A few months ago, I started to notice my right hamstring was feeling a lot tighter than my left one. I didn't think much of it, but I did try to make a better effort of stretching my hamstrings after my workouts. 

The stretching felt good and I figured the tight muscle would resolve itself in time.

But that's not what happened. 

Instead, it just kept staying tight, and would get really sore at weird times -- like on our 8-hour car ride to North Carolina back in April. 

I backed off my already low running volume and focused instead on strength stuff, until about two weeks ago, when I tried to go for a run and I felt discomfort more than just tightness. I made it less than a quarter mile before turning around to walk home. 

And that's when I decided to pump the brakes. 

I took two full weeks off running and about ten days off lower body strength training. 

I also started noticing my leg felt tighter if I didn't move it much all day so I started to try to get up off the sofa a bit more and sneak in a quick walk around the block here and there. 

Things seemed to be feeling a bit better after my rest so yesterday I decided to try a short run. My leg was definitely looser, but tightened quickly over time. I made it a mile before taking a walk break and then turning around and heading home. 

I've been liberally applying Icy Hot and trying to do some gentle stretches. 

But I've got to say, I'm super frustrated. How in the world do I end up with some sort of a hamstring strain when I am barely running at all? (I mean the answer is that I probably overdid the weights while deadlifting, but still). 

I've intentionally been trying to focus on weights workouts to help with my muscle imbalances and avoid injuries, and now here I am with this annoying hamstring thing. 

I'm trying to baby it now so it doesn't blow up into some sort of full blown injury, but my patience is wearing thing. I'm so antsy to not be able to workout when it's such a part of my day-to-day routine. I just feel like something is missing and it's making me crabby.

I'm hoping with another week or so of rest and babying I'll be able to get back to my regular activities. In the meantime, I'll just be over here trying to figure out what sort of exercise I can do to maintain my sanity that won't aggravate my hamstring. 

Sorry I'm so tardy getting my April reads posted. May has felt like a super busy month, and I just haven't had a minute to sit down and pull this together. But better late than never. 

I read a lot of good stuff in April, and it was a healthy mix of authors I really like plus some new-to-me writers. 

Five Stars

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved getting to know Maverick in The Hate U Give, so I was really excited when Angie Thomas decided to write a prequel focused on Maverick's late teen years. You see Maverick trying to balance fatherhood, school and his social life. Thomas captures his struggles and makes you want to cheer for him even when you know he's about to make a questionable decision. If you read The Hate You Give, you know how Maverick's story ends, so in this book it's fun to try to pick up the threads of the later story and see how he got to where he did.

Four Stars

Everything After by Jill Santopolo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this book was really cute and I love the way Jill Santopolo plays with the "what would life be like if..." question in her books. In this one, the big question is what would life be like if Emily and her college boyfriend hadn't broken up? Would they have literally kept the band together and become rock stars or would she have ended up where is she now anyway teaching at college and married to her current husband? This was a fun and fast read.

The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a bit outside of my normal reads with it's mystical and magical elements, but I loved that there was a strong central mystery pulling me along and making it easy to escape into the world of the secret circus that Constance Sayers creates. The book opens on the eve of Lara's wedding, but the next day her husband-to-be doesn't show up and though his car is soon found but there is no sight of him. In her quest to find out what's happened, Lara dives into her family's magical history as a circus family. Definitely recommend this for something a little different.

The End of Her by Shari Lapena
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've only recently discovered Shari Lapena's books, and I've come to enjoy them for their psychological twisty turns. In this book, Stephanie and Patrick are happily married with newborn twins. Everything is fine until a woman from Patrick's past shows up and accuses him of murdering his first wife. Did he do it? Is the woman just trying to blackmail Patrick? The book will keep you on your toes.

The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this tale of a woman living a double-life. In one version of her life, she's Becky Farwell, a loner-type who works as the comptroller of a small town in Illinois. In the other version of her life, she's Reba, a polished art collector, known for chasing expensive works of art and flipping them for a profit. The only problem is, Reba/Becky is embezzling from her small town in order to fund her art purchases. While I would have loved to see some more time spent on the Reba character development, I loved following along and trying to figure out how she was going to pull off her next scheme and constantly wonder if she'd get caught.

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my friends recommended this series to help me get out of a reading rut, and I'm so glad she did. This is the first book in a series about a mysterious disappearance at a secretive bordering school in the 1930s. Flash forward to today and Stevie is a student at the school set on solving the mystery. But strange things happen on campus, and pretty quickly Stevie has a lot on her hands. This book does end in a total cliffhanger, which is annoying, but I didn't have to wait too long to get the second book from the library.

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this book was so beautifully written. It follows the story of one family through generations of women, the sacrifices they make both in Cuba and the United States. It’s a short read and I do think it there were a few things that maybe could have been fleshed out a bit more, but it was a great book. Highly recommend.

Three Stars

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm only giving this one a three on Goodreads because the ending really let me down. After so much build up, the ending was rushed. Yes you eventually find out who killed the young girl, but you don't know what happened to the protagonist. The book goes from her recounting how she read an ad for a nanny job, was eventually offered the gig and moved in and started carrying for the family. The nanny recounts all the mysterious events that went on in the house in letters to her lawyer from jail. This part of the book was really great and I was trying to figure out who was behind everything. But then at the end of the book, the narrator changes and we have no clue what ultimately happens to the nanny. Is she still in jail? Did something else happen? You have no clue how her story ends, and after all the time spent with her, it felt wrong to not know what happened.

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We've tackled lots of different DIY projects since we've moved into our house. But this junky bookshelf to fancy sideboard transformation might be our most successful project yet.

When we moved into our house, we discovered the previous owners had left a piece of big, white furniture. We didn't quite know what it was. I took to calling it a bookshelf. My husband thought it was possibly some sort of cabinet or entertainment stand. 

It was incredibly sturdy, but it was ugly as all get out. 

We didn't really know what to do it with it, so it became our de-facto place to store our dumbbells because the shelves were solid wood and didn't bow under their weight. It used to live in our sunroom. 

When we converted that to an open air, outdoor space, it moved into our living area. 

That's when I really started to hate it and wanted it out of our house. It was so ugly. The paint was chipping in some parts. In other parts, the paint was thick and had dried all gloopy. It was not a nice piece of furniture to have in our house. 

The problem was, I couldn't find anything to replace it with. I spent months shopping around for some sort of storage item that would be able to handle all the weight I needed it to, fit in the space and not cost approximately one million dollars. 

Then my husband had the brilliant idea to refinish the bookshelf, build doors for it and transform it into a sideboard that could store our workout equipment and keep it out of sight. 

And so off we went to the hardware stores. That weekend we hit Ace twice and Home Depot once. 

Supplies to refinish the cabinet:

• Sander 
• Primer
• Paint (we used Benjamin Moore Amsterdam)
• Sealer specifically for painted wood

Supplies to make the doors:

• One 3/4" x 4' x8' Melamine panel cut down into the size of the three doors (have your measurements handy at Home Depot and they will do this cutting for you)
• Wood filler
• Putty knife
• 3 packs of hinges
• 3 handles
• Drill

When we got all the supplies home, we deconstructed the cabinet, pulling out all the shelves so we could see what we were working with.

Then we started working on the doors. Since we were using a melamine panel, the front and back were nice smooth surfaces. The sides and edges needed some serious sanding. After roughing everything up so the primer would stick, we also sealed the edges with wood filler to make them less rough.

This step took a long time. It required multiple coats of wood filler with lots of sanding in between coats. If no one is going to see the edges of your panels, you can likely skip this and jump straight into priming. But since I'm a bit of a perfectionist, I wanted to make sure the edges of our doors looked top notch.

While I worked on priming the doors, my husband moved on to sanding the shelves and the base of the cabinet.

Priming was slow going because you could only do one side at a time and needed to ensure everything was nice and dry before flipping the doors to work on the other side.

But it was nothing like the pain in the neck my husband was dealing with while sanding. The previous paint job on the bookshelf was terrible. In hindsight, we probably should have just used a paint stripper and started from scratch, but nope, instead my husband just sanded the heck out of it. There was dust everywhere. But the end result was pretty good. The globs of paint were gone, and we had a nice smooth surface to work with.

We gave the base and the shelves all two good coats of primer.

We followed that up with two coats of the paint.

And then lastly, we gave everything three coats of the sealant. I can't stress enough how important it was to seal all the paint. I could see from before how our dumbbells would rip the old paint off the shelves or how easily the previous white paint got chipped. I did not want that happening to the new sideboard after we put all this work into it.

So even though the three coats of sealant took a long time because of the drying time, it was 100 percent worth it.

Then came assembly.

We put the shelves back into place.

We measured where we wanted our doors to hang and then drilled holes to attach the hinges. We worked left to right, starting the with single door, and then working toward the adjoining doors. Hanging doors requires patience. Lots of measuring, lots of leveling to get things just right.

Last but not least, we needed to attach the handles.

We started with the single door again because it was the easiest. Then we moved on to the adjoining doors. This handle installation was a little bit painful. Trying to get everything to perfectly align top to bottom, left to right, when the base of the cabinet wasn't perfectly square was a challenge. But we eventually got it done.

And I'm completely obsessed with how this turned out.

I cannot believe this was the same piece of furniture. A fresh coat of paint and adding some nice doors made a world of difference. 

Such a transformation from my most hated piece of furniture to my most favorite.

Over the 15 years that I've blogged about fitness, I've always struggled to find any sort of consistency in strength training. Running has been and probably always will be my favorite form of exercise.

Strength training has come and gone over the years -- oftentimes it shows up when I'm rehabbing an injury, sticks around for a while and then takes a back seat when I start training for a race. 

But since April 2020, I've discovered a new appreciation for strength training and actually kind of look forward to my weight lifting workouts now. 

It's a weird shift for me, going from running 4-5 times per week with one day of lifting if I was lucky, to running once or twice per week and consistently lifting 3-4 times. 

But I've found that I don't miss running that much. I think that virtual marathon back in the fall really burned me out. While I largely enjoyed training for it as a distraction from the pandemic, I was also very, very glad when it was done.

Having strength training as an alternate form of exercise to focus on has been a really welcome change of pace, and I've been really proud of some of the progress I've made in just a year. When I started lifting weights regularly last April, I had access to 3, 5 and 8 lb dumbbells at home. My husband was able to find a set of adjustable weights that went up to 20 lbs fairly early in the pandemic. I couldn't use those for much more than a few leg exercises at the time.

By June, I found myself desperately searching the Internet for a pair of 10 lb dumbbells. In just two months, the 8s had become too easy for many things. I felt like I struck gold when a Walmart that we happened to be driving past in Fredericksburg, VA said they had two 10 pounders in stock. 

By the fall I was comfortably using 10 pounds for every upper body move except shoulder and tricep stuff and that was mainly because I was dealing with my stupid frozen shoulder. For lower body, I was now using my husband's adjustable dumbbells alternating them between 15 and 20 pounds each depending on what exercise I was doing. 

And by February, I was ready to bump up to 12s for some upper body things and really needed the ability to jump to 25, 30, or more for lower body if I wanted to avoid a plateau. 

So we started shopping around for one of those super expensive sets of adjustable dumbbells. Bowflex was on a 4 month back order so that was a no go. I found a set of NordicTrack ones on Amazon, but they sold out before I convinced myself I really wanted to spend that kind of money.

I fumed to myself for a while about my hesitancy, and as soon as I saw they were back in stock, I pulled the trigger. And since then, I've been able to continue to slowly progress in the amount of heavy stuff I can pick up.

I'm glad I have these kinds of progress markers because from the outside, I don't think I look very different, and I feel like that's the stuff people are alway curious about. 

All this weight lifting has not given me a six pack, but I can tell my core is a ton stronger because I can hold a plank for so much longer. I haven't lost any weight, in fact, I've actually gained some during the pandemic -- probably from all those M&Ms I eat. 

Maybe if I squint at myself in the mirror, I can see a tiny bit more definition in my arms -- you know if the light is right and I stand just the right way. But this is not some remarkable physical transformation story. I don't have any before or after pictures to show you. 

This is just slowly and consistently working to get a little bit stronger. One year in, I can pick up much heavier stuff, many of my muscle imbalances have gone away and sometimes I even find running faster isn't quite as hard as it once was.