August Wrap-up

Overall a good month.  I had quite a few fun outings with the kids before school started. Now kids are all settled in and happy in their classrooms. We've got our morning routine pretty well set, just waiting for a couple more afternoon activities to start before we're going on all cylinders.

I logged 41 miles running and walking the kids to/from school adds another 4 miles of walking a week.

I'm hoping we manage to keep it up when it gets cold cause I enjoy our little walks - especially when the kids get a little ahead of me and talk about stuff completely forgetting I'm right behind them. My daughters would love to walk to school on their own, and the school would allow it.  Even though they're good about crossing the street safely, I'm not ready.

The end of summer vacation came upon us a little too quickly, but I'm grateful to get back into our usual routine.

Unfortunately I am waaaay off track with my weekly projects. I need to look at what still needs to be done and get back to it.

With the new school year I'm planning on setting new goals and routines for myself.  As great as routine is, if I don't set goals I'll just get caught up in the day to day stuff and never get any of the big stuff done.

Photo Friday Link Up

When my husband and I bought our house 9 years, this tree was one of the things we really loved about the yard. It's a silver maple that's over 150 years old. The canopy shades our whole backyard.

Lately a lot of trees in our town have been cut down due to disease.  Luckily not maples, but we've still lost 6 trees on our block alone.  Last night I dreamt that I came home from picking up my daughters from school and there were tree trimmers in our backyard cutting down our beautiful tree. I hope that never happens.

Linking up to:

Endomondo

I love this app! I used to run with a pedometer but since it was a relatively cheap one I was never really sure of the accuracy.

This tracks your distance and so much more. It saves your history so you can keep track of personal bests. When you reach each mile or a finish a run it tells the time difference between that run and the previous personal best.You can map out routes online and then save them to your phone. Some people are good at estimating distances, I'm not one of them. At this point I know that if I run continuously for 30 minutes I definitely ran at least 3 miles but I like to have something more accurate.

You can access routes posted by other people (nothing really great in my neighborhood, but a few a short drive away).

You can friend people and then compete against them (I've never done this as I only have a couple of friends and they are all in Europe). You can send peptalks to friends if you see that they are out exercising.

While so far I've used it exclusively for running you can use it for lots of other sports too - cycling and kayaking are popular among my friends but also team sports

You can connect to a heart rate monitor to get access all of that info too. Mine is too old to be compatible so I don't even wear it anymore.

But really it's the stats that I love. It even has some silly ones online. Since it tracks calories it also lists how many hamburgers burned. Since it tracks distance it shows your distance compared to running around the Earth, and to the Moon. Not sure how long it will take me to run around the world.  I know I could do the math, but I don't want to.  I'd rather just watch that number slowly increase.

I know there are plenty of other training apps out there. I started with this one as I saw it come up on one of my friends Facebook posts. You can share your stats on FB. I don't. Maybe when I get better, but not yet.  Right now I don't feel like I have much to brag about.

I started with the free version and recently upgraded to the premium. Free is pretty good, but premium allows you to do interval training, which I need to do more of if I want to increase my distance.That's my next step, and I like that along with preprogrammed interval training programs, you can also create your own interval training program.  I've made one that I need to try out - we'll see how it goes.