while since I’ve done good ol’ proper socca, with no crazy additions (grated carrot, millet flakes, raisins, walnuts, coconut etc etc..). I’ve missed it

10) I had a job interview last Friday!

To give you an idea of just how competitive the job market is now: 130 people applied for this job! 130!! And they gave under 30 an interview, so even if I don’t get a second interview, at least I got one in the first place! That in itself is an achievement!

11) I played with my pony this weekend

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We were playing Tag…

I also played with Tig:

And those Tig photos are on the blog purely so my dear sister (HI HANNAH!) can nick them! She misses her boy now she’s living up the teacher lifestyle in some corner of London.

12) The OLYMPICS will be here soon!!! I have a predicament. I don’t have tickets to anything, but I do believe that the marathon is a free-for-all – ie, if you can get to London and find a space [amongst the billion or so other folk] then you can watch. Now, I’d LOVE to watch, because at what other time in my life will the Olympic games be a mere 2hr train journey away? BUT. If I do watch the marathon, chances are I’ll see a blurry 2 second flurry of super-fast men running past, and that’s it. I’ll miss the racing finish and all the blood, sweat and pain that will inevitably happen before – the bits which would be shown on TV. Soo…what to do? Go and watch, just so I’ve done something Olympic-y, or watch at home? Decisions, decisions….

13) I dreamt about my super-cute physio the other night….remember, the one who treated me for shin splints a year ago? Yeah, he’s still on my lovesick mind. OH, he was so beautiful….woe is me! Maybe I shall feign injury just so I can go and say ‘ello ‘ello to him ;-p

14) That’s it, I’m done, post over! I’m tired!

xo

Question Time: What sport do you want to see most at the Olympics?

Hello!

Oh boy, life has taken over this week! And it’s still rolling along at a fairly steady pace, leaving little time to sit down and waste an hour whilst WordPress s l o w l y uploads photos and the like. SO, until I do feel the urge to be patient, here’s what’s been going down this past week:

- I saw Paul from Physio & Therapy (the Women’s Running / Project 26.2 official physio, and the guy who treated friggin; MO FARAH before he moved Stateside!!!) on Tuesday, and my goodness, the man is a genius! He gave me THE most painful ITB-loosening session, clicked a whole bunch of my bones into the right place, made me an inch taller, straightened out my right knee cap, gave me a heel raise (my left leg is a shorty) and countless other things. I am sore today, but it was worth it!

- I have a job interview for an outdoor clothing company on Friday!

- I’ve got to the interview stage of the primary teacher training course!! That in itself is a Big Deal, because [according to the letter] there were a heck of a lot of strong candidates this year. Even if I don’t get any further than the interview – which involves storytelling to a class of 5year olds, amongst other things – the experience will be so useful. I’ve now got to spend the next 10 days prepping like a mad woman…

- Warhorse is out and I still haven’t seen it. Has anyone seen it??! How is it!?

- My running has been going amazingly well! I had a 4 x 7minute threshold run on Tuesday, and my last threshold was 7.03 pace. Now, 2 weeks ago, I ran a 5min threshold at 7,03 pace and was very, very pooped. 18months ago, I practically died running a mile at 7.03 pace. On Tuesday, 7.03 felt pretty dang manageable! In fact, I could’ve kept going and going, and it was ok and enjoyable and lovely, and came after I’d already done three 7minute thresholds! Man, I do love this running lark. It’s amazing to see real differences in my fitness.

- I’ve got Brighton half marathon in February, Colchester half marathon in March, and Brighton marathon in April. Anyone care to come cheer me on!?

- I’ve started my teaching assistant training course, which goes on til June. So far, so good!

- I’m currently at my aunt’s house being a House Sitter, researching for my job interview, and working out my answers to possible questions I might get asked at the primary school teacher interview. And it’s also 10pm, and I have to get up early to run tomorrow and it’s going to be ‘heavy rain’..wwaahh. ANd I haven’t read my newspaper yet, or taken my aunt’s dogs out for their last bathroom break, or given my Rabbit a hug today. le sigh. Ze tough life!

Right, I have to get back to it! I just wanted to let y’all know quickly that I haven’t died / abandoned the blog forever / run to Vegas and married Ryan Gosling.

xo

Heyhohoho.

How are we all?

It’s been busy my way! Last Saturday, I had a training day for Women’s Running / Project 26.2 in Teddington. You can read all about it on the Women’s Running website, when my blog goes up, but before then – here’s some stuff that I’ve learnt since that day:

1) I can drive through the middle of London (yes, LONDON), with a panicking SatNav that will only say ‘re-routing’ over and over again, by myself, in the dark, with low blood sugar and not a clue as to where I am going – and not die. And all that BEFORE the training day even began! Sheesh.

2) Tomato pasta is tasty enough to be worthy of second helpings for lunch, when made by other people (I’m looking at you, random cafe in Teddington). Tomato pasta made by oneself is never as good – mainly because chewy, undercooked pasta is not the way to go:

At least I tried, right?

3) When I run with lots of other people (particularly fellow Project 26.2 men and women..), I run faster! I think it’s my competitive side coming out to play, but never before have I had two 7.04 min/miles in a row, and NEVER have I hit 5.58 pace! I’m the next Usain Bolt – mark my words.

4) Pancakes are still my number one favourite lunch – and always will be.

(Charred) Pear-flax-ginger, with a PF-banana sauce, and a BLOOD ORANGE! Which leads to…

5) Blood oranges are 10 x better than regular ones. Maybe it’s because they’re red, maybe it’s because they sound daunting and evil, or maybe it’s the sheer novelty value at never having had a b l o o  d o r a n g e before…who knows.I just know I want more of them in my life!

6) My favourite coffee-maker in Costa has let her standards slip…normally, when I order my primo soya cappuccino, I ask for it to be extra frothy (aka ‘dry’, in CoffeeLand lingo). I’ve been training up the Costa barristers and they’ve all become experts at my order, literally beginning making it as I walk through the door. However, my favourite lady seems to have changed her method / idea of what ‘frothy’ is – she handed one to me the other week, and said ‘extra bubbly, just how you like it.’ Now that’s super sweet of her, but bubbly? No no no! Frothy!!! Bubbly is a few centimeters worth of bubbly weak froth – I like inches of thick foamy goodness, the kind you need a spoon (or a finger) to finish. Gah! So, when I went in to town yesterday and saw she was working, I kind of just…walked straight back out again, before anyone saw me. I then did the unspeakable, and bought a cappuccino from the Cafe Nero just down the road. I felt so bad about it…but then, the Cafe Nero coffee was incredible, perfect, frothy, thick & wonderful. BUT, it was 60p more expensive. Hmm. Maybe I should just stick to making my own at home?

Check out THAT froth!! Made with a £9.99 frother! Incredible. I may or may not have had six homemade decaff soya cappuccinos in two days.

7) If I want to continue doing swimming as my cross training, I need to either a) shave off all my hair. b) be the only one in the pool who is wearing a swimming hat, and risk getting ridiculed, or c) ask y’all for advice on what the heck to do with my hair whilst I’m in the pool!

Exhibit A:

My hair, post swim.

W.

T.

F.

Last week, I plaited it – FAIL – and this week, I put it in a ponytail/bun thing – even bigger FAIL. It was literally one huge clump of tangled mess!! HELP! If hair had feelings, mine was screaming in agony whilst I tore it apart brushed it through. Oh, and I had one nasty headache afterwards, from all the yanking and pulling. Waah :’(

8 ) Nope, can’t think of a number eight. I guess seven is the maximum number of new things I can learn in the space of 4 or 5 days. This bodes well for the future.

So, any hair words of wisdom??!

What do you order when you go into a coffee shop? (& if you don’t like coffee, SHAME ON YOU! ;P)

I feel happy today!

1) I’m wearing freshly washed jogging bottoms, which are still hot from the utility room (#uglycomfort)

2) I ran a painless 10.25 miles today.

3) I hit 2 miles at 7.04 pace, and maxed at 5.58 pace, during the (absolutely freakin’ fabulous) Women’s Running / Project 26.2 training day yesterday (AAH!)

4) I’ve had plenty of Rabbit-hugs and Chika-hugs today.

5) I drove through the centre of London all on my lonesome yesterday, and DIDN’T DIE.

6) I’ve already washed my hair today (least favourite job ever)..

7) I had a lovely 3 mile walk with my mum.

I’m going to have my number one favourite dinner tonight.

9) I am in mad crazy love with running.

10) Warhorse comes out Friday, my teaching assistant course starts on Thursday, and I shoooould be going to my first ever Hatha yoga class on Tuesday evening.

= HAPPY!

Why are YOU happy today?