A Little Help From Some Friends

I haven’t seen a number that big in a LONG time. 951 calories burned! Holy Smokes!

We did our warm-up and then got right into it. Saturday was a day of new things at the Warrior Room. We started with a workout where we did pushups for 20 seconds and then a plank for 20 seconds, rest, repeat 8 times. Yes 8 times! It was a hard start to the day but I got through it.

We moved onto the station workout. One station was a deadlift, goblet squat and another kind of squat (I can never remember the name). We did that 6 reps, 6 reps, 3 reps then repeat. The next station was a bent over row with the kettle bell, lat raises, and jumping jack planks. The next station was hammer curls with kettle bells and triceps. Finally there was a one-handed swing station with a few other moves. It was hard work! I was feeling it with just one time around the stations.

Then it was time for a run.

It was a bitter cold morning but sunny and blue-skied. The big group broke up into two teams to do a “snake run.” I’ve described this before: you run in a single file line, the last person does a sprint to the front and so on. It’s really challenging but for me with my knees–sprinting is not wise. Thankfully Ashley told me to just go run outside at my own pace. Wise idea. We did the run every 20 minutes to break up the kettle bell workouts. I ended up run/walking about 1 mile total.

We did a few different sets of abs and honestly that felt like a bit of a break from the super intense stuff we were doing before. After the abs we did a routine similar to the pushup-plank one. This time it was squat jumps for 20 seconds then holding a squat for 10 seconds–repeat 8 times. Ouch! My thighs were BURNING after three rounds. I wasn’t sure I could make it to 8, but I did with taking it easy and going a little slower during my 20 second set.

There was a few other station workouts and another ab sets and then we did something I’ve only heard about before: the Turkish Getup. Michael talks about this move a lot. It’s part of his kettle bell routine at home. He’s been telling me how challenging it is for years but I never tried it. It was fun but HARD. Mostly hard because it was the end of the workout and I was spent. My arm was shaking as I tried to hold myself up.

The Turkish Getup seems like a very efficient move to me. It works your entire body and relies on strength AND balance. I think I did ok. The part that was hard for me (other than holding myself up) was the move to get your leg under your body to get ready to stand up. That is gonna take a lot of practice I think!

Later that night, I had some friends over for dinner and a little crafting. It was time to send the save-the-date postcards. Well, according to bridal website calendars I was months behind on this but oh well. I don’t know that save-the-dates necessarily need to go out a year in advance. Plus, most people who are invited already know the date. 🙂

Michael created out postcard with photoshop. He did a fantastic job and I love the way it looks. We mailed a few test postcards to see how they’d hold up in the mail. They did ok. Most of the “test” ones held up, one or two were  a little torn. I searched for the heaviest paper/postcard paper I could find and couldn’t find anything heavier than what I got.

Michael printed out all the postcards and I invited my bridesmaids over for dinner (bribe) and to help address and stamp the cards. I was so glad they helped! I think hand-cramping would have set in around postcard #40….

Michael made his amazing mac n’ cheese, my cousin Anna brought some white wine and we got started! We ate dinner (so good) and then cleaned up before starting the postcards. Anna was smart bringing white wine instead of red! But we got lucky, no spills or anything. 🙂 It was fun and having Erika and Anna there to help me we were done with the post cards pretty quickly. We spent the rest of the evening chatting and just hanging out. I was happy to have the company AND to cross one more thing off the to-do list.