I have a virtual Ubuntu installation of 14.04, I ran a simple sudo apt upgrade, I got an output telling me linux-generic-lts-xenial and a bunch of other kernel related xenial components will be installed. I'm just trying to do a simple upgrade as you can tell to update software like firefox to its most recent version. I'm not trying to distro upgrade. Is there anyway to do this?
That is actually part of the LTS Enablement stack. It is to give you the hardware support of the Xenial (16.04) Kernel without installing the 16.04 distro. You should be fine to install that kernel without upgrading to 16.04.
More information can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack