Tag: Chicago

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2nd Run Back 3/21/2020

3.45 Mile Run @ 11:32 Mile pace

I took a few days off to help let my body have a fighting chance to recover from the first run in forever. The working strategy is to give myself ample rest in between runs in the first couple weeks to stave off any shin splits and overtraining. Overworking is a common issue in beginners that are too excited and try to train at full speed without building up the necessary fitness level to match their workout regime.
Knowing not to hit the ground running (excuse my pun), I will be diligent and not overdo it and push my pace. Persistence will be the key to success here.

Onto the run, 3.45 Miles with an 11:32 average.

The first third and last third was heavy on the walk-run ratios, but the middle third was a steady run with no stoppage or noticeable slowdowns.
Overall this was an excellent follow-up run with an increase in pace with more distance ran vs. walked.

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Weekly Post 11/25/2019

Highlights:

  • Went to the gym
  • Bears win!
  • Thanksgiving leftovers

Lowlights:

  • So much traveling

Goals for next week   Go to the gym again

I made it up to the gym for the first time in a long time. I found my old condo gym routine that hits the whole body with all of the weight machines at my home gym. It’s a basic 3×10 protocol with roughly 15 exercises that I can finish in almost 35 minutes with little rest. I need to make a concerted effort to make it the gym though. I don’t find the lifting and exercising to be that difficult. It seems that my brain doesn’t like getting healthier or put it at the top of the priorities list as I think it should be. There is time in the later evenings with my work and family schedule, but in the past working out late and taking a shower has made it difficult to fall asleep. To be fair back then I was getting an ample amount of sleep compared to now maybe this time will be different?

The Bears beat the New York Giants, but it wasn’t pretty we are still struggling and it this was a game we should have decidedly won but, we were so very close to losing I was on the edge of my seat for the entire game. This season is running of games and the Bears still is playing like trash. There are glimpses of hope but they are sporadic and we never seem to capitalize off them or put 2 good drives together. I’m hoping the Bears offense will start clicking so I can enjoy watching the games rather than biting my nails for 4 hours straight.

I had a great Thanksgiving with my family in downtown Chicago. Easily my favorite food of the Thanksgiving meal can only happen the day after Thanksgiving. The stuffing sandwich has been my go-to post-turkey day lunch for about the last 18 years. My Grandma whipped it up for me one year when she stayed over for the holiday weekend. It is a real game-changer combined with most of the food groups. Two toasted slices of white bread both have cranberry sauce spread like jam. Stuffing that was reheated in a frying pan giving it some crunchiness. Ham slices that are also hot, I mainly eat ham in Thanksgiving rather than turkey. That is the gist of the sandwich the hard part of the sandwich is cooking the stuffing into a patty and not burning them since you are working with leftover and you won’t have any more stuffing until next year. If you get that stuffing just right with the right ratio of ham this is my favorite sandwich of all time.

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Weekly Post 11/11/2019

Highlights:

  • Beard is coming in nicely
  • Bears beat the Detriot Lions!

Lowlights:

  • Only ate fast food for lunch

Golas for next week: Find a place to eat my bring from home lunch at

After a week and a half, this is the best shape my beard has been in since I started participating in No Shave November. The major tip I have learned is to stated conditioning the beard as soon as you can. I started after day 5 of no shaving and my beard hasn’t itched once. In the past years, it would develop this horrible itch underneath my beard. It would always sneak up on me before I knew it and the only remedy would be a couple of days of conditioning in the shower.

This year has been the most comfortable by far also due to the constant brushing whenever I walk past the bathroom. I read somewhere once that the brushing also stimulates growth which would be difficult for me to judge since this is the only time of the year that I will rock the beard. I will keep you guys posted on the beards progress in the coming weeks.

Finally, the Chicago Bears won a game, I was really about to lose all hope on this season and pretty much lost general interest in most of the NFL games while were all enduring some really bad football played by the Bears in the past weeks. It is nice to start the week with a little pep in my step on a victory Monday.

The new work location is still making my lunch decisions pretty limited to fast food only options. I still haven’t found any better/healthier options yet and starting to worry that I will have to mine the menus of a restaurant to eat more responsible. This is a task I have never attempted and don’t have much confidence that I will be able to do without just ordering fries all the time. The quest will continue until I find some good lunch options.

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Weekly Post 11/4/2019

Highlights:

  • New Low Weight

Lowlights:

  • Got Sick
  • Ate Mcdonalds
  • Bears Suck Agian

Goals for next week:  Breakfast smoothies all week with 3 days of salads for lunch.

It was a roller-coaster week health-wise for me as I hit a 2 year low on the scale and immediately got a bug from my son’s daycare that knocked me out for almost 48 hours. I still had to go to work due to me starting a new project at another location other than my home base and since this is on a short timeline I felt like I had to risk it to kick off the work and get the team making progress in the right direction before I would feel safe taking a day off.

I am usually a large proponent for staying home while sick no matter how important you feel it is to be at work. If it hadn’t been for this project I would have happily stayed home and destroyed some Netflix on the couch. With staring this new project at a new facility with a whole new leadership team I didn’t want me missing work be the first impression the new force had of me.

With that new work, location means I have lost my roster of restaurants that have enabled me to start eating healthy and shedding the much-needed weight I have been carrying for the past few years.

Losing those restaurants and food choices are scary, the new location has all the fast food choices you could want and the nearest grocery store or market is 2 or three times further making my lunch break that much smaller. I know I could be making my lunches at home and eating them at work but I value that time away from the office. Typically I watch some DVR shows or some Netflix and eat my lunch but, it does help me recharge/set my afternoon up to be nice and productive. Where in the past working on a closed campus I would get a stir crazy and my work rate would plummet toward quitting time.

This is how I ended up eating at Mcdonalds for the first time in a couple of months as I still view it as safe food and I was looking for some comfort after being sick.

Taking a step back maybe this is an opportunity to take another step forward in eating healthier and saving major cash. I have the skills to be making salads and soups at home. Buying the ingredients would reduce my lunch cost from 9 dollars a meal to closer to $4 a meal. That is significant savings at 20 meals a week. (20 x5)4 weeks that 400 bucks saved a month! close to $5,000 for the whole year. Wow, that is a lot of cash that’s in my pocket and the end of the day. I wonder if I could find a place to eat my meal outside of work to get those benefits and bring my lunch to save all that money. I will need to look into this further and see my options. Making food at home and bringing it in isn’t the hard part, Eating lunch outside the office will be the tough one. Time to start exploring!

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Weekly Post 10/28/2019

Highlights:

  • No work this weekend
  • Fun brunch on a rainy Saturday

Lowlights:

  • Bears lost 3 in a row now

Goals for next week: Keep trying to get rid of these work day Mochas

It was a nice low key week. I could have done without the cold rain during the weekend. Still managed to make it to Brunch despite the weather. This weekend we went to Tavern on Rush for a boozy brunch. Not gonna lie this place had some weak ass Mochas, so I guzzled mine down in 3 gulps and went straight to the beer before my food even came. In case you are wondering Heineken and french toast paired beautifully together. We followed up Brunch with some beers at my Brothers’ new spot downtown to hide from the cold rain. College football was on and the rain never stopped and we never left the couch.

I should try and purposefully plan some low effort weekends to use the off days to recharge my battery. Busy weeks seem to compound that tiredness that creeps in during the week. Recovery needs to start being a bigger priority now that my age gets up in value.

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Weekly Post 10/21/2019

Highlights:

  • Fired up the grill
  • Driving Range Session 

Lowlights:

  • Ate 2 Desserts On Monday
  • The Bears Are Embarssing 

Goals for next week:  Zero mocahs during the work week.

In the long-time effort of trying to reduce and or eliminate caffeine from my diet. Mochas/expresso has been the toughest to raign in. Kicking the soda habit only took three months. Albeit I did stop cold turkey style, the coffee is much more a social/ fun engagement for me layered with the added benefits that the jolt of caffeine gives on those weekend end mornings after a fun night out.
Maybe I need to change my goals to something more achievable in a short time and put some wins on the board and build off that success. So starting to this week My new goal will be to only have mochas 3 or fewer in a week. I will strive for 2 of those to be on the weekends and stay away from the weekdays as much as possible.

A quick recap of the Bears the past weekend. We sucked and I’m not ready to talk about it yet. This season is dangerously close to falling off a cliff. Not sure who to blame here but it feels like a lot of bad coaching decisions have not prepared this team at all for this season.

Got to fire up the grill this week for the first time in a while. Since both, I and the wife are back at work full time and the baby is at daycare. Family time has been condensed to 200 minutes daily. This has cut out a lot of time for things like grocery shopping, dry cleaners, golf. One of the services we have found to help maximize the time spent at home and not running errands was Hello Fresh. This meal-delivery service drops of ingredients for 3 meals a week. All of the ingredients are separated in a way to ensure a meal in less than 30 minutes. There have been some meals that took longer than that but all of those were due to a longer oven time, but the prep time is wicked fast. All of these meals are designed to be cooked with the least amount of tools and create as little mess as possible to eliminating the need for me to grill anything. I’m sure we could be grilling most of the meats that have come in the meals but they mostly cooked in a pan with sauce. So it was a real treat when I found some great looking bone-in ribeyes at the market this past weekend.

The weather was a little warmer on Sunday so I went to the range for an early morning practice session. I hit the first 5 or 6 balls well then the next 25 progressively got worse and worse. This time though I was able to work my swing back to some decent ball strikes. That process took way too long if memory serves me right it was close to 40 balls which do not is able in a regular round of golf. This is why we practice though. The best swings of the day came form hitting my 52 and 58-degree wedges. All of a sudden I’ve developed some distance control. I played a game where I would aim for the 25,50,75s yard flag and was sticking balls within a couple of yards and hitting the flag a few times. This is a major game-changer for me, if I can take the distance control to the course I should be giving my self ton of more par chances and maybe even some birdie puts on the Par 5s Now I just have to get out and play but it does feel like the golf season here in Chicago is about to slam shut.

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Weekly Post 9/23/2019

Highlights:

  • Bears Won
  • Short Work Week

Lowlights:

  • Still Worked 6 Days

Goals for next week: To continue have smoothies for breakfast

Bears won so this week instantly became a great week in my book coupled that with a holiday week here wasn’t much to complain about. Even though I did work 6 days this week it was not the usually hectic and frantic workplace that I usually experience in 6 days.

Bears played well against a winless Washington Redskins team. It’s early in the season but every win is major since our loss to the Green Bay Packers and how strong the rest on the NFC North division is playing at the moment. Add that we have an intense second half of the season scheduled as well we cannot afford any more step backs.

Been getting into a nice groove with my Breakfast smoothies. I no longer crave anything else in the morning until I am hungry for lunch. I also have been working in some salads for lunch from the salad bar. So far I’ve been having a smoothie 5 time4s a week and a salad for lunch 3 times in that same week. This has been a major improvement in my weight management strategy. Plus all that extra vegetables have to be doing some good as well. I have been enjoying the progress seen on the scale and have given that extra motivation to stick to my routine to faster reach my goal of getting under 220 lbs.