A week of MAF...and baby chicks.

Oh Boy, where do I even begin? It has been a roller coaster of a weekend, and maybe to your disappointment, there wasn't a lot of running involved. This is why. Meet the Girls.

Wednesday morning was pretty much one of the happiest days of my life! I got to pick up our newly hatched baby chicks from the post office. It was a highly anticipated day for me, and I've been preparing for probably a month now! 

I ordered 5 baby chicks from mypetchicken.com. The ship as little as 3 per order to your house, and you can get all kinds of breeds. It's recommended to find a nearby farm to avoid the stress to the chicks, but I wanted specific breeds with friendly temperaments. The result? Dyno - the Easter Egger, Nugget - the Buff Orpington, and Eggitha, Pebble and Margaret Hatcher. One is a Black Copper Maran, another is an Australorp, and the last is an olive egger but right now it's hard to tell the three apart. They should all lay different color eggs except for the Australorp and Buff Orpington which is a standard brown egg. I'll try to spare you from the hundreds of photos we took, but here's a couple of my favorites.

Jon and I fell instantly in love with these little ladies. They are just the cutest things I've ever seen! They grow so fast too so every day you will see something new, whether it's new feathers, or a new skill. Prettttty sure I'm driving everyone mad with all of our chicken updates on fb and instagram, it's just totally devouring my time, energy, and life right now. Please bear with me...there will be running talk.

Dyno has new shoulder feathers!

Speaking of which, most of my runs have been very chill lately, and I only did two weight lifting sessions last week. Jon and I just craved to be home to spend time with the chicks. It was nice though, and I gave myself a bit of a break from all the exercise since last week was really pushing the envelope for me. I am pretty sure I was on the verge of overtraining with all the climbing, lifting, and the two races back to back.

Since my last post I have done one 4 mile run, one 8 mile run, and one 10 mile run. The 4 miler was a bit slow which I expected from the hard week prior. The 8 miler was in the afternoon and I kept it under MAF for once! It was so relaxing and beautiful. It was supposed to be a 6 mile run but I extended it so I could catch more of the gorgeous sunset. 

I tried to keep them all at MAF (149 heart beat or below) but the 10 miler yesterday was really hard to keep my heart rate down.

The reasoning? Well, #1 it was hot. It has been scorching in San Mateo recently. It'd be great if we had air conditioning to catch some relief, but our house is built like an oven and it's often hotter inside! Also, my diet has been complete crap lately. My typically iron-strength willpower has been caving to plenty of carbs...hot dogs with giant fluffy buns, pho, and hard ciders. My salads no longer contain the plateful of lettuce topped with veggies. Instead it's...a plate of tomatoes with some mushrooms and radishes sprinkled on top. I need to get back on track with eating more veggies. 

My heart rate Sunday was also high because I was also under an unusual amount of stress because one of our chicks (little Nugget) was falling ill.

I noticed that she was unusually sluggish on Saturday. She has always been the smallest of all of them, which is why I named her Nugget in the first place. She was sleeping a lot, not eating, or drinking, so we basically carried her around in our hands to keep her warm with our body heat and tried to get her to eat and drink for the entire day. My stress levels were slowly going through the roof seeing her go downhill. She started to get better Saturday night though, and eating more.

Sunday, after my run I spent the day painting the chicken coop. I think it's turning out well! What you can't see is that there are shingles on top. It's so cute!

By the end of the day though, little Nugget still wasn't feeling well, and at midnight we decided to take her to the only emergency veterinary office that would do anything for us. Turns out, she wasn't an expert, and actually knew next to nothing about chickens. While she was very sweet, I am pretty sure I could literally hear her typing, searching for treatments in the room next to us.

Long story short, little Nugget passed away sometime last night. I woke up at 7am to check on her, after getting to bed after 2am. 

We sobbed. All day. 8 hours of crying. I can't remember the last time I've cried this hard. It was just so difficult watching her become so week that she could barely do her signature peep. I felt so helpless.

Wah wah. Sorry to be a Debbie Downer and have almost an entire post about chickens and death, but that's basically everything that's been going on. Here's Little Eggitha was able to get a smile on our faces with her new skill of perching.

To take our mind off of things I ended up going to the gym to get back into the weightlifting routine. Bodybuilding.com made sure to remind me that I was a slacker, and needed to get back on track. 

I enjoy the workouts for the most part. I like that they mix them up every 1-2 weeks, and it doesn't get boring. What I don't like is that some of the workouts are really...weird...and not very convenient. Sometimes they use very specific machines that are hard to find in regular gyms. Other times require a partner, and while sometimes Jon hops in to help me, I'm usually forever alone.

I've been slacking on progress photos, but honestly I am not sure if I can see much of a difference. I *feel* a difference though, and I think that's what matters. Things I've noticed though are that I definitely have more strength. I have gone up in the weights, and struggle way less than before. I also have lost some belly fat, and have less of a muffin top. So that's nice. I haven't lost too much weight, but that wasn't my goal. 

Before and after. When I first started training to today. Cheesy bicep pose.

Before and after. Photo on right is from today.

Oh, and to swing things back to running, here are some photos I found of myself at the Double Dipsea. I didn't realize how terribly balanced my running vest is! I guess I noticed that it slips off my shoulder, but I can see now it's because the straw is pulling it over. It might need some tweaks. I'm surprised I'm running in any of these photos. That was a tough race.

Anywho, that's about all I have in store for this post. I plan on getting back on track and training longer distances to prepare for our three person team for Brazen's Dirty Dozen and Half Dozen. So excited for this race! I will probably just be doing about a half marathon, but hopefully will be able to push the pace a bit so we can score well. The race is July 11th, so definitely check back afterwards to see my race report about it!

Ok, somehow I'm still running on 5 hours of sleep but I think I need to go to bed before I pass out. RIP my little Nugget. This one goes out for you.