Livin' on the Edge

What is more fun than finishing a 3.6 (hilly) mile run in Valley Forge Park? Completing an hour-long ice skating session after it! It was probably the olympics ice dancing (minus the hokey costumes) that put me in the mood. And my running guru thought his birthday celebration would best be spent competing with me on one of my more familiar turfs. He's got the running. I've still got the skating. Phew!



Now if I can get 1/4 as good as this I'll be really thrilled....

Balancing Act

My dear friend Olivia, health junkie extraordinaire, invited me to blog about ways to stay motivated with exercise. Check out her site, A View from There, here!

Snowed In

Sometimes there's nothing more fun than being snowed in...for a day. But after that I get ancy. I managed to get a 3 mile run in last night before our latest wintery mix. But today was just too darn cold and windy for any outdoor activity. It was, however, the perfect time to resort to the DVD collection:




Crazy Sexy Cancer ~ comes with a 25 minute yoga routine with Colleen Saidman and Rodney Yee. Also features a 12 -minute guided relaxation.

Ballet Body ~ includes 5 workouts combining pilates, yoga, and ballet moves. Play separately or all together!

Jillian Michaels - 30 Day Shred ~ will kick your you-know-what! Who doesn't have 20 minutes a day to work out?

Shiva Rea: Daily Energy - Vinyasa Flow Yoga ~ offers a variety of short yoga routines that you can mix and match. Some of the moves seem very advanced but it's fun to have something to aspire to, right?







10 Minute Solution: Dance and Tone Kit ~ gets your heart pumping quickly with three ten-minute dance sequences and two 10-minute segments for legs and arms. Resistance band included. If you don't have 20 minutes for Jillian, surely you have 10 minutes for Jennifer.

What workouts do you pop into the DVD player?

Getting Off on the Right Foot

After a fabulous dinner with Archna at Midtown I got propositioned. My friend Ed asked if I wanted to run....at 9:30 tonight. The weather couldn't have been better. And I dig all things impromptu. The Universe was also sending me a message: "Earth to Jen, this is the week you're supposed to exercise." With my self-tested theory that a person can stick with anything for a week, I did a week without cheese and several weeks sans coffee. Last week I roughed it and included more fiber in my diet. It was time to bite the bullet and put off further procrastination. Darn. Exercise, here I come. Please be nice to me.

I needed some inspiration. Enter Ed. Here's the thing about Ed and running. He can finish a mile in 5 minutes...without any help. It's tremendous. And he's so in love with running. I thought maybe his addiction would rub off on me. It hasn't yet. I'll give it a little more time. Maybe a day or two.

Twenty seconds into our run he started goofing off. I couldn't stop laughing. He didn't hear me. His iTunes was on full blast. He zigged and zagged through the streets and I wondered if I'd make it through all this ridiculous fun. My inner mantra was less than stellar: "You are not cut out for running. You won't make it." But make it I did...a whole mile to Border's with a long break in between...and a mile back. It wasn't pretty. I wanted to hurl. My head throbbed. The ears were aching. Did I mention I wanted to hurl? I guess no exercise in months will do that to a person. Yikes!

I'm nevertheless thankful to my running guru for getting me off my you-know-what and making it burn. We'll see if I fall in love with running. I'll probably just fall. But I'll have a lot of laughs while doing it.