Workouts in a winter wonderland...

Ah, winter break.  The time for holiday baking and sitting around sipping hot chocolate and playing board games by the fire.  Sounds like a Hallmark family portrait.  I'm all for relaxing, but I'm also trying to stay active to avoid those extra holiday pounds! Okay, and because I have trouble sitting still.

As soon as I arrived in Maine earlier this week, we headed into our woods to get the Christmas tree.  I have to say, for all my whining about being all the way up in Maine, it really is beautiful.  Wood stove, snow-covered woodsy landscape, and a tree from our own land.  It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Although I'm not usually a cold-weather girl, I do get a bit restless if I'm sitting around all day so I caved and went snowshoeing with my parents the other day.  There's a nice path that goes through the woods, along the river, and back up to the road.  In my head I was thinking, it's just like going for a walk but with things attached to your feet, right?  Well, I'm embarrassed to say it was a little more of a workout than I was expecting.  I was huffing and puffing by the end of the trail and was especially frustrated when I got stuck on a tree trunk and went flying backwards onto my butt.
Woods: 1 Adrienne: 0

Aside from walking in a winter wonderland and snowshoeing, I've been keeping busy with stacking wood (I know, shocking) and planks by the fire.  I started a 30-day plank challenge right around the end of finals and I've roped my family into doing it with me.  There's a few rest days built in, but basically you do a plank every day and the time increases as you progress.  So every afternoon we have "family plank time" where we all find a spot in the living room and do a plank together.  I've also tried to balance out the holiday baking by rewarding myself with an exercise every time I have a taste of whatever I'm making.  Little bite of dough, ten squats.  Another bite of dough, ten pushups.

There's a little too much snow outside to actually go trail running or anything, but I'll brave the cold soon and check out my dad's "gym" set-up in the barn.  Gotta keep myself busy up here in the woods! That is, when I'm not wrapping presents, playing with the animals, or reading by the fire.

Balancing on the left-over tree stump (no longer attached to the ground... much harder than it looks!)

Merry Christmas!
xo A

Zombie Tag

Short and sweet entry: I got to play zombie tag this weekend! We spent a few hours in the park on Saturday playing and filming, and P is already done editing because he is awesome like that.  Check it out:

Women's December Meetup

We had our fifth women's parkour meetup this past weekend! Last one outside for a little while since we're entering "winter."  I say that for all of my New England readers who are probably gawking at the fact that we've had two snow days this week and there's not even any snow sticking to the ground.

It wasn't bad on Saturday, probably in the low 40s and sunny.  We had a group of about ten women.  We started with a little jog around the park, running forwards, backwards, side to side, 360s, up and over things to get our bodies moving.  Then we did some dynamic stretching and joint mobility to finish the warm up.  Before the girls got there, M, K & I had created a course with jumps, vaults, strides across precisions over lava, and a staircase to get down without using the stairs.  We ran it a few times to get comfortable, then focused on different things each time.  Flow, minimum steps, speed, creative awkwardness.  I also timed some of the girls who wanted to work on their speed.

After running the course, we talked about parts of the course that were really challenging for us that we wanted to improve upon.  Almost everyone pointed towards a large jump that was within reach for most, but scary because it was higher than they were used to and took a lot of power to make it.  We worked on the jump for a while, practicing the same distance on the ground and then trying it from the wall-to-wall.  One of the women could definitely do it but she was thinking too much about it.  I kept trying to distract her.  What's your favorite color? I asked.  Teal, she replied.  Good, now jump! It almost worked...

For a change of scenery, we went over to a set of walls down a tall flight of stairs where the girls could get some balance work in that would challenge them mentally but was easily within reach physically.  The challenge was to get down to the ground without using the stairs, relying on the set of walls and railing alongside the set of stairs.  Everyone made it down to the bottom, and we headed back up—same rules, no stairs to get up the stairs.

We wrapped up with a game of Pac-Man tag on the course from earlier and a good stretch while we talked about our goals and accomplishments of the day.  Overall, a great session.