Last night, I skipped my late night workout in favor of trying to get a bit more sleep, since I had woken up tired. That meant I only got in 45 minutes on the elliptical as my total workout for the day. I love that these days I refer to a 45 minute workout as “only” 🙂
I got up again at 7am this morning, but this time didn’t have much trouble getting off when my alarm went off. I considered going for a run sometime today, but what got me out the door was that if I didn’t go now, it would only get hotter later in the day. There’s one plus of summer running – it gets you out the door early!
I was aiming for a 3 mile loop going along the Hudson River / Riverside Park, but ended up enjoying it so much that I stayed out for four miles. I’m using the BuddyRunner app on my phone, which I like a lot… but just when I reached the end of my run, my update to the new Android system (FroYo) came through. I had read on various forums that if you opted to “install later,” you might have to wait for two weeks, so I opted to “install now” and just hoped that the data from my run wouldn’t be erased. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t – score one for the day.
So to start off my morning, I did 4.03 miles in 38:10 – that’s an average pace of 9:18/mile. Not bad for my second day back at running! I’m hoping I can get in at least a 10 mile run this weekend in between all the Labor Day festivities, because that would make me feel like I’m on track for Hartford in 5 weeks.
Speaking of Labor Day, any NYC-area bloggers interested in doing the Labor Day Five Mile Run on the boardwalk at Long Beach? I was thinking it might be nice way to close the summer by doing the race and then hanging out at the beach all day. Problem is, I’m not sure if any of my friends are into running enough to get up early and trek out there for the 8:30am start!
On the food front, today for lunch I made a recipe I had saved from Cooking Light: pan-seared scallops with ginger orange spinach. I mostly kept the recipe as-is, but took a few shortcuts in using pre-minced garlic and ginger, and frozen spinach (the fresh was too expensive at my grocery). My picture didn’t come out quite as pretty as theirs, but it was still delicious!
I was proud of myself for getting the golden brown crust on the scallops – I had never cooked scallops before in anything other than a seafood soup. With visions of Gordon Ramsay in my head about getting them crusted but not rubbery and overdone, I actually set my kitchen timer to 90 seconds and flipped them exactly then. I think I actually undercooked them just a bit, but they were still pretty tasty. And yes, that is a ton of spinach. I opted to just use the whole box in lieu of making another dish to fill me up. Still, totally light and healthy:
Now it’s time to buckle down to work for a while, and hopefully get enough done to be able to hit the gym a bit more later this afternoon. Pounds be gone!