As of yesterday, IMLOU is 26 weeks away!  That sounds far but really, considering I still have some serious work to get my base built back up again (my training volume has been in the 5-6 hour range…really really low, mostly due to a hamstring strain in January and missing an entire week when I was in Cancun), it isn’t that far away….

The past few weeks have been filled with the usual suspects….work, training, a little volunteering at races and too much eating 🙂  It doesn’t help that JMR got me a ton of chocolate for Valentine’s day and we did a 5k race on the 15th, ‘Run for the Chocolate’ (we also ran it last year) where we got even more chocolate.  Also, at the finish they had cookies, pretzels and other treats to dip into individual little containers of chocolate.  Oh lordy.

When I first saw the arrangement JMR surprised me with I didn’t even notice the flowers…all I saw was chocolate, whoops!

So along with ramping up my training volume this week (a whopping 8.5 hours, ha), I’m also cleaning up my eating.  It does help knowing that I will be in Florida in a little over three weeks, so I do have some incentive!

A typical evening snack

I also have a new addition to my family of kitchen appliances….Henrietta the Hen, an egg cooker!  Yes, I realize how lazy that sounds when I have a perfectly good pot that I can boil eggs in, however my old egg cooker was so easy, no waiting for boiling water and it cooked eggs in half the time it takes in a pot (it boiled 4 eggs in 6 minutes).  I usually make them before work in the morning so anything that can help me to sleep in a little longer is a win in my book.  So when it died last week (it was 14 years old) I searched for a replacement and couldn’t resist one that looked as cute as Henrietta.

Sadly she is not as much of rockstar as my old egg cooker when it comes to boiling eggs….there was a little false advertising on the website and the ‘cooks eggs in 6 minutes’ only applies to poaching 4 eggs, it takes 13 minutes to hard boil 4. Bummer.  At least she’s cute looking, and for $20 I figured it was worth it to keep since it still is faster than waiting for water to boil and then cooking the eggs for 12 minutes.  So much thought and effort over hard boiled eggs!

I promise my next post won’t be all about chocolate and eggs, I will probably have much more to say about training since my volume is definitely increasing!  I also plan to get back into the routine of posting my weekly totals to help keep me accountable!