Good morning and HAPPY FRIDAY! Boy, am I glad it’s the almost the weekend (only 9 hours of work to go!!).  Work has been crazy and hectic lately, so I’m definitely looking forward to two days of R&R.

We’re having friends over this evening, so I did an AM workout.   Whenever I work out in the morning, I make it fast and hard to maximize calorie burn in a short amount of time.

Today, I ran 3.0 miles at a 8:00-mile pace.  Woo hoo! I felt like I was flying!  I came home and did Parking Lot Bootcamp, which is my fancy name for working out on the sidewalk in front of my house. :)  Here’s what I did:

• 3 sets of walking lunges (12 lunges per set)
• 3 sets of bicycle crunches (30 crunches per set), alternated with 3 sets of push-ups (10 push-ups per set).
• 3 sets of suicide runs (five 25-meter dashes per set), each set alternated with a 30-second squats against a wall.
• 3 sets of tricep dips against the hood of my car (10 dips per set).

Here are my statistics:

• Duration: 39 minutes
• Average Heart Rate: 173 bpm
• Maximum Heart Rate: 191 bpm
• Calories Burned: 359

Breakfast – Green Gorilla Smoothie

Looks scary, tastes great! I love sneaking in a serving (or two) of veggies in the morning.  The secret ingredient? SPINACH!

Ingredients

• 1 banana (frozen)
• 2 cups fresh spinach (frozen)
• 1 scoop ImmunPlex Vanilla Protein Powder
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 cup milk

I froze the banana and raw spinach in a ziploc bag overnight.  It was a creamy, delicious smoothie.  The spinach taste wasn’t overpowering at all! I’m definitely making this again.

Last night, I discovered NutritionData, which lets you input your own recipe and spits out a fancy-looking nutritional label.  Here’s the nutritional information for my Green Gorilla Smoothie:

Pre-Workout Snack

Before my workout, I had 1/5 a Myoplex Deluxe Chocolate Peanut Butter Bar.  The whole bar has 340 calories, so my little serving only had about 68 calories (and 6 grams of protein!)

It kind of reminded me of a chocolate caramel chew:

This was a pretty yummy bar.  It tasted rich, which hid the protein-y taste rather well. It was super chewy and thick–I can’t imagine eating a whole bar at once!  The small portion didn’t feel too heavy in my tummy during my run, either.  There were some drawbacks to this bar–like several artificial sweeteners–but, all in all, it was a decent pre-workout snack. 

I also had an iced coffee with half and half and Stevia.

Off to work! See you for lunch… TGIF!