ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!

Just watched Gladiator last night. Had to.

Whew, where to start?! Alright, I'll quickly cover the stuff that I missed in my last post due to being in a hurry. My knee started bugging me when I was doing my legs workout, however, it's better now. I'm glad I won't really be doing anymore leg workouts for a while, due to running. Also, something I'm adding a lot of into my diet is green tea. Last I had heard, it was filled wih antioxidants to help prevent cancer. I read more information the other day, and firstly found out it helps keep you satisfied, which will one, fill me up a bit more than the usual water, and two, help make my stomach realize that I'm not all that hungry. Also, I forget the name of it, but something in the green tea also boosts your metabolism. So it's great to have in the morning, as well as times when you're a little hungry, and need something to tide you over. But being more satisfied to prevent snacking, and raising my metabolism, from the tea that I prefer over other kinds? Sign me up.

Wednesday night, I went with Ryan and Nick to Dixon (Rec. center/gym at OSU) to shoot some hoops. It was too busy when we arrived, so we went out to the near field and played around with a soccer ball and football. After an hour, went in to shoot hoops for ~45 minutes. However, my ankles took a pretty hard beating, and my shins as well, due to the small amount of running I did, but also the kicking. It's been YEARS since I've played soccer, so it was doing something very different with my muscles. But it was all fun, and due to a very sore right ankle, I've been icing it a bit and stretching it. Much better now, that, or I'm just used to it by now.

Alright, I'm never going to get to this, since I always have plenty to talk about. So I need to go over what happened during the 2 months that I wasn't posting. Nothing big or exciting. Let's see, winter break, I did... Nothing. So that was fun. And then I got sick around January 8th and was pretty inactive until the beginning of February. However, I got some cool new gadgets from Christmas. The most exciting to me and relevant to the blog is my pedometer, which I love. I always have it on me, walking/biking (although I've only ridden my bike once since the start of the term), when I work out, always (okay, not when I sleep or shower). Also got an armband for my iPhone, which is great. I use it sometimes when I work out, but it'll mainly be for running. Then there's a bunch of irrelevant things like movies, ornaments, a boomerang, and the list goes on. But, I also got a book, The Hunger Games. At first I thought, alright, cool, another book to read, and luckily, it's in the genre that I prefer. I read the first 1/3 in a couple days, casually. However, then I went on a rampage and finished it by staying up until 7 AM one night. About 7 hours to read it all. And I LOVED it. Can't wait for the movie. So then, naturally, I read the second and third (from the library though) books in the series pretty damn quickly as well. And now I can't stop reading! I then got The Hobbit/LotR in a PDF file and read The Hobbit, which I finished a couple weeks ago, and last week I finished Redwall, and currently reading the prequel (but published after Redwall) called Mossflower. I bought a set of The Hobbit and LotR, as I prefer to read the books, rather than text on my phone or computer, so I will be starting The Fellowship of the Ring after I finish Mossflower. Books - who would have thought I'd like books.

Alright, almost done. This will be slightly longer due to me writing the previous paragraph. Well, today... I WENT RUNNING. YEAH, I KNOW! I ACTUALLY DID. As I had previously mentioned, I was going to get started as soon as P90X was finished, which is next Tuesday, but a few things happened. Firstly, everyone started talking to me about running. Hannah and Jourdan decided to start running together, and they went today (not sure how that ended up going), as well as Malika who started up using the same podcast as me today. Before I continue on, I got the podcast called 5k101, and you can read a bit about it on http://runningmatemedia.com/5k-101/ and it's pretty nice, encouraging, and has some decent music to go along with it. So that was my first bit of inspiration to start running today (Nick is an honorable mention, but he's been working on running for a little while now), but I had one more big piece, which would be thanks to Malika. iRun for kids is the site for more information. But I'm going to be participating in the 5k (still need to register, but will do that soon, possibly this weekend) on March 17th. I won't be racing it or anything, but I just want to go for fun, hang out with Malika, and run/walk it to see where I'm at currently. It'll be nice to compare the 5k in March, to the 5k that I want to race/run (I say that because I'll be running, but have no idea where I'll be at by then) and see how far I've come by that point. But anyways, I decided that if I were to wait until after P90X, that means I wouldn't get started until at least February 29th, and more likely, I'd procrastinate a bit and wait a bit until my body had completely recovered from P90X, which could be anywhere from 1-7 days after that point. And then that'd leave me with what, 2 weeks of running to get me going for this 5k? So I decided with everyone else starting today, I'd start as well. Also, since Malika is using the same schedule as me, I decided starting the same day as her would be better, that way we can motivate each other a bit more to make sure we keep going with it.

Oh, I was about to sign off, and then realized I didn't even talk about my run. So the beginning week of this podcast has us jogging 2 minutes and walking 3 minutes, and doing 4 total cycles (20 minutes, plus about 10 minutes of warm up and cool down). I ended up doing about 1.84 miles (I actually didn't make it out the door of my apartment until the warm up was basically over, so I did lose some ground there) which isn't a bad start, considering I haven't run in years. It was great though, albeit a tough beating on my ankles, due to being overweight and the fact that you're pounding your feet against the cement. But yes, I loved it, and can't wait for Sunday (hopefully decent weather, since it's pretty crappy outside right now). I also ended up running up this really steep hill on my third jog of the podcast, and it was a bad decision at the time, as I lost my breath pretty quickly, but I felt by the end, it was a good enough challenge to add in there. I only went up the hill because it was a part of the city I had never been to, so I thought I'd take a quick look around. But now, I'm just glad I got my first run in, and will be glad to be going out there again soon. And an update on this matter, my last blog post, I was at 3-4 notches on my belt (I could only do 4 on a good day for at most a couple of hours before it got too uncomfortable), and now I can go the whole day on 4 notches, meaning in just a few days, I lost just enough on my waist to get to the 4th notch. A good feeling.

I know that was long, but I had to talk about my time away from this blog, even just for a bit. They'll be a bit shorter in the future now. Well, I guess it's that time again, to stay fancy.