Wedding Wednesday: The to-do list picks up

I have a long running update tomorrow, things have been fun/busy in that department, but it is Wednesday, and what better reason to talk more about my wedding :)

Countdown:

The countdown is slowly starting to begin. We are at less than 4 months and to be very technical, 16 weeks until the wedding. For a runner who thinks of my life in terms of 16 week training cycles, we are moving into the final cycle of it all and my to-do list has certainly picked up, there is lots going on, luckily, this is all the fun stuff!

 Crafting:

The crafty, do it yourself projects have begun! I am NOT a crafty, artisticly inclined person, I tend to think in solid colors, no patterns, and straight lines--> this also tends to be very boring. My fabulous craft inclined friend Heather has brought her skills to the table and we are embarqing on some fun projects!

Joann Fabric has become one of my new favorite stores! It is amazing how many random things they have than seem to fit my wedding needs, and I feel like I am starting to develop the right side of my brain a little more.

 One of my favorite tasks that we are taking on is making custom water bottle labels. Lets face it, it will be hot, there needs to be water, it might as well look fun right?

We are just getting started with these, and I am very anxious to see how they turn out! 

Invitations:

My invitations have come in and the stuffing process has begun...

We are keeping these a secret until they actually go out, but I was super happy how they turned out. I chose an existing design, but had them custom make our invitations to fit our color scheme and my taste, they are a little more modern than I usually go for, but I am super happy with them!

I went back and forth a lot about how I wanted to have the invitations addressed, first world problems, I know!!!! The women in my family were very quick to remind me that hand written invitations are expected in the south, but I really dislike the look of caligraphy and my own hand writing kind of blows, especially in mass quantity. I thought the easiest thing to do would be print them in a nice scripty font, but I also knew I would hear about it from our older and more traditional guests and family members. Luckily, I had a very naive volunteer with literally flawless handwriting agree to hand address the invitiations- yippee!!!

Most people use printed envelopes now, am I being too old-fashioned following tradition? I feel like the older people will care and appreciate that we made the extra effort, but my guess is most people wouldn't have noticed either way.

Shopping:

As much as I love to shop, it was about time that I finally have an excuse to get a little crazy! While we don't have a 'theme' per say, we definitely have a cohesive element/style that we are using to tie everything together, and it is going to require some shopping...

At this point, I really feel like I am going to be saying  "Stephanie's wedding, brought to you by Etsy". I have always read wonderful things about Etsy, and spent time perusing their site, but have never purchase anything, I never felt I truly needed it, whereas I always needed more running shorts ;)

I have fallen in love with a zillion things on Etsy that I want to bring in to 'decorate' our wedding and gifts for all the fabulous people involved in our special day, but I am trying not to get too out of control yet.

Jewelry... I have been starting to think about my bridesmaids jewelry and what shape and color I think will look good with their dresses. While I will be giving them their wedding day jewelry, John's mom is actually making it for me (them) and I love that we can basically design it to be anything we want!

I have had lots of fun trying on different styles

And colors. I think we have a pretty good handle on what we want it to look like, and I can't wait to see the first few designs she has for me!

Shoes!!!!! I LOVE shoes, like own so many pairs I don't need just because they were pretty, but that's the fun of it!

I have had lots of fun finding shoes that I love and having an excuse (or 4) to buy them. Showers, parties, rehearsals, wedding, after parties, etc. all a good reason for new shoes! Here are a pair of my favorite recent find!

We have more things coming up soon that I am very excited about! Will have to get back to them next Wednesday!!!!

Back to Training

Happy Monday! I trust everyone had a great weekend!


For the last 6-7 weeks I have been running without a plan without a pattern and without the pressure...it was nice. Mentally, I need a break, time to figure out what I wanted to do next, work on getting faster, etc.

Well my nice no plan phase has pretty much come to an end. I am 5 weeks our for my goal 5k race of the summer, and 4-5 weeks is about all I can handle focusing on the insane paces needed for an impressive 5k PR. After that race it is right into base building for the fall race season. My goal after my last spring race was to make sure that when my fall races came around, I was in a totally different pace range, so here is hoping it all worked.


I am just about finished finalizing my fall and winter race schedule, and should have all the fun details up soon.


Over the past 3 weeks, I have been getting back to my normal routine after a 2 week illness and also getting acclimated to Florida Summer.. oh yes, its already here! Between the 2, most of my runs the last 3 weeks have been pretty sub-par, average paces, plenty of struggling and frustration, but I was reminded that one day I would head out and it would all just click again. I would hit my new fast paces with ease, every step wouldn't feel like my feet were bricks, and it would all go back to being natural.

Well this weekend, it all came back


Saturday Long run:
7 Miles- 1:01:29, 8:47 average pace
Mile 1-  9:33
Mile 2-  8:58
Mile 3-  8:55
Mile 4-  8:45
Mile 5-  8:26
Mile 6-  8:25
Mile 7-  8:23

I made sure to start out super easy, especially since I had been running so slow recently, and I just kind of assumed I would hover in 9:00-9:30 the whole run, but it just kept getting faster- always a nice feeling!


This morning it was back out to the bridges, which are not my favorite workout of the week, but I have definitely seen a lot of improvement, so I always try to go. I never try and hit fast paces while doing bridges, I figure the inclines themselves are enough to get my heart rate up without me trying to kill myself, so I always just go with it. Today, it seemed to go better than usual:

5 Miles-
Mile 1-  9:32
Mile 2-  9:28
Mile 3-  9:21
Mile 4-  9:29 --> up the big beast
Mile 5-  8:56

So these might seem like a snails pace in comparison to Saturday's run, but with 4 separate inclines to tackle, that is actually quite nice to see :)


I have a fun workout planned for tomorrow morning, sort of a fun take on a progression run, and I am running for time not distance- cannot even tell you the last time I did that. I think I am anxious to see how far I can push in the time allotted, and then of course see if I can beat it next week!


Do you prefer to run for time or distance?

Wedding Wednesday

So it has been quite a while since I have managed to doa wedding post, or really any post, but I have been a busy girl!

Work, running, wedding planning, Bachelorette weekend for Jaime, so yeah it has been a busy one.


So onto the wedding update:  this week John and I got to do something fun... we took our engagement pictures, and it was super fun!!!! I even think John started to enjoy himself towards the end, not that he would let on to that.

At first we John was a little skeptical of the whole engagment session thing. He is not a huge fan of posed pictures, which is why so many of my race photos are all of me talking and looking dumb, but I promised I we would take the cheese factor out as much as possible, I think like everyone I wanted our pictures to look like us and how we normally interact.

We are not cheesy stare into each other's eyes touch your face kind of people, so I tried to convey that to our photographer early on. While we certainly have a few of your more traditional poses in our photos, I really loved how they turned out, for the most part we look like ourselves, and like we actually like each other :) I am so thankful that we decided to haev these pictures done as part of our wedding package, it will be nice to have non-wedding pictures of us when we were still young and pretty. Considering the only professional pictures I have ever had done were baby pictures and senior portraits in high school, I thought we deserved some nice pictures of ourselves!

Our photographer, Tonya Beaver is just fantastic! She and I clicked as soon as we began exchanging emails, and I am so excited for our wedding and all the great pictures to come out of it! It made


Check out her blog HERE to see some moe pictures from our session!