I’m not a huge rice / pasta fan but I know that the brown and wheat (or plus) varieties are good for you and a healthy addition to your diet. I ran across a post on a blog that I follow that was about brown rice, Rice Baby Rice, the post ended with how do you eat your brown rice? And I realized oh crap I need to come up with something for dinner tonight, might as well make a stab at the rice. What I ended up coming up with was quite good!

For starters I was using Minute Brown Rice, the stuff cooks in 5 minutes, or so they claim. I have ZERO patience for rice for some reason. Instead of water I used chicken broth to cook the rice. After it was done I added in a spoonful of pesto that I had in the fridge and a small handful of cut up sun-dried tomatoes. After mixing it all up I served it with a Moroccan spiced pan seared chicken breast.

I know I should have had a veggie on the side but I’ve been on a total fruit kick this week so I was pretty stuffed coming into this meal due to my grazing on fruit.

: ) I suppose their are worst things to be addicted to. The fruit casualties for the week is going to end up hitting 7 apples, 1 cantaloupe and 2 pineapples! Woopsiessss. Granted thats a Fri – Sun guestimate. I still have half the cantaloupe, half the pineapple and 3 apples to go through by the end of the weekend. I have no doubt I will succeed though.

On to mini goals! So San Juan is in 21 days, 21 days until I need to get myself in a bikini, oh joy! While I don’t think I will ever “love” being in bikini and prancing about I’m hoping I’ll at least be comfortable by the time I get there. So my mini goal is to drop 3 1/2 lbs by vacation time. Totally doable and as long as I keep up with the running and gyming I don’t think there will be any problem reaching this. Cutting back on booze prior to vacation will be something I will attempt though. With family stuff this weekend and having to drive it should be pretty easy. My parents are coming to visit (!!) the weekend before vacation but I think by bringing them to eastern market and cooking for them one or two of the nights they are here will keep the amount of wine I ingest in check (fingers crossed).

Work outs this week have been a wee lame thus far. I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather so after soccer Monday night (brutal work out this week) I relaxed and took Tuesday off. I took Wednesday off of work because I was exhausted and feeling like I had a small cold coming on but by lunch time I was feeling a little better and was getting restless so I attempted to go for a run. It ended up being an hour long ~4.5 mile walk / run. The walking felt nice, the running not so much!

Today I’m going to be doing my first tempo run! I have been loosely using http://www.runnersworld.com for a training program for the half marathon. Todays work out is a 1 mile warm up jog, 4 mile run @ 8:50 pace and then a mile cool down. Hopefully I am feeling stronger today and can power through it. The Tough Mudder (May 13th) is creeping up around the corner and I’m a bit worried that I have lost focus on my strength training because of all the running so I will make Friday and Saturday big lifting days. I don’t think my poor little arms and shoulders are going to be able to tackle the climbing rope and all those lovely 12ft walls I need to scale. Awesome. My endurance however is fantastic, my brute strength, maybe not so great.

How do you balance your strength training and cardio exercise? 

Categories: Food, Half Marathon Training, Running, Tough Mudder Progress

Tags: active, exercise, fitness, food, gym, healthy, recipe, running, tough mudder, weight lifting, weight training