Last year in 2014, I did a TON of races...but I never did get much faster.  Mostly I was using racing as a tool to force me to get back into a running or exercise routine.  And it did work, I like racing and the stress/fear that can come with it forces me to get off the couch and do something.  But I was looking at my times and realized that while I ran a 5k in 22:29 in college...I hadn't gotten below 25 minutes in over ten minutes.  I decided to sign up for a local running camp called Set Goals Not Limits.

As part of our effort to eat less junk and create less waste, one of the areas we identified in our diets that generates a lot of trash is our meat consumption.  Everything from the store comes on styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic wrap, with extra labels and sometimes even individually wrapped.  Plus, if you look at a lot of the chicken breast packages at the store...they are injected with water and sometimes "added rib meat".  Why can't chicken just be chicken?  I considered purchasing organic chicken from the grocery store but it's a lot more expensive and you still don't know where it comes from or how it's processed.  Another option is to buy chicken from a local farm but I'd like to maintain some of the low-cost and ease offered by a supermarket.  That's when I found another option, a local butcher called Ken's Custom Meat & Seafood.

A few months ago, we decided to sign up for a weekly produce delivery service called Space Girl Organics.  We had heard about them a few times but never really looked into it until we got a Groupon for half off our first box/order.  We decided to try it out and have been using it for long enough to share a real review of their services.

I told you that I made fresh pasta but I didn't tell you what I ate it with...I made Eggplant Parmesan for the first time!  I don't know if I've ever even eaten it before but it was so delicious and really not that difficult.

It's kind of funny how the change of the year leads us all to look back on what we did and make new plans for the coming year.  I mean, we could look back and review what we've been doing at anytime.  But somehow we've become trained to treat this holiday like the start of a new chapter in our lives.  This year was busier in some ways and less in others, let's take a look at what happened in 2014...

In our house, we're always trying to improve our health, quality of life and impact on the environment.  It's kind of funny but we've both gravitated towards trying to eat better and waste less.  Not too long ago, we came across a couple of interesting websites that have inspired us: Zero Waste Home & 100 Days of Real Food.  I want to share a little bit about these two sites and how we're going to incorporate some of what these people do into our daily lives.

On Sunday November 30th, I completed something I never thought I would even attempt:  a full marathon (26.2 miles running race).  It all started earlier this year when my running partner (at the time) Angela and I were discussing our next race and decided we wanted to do the Space Coast Half Marathon.  This race is very popular because they are doing a 5 year series where each year’s medal is of a different space shuttle (2013 Columbia, 2014 Challenger, 2015 discover, 2016 Endeavour & 2017 Atlantis).  If you do three out of the five years you get an additional medal and if you do all five years (half or full or a mix) then you get yet another medal.  Since the series is so popular, the half marathon sold out in less than a day and we missed our chance to register for it.  We pondered back and forth for weeks and the full marathon started to fill up too.  Finally, we agreed that now is probably the best time to do it since neither of us have kids, both of us had a normal work schedule and we had a committed running partner to make the long runs go easier.  So we bit the bullet and signed up for our first FULL marathon.

I can't believe I didn't blog about the Battle of the Bridges Triathlon! On Sunday September 28th, 2014, I completed my first Olympic distance triathlon.  I had done numerous sprint distance triathlons before and I had done the Battle of the Bridges sprint distance in 2011.  But I had never done an olympic distance.  This race was 1500m swim, 23km bike and 10k (6.2mi) run.  There were only 30 female participants in the olympic distance!