Star Wars Light Side 10k and Half 2017 vlog (Weekly Wrap-up Edition)

It's been a busy week here.  Not too much in the workout world.  I skinned my knees last weekend and between that and the rain on Friday I only got two runs in.  Both not very fast.  I did run the Ukrop's 10k yesterday and did really well.  I'll have a recap on that on Tuesday.  For now, I want to get a couple more vlogs out for your enjoyment.

If you missed, here are the other vlogs from the weekend.

• Arrival and Expo
• 5k and Disneyland

First up, the Star Wars Light Side 10k.

Click here to read the 10k recap.


And then to wrap up the running portion of the weekend, the half.

Click here to read the half recap.

Make sure you check out my vlog of Universal!

Linking up with Holly and Tricia's Weekly Wrap Up.

Skinned Knees (Friday Five Edition)

Warning: This post contains pictures of skinned knees and blood.  If this is something that you rather not look at, please feel free to skip this post.

On my Saturday run I fell and skinned my knees pretty badly.  I was in mile 4 of 12 and tripped on uneven sidewalks.  Thankfully there was a training team running part of my route and their follow up car stopped to help me clean up.  Unfortunately I have to say this is not the first time.  Not even the first time this year.  I tend to fall on a run 2-3 times a year as I'm just a klutz.  Here are 5 things I've learned on how to take care of skinned knees.


Please note: I am not a doctor of any kind.  This is what I have found to be useful.  Please consult a doctor if necessary.

1. Clean the wound out -  The last couple times I have fallen bad enough to break the skin, I was lucky enough to have someone around who had baby wipes or a first aid kit to help me clean out my wound right there.  Other times, my run was short enough that I could finish my run.  On Saturday I found that if I didn't run into the other training team I probably would have headed back to my car because the cuts were pretty bad.  You can buy baby wipes individually wrapped and I used to carry them in my race belt.  I need to get back into that habit. 

After the run on Saturday.

2. Stop running - This is true if the scrap hurts you enough that your gait changes.  Mostly due to the adrenaline I was able to finish my run on Saturday, even though it was hurting towards the end of the run.  But when I tried to run a couple days later I found that the scab was forming and making it hard for me to bend my knee all the way.  I decided to continue the run, but just walk it.  I found that towards the end of the first mile the scab loosened up enough that it didn't change my gait when I ran.  It's best to walk or skip runs and not hurt something else.

3. Ice - Along with the scrapes there is also inflammation.  Once you get home from your run, after the fall, clean up the wound and then put ice on it.  This will help the healing process.  I know I do not usually think of putting ice on a scrape, but it does help.

4. Ointment - Using an antibiotic when cleaning out the wound will help if from getting infected.  After it's cleaned up and the scabbing process starts, the ointment that is my go to is Aquaphor to help keep the skin from drying out.  I use this for a lot of things, especially chafing.  Aquaphor is a lot like Vaseline except Aquaphor has other ingredients in it besides petrolatum that help it absorb into the skin and speeds up the healing. 

5. Dressing - There are different schools of thought on if you should cover up a wound.  My thoughts are it should be covered if your are doing something where it can get dirty or if clothing will be irritating it.  This week we have been lucky enough to have warm weather, so I have been wearing shorts as to not irritate the wounds.  But at night, because of the sheets I have covered them.  The first night I covered both knees.  After that, since one knee wasn't too bad and had a good scab on it, I stopped covering it.

I cover the would with a non-stick pad and use tape to secure it very loosely.


I found that I had some underwrap left over from something else (I really don't remember what).  Underwrap, also known as pre-tape, is a thin foam like bandage usually used as a base under adhesive tape.  I have been using that to wrap around the pad and lightly taped the wrap.  The only reason I have been doing that is to help keep the pad from being snagged as I toss and turn throughout the night.


Do you have any other tips about skinned knees?  Do you usually cover the wound 24/7 or just as needed?

I'm linking up with Fairytales and Fitness and Running on Happy for Friday Five 2.0

Star Wars Light Side 5k & Disneyland 2017 vlog (Tuesdays on the Run Edition)

I'll be continuing on with more of my vlogs.  If you haven't seen the previous ones, here they are:

• Arrival and Expo  

Today I want to share with you the 5k and the time we spent in Disneyland afterward.

First, the 5k.

Click here to read the 5k recap.


And then our time at Disneyland.

Click here to read the Disneyland recap.


And for those of you that are Star Wars fans, we saw the original trailers for Episode IV-VI.  I only caught Empire and Return of the Jedi as I wasn't expecting them to start with.  So here are the two of them.  They are very interesting to see how they advertised these movies back in the 70's and 80's before it became a whole thing.

Make sure you check out my vlogs about the 10k and Half!

I’m linking up with with MCM Mama Runs, Marcia’s Healthy Slice, and My No Guilt Life for the Tuesdays on the Run linkup.

Star Wars Light Side Arrival and Expo 2017 vlog (Weekly Wrap-up Edition)

Hey guys - finally got all my videos from the Star Wars Light Side Half Marathon Weekend edited together.  I separated them into shorter videos so that they were not too long to watch at once.  I had fun editing these together, so I hope you have fun watching.  First up is my arrival to Disneyland and the Expo.

Here are the links to the posts about each part of the trip.

• Expo
• 5k
• Disneyland Park
• 10k
• Half
• Universal Part 1 
• Universal Part 2

Make sure you check out my vlogs about the 5k and Disneyland!

Have you ever stayed at the Disneyland Hotel?  Have you ever eaten at the Jazz Kitchen?

Enjoy!

Linking up with Holly and Tricia's Weekly Wrap Up.

Sign Language Class (Friday Five Edition)

Since I lost my job I have been trying to stay busy.  I was lucky enough to get some training money with my severance and they did not have to be IT classes.  After telling my mom that I was not going back for another degree (she is a college professor and loves to encourage me to go back to school), I looked around at the local classes to see what I would like to learn.  I saw that one was offering Sign Language classes.  I don't know what my draw to Sign Language is as I do not know anyone who is deaf, but I have always been fascinated by it.  I love watching the interpreters at live events.

1.  I learned the alphabet and some basic words when I was in second grade.  I went to a Montessori school and there I remember being taught these basic things.  Up to the start of the class I could still did remember the alphabet and a couple words like love, want, and day. 

2.  The class was a 6 week course taught through one of the local universities which as a vast non-degree curriculum.  The class was taught by a deaf person.  The first day there was an interpreter there explaining a lot of the details.  The rest of the classes there was not.  It is a little challenging to take a class without an interpreter there, but it made us learn a little bit more to communicate.  We would write on the board or finger spell things to get our thoughts across.  I do think I learned more without being able to rely on the interpreter.

3.  We played games.  I think this was the most fun and the way I learned.  Remember the game telephone where everyone sat in a circle and one person started and whispered something to the person next to them?  They would go around the circle back to the first person and what was said was so mangled it didn't make sense.  We played the deaf version of that where everyone stood in a line and the person at the back would show a sentence (or word spelled out) to the person in front.  It would go through the line to the first person, and like telephone, it was a mangled mess.  It was funny to see what it started at and how it ended. 

The other game we played the last week was that the teacher started with a word and each person would add one word to that sentence.   The sentence we ended up with on the last class was "Women love watching birds fly in the evening and don't love to eat cats or dogs, but they want many flowers on Friday".

4. The hardest part for me was reading the signs, especially when it was spelled out.  It's easy to practice signing, but if you don't have anyone to sign to you, it's hard to keep up.  The other students had said the same thing, especially about the finger spelling.  Your brain is so busy trying to figure out what letter it is, you forget what the first few were and then you can't figure out what the word is supposed to be.  And it doesn't help that I'm a horrible speller.

5. The American Sign Language (ASL) sentence structure is different from the English language.  Like when you are speaking Spanish, the adjectives are always after the noun and in English the adjectives are before the noun.  In ASL the questions are backwards for the most part.  Instead of "Where were you born?" it would be "Born Where?". 

I have really enjoyed these past six weeks, though I feel like we haven't scratched the surface.  Luckily there is another 6 week course taught by the same teacher.  And I have already signed up for it. 

What other languages do you know?  Have you ever learned Sign Language?

I'm linking up with Fairytales and Fitness and Running on Happy for Friday Five 2.0

Local Races (Tuesdays on the Run Edition)

So there really isn't much going on in my life now that I find exciting enough to blog about.  Then a friend reminded me of the Tuesdays on the Run topic of local races.  This is something I haven't blogged about yet, so I thought I would tell some things of one of my favorite local races.

In Richmond one of the biggest races is the Ukrop's 10k.  Last year it was the 4th biggest 10k in the US with 23,127 finishers.  The race is so big that probably the first fourth of the field is done before the last person crosses the start line.  This is also the first race I have ever done.  This was back when I was just a walker.  It is a great race that encourages all people to come out participate.  They have tons of band and every inch of the course is filled with spectators.  They even have a costume contest.  The best costume I saw at this race was from Disney's Up where the guy dressed up as a by and above him he carried a full blown house and balloons.  I wish I had a picture of it.  It shuts down Monument Avenue, which is a beautiful road to run.  All of the monuments are beautiful, even if basically all of them are Civil War Heroes.  The houses and architecture is some of the most beautiful in Richmond. It's a great race for beginners as they encourage walkers, which is the way I participated my first few years.

The local YMCA put training teams together all over the city.  They train advance runners as well as beginners and walkers.  The first time I participated I didn't think it was a big deal.  I wasn't even close to thinking about running, but I walk a lot.  How hard could it be to walk 6 miles.  Well in the first mile I pulled my quad and hurt the rest of the way.  The next year I joined the YMCA walk training team and did a great job of walking it all.  I did the walking training team for the next few years.

The one thing I hated about this race was that it was so hard to find a parking spot.  It's all street parking minus a few inconvenient parking garages.  One year, even though I was signed up, I spent an hour looking for a parking spot and finally gave up and just went home.  It was so frustrating that I vowed not to do the race again.  They listened to the complaints and a couple years later they started a shuttle from a couple different places and it works out perfectly with no stress.

When I started running, this was the first race I ran the whole thing.  I again joined the training team and the first week when we did one mile I ran the the whole mile.  Then the next week when we did two miles, I ran it all. And so on each week, I kept running the whole thing.  I couldn't believe that I was actually running more then 5 minutes at a time.

Most of the running community runs this race every year.  All of my running friends usually meet at the expo on Thursday night and go out to dinner and celebrate.  Then on Saturday morning we all meet up at the shuttled parking lot and head down to the start line.  We go to the local coffee place and stand in line to go to the bathroom and we make our way to the start line.  Then we meet afterward and go to brunch.  Most of us do not care about our time and are just out there to have fun.

I signed up for this year's race which is April 1st.  I'm actually looking forward to the fun weekend with running friends I haven't seen in awhile.  Come back to read my race report in a few weeks!

Have you run the Ukrop's 10k?  Have you dressed up for a race to try to win a contest?  Do you have expo/dinner/brunch traditions with running friends around local races?

I’m linking up with with MCM Mama Runs, Marcia’s Healthy Slice, and My No Guilt Life for the Tuesdays on the Run linkup.

My New Running Goal (Tuesdays on the Run Edition)

So as I have been running I get thinking (as everyone does).  I really haven't had a lust for running and really don't have a goal race this year.  I'm signed up for the Ukrop's 10k and the Star Wars Dark Side Weekend but my goal is to just have fun during these races.  So as I have been running I've come up with a new goal.  It's not big or anything, but it's something for me to work towards.


For my midweek run I have a 3, 4, and 5 mile loop that I can do in my neighborhood.  I've been doing these loops since I started running.  When I started running I didn't know anything from anything.  I didn't know about dry-fit clothing, GPS watches, running blogs, or even the walk/run method.  While I didn't know anything about the walk/run method, I naturally started out that way.  I would run the down hills and walk everything else.  I built up my running by not only running the down hills, but also the flat parts.  And then before I knew it, I was running the whole 3 miles, including those nasty hills.

So why am I getting into how I started running, when I'm talking about goals?  I had always ran my midweek runs, weather they were 3, 4, or 5 miles, then on my long runs I would do a walk/run.  Over the past two years, I have lost the ability to run the full 3 miles and would walk/run them.  I think some of that had to do with marathon/Dopey training.  Some of it came from gaining weight.  But once I started to walk/run the midweek runs, I just continued to do so.

I now want to build myself back up to running the full 3 miles (and 4 and 5 as I get up to that).  I want to be able to run my midweek runs like I used to.  For the past few weeks I have been working up to it without even thinking about it being a goal.  And now that I am getting closer, I know I can do it.

What is funny is that I'm going back to the way I did things in the beginning.  Even after all my years and knowledge, I go back to what I know and what I know works.  I have been walk/running the first mile as a warm up and then skipping walk breaks for the last two miles.  Run the downhills even if I'm on a walk break.  Now I'm not only skipping the walk breaks if I'm on a down hill or flat part, but I'm skipping them on some of the hills.  I push through even though I'm out of breath and want to stop.  I know I can keep going.

I know it will take me another month or so to get there naturally and not to push myself, but it's a small goal to work on.  Then maybe from there I can work on the 4 and 5 mile loops.  I know it's a silly small goal, but it is what I've started to work towards in the last couple of weeks.  I am still not wanting to do a lot of long distances this year, so this is a perfect small goal for right now.  Maybe it will help me with my 10k time for my Disney proof of time.

Do you make yourself non-race goals?  Do you like to set smaller goals instead of bigger ones?

I’m linking up with with MCM Mama Runs, Marcia’s Healthy Slice, and My No Guilt Life for the Tuesdays on the Run linkup.