9 Miles

Better than last week, as far as how I feel. It didn't get awful until the last mile, as opposed to being awful the whole time. But the time was about the same, 12:24/mile. All good, if that is my race pace then I will finish within my goal time. This thing is in three weeks, and I'll feel better once it is over, I always do.

From Scratch Week One

The good:

I made this meal from "scratch". It is lasagna, salad and bread. It was good, although a bit salty (Chris thinks this is because the recipe called for ground beef and ground pork and I substituted italian sausage). Everyone helped (slightly), and we did in fact consume the meal lovingly at the table.








The bad:

The whole impetus for making lasagna (as opposed to some other meal that I am more familiar with making) was that the boy had wanted to make it. But by the time I had come back from the store with the needed ingredients, he had a friend over and a sleepover planned very little interest in browning sausage and boiling noodles. I got him to shred some cheese. In fact, as far as "family involvement" that is what everyone did. The girl and Chris also grated some cheese. I did everything else.

Also, I cut my finger rather badly on the stupid mandolin whilst trying to slice carrots for the salad and the stupid pan overflowed a bit in the oven, resulting in a mess in said oven as well as a smoky house.

The indifferent:


This is all the ingredients I used that I had to open a package, box or other container for. It seems like a lot. I did not grow tomatoes, they came from a can. I didn't bake my own bread, I did not raise the chickens that the eggs came from, nor did I create my own cottage cheese. I also didn't make my own noodles. Is this still "from scratch"? I don't know. What I can say is that it took me TWO HOURS to make, and that is time I definitely could have spent reading or pursuing any number of other pursuits more enjoyable than this one.



Overall, a mixed bag. I'll try again next week (actually, next week Chris is on deck for the scratch meal, he is going to do something with these really thick pork chops we have in the freezer).

Lastly, here  is a picture of my dog. Because he is cute and because I got a new camera and he has been the quite unwilling subject of many photos for the past week or so. This one I found particularly amusing... this is the face he makes when he thinks he is in trouble, or when he is about to get medicine (he was neither in trouble nor about to get medicine when I took this picture, but he seems to think that getting his picture taken is its own brand of trouble and/or medicine).

What is Cooking?

I was reading this post over at Weighty Matters, a blog which is fast becoming my favorite (I wish I could have Dr. Yoni as my doctor! If I went to Canada do you suppose their health care system would cover me to see him?) about eating out and he and I had a bit of dialogue in the comments about cooking. I remember one time mentioning to my sister who was visiting that I needed to "cook" dinner and she snorted rather derisively at the term, since what I planned to do was boil some pasta and put some pre-made sauce on it. So, apparently to some people, that isn't "cooking". My question to Dr. Freedhoff was quite genuine, I really am not certain that what I routinely do for my family is "cooking" even though I always considered it to be. I always figured that any food I was preparing at home, regardless of if the ingredients come partially or fully from boxes or packages, was cooking. Is it gourmet cooking? I suppose not, but nor is it swinging through a fast food restaurant drive up window.

Anyway, so Dr. Freedhoff said if he could recommend one thing to all families, even the really busy ones, it would be that just ONE meal a week be made totally from scratch, with all the family involved in the preparation and consumed at the table.

Well, the table part we have down, as regular readers know (last night we had one of the kid's friends over for dinner, and even he had to eat at the table with us), but I decided to make this a goal for us on the weekend, to have one meal prepared from scratch. The boy has been asking to help make lasagna for some time (he apparently learned how at the day camp he was at during spring break and wants to show us his mad skillz) so we'll do that this weekend. I hope dry noodles count as "from scratch"! I am willing to try making my own marinara sauce though, but it will almost certainly be made from canned tomatoes and tomato paste, right? Will that still be scratch? It's enough to drive a person crazy!

But in thinking about this topic, I remembered how my mom used to bake bread (she sold it to fund a trip for our family to DisneyLand, a fact which moves me to tears to this day when I think about it, god the things we do for our kids!). I also remembered how sometimes we would make homemade tortillas (I remembered this when I was kind of giggling about Dr. Yoni's comment about "hand pressed tortillas" and I thought, my god, has he ever made homemade tortillas? it takes an ENTIRE DAY and tons of lard!, but I digress) and I thought it sure would be nice if when my mom is visiting we could take a day and make some homemade bread and tortillas. That was the kind of family experience I think Dr. Yoni is referring to, because I remember being in the kitchen and flipping tortillas on a skillet and trying not to burn the tips of my fingers, and I remember we were all involved at some point or another in the process. I also remember we used to do nothing but complain about my mom's bread. It was whole grain, you see. The healthy stuff. I feel bad about that now, and man, what I wouldn't give to be able to have that bread every day now. Oh well, live and learn.

As for exercise so far this week, Monday was a purposeful rest day, yesterday was a not-so-purposeful rest day, but today will most definitely be a treadmill day. Chris is traveling this week, which always makes it just a tiny bit harder to fit the exercise in, but I'll manage, I'm sure.

Brutal

Did my eight miles. The first three were okay, and the rest of it was kind of awful. It was warmer than I have been accustomed to (it must have been 70 degrees!) and my legs just did not want to do this. Everything hurts and it just wasn't much joy. Oh well. Time was okay, but not as good as last week, 12:24/mile. Now granted, I want my race pace to be 12:30 to meet my time goal of 2:45, but still.... it was a pretty miserable run, I'm not sure I could have kept up that pace through a half. But I think I remember always feeling that way at this point in training.

Also, I think it might be time for new shoes, I need to check.

Bluebirds

The bluebirds are back, saw two of them on my run this morning (or maybe it was the same bird that I just saw twice), which was three miles. Also did three on the tready yesterday, so off to a good start this week. Long this weekend will be eight miles, I'm thinking about going to city park to do it, but will likely end up on my regular trail.

Also, just to update on our family food goals, the eating together at the table every night is going extremely well. The kids have stopped complaining about it (although they will not admit to enjoying it), and both Chris and I have come to really enjoy that time, even if it is just grilled cheese sandwiches and apples, it is dinner together and it is good. Sure, sometimes we are sitting with a surly teenager who refuses to speak all throughout the meal, but you know, we take the bad with the good.

Everyone is still on bagged lunches, including the boy and he has not forgotten that he has brought his lunch, even once. I think he likes the bagged lunches better now, he has stopped even requesting to eat at school on pizza days.

So, yay for good choices (hopefully) becoming good habits!

Enough already with the snow!

This is what I woke up to today. It will mostly melt by the end of the day, but would certainly be a very wet mess to run in. So, it really was good to get my long in yesterday, I would not have been able to do it outside today (it was my husband, the official family weather watcher, who warned me of this and in return he got a very grumpy wife complaining about not having a choice about which weekend day to do my long, but he was sure right, thank you Chris!).

Off to the gym!

A good long run

I've spent way too much time in the past few weeks in low altitude, so I was kind of concerned about my long run this week, but it went okay. I did seven miles at 12:14/mile. It was a good run, although my lungs were a bit more hurty than usual.

I am reading this book right now, and I'm sure I have lots to say about it, but now I'm too tired and I still have chores to do today, so this will have to do.

It's been a pretty good week for running, although today and tomorrow will be my only outside runs, I did the treadmill and the elliptical this week. Although now I am thinking on it, it is supposed to snow tomorrow here (which was the whole reason I did my long today instead of tomorrow), so actually I will probably end up at the gym again, making this long run my only run outside. Huh. Oh well.

Last thing I will mention is that today's run was good enough to get me a new 10K PR. Blog side bar updated appropriately.

Vaca and new PR

I was in AZ for the past few days for a family reunion. Pretty unremarkable exercise/running-wise, with the exception of a new 5K PR. I did really well, and met one of my goals for the year, getting it in 33:34, 10:49/mile. I was pretty damn sore the next day, I have never run that fast and altitude advantage or not, it was a fast run!

Despite running every single damn day of the trip, I still managed to gain five pounds, which I am desperately hoping comes off quickly.

Before/After

So, a week or so ago, I was watching this show on TLC called "My 600 Pound Life". And it was this sort of follow up show where they were talking to all the documentary participants and the host guy would show them footage of them before their surgery. And it was striking how every single one of them made some variation on the comment "that is still what I see". It was universal. When they look in the mirror, even after losing as much as 400 pounds, they still saw that bigger person.

A day or two after watching this, I was helping Chris look for some medical records, and I came across these pictures. I remembered the setting (we were camping, hence the deplorable state of my hair and generally unkempt condition) and after some searching around on my computer, I was able to date them to early September of 2006.

I found this one while I was getting ready to publish this post, this is from when I went to Boston in 2008.

In these pictures, I was probably at my highest weight. I have to guess at that, since I don't actually remember what the scale said back then, but that shirt I am wearing I believe was a 3X, and even though it was baggy, it wasn't that baggy. I was probably somewhere around 275 in these pictures (the scale this morning says I am now at 187). I had lost around 60 pounds back in 2004, but by this time had gained it all back.

Anyways, so I found these pictures and I realized how true it is what those people in the documentary were saying. Because this is still ME. I look at those pictures and I don't feel disgust or any other negativity like "thank god I'm not there anymore" because most of the time in my head, I still AM. All I feel is a kind of familiarity, like "oh, yeah, I remember that shirt, I remember that trip" but seeing how much bigger I was is more of a startling thing than anything else. Because that girl is still with me. She's with me on every run, on every walk and bike ride. She's with me on good food days and bad food days and every other day in between.

I don't actually have anything particularly profound to say about it, but I thought I would share it anyway.

And since everyone loves an "after", here ya go:

6.5

Was not nearly as good as yesterday's. My legs felt heavy and the first half I was running into some pretty heavy wind. But it got done. Time was certainly nothing spectacular at 12:25/mile. Oh well.