Challenge

So, I am travelling for work this week, and I decided to challenge myself. When I am travelling, I tend to think of it as a sort of food vacation.... I'm not home! I can eat whatever I want and it doesn't matter! The company is paying for everything, and they clearly WANT me to have the chocolate cake! Inevitably this leads to not only higher numbers on the scale when I get home, but more importantly it leads to me feeling like absolute shit both while I am travelling and for some time after I get home. Belly aches, headaches, general malaise.... which also leads to not wanting to exercise much, and while traveling it is all too easy to work for twelve hours and come up with any number of reasons(excuses) not to do it.

Anyway, so I set a challenge for myself. No "junk food" for the duration of my trip. I don't feel the need to parse this out too much and get bogged down in definitions. To me, junk food is just like that one supreme court guy described pornography... it might be hard to define in words, but I know it when I see it. I know what consitutes junk food and what consitutes dinner, and I am learning through this challenge that it is shockingly hard to fool myself in this matter.

So, ask for a challenge and the universe will supply in abundance! Every single place I go has junk food. Initially, it was junk food I could purchase... every airport store that sells bottled water also sells candy (I got a CLIF bar for my breakfast, and chose goldfish crackers with my sandwich, which I didn't even end up eating, the sandwich was enough). The hotel has a "sweet shop" where you can buy pints of ice cream and plenty of other sugar laden treats (I can't name them for certain, my eyes were too locked on the ice cream). This was day 1.

Once the universe sees that you are not to be tempted by junk food that you must spend money on, it will simply start throwing it at you. Day two brought cupcakes in the break room of the work place I am at. It also brought frosted pink sugar cookies in a heart shape at the place where I bought my lunch sandwich (a frosted sugar cookie is one of my greatest weaknesses, but maybe I shouldn't be putting that in writing, lest I start finding them everywhere I go). The day was capped off by coming back to my hotel room (what I had thought was a safe haven) to find that some kind staff person had left me a bag of Valentine's day treats right on my nightstand. Good god.

I resolutely put the treats away. I did check out the bag, but found that it was really and truly just crappy candy. Good to bring home to the kids (which is why I didn't just throw it out, although if my thoughts had continued to dwell on it any more than they did, I would have thrown it out), but not actually you know, GOOD. I was able to remind myself both that it was cruddy candy and that if I was going to eat that crap, I may as well have gotten the brownie sundae at the restaurant which is what I really wanted, I mean, if you are going to have a treat, have a TREAT, right?

So, I am now on day three. I'm kind of frightened about what the universe might try now that I have managed to not eat the candy left for me in my room. I'll bet you the next step is going to be really GOOD treats just thrown at me.... like frosted sugar cookies or really good chocolate truffles. I'll let you know.

I like the word "challenge". This isn't a diet, or even a stupid "lifestyle change" or anything like that. It is simply a challenge. Four days. No junk food. Can I do it?

Anyhoodle, so I did run yesterday. I marveled at how crazy one has to be for 31 degrees to feel like such a luxury that you cannot possibly not take advantage of it and thus you run outside in a strange city up and down a busy road in the fog. But so it was. I did 3.67 miles (I had meant to do three, but overshot the halfway mark while contemplating an electronic billboard I saw outside some bowling alley/party place that flashed a bible verse for a few seconds and then flashed "LASER TAG!!!!" for a few seconds, and while my contemplations did not result in any reasonable explanation, they did result in a longer run, so), total time was 46:05, 12:33/mile, which is pretty good considering how many times I had to stop for stoplights at intersections and that the whole first half was pretty much uphill.