I will never understand why today is not a national holiday. I mean baseball is America's past time after all.

But luckily, I have the day off work so I'm spending what looks to be a sunny and gorgeous day in Baltimore celebrating anyway.

I'm so glad to have baseball back in my life -- and since I can't spend opening day with the Phillies (they're in Texas after all), Baltimore seems like a solid back up option.



Happy Opening Day! May all your teams win (unless your teams are the Rangers or anyone in the NL East...)

When I first got my iPhone however many years ago now, I was very much in "download all the apps!!!" mode.

More specifically, I was in download all the health and fitness-related apps mode.


Also, the iPhone brought the dawn of the fitness selfie

Over the years I've found some of the apps have come and gone, but a few have endured stuck around for the long haul.

Here's a peek at what I use on a regular basis.

1. Sleep Cycle. I did a review of the Sleep Cycle app a while back now, but the gist is the alarm on this app wakes you up during a 30-minute when you're in your lightest sleep. It judges that based on your movement in bed through a sensor in your phone. Plus it gives you a million awesome charts. (Data porn!)



2. Fitsnap. This is a photo overlay app specifically geared toward athletes. It lets you select a workout type (I usually select running) and then it puts your time, distance and various other notes right on top of the picture before you Instagram it, post it to Twitter, etc. I've only had this app for a few months, but it's fun.



3. My Fitness Pal. I actually have a really love/hate relationship with this app. In general, I despise tracking the food I eat. I find it extremely annoying and tedious, and it makes me get way, way too worried about what I'm eating. I prefer to you know, just eat and not think about it. But, I think tracking has its place every once in a while. It was especially helpful when I was having some dairy sensitives in 2012. (Thank goodness that seemed to resolve itself.)

4. RuntasticPro. This is the newest addition to my fitness apps collection. For a long time I never had any interest in an app that tracks time and distance on a run. I mean that's what my Garmin is for, and I always found Garmin's data way more accurate than my phone. But Runtastic released the newest version of its app yesterday with a sleek new design and bunch of new features that I was curious to check out. (And for full disclosure, I was given a sneak peek before it went live.)

I like that it's got a library stocked with routes for when I'm not feeling very motivated to run my same loop for the millionth time. And it's got some voice encouragement built in (though if that's not your thing you can opt to turn it off.) And also, more charts and data.

That's actually probably my favorite part about all of the apps is that they give you quantifiable metrics about yourself. Pardon me while I veer into some major nerdiness over here, but ever since I started running seriously, I have loved getting data and feedback about myself...speed, pace, time, calories burned, hours slept, etc. etc.

I don't have a FitBit, Nike FuelBand or anything like that, which sort of surprises me since I'm obsessed with having all the latest data about myself. For now, I use my suite of fitness apps to satisfy my need for fitness data.

What's your favorite health and fitness app? And why? What should I download immediately?

Thanks to everyone who suggested possible race ideas based on my last post. I have a quite a list of options going that I'm hoping to narrow down in the next few weeks!

Planning a race calendar is fun and definitely something I've been missing.

Unfortunately though, getting back to regular workouts has been slow.

Remember that giant blister I got at the Shamrock half? Well it pretty much burst open in the middle of last week and has expanded to even more of my toe. No matter what I do to cover it and protect it, it still bothers me.

I was hoping to go on a short run on Friday during my lunch break since the weather was so nice, but the minute I slid my foot into my running shoe, I knew that wasn't going to happen. I could feel the raw skin on my toes rubbing uncomfortably immediately.

On Saturday I thought I'd give my two hours of spinning a go since spin is generally a little bit more gentle on the body than running.

I managed to make it through the class just fine, but by Saturday evening the blister situation was pretty uncomfortable again.

Guess I will just try to keep it wrapped up for now and let it heal. Seems like forcing workouts is just making the situation worse.