Posts filed under ‘Fitness’
Giveaway: Two spots to run the Sporting Life 10k race in Toronto!
Hello, runners! The Sporting Life 10k is soooooon — on May 13, 2012, to be exact. Yours truly is running it. Wanna run it, too? Chobani has hooked me up with two race entries to give away to this fun event.
You ready to race a 10k? Go ahead and enter!
There are three ways you can enter (enter all three ways to increase your chances of winning!):
(1) Enter by emailing your name, mailing address, phone number and age to healthandswellness@gmail.com (please put Sporting Life 10k in the subject line). Please note that the race entry is not transferable.
(2) Leave a comment on this post about why you run.
(3) Tweet about this giveaway including a link to this blog post (and you must include my twitter handle @healthswellness to ensure I see your tweet!).
This giveaway closes at 12PM on Friday, May 4, 2012. Two winners be randomly chosen, notified by email, and announced on Health & Swellness.
Good luck!
Enter to win entry into the Toronto Marathon, Half-marathon or 5K!
The fine folks at Chobani (have you tried their yogurt yet?) have given Health & Swellness (that’s me!) two registration spots to give away for the Toronto Marathon events May 6th! (I’ll be running the marathon so I’ll see you there!)
So maybe you’re a marathoner or half-marathoner and are trained and just haven’t registered yet. Or you’ve been wanting to run the 5k but don’t want to shell out the $50. Well, problem solved if you enter and win a spot through here!
(Puh-lease don’t enter to run the marathon or half-marathon if you have not been training just because you want to cross it off your bucket list — you’ll only injure yourself! I’ve been training four long months for this marathon; it takes that long to build up your endurance safely, people!)
To enter, email healthandswellness@gmail.com (please put Toronto Marathon in the subject line) with your name, address, phone number and age, along with your race of choice (marathon, half-marathon or 5K). The person entering must be the one participating in the race (it’s not transferable). Giveaway closes at 12PM on Sunday, April 29, 2012 — I will notify you that day if you’ve won an entry. The two winners will be randomly chosen.
Good luck!
Go coastal
Saw several people running on the beach today and I was feeling guilty about not running at all during my weekend beach getaway (but I forced myself to bring only a carry-on and that meant no room for running gear), and then as if to add salt to the wound, I came upon this research finding:
Exercising anywhere outdoors is linked with calmness, enjoyment and refreshment, but exercising on the coast is most beneficial and in urban parks the least, says research presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference.
Note to self: Make room for running gear next beach getaway.
(Image: My sunset view of the Gulf of Mexico)
I survived CrossFit
Ok, ok, so I only tried it once. But hey, my WOD (workout of the day) was Running Fran. Running Fran, people!
What’s the big deal about Running Fran? As I learned at my trial class at Reebok CrossFit Liberty Village, CrossFit has certain benchmark workouts, which are named after hurricanes, and Fran is a renowned for being one of the toughest WODs — seriously, google it and you’ll see it strikes fear in many a CrossFitters heart. And the one I did was a modified version as it also incorporated running, yo. Here’s the breakdown of our WOD (and your aim is to complete it all as fast as you can):
- 21 thrusters (a squat holding a 15-lb bar at your shoulders, and then when rising out of the squat thrusting the bar up overhead by raising arms straight)
- 21 pullups
- run (I forget the distance, 200 metres, perhaps?) (Correction: just found out it was 500 metres)
- 15 thrusters
- 15 pullups
- run
- 9 thrusters
- 9 pullups
- run
Whew! Tired just thinking about it!
Ok, full disclosure: I could not complete a pullup if my life depended on it — thankfully, the moves in CrossFit are designed to be scaleable. So we used resistance bands to assist us in completing pullups. Oh, and that 15-lb bar we used for thrusters? Women are prescribed to use a 65-lb weight, yowzers! I was plenty pooped with just the 15-lb bar.
As for the run, well, that part was a cinch (I am in training for a marathon right now, remember?); the run was a welcome break, in fact (although I was probably supposed to sprint it, oopsies…).
All in all, though, I’m pretty happy I was able to complete it with a decent time (decent in my opinion, anyhow).
Still not sure what CrossFit is or if you can handle it? Check out my article on Lipstick Powder n Paint for a more detailed description of the workout concept.
