This and That

Okay, okay, so it turned out I took another week off - yikes! We had company over the weekend and were busy visiting Maastricht, Gent and Scherpenheuvel, and enjoying ourselves - no time for our long run (or is that just an excuse???). Stefaan actually got up and ran a bit on Saturday but I was too busy making pancakes!

Knowing myself well enough (being a "pancake duty trumps running" kind of woman), I signed up for two races this summer to keep myself in line: an 11K in Rijkevorsel (Belgium) in July with Jenny while she is here, and the Hottest Race 10K in Texas in August, that Stefaan, Christy, Mom and I will do (yes, we are crazy).

So, like Jenny always says, "Get a plan and follow it!" I plotted out all the workouts I need to do the next 13 weeks to be in tip top shape for those two races. Yesterday I got back into the swing of things again, with a tempo workout at the gym. It went pretty well, considering my last run was a week ago. I managed to do 4.12 km in 26 minutes, alternating 4 5-min tempo segments with 2-min recovery segments. Warm up and cool down jogging brought the total distance to 5K in 33 min.

On another note, Oprah is going to do a vegan diet for 21 days! She is following the cleanse program from Kathy Freston's book, "Quantum Wellness", which has you give up caffeine, sugar, alcohol, gluten and animal products. So it's not just vegan, but also a pretty strict detox diet. You don't have to cut out all those other things in order to eat a vegan diet and reap a lot of benefits - I certainly haven't!!! I still enjoy treating myself to a good cup of coffee, a glass of wine or a piece of dark chocolate (or all three on some days!)

I haven't read the book myself, but in it Freston proposes 8 pillars of wellness (found this on www.oprah.com):

• Meditation
• Conscious eating (i.e. vegan diet)
• Exercise
• Visualization/journaling
• Spirituality
• Self-improvement (education)
• Service/volunteering
• Fun

I certainly can't argue with any of those, but how do you fit them all in? My trick is to consider that my running counts not only for exercise, but also meditation, visualization, spirituality, self-improvement, and (gulp!) fun! Ha!

Ik loop op groenten!

I just won a cool running shirt which says "Ik loop op groenten" (translation: I run on veggies). So I decided to test it out for today's run.

It was just an easy 5K which took about 35 minutes. I have to confess it was the first run since last week's Ladies Run - I took a whole week off!

Now it's back to a training program again, as Jenny wants to run a 10K when she is visiting here in July and we have the Hottest 10K at the end of August in Texas (help!)

For those of you who live in Belgium and would like to win a shirt, they are giving away 50 shirts each month at the website http://www.start2eat.be/, courtesy of the vegetable company Flandria. Scroll down and click on "Start 2 Eat wedstrijd". They have lots of veggie recipes on the site too. Good luck!

Recap Ladies Run 2008

Stefaan and the boys and I arrived in Kortrijk on time, but the sports hall was already bustling with people - you could tell there were a lot more participants than last year. It was also hot, supposed to hit 28°C (Belgium was apparently the hottest place in Europe this past weekend - how weird is that?) I went in to get my race number and chip, stopped for a picture by the Ladies Run poster:

Then it was outside to the parking lot to line up for our warm up, as in the past two years, very enthusiastically led by Steve (he was one of the coaches on the Flemish version of "The Biggest Loser"):

Once the warm up was done, a slow shuffle to the start:

The fun thing about the Ladies Run is they have a "dream team" of well known Belgian women who train together for it and run it right along side the rest of us mere mortals. One of them is our news anchor, Martine Tanghe, here being interviewed in the upper left corner of the picture:

Martine has been doing the Ladies Run since its first year in 2006 (just like me!). Someone new this year was Roos Van Acker, who is a TV presenter. My kids are really into "Peking Express" right now (the Flemish version of "The Amazing Race"), which she presents, and we were all thrilled to see her in real life (she is the blond lady in the middle):

Here is everyone ready for the start...I was a bit further back!

And we're off! There was a lot of weaving in and out in the beginning to get started, but the first half of the race is pretty much all down hill, so I was really pleased when I made it to the three kilometer mark after just 18 minutes. My goal this year was simply to improve my time from last year so I kept checking my watch at each distance marker to make sure I was doing okay.

As we approached the center of Kortrijk, with all the people standing on the sidewalks watching, I was so parched, I wished I could just follow the ladies who were doing the 5 K and be done! But no, I had committed to the 11 K which meant I had to keep going over the cobblestones and start the return trip back up the hill to the finish. I just kept plugging along, desperate for the next water station!

Finally I hit the 9 kilometer marker and could tell by my watch that I was going to make my goal of improving my time from last year. Stefaan and the kids were waiting for me at the beginning of the last kilometer, and they took this picture of Martine Tanghe and Mieke Boeckx who were "just a few minutes ahead of you, Mom!"

Here I am in the very last stretch...it was a hot race which made it hard. But I just kept thinking to myself how grateful I am to be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward.

Hot, sweaty and rather shaky, I crossed the finish line and saw I had met my goal - but the first thing on my mind was getting something to drink!!!

The Ladies Run is a well-organized fun race...it was the very first race I ever did (the 5K in 2006) and I am already looking forward to doing it again next year!

11 K Ladies Run Kortrijk 2008

It was a hot (28° C) and sunny day and I managed to improve my time from last year by 5 minutes, running 1:12:41 this year. Will report more tomorrow, with some pictures of the VIPs that ran the race too - my kids told me I was right on the heels of our news anchor, Martine Tanghe. My oldest son took this short video of me coming in at the very end of the race!

Happy Mother's Day

Here she is with her mom...
And here she is with me...

I consider myself very lucky to have a wonderful mom! And very grateful to be one myself.

And so I wish every mother a very happy Mother's Day today (especially mine!)

And thanks to everyone for keeping Johan and his family in their thoughts and prayers.

Thoughts, Prayers and Gratitude

A friend of ours is in the hospital, seriously ill, and since we heard the news, my thoughts have been with him and his family. It's hard to focus on the little, seemingly unimportant things when you know they are grappling with something so devastating.

My run today felt like a prayer in motion. I didn't know if I would be able to run after another night of tossing and turning and waking early...my legs just didn't seem to have any feeling in them at all. So I ran focused on my heart and my thoughts and my legs just followed along.

As I ran I thought of all the things I have to be grateful for, for my family, for generous friends and helpful neighbors, for the sun and the cool air blowing on my arms, for the people I know that I passed as I ran and said hello to, for the fact that my two feet kept plugging along, up and down hilly streets...

I thought about how we take so many things for granted. And how we all assume we have so much time to do the things we want to do. How we put things off, how we don't reach out because we think we can do it any old time. How we beat ourselves up for not being perfect, and how we can be disappointed in others when they don't live up to our expectations. And how we are all just human, trying to make our way.

Home is where your Stella is

The weather was great so I biked to the gym today. This is what I pass on the way:

Sometimes you can really smell the hops, but today it was more of a sour, malty smell...

Leuven is the birthplace of Stella Artois and you see her name all over town. It's probably a real shame to live in Belgium and not really be a beer drinker, but I confess, I usually prefer wine!

My tempo workout was okay, tough at parts, but I did 5 km in 32 min. And then biked home.
Cheers!

The Joke Was On Us!

The weather here in Belgium is just gorgeous this weekend - the perfect kind of weather that you wish it could be all year. So we set out after breakfast to the park to run around the lake as usual, parked in our usual spot, not noticing anything in particular except the glorious day.

I've been paying attention to what Mom has been telling me about her running class and so today I decided to run one loop as a warm up and then stretch for a few minutes, and then continue running. I have to say, I did feel looser and the third lap, which is usually hard for me, seemed (or was I imagining it?) not as hard as usual. In any case, we ran 6 loops in total (8.4 km) in 55 minutes, stretched and walked back to the car.

What car? Where was the car? It was GONE!

It was then that we noticed the little "no parking today from 9 - 5" sign all the way at the end of the parking lane, that we hadn't seen when we arrived...oops. There is going to be a bike race going through Leuven today, the Flanders Cup, and we had no clue. Duh! My first thought was, Christine is probably going to report about this race today on her blog...my second thought was to call the police to figure out where we had to go to pick up the car...and my third thought was thank God we didn't run another two loops because now we were going to have to walk home. Which we did, it took us another 30 minutes.

In the meantime, Stefaan walked down to the parking lot in the center of Leuven where they put all the towed cars and brought it back home. You really have to admire the excellent organization here in Leuven - our bill will arrive neatly in the mail too! And we sure got our exercise in for today!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Vacation Day

Today is a holiday in Belgium and pretty much everyone is off. Unfortunately the weather is not so great, sun alternating with sudden hard rains. We were supposed to run in a "Bosloop", a run through the woods, that was organized by the football team Oud Heverlee...but with the weather I didn't want to risk all of us being out there and getting totally soaked. So instead I did one of my usual hilly runs around the neighborhood. When it started to rain real hard I just turned back a bit sooner than I normally would. So my run ended up being 4.7 km in 32 minutes. Not bad, but shorter than usual. Oh, well, it is a vacation day after all!