It's Thursday, which means the weekend's almost here and of course it's time for another edition of Thursday Three. Here's what's on my mind this week.

1. Running: A lot of you asked if I was doing any sort of speed work or tempo runs during my marathon training. The answer is kind of sort of. I don't have a specific day dedicated to speed work this training cycle like I did for the Philly Half, but I do try to pick up the pace and do a tempo style run once a week. The reason for the cut back in strict speed work is that I really wanted to focus on distance, and having a set day for speed was making me stress too much about time and was taking some of the joy out of running. Of course, now that I'm slowing day, I'm getting frustrated...nasty cycle, I guess.

2. Food and Fun: Today is National Men Cook Dinner Day. (Thanks to Roni for the tip on Twitter!) So guys, check out the rules, then get into the kitchen and make the ladies in your lives something delicious. In return, we promise to shower you with praise. (Seriously, that's one of the rules.)

3. Motivation: I knew the holidays were started to creep up on me, but Amanda made it very real when she announced the Third Annual Holiday Bootie Buster Challenge yesterday. I love this challenge and signed up right away. If you haven't participated before, I highly recommend it for this year. It's great motivation to get through the holidays without packing on the pounds. You earn points for working out and eating plenty of fruits and veggies. Plus, Amanda has some really cool prizes lined up for this year. You don't have to have a blog to participate, you just have to track your workouts and such.

Today is the kick off of Amanda's Holiday Bootie Buster Challenge. I'm super excited about it for a few reasons. First I love a challenge that incorporates every kind of exercise you could possibly imagine. Points for walking, points for running, points for cross-training, points for eating healthy food. It's great. Plus, this year's she's added teams so we have a little extra motivation!

I have a date with the dreadmill tonight. I'm going to rock out some quality workouts the next three days before I head home for Thanksgiving and my schedule gets all weird.

In computer news, I took my MacBook Pro to the Apple store this weekend to have one of the Geniuses at the Genius Bar look at it. I was having huge problems connecting to the Internet. I was using both Safari and Firefox and both were horribly slow, unless I had the modem plugged directly into my computer. I was wondering if my wireless card was crapping out.

The guy at the store poked around in my Network settings and found that my work's VPN software (which I had uninstalled back in September) had dropped a few IP addresses into my DNS and changed some other settings. So basically my computer was always trying to use the work IP addresses first and when those didn't work then bounced to my home IP address. No wonder it was taking pages ages to load.

Genius guy deleted those addresses and fixed my settings and now my baby is as good as new! Oh and it cost me zero dollars!

Thanks Mac guy!

Happy Monday all! Three cheers for a short week!

Back on Track Month:
Caitlin has dubbed November Back on Track Month and I'm jumping right in on the fun. Basically the idea behind BOTM is to get back to good healthy habits that we may have been slipping on lately. When I read her post about it, I knew I was going to be playing along too because while my running has been really solid through the month of October, healthy habits have been slipping in other areas. I've been eating pretty crappily, which I can chalk up to lots of sweets and bad tailgate food. Plus I've been getting not nearly enough sleep (thank you Phillies. P.S. Note to the team, stop sucking, thanks!)

So here are my goals for back on track month:

• Run at least three times per week, with the goal of trying to start up morning workouts now that we changed the clocks and it's dark by the time I leave the office.
• Eat three to five servings of fruits and veggies per day.
• Sleep seven to eight hours each night.
• Limit sweets to a maximum of once per day. (Note to self: Stay away from the work candy dish!)

They're all pretty attainable and easily measurable, which is important so that I don't set up myself up for a major failure.

Feel free to take the idea and play along too if you need to get back on track.

Pile on the Miles Challenge:
Going almost hand in hand with BOTM is POTM (wow so many acronyms in one post). The Pile on the Miles Challenge is being hosted by Bobbi and Caitlin and from now until Thanksgiving the goal is to increase your running or walking mileage to pile on the miles, not the pounds as we head into the holiday season. Since running three times a week is one of my goals for BOTM, I think I should be able to accumulate a decent amount of mileage for this challenge.

NYC Marathon:
I spent yesterday morning sitting in front of my computer watching the NYC Marathon. I was so excited that Meb won. He's the first American to win the race in my lifetime. (Last time an American won was in 1982). I was bummed when I saw Ryan Hall drop out of the lead pack. I was really hoping he'd be able to win, what with Runner's World dubbing him America's Hope and all. But still a fourth place finish is solid.

Congrats to everyone else who ran NYC, especially Lindsay who kicked some serious booty (and sent me a sweet pic of Ryan Hall signing autographs at the Expo!)

Family Time:
I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out with my family at my cousin, Laura's, new apartment. She invited the BF and I over for lunch with my aunt, and her brother and sister and everyone's respective significant others. Laura made some of the best baked ziti the BF and I have ever eaten and she graciously emailed me the recipe this morning. I'm sure I'll be trying it out some time soon.

Also congrats to my cousin Amy who ran her first 10K this weekend!

Laura and her boyfriend are thinking about running the Celtic Solstice Five Miler with me in December. Maybe this bit of friendly peer pressure will encourage them to register! :)

Happy Monday!

D.C. got dumped with a late winter snow storm Sunday into Monday and lucky me I got a two-hour delay this morning. Those extra two hours of sleep were the perfect way to start a Monday morning. I felt more energized at work than I had in weeks. Score one for extra sleep.

Unfortunately, the snow meant I couldn't get out for a run to test out my knee and there was no way I was walking in the frigid temps to the gym when I got home from work to use the dreadmill. So instead, I decided I would chill out with some yoga.

I busted out my yoga mat, threw my favorite yoga CD into my computer, turned off the lights in my room and went to town. One of the perks of being a yoga instructor is the ability to decide to host an impromptu class, with myself as the only participant. I did a normal hour long classes, working through a bunch of my favorite poses and working on some of my favorite stretches. I felt awesome afterward and was so glad I got some exercise in.

I had a really awesome weekend, hanging out with a bunch of friends I hadn't seen in a while and going to see Confessions of a Shopaholic on Saturday with some of the girls. It was such a cute movie. I highly recommend it if you're in the mood for a good chick flick. We stopped at Borders after the movie where I picked up The Complete Book of Running for Women. I was in the mood for a good running read. I haven't started it yet, but I'll write a review when I get through it.

The MBBC is underway and I'm doing an OK job earning points. I'm not expecting to win, but hoping to use the challenge as a way to motivate myself to get some good cross-training in as I work on getting over my knee issues.

I figured out why my knee problems have been so persistant this time around. The cause, unfortunately breaks my heart.

It's my beloved black boots. I noticed it today after my mom suggested maybe my footwear was causing some of the problem because my knee would start hurting at random times when it had been doing just fine the day before.

It happened this weekend when I wore the boots for about 5 hours on Saturday for dinner and then dessert at my aunt's house. On Sunday, my knee wasn't happy. Yesterday it was fine. Today I wore the boots to work and now my knee is killing me.

I notice I walk really funny in them. My left foot kind of points out like a duck, but not the right foot. Weird right?

So I think I'm going to have to retire the boots for a while. This is sad because I wear them at least once a week to work with dresses/skirts. I am in mourning.

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I went to my doctor appointment on Monday to see what he had to say about the knee. He took X-rays, which came out fine. He thinks it's the same thing I had last summer, patellafemural pain syndrome, but wants to send me for an MRI just to make sure it's not something else. I haven't had a chance to make an appointment for the MRI yet though. I'm going to try to set one up soon.

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In weekend news, it was great being home and getting to see my family. It was the first time I'd seen my cousin and his wife since their wedding in October so that was fun and exciting. They're getting ready to buy a house and it sounds crazy stressful. Glad it's not me. The family seemed to like the BF. I was hoping to come out of the weekend with some hilarious story, but nothing really...ohhhh except that we went to buy his first pair of real running shoes this weekend. Took him to a running store and got him all fitted and everything. He ended up with a pair of New Balance, but I don't know what style.

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If you haven't heard yet, there's a new challenge in blogland for March modeled after Amanda's Holiday Booty Buster Challenge. For details check out Chandra's Shenanigans.

So after the other day's major rant of a post, I'm coming to you with a more positive one. I won't even bitch and moan about how I almost slipped backwards down the stairs at my apartment complex this morning because they didn't ice the sidewalks when they knew we were getting at least an inch of ice overnight. (OK sorry, I had to, because seriously, aren't they worried about getting sued if a resident slips and falls???)

Anyway, despite the yucky weather, I'm in a pretty good mood.

Here's some of the reasons:
1. I just ate a delicious strawberry granola bar for breakfast...yummm.
2. My mom didn't get picked for jury duty yesterday and both she and my dad escaped the first round of layoffs at their company. Fingers crossed they make it through the rest of them.
3. My roommate and I saw Bride Wars this weekend and loved it.
4. Even though I wasn't feeling up to running yesterday, I was able to get my Sexy Six Pack Challenge workout in. (I repeated Week 3 Day One because I wanted to start fresh after being sick.)
5. Things are going really well with the BF.
6. It's Wednesday, but feels like Tuesday because I had Monday off.

Nothing super exciting to report today. The BF has a volleyball game tonight, so if the roads aren't too treacherous I'm going to go watch. (From what I've seen, the roads were way better than the sidewalks this morning.)

RunToFinish is hosting another awesome challenge for this month, so you know I jumped on board.

All I had to do was select a core-strengthening program that I would work on all month and then report on the results. Sounded easy enough to me and it was the kick in the pants I needed to step up the core work I had so badly been neglecting.

Here's the details:
I picked the 200 sit up challenge because it required no equipment, no DVD and I could literally do it any time, any place. Flexibility is part of the reason why I love running so much, so the 200 sit ups sounded like they would be the perfect fit for me.

The Sexy Six Pack Challenge kicked off on Monday so I that's when I tackled the initial test from 200 sit ups. Basically the idea is you do as many crunches as you can until you can't crunch no mo'.

I didn't have high expectations, I was hoping to eek out the 40 I needed to not fall into the "poor" classification. But boooo-yah I kicked some booty and busted out 80 crunches. Whooop!

For having not done ab work in ohhh, at least six months, I was pretty pleased. I used to teach a core strength class at the gym I worked at and I was known to make strong guys tremble in fear, but that was more than a year ago. I guess the good posture from many years of ballet and yoga really stuck with me and helps keep my core strong.

Anyway, because I did so many on the initial test I got to jump ahead to Week 3 of the plan. Week 3 Day 1 was Wednesday. I was able to finish all five sets (21, 27, 21, 21, max of at least 30. I did 35) and I could really feel the burn.

I plan to do Day 2 tonight when I get home from work. If I can do all 200 successfully, I might consider trying the 100 push up challenge.