Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December 1, 2019

How to go from injured to injury-free.

I consider myself a very resilient athlete. I also don't consider myself injury-prone. Although my recent injury lasted around 4 months, I was able to complete two Ironmans, I experienced huge improvements in my swim and bike fitness and I am now back running injury free. This was my first  athletic setback in over 6 years. Having said this, I know I am susceptible to injury. Whether it's my swimming (non-weight bearing) background or bad motor patterns or maybe my endurance and strength allows me to muscle my way through fatigue, me and running have a rocky relationship. I've never had a stress fracture or broken bone and no foot, ankle or knee issues. It's all been glute/hip/lower back related. I've learned that my body needs a certain amount of running frequency + strength based runs to keep my body happy.  Injuries are extremely frustrating to athletes. They force "us" to modify our lifestyle and remove us from doing what we love to do with ou...

Before you change your diet, consider these tips

Changing your eating habits may help improve your overall health, fitness/performance, improve your body composition and reduce risk for disease. Despite these benefits, many people struggle to maintain dietary changes in the long-term. To ensure that your dietary changes are practical, beneficial and health promoting, consider the following tips before you make an extreme lifestyle change with a new style of eating. 1. What's your motivation/reason for change? -  If you are wanting to eliminate or add certain foods to the diet, give yourself a really good reason to do so. "Because it's trendy" or "because I need to lose weight" can be motivating but remind yourself that for any diet to be successful, long term nutrition compliance is key.  2. Don't go all in - I caution you not to wake up one morning and start living with a dietary title (unless it's for medical/health reasons). Like anything in life, dietary changes take time. Make small t...

Brussels sprouts, apple and pomegranate salad

Picture from  Smitten Kitchen I was in charge of providing the "vegetable" dish at our Thanksgiving day meal. I recently came across a beautiful picture on a friend's social media page with the recipe titled "Brussels sprouts, apple and pomegranate salad." I quickly bookmarked the recipe as I knew it would be a nutritious and flavorful dish, providing a pop of color to the Thanksgiving day table. While the dish was well-received, I failed in snapping a picture of my final dish. So that is why I have the picture from the actual recipe featured above. Well, I did capture this picture of Campy at the head of the table where you can also see my dish. I hope you enjoy my modification to the dish (for the actual recipe, click on this Smitten Kitchen link. ). To help save time, I recommend to purchase your Brussels Sprouts already chopped and to buy a container of pomegrante seeds. This dish took me a while to make but it was worth it. But next time aro...

Thankful for Thanksgiving

We were spoiled with amazingly beautiful weather over the past four days in Greenville, SC. With family in town (and my mom living a mile away), we combined our love of physical activity + nature + food with the Thanksgiving holiday. Oh, and Campy was part of almost all of it! For a change of scenery and terrain, we decided to do our Thanksgiving day workout at Lake Summit. Because this 9-mile run loop is about 30 minutes away, we rarely make the drive to Tuxedo, NC to run on the gravel road that wraps around the lake (with a short section on the paved road). But with the Thanksgiving holiday, we ventured out to get closer to nature. It was a fairly aerobic run with a few hard efforts to get up the hills. It was also a bit windy but overall the temperature was perfect in the low 50's. Karel is much faster than me when he runs so we each did our own thing (while listening to triathlon-related podcasts on our wireless earphones) and Karel would loop back for me here and...