Today was Eli's birthday party with his friends from school. He decided to have it at the roller skating rink again (he had his party there a couple of years ago). Yesterday, I went to Sam's Club to get his cake--a very non-traditional birthday cake:
It's called a "Scoop Cake", and it's basically layers of chocolate cake and frosting. Every time I see it at Sam's Club, I want to dive into it face first, but I've never actually bought one (it's big, and I would have eaten way too much of it). So, I decided to make today my high calorie day for the week, because I planned to have some of that cake!
Today also happened to be my long run day, and I had 60 minutes on the schedule. I was reading yesterday whatever I could find about the foot pod and the Garmin 620, because Garmin customer service never responds to my questions about how to calibrate it. On the 910XT, there was a calibration setting, where you would run half a mile and it would find the right calibration factor. For the 620, there is no calibration setting. Since I've been running on the treadmill lately, I'd really like to re-calibrate it.
Garmin must have updated the instruction manual online, because now it says that the foot pod is "self calibrating" to the 620--when you run outside using GPS, it automatically calibrates the foot pod. I never wear the foot pod outside, so I want to start doing that just to see if the it is, in fact, "self calibrating". I set the calibration factor to the factory setting, which is 100%, so that I could look at it later to see if it changed. (The Garmin automatically uses GPS first, and if GPS isn't available, it will use the foot pod data... so wearing the foot pod won't affect a GPS run).
After checking the weather, I dressed for cold and wind today. I started wearing a wind breaker type jacket over my regular running clothes when it's windy, and it's helped a lot! I should have tried that sooner. The jacket is super lightweight, so it doesn't add any warmth, but it helps keep the wind from penetrating my clothes. I wore two long sleeved layers plus the jacket, and it ended up being the perfect amount of clothes.
My heart rate was kind of high to start with today, and I felt like I was barely crawling along in order to keep my heart rate under 146. I had a headwind the first couple of miles, and my pace was close to 12:00/mi in order to keep my heart rate low. Once I turned away from the wind, I was able to go a little faster.
The last two miles felt amazing, likely due to the tailwind ;) The only bummer about running at such a low heart rate is that I don't burn as many calories--today, I only burned 461 calories for a 5.45 mile run (roughly 85 calories per mile).
I checked the calibration setting to see if it had changed from the 100% that I'd set it to, and it did! It was at 96.4%. I'll need to do some speed work outside with it to make it more accurate, but I'm glad to see that it really does "learn" the calibration from GPS runs. So, if you have a foot pod, leave it on your shoe whether you're inside or outside and it will calibrate to the GPS. Nice!
Since it was my high calorie day, I decided to get one of my very favorite foods for lunch--a 13-8-on-9 sub from Erie Bread Co. Eli and I went to pick up some supplies for his party, and while we were out, we got the sub to bring home and share (the sub is huge, and I estimate half of it to be around 1,000 calories!).
As I was eating it, I declared it the best thing I've ever eaten. Truly.
In the afternoon, we went to the skating rink for Eli's party. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people don't RSVP for a party--it only takes 30 seconds to send a quick text to let me know if they are coming. I had gotten responses from five kids, so I was planning on seven kids to be there (my boys, plus five of Eli's friends). We ended up having 11 kids show up! I had made a few extra goody bags, just in case we had an extra kid or two, but I only had 10 bags.
Eli had a lot of fun, though, so that's all that matters in the end.
(Noah and Eli are actually the same height, but Noah was wearing skates in this photo, and Eli was not.)
I skipped eating any pizza there, but I did eat some of the scoop cake. It wasn't as good as I was imagining, so I'll stop lusting over it when I see it at Sam's. There is some left over in the fridge right now, but it's not even tempting me. I'm kind of relieved! If it had been as good as I thought it would be, I would probably think about it way too much.
The kids are staying the night at my parents' house tonight, so Jerry and I were talking about going out, but I'm kind of exhausted--it's been a busy day. Today will likely be a "Netflix and chill" night--and I mean that in a LITERAL sense! Hahaha, I had no idea that "Netflix and chill" meant anything other than watching Netflix and relaxing, until I used that phrase a couple of weeks ago on my blog and a few readers pointed it out ;)
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