Gina’s Winter Shape-Up program<\/a>?\u00a0 I am totally going to do this!\u00a0 It could not have come at a better time!\u00a0 I have everything I need except for a medicine ball which I was going to purchase anyway.<\/p>\nI want to run the Cap City Half again this year and that is coming up on May 1st!\u00a0 Not too far away!\u00a0 I am training for the miles on my own since I have to increase my mileage slowly.\u00a0 Currently my long run is 8 miles, I should have no problems getting those remaining miles in by May.\u00a0 However, from my experience last year I know that I definitely need to add in some strength training to avoid injury.<\/p>\n
Last year during training, I suffered from a tight IT band.\u00a0 Not a big deal, it happens to a lot of runners.\u00a0 Stretching and massage helped that out.\u00a0 However during the race I strained my right hamstring.\u00a0 It bothered me a great deal for a long time and I was off running totally for just over a month.<\/p>\n
As a cardio fiend and new lover of running, being sidelined was crappy.\u00a0 Not only did I have to start off at a low mileage, but I’m still<\/em> working on increasing and bumping my mileage back up to where it was.\u00a0 When I started training last year to run another half in October, I had to pull out because my hamstring was still bothering me.<\/p>\n
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I know this is a direct result from the lack of strength training for that first half.\u00a0 I know hamstrings are a very common problem and an easily injured muscle for runners, mine were weak.\u00a0 Hamstrings do a lot of work for runners and it’s up to us to make sure they are strong enough to handle training.<\/p>\n
In an attempt to prevent injury this season and to make sure I’m getting enough strength training in, I’m signing up for Gina’s challenge!\u00a0 She even provides the workouts each week, all we have to do is follow them!\u00a0 Easy enough right?\u00a0 Who’s in? 
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Hi guys!\u00a0 As promised, here is my snack from last night. A glass of red and triple threat chocolate!\u00a0 Left to right: 60% dark chocolate chips Dark chocolate mint Sea salt chocolate I had one sea salt, all of the mint (so freaking good! totally my favorite) and a few of the chips.\u00a0 No way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4KYWa-2Gf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/OHC-01-17-10_chocwine.jpg\" "\\"Red")
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