Alfie's Adventures - AnnaTheApple

July 31, 2014

A Day in the Life of

Me! I did one of this ages and ages ago but thought I’d do another one as things have changed a bit. This was a working day last week where I was running in the morning. I don’t run every day but it’s more interesting when I do 😉

At 5.10am my Fitbit fitness tracker gently wakes me up by vibrating on my wrist. This is handy because it only wakes me up and not Ben (though, to be honest, a truck could drive through our bedroom and he’d still struggle to wake up, whereas a drip in the sink from the bathroom could jolt me awake).

I took this photo from our bed just before I got up. Our curtains have been left open just because it’s so damn hot. Also it’s nice to be semi-awake anyway from the morning sunlight when my alarm goes off.

Around 5.30am after the bathroom usuals and getting my running gear on I take Alfie for a walk.

Unbelievably this dog is raring to go at this time. What is wrong with him?? I do quite enjoy these very early morning walks with him. It warms me up for my run and it’s so peaceful and quiet outside, barely anyone else around except for a fellow ~~crazy~~ dog walker or two.

I get home and do a little 5-10min dynamic warm up before I run. I do things like leg swings and high knees. Just some moves to get the creaks from my legs.

Then off I go. Depending on the session I’ll either listen to a podcast (easy run) or music (intervals/hill sessions/tempo) or sometimes just run to sound of my own feet. I run anywhere from 3 miles to 6 miles (but this will be increasing as the weeks go on).

Then I get back and walk Alfie again as a cool down. On days I don’t run I usually give Alfie a long walk, so when I run I’m giving Alfie two short walks (we call him Double Dump Alfie – go figure!)

Then I get back and do some stretching and foam rolling while drinking some water with this stuff in it:

I got this ages ago (I only have 5g a time). It basically helps with muscle repair and you metabolism. I can’t say I’ve noticed anything really but I take it anyway! I then race to the shower. I’m usually always late at this point (where does the time go??)

Shower, wash hair, comb hair, dry hair, straighten hair – gargh I sometimes HATE my hair. So damn long and so damn long to maintain.

Acceptably groomed

Then I’m ready for breakfast!

I sort my lunch out for the day (I’ve made most of it the night before so this is just a case of popping my popcorn in the microwave and putting everything in my bag by the door). Sometimes I also prepare dinner for the evening to go in the slow cooker. This day the evening meal was coconut beef curry so I prepared all those bits and pieces.

And finally breakfast time.

Just simply oats, teaspoon of chia seeds and almond milk.

Every single day and I love it.

Then brush my teeth and off to work. I have a 45-60 minute commute to Basingstoke which is just a joy, I can tell you. Sometimes I share a lift with my dad which has it’s good points and bad points… 😉

Recently I’ve been dropping into Costa to grab a coffee (black Americano, sugar free caramel syrup – I just adore. No calories, more chemicals…yeah I know).

Then work, work, work.

This day I was in a lengthy all day meeting so I had regular drinks to keep me going. This was a cranberry, raspberry and elderflower herbal tea.

Finally lunch time comes around. I love my lunch. Sad but true. Tuna salad, salted popcorn, Greek yogurt with frozen blueberries and summer fruits.

Then work, work, work. Mid-afternoon Graz snack to keep me going.

Mmm the cake ones are the best! Though I probably do prefer the nuts ones as they keep me going longer. Then my 4 o’clock apple and banana (someone stole my banana the other day – I had one left in my fruit bowl and someone took it. Everyone claimed innocence…apparently it was someone senior. Damn them. They were lucky it wasn’t my apple!).

If I have nothing on in the evening I’ll probably go to our office’s mini gym and do a 45 minute strength workout.

I really do mean ‘mini’ gym

I tend to focus on my physio exercises that have been recommended to me in order for injury prevention (e.g. single leg squats, clam shells, core work, etc.)

Getting ready to do the ‘crab walk’ with my resistance band

Then the long commute home. I usually get home anywhere from 6.30pm to 7pm. Ben is already home and has walked Alfie so I sort my things out, pack my gym bag for the next day and get into mooching clothes. Then time to prepare dinner. This morning I’d already prepared the meal but some evenings I need to make something from scratch (like tortilla pizza, something egg based, gammon, etc.).

As I said previously, I’d prepared coconut beef curry. This was OK, nothing amazing. It filled a whole! I don’t think I used a recipe, just put some diced beef (from the meat that Ben won) with some vegetables (like chopped onion, kale, carrots, courgette, mushrooms) and added a bit of beef stock and a can of light coconut milk with lots of Indian spices. It was kind of soupy as there was a fair bit of liquid but nice nonetheless. More of a stew I guess!

Then I have two apples after dinner (always) and chill out watching some TV with Ben. I’ll have a hot chocolate and a jelly (rock and roll) before hitting the hay around 9ish to read my book and get an early night. I’m shattered by this point! It doesn’t take me long to fall asleep at all.

My day might sound boring but I enjoy it. I love running so early in the morning and I love having an easy evening where I don’t have to do too much (quality sofa time!).

What is the favourite time of your day? I love mornings. I might not be overly chatty but I get so much done and am very efficient.

Do you have night time snacks before bed?

Is your day always the same during the week? The only real variations for me are if I run in the morning or not! Also if Ben is running in the evening (he’ll never get up as early as I do to run) then I might get to watch all those amazing shows like the Kardashians 😉

July 10, 2014

Things lately

Things are plodding along quite nicely round here. Though I’d hate to look back at my life and think of it as a “plod”. Rather that though than a sprint I suppose!

I guess you could call this an ‘odds and ends’ post of stuff that’s been happening lately:

Ben making carrot cake

This is big, big news people. For so long Ben has been promising to bake for me. But these promises have never materialised to actual calorific-dense baked goods (despite me buying him ingredients and everything). I’m the one who cooks, he’s the one that apparently bakes.

Last week he had the week off as he was starting a new job so he had no excuse. Being a typical man, he left it to mid-afternoon Friday to begin his task. I got regular text updates as to the progress of the cake…

Apart from a minor zest grating related injury (and a lovely photo of it sent my way – in case I wasn’t fully aware of the sheer hard work he was putting in), it all seemed to be going swimmingly.

That is until I got a bit of an urgent phone call: “Anna, I forgot to add the carrot in before I put it in the oven. What do I do??”.

He even sent me a selfie to adequately express how he felt.

Luckily he was able to get the cakes (there were two) out of the oven asap and stir in the hastily grated carrot (no further grating related injuries here thank goodness). Whew. Rectified. But amusing nonetheless 😉

Ta da! How good do they look? As the loaf tin was a little small for the batter, he made a mini round cake as well…with a better cake to icing ratio if you ask me 😉 It tasted divine and it was all I could do to not consume the entire two cakes in one sitting. And yes, there was carrot in it 😉

New mattress

Ben’s above selfie could also adequately describe the feelings we felt when our lovely new mattress was delivered the other day.

“Pants” would be one word to describe this situation. There are others I could use. Thankfully we can swap it (and pay the extra) for the correct mattress size. Not sure how we got this so wrong really…I don’t know how we both survive in this big wide world pretending to be adults.

Trips to London

Getting up at stupid o’clock to get the train to London for a meeting is no fun. Especially when it means eating my porridge in the car while my dad drives us to the station.

Lots of things in my life change and new habits form, but eating porridge for breakfast will never change.

And I’m sorry all you lovely Londoners but I detest going there. It’s stressful, busy, crowded…and dirty. Yes I realise most cities (and places in general) are dirty. But I freak out.

Essential requirement for me!

And just randomly, a mini escalator. For all those lonely people who have no friends to stand with…

Room for one only

Or people who are so so busy they need to use the mini escalator to hurry up them quickly, by-passing the more normal sized busier escalator (I found this out as I was dallying around taking photos of said escalator while a man tried to hurry past…).

Birthday trip to Chichester

On Sunday Ben and me went out to Chichester to go shopping for a belated birthday trip. Rant alert: I got a little bit angry in one of my favourite shops (Oasis) when I realised they didn’t stock my size is anything I liked (bar one dress). It’s not an obscure size either – a normal size eight. The lady in the shop just shrugged and went “yeah I know” and after a long pause “look online”. Gargh!! I like trying stuff on and I’m there willing to buy stuff NOW. I understand that they can’t stock masses of every size but they had about three size 20s in everything. Your loss, Oasis, was FatFace and New Looks’ gain.

We stopped at one of my favourite restaurants for lunch as well: Trents.

We had a sharing platter (hummus, sundried tomato dip, beetroot dip, stuffed peppers) to start, followed by a Caesar salad for me (of course) and a club sandwich and curly fries for Ben, followed by crème Brule for Ben and chocolate brownie for me.

I had run 10 miles in the morning and I was FAMISHED. Sadly my salad didn’t quite cut it. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t one of the best I’ve tried (no croutons and no anchovies). Ben was struggling so I helped him out with eating some of his sandwich filling (bacon and chicken) and his fries. Win.

That pudding. Oh wow. It could have done with vanilla ice cream to balance it rather than hazelnut ice cream but it was pretty damn amazing. Afterwards I was like “pft, that was easy. Three courses done and dusted.” After leaving the restaurant for a shopping continuation the fullness hit me like a ton of bricks (literally in my stomach). I couldn’t bare to even look at people eating or drinking. I couldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day and required an hour long nap when I got home. Whew. Pretty good day I’d say!

Alfie

Kids (and adults) all over the globe are obsessed with Frozen.

Apparently so is our dog, Alfie. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what he does all day when we’re at work. He just wants to build a snowman…

Do you prefer online shopping or going into the actual shop? I like to try things on because invariably things that I think will look nice look awful. And it’s the whole faff of sending stuff back that really annoys me with online shopping. But it annoys me when a shop is seriously under-stocked in my size for pretty much everything.

Ever ordered a large purchase that turns out to be very wrong?

What’s your worst baking disaster? I could write a book for mine so it was nice that Ben, ‘Mr Baking Pro’ got something wrong 😉

March 31, 2014

The best kind of weekend

Posting a bit later today as things have got a bit ahead of me. The story of my life at the moment! Definitely didn’t enjoy losing that hour Sunday morning.

The weekend was a busy one. We went to Parkrun in the morning and helped set out the course. Ben is a huge fan of doing this and now has me hooked. I don’t mind getting up earlier to help out as you get a bit more social time with other runners.

I was a bit nervous for the run as my calf had gotten quite tight after Thursday and it’s so close to the marathon now that anything is causing me huge amounts of stress…someone sneezing near me is enough to freeze up my system in terror.

I made sure I did a very good warm-up with jogging, dynamic stretches and specifically stretching my calf using a handy tree.

I’m sure a fun caption could be made here… “Ben I can’t seem to move this tree no matter how hard I push”

Which was caught on camera…lovely! Not one of my best photos haha!

I decided to take Parkrun nice and easy and there were quite a few of us who decided to run together so we had a nice natter as we ran round the course in the lovely sunshine. My calf was OK <– WHEW.

I’m still wearing my gloves even though it was so warm. My hands are the very last things to heat up.

My time was 23:29 and third female – not too shabby at all! After this we had a nice cup of tea with some of the running club and then headed home for breakfast. At this point I was STARVING.

We met up with a friend in the afternoon and did a huge walk with Alfie around the countryside. It wasn’t meant to be so long it’s just we got caught out with lots of muddy routes and had to go the long way back home (needless to say Alfie required a bath that evening…). At the end of the day I’d done almost 30,000 steps. And, more importantly, this happened:

If you don’t know what this game is, I urge you to download it (it’s an app). It is so simple but so very addictive!!

We had a lovely early night as we had to get up early the next day for a long run. I was so tired when the alarm went off at 6.40am – which my body thought was 5.40am due to the daylight savings. Arghh!

My plan was to run 13 miles. Perhaps not the most ideal distance considering I have the marathon a week later but psychologically I needed to do it. Ben and me had decided to meet up with some guys from our running group to run with them. The route was only 10 miles so I ran the 2 miles to the meeting point instead of going in the car with Ben, then planned on adding a bit on at the end.

The route was lovely. Credit to my husband who planned it (though I think it was based on a route one of the other guy’s had used before – so credit all round). It was fairly hilly though which was tough.

There were quite a few of us – eight or nine? Not sure. But in the end we sort of spread out from each other as we found our natural paces. It was really nice to spend a long run chatting to people rather than go solo. Though I will always love my solo long runs listening to podcasts…

I’m not going to lie, it was tough with the hills and not feeling completely fresh from a week of running (6 miles Tuesday, 8 miles Thursday, 3 miles Saturday) of which I’m not as used to anymore with my sporadic training. But it didn’t feel that bad as to worry me. I felt like I could have gone on further (bloody lucky considering it’s double that seven days later).

I was shattered when I got home though. Absolutely drained. So was Ben. We’re pretty sure the long walk the afternoon before hadn’t helped. Then it was time to treat two lovely ladies to some afternoon tea as it was Mother’s Day in the UK.

My mum showed up with the same handbag as me but slightly smaller – it was like mum and baby handbags! (She had originally given me the big handbag as she prefers smaller handbags and I love a huge bag to put my multitude of things in it).

Then off we went to indulge in some very lovely tea, sandwiches and cake at our favourite local (dangerously local) coffee shop: Elsie’s Tearoom if you’re in the area.

[Ben wasn’t happy with this photo; he said he felt uncomfortable because the table next to us were gawping at us – how rude!]

We all had afternoon tea. I had ham and mustard sandwiches, a fruit scone (with strawberry and rhubarb preserve, oohh err) and a slice of lemon cake.

Honestly, I am getting to be somewhat a pro at this afternoon tea business. Way to easy to eat. And I even had a bite of my mum’s unfinished lemon cake. Oh god…

After spending some quality time with The Mums, Ben and me pretty much did nothing. I fell asleep on the sofa to the dulcet tones of Ben blowing up zombie brains on the Xbox…then awoke with a new lease of life to tackle the ironing while we watched Elysium. I would give this movie a rating of “meh”. An OK film for when you’re not in the mood to think too hard.

The plan for this week is all easy running. Probably three miles Tuesday, three miles Thursday, the Paris breakfast 5km on Saturday (to shake out our ‘plane legs’) and then just a short gentle jog taking in the different sights of Paris. Probably 26.2miles, but we’ll see how it goes 😉

For those who celebrated it, how did you spend Mother’s Day?

Do you struggle with a full afternoon tea?

Ladies, do you prefer big handbags or small? (Men you can join in too with your manbags!) I have small handbags when I’m going out for an evening, but I do love a good handbag. Looking forward to all those back problems in later life 😉

Long runs solo or with a group?

March 17, 2014

Walking not running

Good morning and happy Monday.

Thank you for your lovely comments about my last post. Provided I’m no longer injured by the time the marathon comes about then I will run. Ideally I’d like to be able to run a good few runs before the marathon problem-free, perhaps even a 12 or 10 miler but we’ll see. The longer long runs are lost to me now sadly.

Ben and me have spoken at length about this and what we’ve sort of decided that I will run the Paris marathon with him. He was aiming for 9min/miles and I think that should be in theory do-able for me. But we’ve both agreed if one of us is really struggling, the other one can run on with no hard feelings. I know that sounds quite callous but I think it’s fairly pragmatic. Unless obviously we’re enjoying running together! I don’t want to hold Ben back if the wheels come off for me – he desperately wants to have a better marathon than his last.

Moving on to this weekend…despite feeling fairly pants about the whole running situation, it wasn’t too bad. We went over to my parents for an Indian takeaway. They have the best Indian. Sadly where we live it’s all very sub-par. I got my usual…

Chicken tandoori starter and chicken tikka main, with lots of onion salad and regular salad. I know this sounds very boring but this is actually one of my favourite meals. I love the little pot of white sauce you get with it as well. I have no idea what’s in it and frankly don’t care. It rocks my world. And a few cheeky poppadoms as well of course 😉

Moving away from food, Ben and me have just treated ourselves to Fitbits [we bought them ourselves, I haven’t been asked to review them]. I used to have a pedometer but it was annoying to attach to my belt or trousers. But I love this! It has really encouraged me to walk more, I’m not even joking. It’s even become a little competition between Ben and me (though he’s winning by miles as he’s able to run and 18 miles is a lot of steps…). To the point that we’re fighting over who walks Alfie in the morning. OK we’re not fighting, but it encouraged me to give Alfie a huge walk yesterday morning while Ben was out running.Then when a friend came over we took Alfie for another long walk to catch up with our friend. In the end Sunday’s steps were over 20,000!

I sit a lot at work so this will definitely help remind me to get up a bit more and take a lunchtime walk, which I rarely do at the moment. The weather is getting nicer so this should be lovely.

As I can’t run at the moment I’ve been back at spin. Oh joy. On Saturday I did the 45 minute spin class followed by 20 minutes of rowing and then lots of strength work. Not nearly as exciting as Parkrun believe me (especially as it was the two year anniversary and it was a fancy dress one…onesies galore). But I just have to keep telling myself it won’t be long until I’m back again. Annoyingly though spin tends to aggravate my IT band and tightens it up. So instead this morning I went on the cross trainer, the rower and the stepper.

Am I the only person who’s never used the stepper before? I was quite confused what to do and had to creepily watch a woman using it to make sure I was doing it right. It was quite cool to see how many floors I’d climbed though. Silver linings and all that.

What machine do you always use at the gym? Which is your favourite?

Do you own a fitness tracker, like a Fitbit or a Nike Fuel band or a pedometer?

What’s your takeaway of choice?

March 6, 2014January 5, 2017

All those random things

Hello! Today feels like Friday for me today because Ben and me have a day off tomorrow. Hurrah!

This post is about the random things that have been happening that I wanted to put in the blog but it never seemed ideal.

Rain. So much rain. And the delightful experience of parking your car at work and coming back to see the river blocking your route back to it.

This was great. I really enjoyed wading through this massive puddle to get back to my car after work.
Alfie, I love him dearly (he’s our little dog if you weren’t aware). But when I get home, walk him, make our dinner, then attempt to make my way to the sofa to relax he picks up his ball and runs over to me with it and drops it right in front of me…playing ball is the last thing I want to do. He then looks up at me with the most expectant face. Oh Alfie, how can I refuse?
However, I have found a way to keep him entertained if I just want to do nothing (read or chill):Put the Animal Planet channel on! He loves the big cats programme and the cat-specific one (surprise surprise).
The gym…ahh the gym. The things you see at the gym:Can you see the girl in the pink jogging bottoms? That white thing on her head is a huge furry hat. Sometimes it can be a bit chilly at the gym…but not that chilly! And yes she was there to workout. Seeing her on the treadmill was an experience in itself.
Crazy shoe guy running on the treadmill: They’re barefoot trainers (I guess). They just looked very odd. I saw someone running in barefoot trainers at the Reading half as well. I’ve never been tempted to try it…You basically have to go back to basics with running to ‘re-learn’ how to run – like mile by mile. The guy in the race though was doing some hard heel-striking so I don’t know if his have helped him. I’d probably get injured in all new areas if I tried it.
Apparently I’ve been saying “grimace” wrong my whole life. I thought it was “grimance” with an ‘n’ in there. Quite embarrassing really.
And I’ve finally taken a photo of my medal holder (which isn’t actually on the wall yet). My granddad made it for me. He goes up to Scotland every winter to help out look after reindeers at this reindeer centre. The male reindeers ‘drop’ their antlers and he collects the ones in good conditions and makes things out of them (he was a carpenter).

Ben held it up for me and I put some of my medals on it to give it it’s full effect. I think it’s amazing!

So this weekend is going to be a busy one. With the meal tomorrow, then Karen’s (pregnant amazing runner) 30th birthday party on Saturday (afternoon tea – YES She very much shares my love of cake!) and then a meal out on Sunday for Ben’s birthday (which was on Tuesday). Lots of food…the best kind of weekends 😉

What do you do with your medals?

What kind of trainers do you wear to run?

Do you have any pets?