Christmas in Amsterdam

Spending Christmas in Amsterdam! I have completely fallen in love with this beautiful city. The entire city is covered with a blanket of snow. I am mesmerized by the Dutch language. I can't stop taking pictures of the gorgeous canals. I visited the Anne Frank house today and was so moved by what I saw. I think it was ever more special because I read the book earlier this year. Loved some of the quotes from the book that were up on the walls:

"I know what I want,
I have a goal,
I have opinions,
a religion,
and love".
-Anne Frank

and a quote from her father:

"We cannot change what happened anymore. The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means. I believe that it's everyone's responsibility to fight prejudice. -Otto Frank, 1970


Merry Christmas from Amsterdam!

Weeks 5 and 6

Almost done with week 6 of training. Week 5 went well. I increased my mileage to 4 miles 5x a week. Cardio-wise I was ready, but the increased mileage really did some damage to my shins. I completed week 5, but had to take it easier on week 6. Monday I could only do 3.1 miles instead of my scheduled 4 because my legs were not having it at all. Tuesday was a speed play or "Fartlek" day. Warmed up at a slow, steady jog for 10 minutes and then did 1 min on, 1 min off x 4 and then 10 minutes at a jog to cool down. This ended up being about 3 miles as well. Wednesday was a very busy day at work and I had to pack for out of town, so I didn't make it to the gym at all. Thursday I got my 4 miles in, but Friday I traveled all day and Saturday was Christmas Day, so I gave myself the day off as my Christmas present! Tomorrow I will still be in Amsterdam but I scoped out a local park where I can get my running in. When I get back home I know my training schedule will go back to normal. Next Saturday is the New Year's Day Resolution Run 5k. This will be my first 5k in almost 2 years. Want to set goal to beat in future 5k's. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Weeks 3 and 4 of Training

Weeks 3 and 4 of training are over. The mileage increased to 3 miles 5x a week. Last week we ran a total of 15 miles and this week we completed 16 miles. Next week we increase the mileage to 4 miles 5x a week. The group training sessions seem to be the best runs so far. I think it is so much easier when you have other people to push you. I have also had easier runs because I discoved an awesome website www.motiontraxx.com . These are free podcasts that are usually about an hour long and the music is recorded at certain beats per minutes so that you can pace yourself. This has allowed me to run at a steady pace and I feel like my strides are more even. I

I am still battling shin splints, but taking ibuprofen before the runs usually keep the pain under control. I have also taken out any other cardio/leg workouts from my schedule other that cross-training so as not to strain my shins any further. I want to incorporate more swimming and biking into my training to help take some of the pressure off of my legs. I am doing Pilates and/or Yoga about 3-4 times a week in addition to the running and cross-training and so far this has given me a good balance.

2nd Week of Training Completed

Week 2 of training completed! Training was difficult this week because of Thanksgiving and the schedule had to be tweaked a little. I uppedmy mileage to running 3 miles 3x this week for a total 9 miles. My cross training consisted of a 55 min Spin class on Tuesday and an hour on the elliptical on Friday. Saturday was our group run. It was really COLD and we were all still stuffed from Thanksgiving leftovers, but the run went really well. Saturday I also went to a Level 2 yoga class at a studio in Cartersville, which felt amazing after the run that morning.

Running has been a little better this week. My shins are still hurting after running, but not nearly as bad as last week. I still take Ibuprofen about 30 min before running and I bought some calf compression sleeves to help as well. So I am ready to enter week 3 of training!

1st week of training completed

Just finished my first week of training for the Berry Half-Marathon. I have been battling shin-splints this week. The mileage doesn't bother me at all, but by the end of the 2 miles my shins are screaming in agony. It is really frustrating! I finally went on friday to Just Sports and Tennis to have someone watch the way I walk and actually measure my feet so that I could be fitted with the right running shoes. I was told that I have really low arches and that I overpronate when I run. I got a really good pair of shoes and some inserts, but when I ran friday afternoon my legs were still in pain. I am hoping that the new shoes will help my shins get better, until then I am downing Ibuprofen and icing my legs!

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.



Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird-Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


43/100 isn't bad. I read a lot of these books in high-school and then went on a "classics" kick a couple of years ago. Some of these books are sitting are on my bookshelf right now. I am going to try to read more of these important books over the next year.

Training for the Berry Half-Marathon

I have been running for about 2 years now and I have run 3 5k's, but I have always wanted to push myself past that 3.1 mile marker. So I began looking for some local 10k races to begin training for and found one at Berry College in March 2011. Luckily, the local YMCA was getting together a training group for the race. I went to the first training session on Saturday morning along with my friend Samantha. Lo and behold, the training schedules that they handed out were not for the 10k race but the half-marathon! 13.1 miles!! Samantha and I thought about it and decided to REALLY push ourselves and train for the half-marathon instead of the 10k. This is going to be a long, tough journey but we really feel up to the challenge. I am going to try to blog about this training process as much as possible. I think it will be a nice outlet to share this amazing experience. The official training schedule begins tomorrow. . .here we go!