Egg beaters & whole grain toast

It's my first day of training, and I am rather proud of myself. I got up early (for me) and had a nice healthy breakfast consisting of egg beaters, 2 slices of whole grain flax seed toast and a nice cup of hot chai tea (a perfectly protein and carbohydrate packed runners breakfast if I may add). My only mistake was not having a couple glasses of high quality H2O before walking out the door- but I've since made up for that throughout the rest of the day. Did you know that once you feel thirsty that you are already dehydrated? I heard that a long time ago and have since verified that fact through reading about marathon training. What I didn't know is that you can actually drink too much fluid which can cause hyponatremia which can cause seizures, comas and all sorts of other fun conditions. Who knew? As much as I love my water with lemon (as my co-worker can vouch- she makes fun of my many potty breaks at work) I seriously doubt that I'll ever reach the point of hyponatremia.

So back to today- my goal was to run three miles and I successfully completed my three mile run followed up with a 1 mile walk. Tomorrow is Sunday, and Sunday's are the actual first day on the training schedule, so I thought of today as a "bonus". Actually, I was using today as a test. As I have stated before I don't necessarily consider myself a runner, but I do quite a bit of physical activity. I work out 3-5 days per week, doing various activities such as running, biking, playing soccer or going to the gym. My pre-marathon-training route around the neighborhood was 2 miles running 1 mile walking, so today I just ran the whole route, and then back tracked for my cool down. I wanted to test myself to see if I could push beyond my 2 mile normal limit. I am not sure if it was adrenaline, or if it was the egg beaters and whole grain toast, but it was surprisingly a very delightful run. When I felt as if my body wanted to stop, I just slowed my pace down a bit, and before I knew it my body adjusted and I was fine. I might need to get some new tunes on my iPod though...some more upbeat jams to pump it up and keep myself motivated.

After my run I could already start to feel it in my hips. When I began running consistently two years ago (only 2 miles per run), my hips started to hurt. My girlfriend, Amy, was having the same problem back then and suggested taking Glucosamine and Chondroitin. I quickly drove to GNC and purchased said supplements and have been taking them ever since. I highly recommend them to anyone who is having joint pain (being my hypochondriac self I have also since then had hip x-rays just to be sure that there aren't any other underlying problems). I began biking this summer instead of doing so much high-impact running, and that helped my hips tremendously as well. I plan to incorporate biking into my cross training; it will definitely help the old hip bones. So since I'm back into running now, I just popped two Glucosamine and Chondroitin pills and plopped my self on the couch to rest my hips. Those supplements will be my friends until I complete this journey. So will the egg beaters and whole grain flax seed toast. Yum, yum.