Fruit Snacks

I love fruit snacks more than my children, and not just any fruit snack. I like the generic brand from Target, their "Market Pantry". Why? I don't really know. Maybe it's because they're very much like gummy bears or gummy worms, but because they're in the "snack" isle rather than the "candy" isle, they're marginally healthier. It's a comforting thought that I tell myself after I've just opened my fourth bag in a row.

Twinkies? No, you can keep your cream-filled sponge cakes. You would not include me in the throngs of people complaining that Hostess went under. Good riddance. Twinkies just took up shelf space where better eats could be displayed. I want something with a bit more "chew" to it, more flavor. You'll find them in my fuel belt along with my gels. Shot blocks?! Meh. Is there really that much wrong with a little corn syrup and vitamin C, especially when you're already taking maltos and dextros gels? I simply can't leave behind these little baggies of goodness!

Loss of Energy - Eat Better!

It happened again! I was too busy to eat properly, resulting in a loss of energy; my performance suffered. A mere five miles today felt like twice that. It didn't help that the "air-conditioned" environment at the YMCA fitness center did little to keep me cool. At the 30 minute mark, I took a five minute break to cool down and to fight back the dizziness that was creeping up on me.

Tonight's meal? A Wendy's Double Pretzel Bacon burger with fries and a drink. Assessment: not all that wonderful. The pretzel bun is a bit too chewy for my preference, and the whole thing was a bit greasy. Some days I go for it, but not today. I'm satiated, but exhausted; I may just crawl into bed now rather than wait until midnight or one! (YAY!) First, time to spend some time with Meghan in our now quiet home.

Breaking News! My son Ryan has just lost another tooth. That's four teeth in four weeks, three in the last two weeks! The tooth-fairy is strapped for cash these days due to inflation: $2 per tooth! Ryan's raked in $8 and has spent it on chips and Nintendo games.

Daily Running = Sore!

Besides being tired all the time, I've been working hard on remaining consistent with my training and diet. By in large, I've been successful at both, with a few stagger steps along the way. To accomplish my running goals, I've been commuting to work on foot with Osprey Talon 22 backpack and water bladder. When stocked with my work clothes, water, hygiene kit, and food it weighs about 12-15 pounds. I often forget to update my weight on Daily Mile for these runs, which us used to calculate the calories expended during the workout. It's a good thing I'm not too worried about it!  I'm more worried about whether or not I'm consuming enough calories to offset those burned!

In general, I'm trying to run each day, though I haven't really gotten into a full seven day streak. In the very least, I run five days, with an occasional sixth thrown in for good measure. Where I've really fallen behind this season is in getting out of  Phase I, or mileage and base building. Like my friend Keath^[1], I've been using the Daniels Running Formula as the basis for my training. Unlike Keath, I haven't been able to make it very far in the plan! I do have excuses, and they're relatively good ones. The fact remains that I haven't really had time to put in some quality workouts, those not run at an Easy - slower than Marathon - pace.


I'm still not sure if anyone has really applied Daniels' approach to ulra-marathon training, but I'm not yet an ultra-marathon runner. with over 4,600 feet of elevation gain^[2], Moose Mountain Marathon doesn't really fall into the "marathon" or even "run" buckets.  Frankly, it's more of a hike separated by running and walking. To prepare, I need to strengthen my quads and hamstrings, but to benefit from this work, I need about three weeks of time from the effort. With less than four weeks to the race, this is the week for quality!

Sunday, I started it out with a hill repeat run. After a 3 mile warm-up run around Lake Joesphine, I ran repeats on Edgewater Avenue up to Lexington Parkway. The hill is about 100 yards long and 50 or so feet of elevation gain. I didn't sprint for the eight repetitions, but I'm sure I went far faster than an Interval effort, hence the designation of a Repeat. Hopefully it will pay off in September.

One thing is for certain, my legs have "felt it" ever since. A combination of my increased, yet still very modest, mileage and the hill workout has left my legs sore. Wednesday night, my quads started to cramp up while sitting in a recliner and my shins were starting to say, "Give us a break!" Although there are no real scheduled "rest days" in the Daniels' plan, I took Thursday off! I'm feeling better today and will get in a half hour to 45 minute Easy run in before mowing the lawn, packing, and heading off to camp!

---

¹Keath recently completed the MOOnlight Half Marathon in Davis, California. Congratulations!
²Aid Stations, Map and Data

What to eat? A Food Recipe Challenge!

In his recent blog post titled, "Learn from Success, Not Failure", author and runner Matthew Patten wrote about a recent conversation he had with someone unsuccessful in their own diet giving him advice on his. Whereas he focused the article on the nature of relationships and where to seek advise base on success or failure in a given subject matter, I couldn't shake the topic of his introductory discussion: diet.

I've been reading up and focusing on diets, the number and variety, over the last week or so. In part for my own edification, but also to understand what my wife is going through. The theories and strategies people employ are innumerable, confusing, contradictory, and even fanatical.  What I assume is "unhealthy" is "scientifically proven" to not only be healthy, but is the way everyone should eat.  Atkins, Paleo, Archevore (Paleo 2.0), South Beach, or something else?  The Hacker's Diet?  What should Meghan be following?

Perhaps the quotes around "scientifically proven" is a bit unfair, since food and diet is probably one of the largest and most prolific bodies of work in the science field.  What I generally have an issue with is how people use and interpret this information, which is often done to push a specific viewpoint or opinion.  With the advent of the internet, information is more readily available to the common person than any other time in history.  How does one approach such a vast set of knowledge and opinion?  How can the gems of objectivity be separated from cruft of subjective opinion?

To frame the discussion, I want to start out with a simple, commonly understood formula regarding weight change:

pounds in weight change = (Calories in - Calories out)/3500

Food Calories are actually kilogram calories (or 1000 calories per gram), but in the interest of brevity, the food industry has chosen to drop the appropriate prefix of kilo.  Maybe it sounded too metric for the American public.  The number 3500 is the estimated number of Calories per pound of human fat.  Calories in are the result of consumption, and Calories out are the result of those burned simply living (eating, sleeping, sitting on the couch) as well as any other exercise or activity you partake in (running, walking to the car, etc).

That's the whole discussion in a nutshell.  To lose weight, you eat less or burn more.  To gain weight, you eat more or burn less.  All diets are ultimately dependent upon this formula, though not all diets focus on it.  In fact, there are very intricate shell games being played in many diets, perhaps to take people's minds off the task at hand, make the "math" easier, or give them a "cheat" every once and a while, a reward.

Some diets play physiological games, forcing your body to change the preferred metabolic pathway to energy.  Atkins forces the initiate into a fatty acid cycle by inducing ketosis in the first two weeks of the diet - denying all but the equivalent of a single banana (27 grams) each day in carbohydrates (max 24 grams).  Given that carbs exist in pretty much every food item, including lean animal meat, you're on an all fat/protein diet for two weeks.

Runners and predominantly aerobic athletes are fortunate to enjoy a sport that requires long a calorie burn.  We equally exercise the glycolitic pathway as (carbs) well as the fatty acid pathway (fats), but we have an entirely different initiation phase... running, running, and more running.  Our benefit is that the "simple formula" of calories in v.s. calories out becomes an afterthought. We're always running, always burning, and in some cases, can't eat enough to keep our weight up. (One of my problems last year.)

So is there something to the whole discussion about "good foods" and "bad foods"?  Is there really something we should be eating v.s. something we shouldn't?  Lots of fat and protein v.s. lots of carbs.  We all want an answer to these questions, but we don't always get them, or rather we get too many of them.  How do you begin to contribute to the discussion without sounding like an advocate or fanatic?

The Challenge

I have an idea, a challenge that will result in an exchanging of tasty knowledge. 

• Pick a food item and discover the basic nutritional information about it.
• Take a week and make that food a focus of your meals, discovering or creating four recipes or ways to prepare that item:
• breakfast
• lunch
• dinner
• snack or desert
• Optional: Add in the calorie profile for each recipe per serving.
• Optional: Cheat and reference a recipe from the internet (but give due credit)!
• Let us know about your approach to diet and why it works (or doesn't work) for you.

I look forward to hearing about what you bring to the table!

Burning It Up - Sleep, Food, and Nutritional Facts?

Time to start paying more attention to food and sleep!  I've proven that I can "burn it up" as a DailyMile'er friend Leigh put it, but I don't want to burn out.  I'm exhausted today, and I felt pretty down in the weather yesterday.  Only two weeks from my last bout with the flu, I'm struggling to keep healthy this weekend.  It's discouraging!

Gone are the days when I could stay up until two in the morning and still get up in time for a seven o'clock class.  I'm not eighteen anymore, and my body is telling me in no uncertain terms that it is unacceptable for me to get less than seven hours of sleep.

With my increased focus on swimming and increased mileage with running, I haven't successfully increased my caloric intake.  Instead, I keep dropping in weight, down to 178 pounds.  I haven't been this light since I graduated from college in '97.  To put this in perspective, last year at this time, I weighed around 195.  Weight loss was not my focus for running, rather finishing a marathon.  Now weight loss has become a concern.

So, this week's focus will be getting to bed before 11:00 pm, and making sure I'm eating many small meals throughout the day.  I often skip breakfast, and sometimes skip lunch -- if I'm too busy at work -- then have a large evening meal.  From what Meghan has been reading, this is entirely backwards.  Adelle Davis, the renown (or notorious) nutritionalist and biochemist, is quoted, "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

I've heard this phrase before but didn't know its origin.  I was about to leave the blog post at this, but like a good researcher, I dug a little deeper.  What was the premise for this statement?  How really does this benefit us?

(Image linked from Wikipedia.) Google to the rescue, or perhaps not, as the waters are now muddied by QuackWatch.  "Despite this training, she promoted hundreds of nutritional tidbits and theories that were unfounded. At the 1969 White House Conference on Food and Nutrition, the panel on deception and misinformation agreed that Davis was probably the most damaging source of false nutrition information in the nation.[emphasis mine] Most of her ideas were harmless unless carried to extremes, but some were very dangerous. For example, she recommended magnesium as a treatment for epilepsy, potassium chloride for certain patients with kidney disease, and megadoses of vitamins A and D for other conditions."  You should definitely read the entire article.  It paints a very unflattering picture of Professor Davis.

So, where does this leave us with nutritional advice?  Looking for more.  As I understand the diets of Ultra marathon runners such as Scott Jurek, they incorporate more beans, legumes, and vegetables in their diet than what most Americans are used to.  I can't say I'm ready to tread the path of a vegetarian, but I'm perfectly happy to add more vegetables.  Especially if it produces results like this.

I have no illusions of grandeur here.  I won't be winning any ultras any time soon;  I just hope to remain healthy and have fun along the way.  If I'm going to run 8 miles and burn a thousand calories, I should definitely replace them or find myself feeling like I do today!  *BLEH*

One other adjustment I think I need to make is to stop burning so hot.  I have been keeping my pace too high on what should be long-slow-distance (LSD) runs.  I'm not trying to do race specific training before Grandma's, rather just build up a nice base of mileage while cross-training with swimming.  It's time to keep the miles up, but slow the pace down appreciably.  If I'm planning on finishing a marathon in sub-4 hours, I should be training slower than that, rather than faster...  I've been doing it backwards yet again.  It's just so fun running fast!

Anyway, time to prep dinner for the family before tonight's Nickelodean Kid's Choice Awards, an event that Connor is quite excited about!  Yep, I'm a dad... :)

Bigbee's Sloppy Joes

Night had arrived early, as it does this time of year, and brought a howling wind to toss the new snow about.  Even with proper attire, you would be hard pressed to stay warm.  As I began cleaning the kitchen to prepare for dinner, a solid knock was heard above the ruckus outside.  On the stoop leaned an older man dressed in strange attire, carrying sacks and bags over his shoulder and attached to a wide army belt.  His grey beard whipped about, and tufts of grey hair stuck out from under his stocking cap.  He coughed before speaking.

"Pardon me, but my car has broken down around the block.  No one is answering their doors tonight.  Could I be so bold as to ask to stay inside and borrow your phone to call a towing agency?"

Normally, I would ask for the person to stay on the stoop and hand the phone to him, but it was not a night for leaving someone out in the cold.  He didn't seem drunk, nor was he trying to sell me anything.

"Please.  Come in.  My name is Chad, and these are my son's Connor and Ryan." Peter was jumping all over the man, of course.  The little Boston simply can't contain his excitement.

"Oh, ho, little one."  The name had a pleasant smile and a crackly chuckle. He reached down to pat the incorrigible dog.  I tossed him the wireless phone and invited him to make himself comfortable.

"Pardon me, but I've got supper to make.  Connor, Ryan.  Tubby time."  I figured having the boys in the bathroom and not in the stranger's way was a good move.  The boys hopped to, happy to have time in the bubble tub.  Meghan was off at Katie's for the night, her Wednesday routine.  I'd definitely have to tell her about our visitor when she got home.

Time to turn back to dinner, or rather deciding what to make with the meager pantry.  I had hamburger, bread, some ketchup and and onions.  I needed something that was quick and delicious to a 5 year old and toddler.

"Could I be of some assistance?"  The old man still wore his coat with its many assorted, draped bags and sacks.  "I believe this should work nicely."  He handed me a 3x5" recipe card with the following inscription:

Bigbee's Sloppy Joes

1 lb ground beef (93/7)

1 small onion, diced

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1/2 cup ketchup

1/2 cup beef stock

1/2 tsp Worchteshire sauce

1/4 tsp ground mustard seed

1/2 tsp chile powder

1 tbsp packed brown sugar

1 tsp cider vinegar

salt and pepper

Brown the beef and drain.  Saute the onions in a little vegetable oil.  Mix the ketchup, brown sugar, vinegar, mustard seed, and chile powder.  Return the beef to the skillet and add stock and ketchup mixture.  Simmer 5-10 minutes.  Serve on toasted bread or hamburger buns.

Bigbee?  Now, where have I heard that name before?  The old man smiled and nodded.  "Thanks for letting me borrow your phone.  The wrecker will be here shortly.  I'd best be at the car when it arrives."

I escorted the old man out the front door and locked it behind him, shook my head, and prepared dinner.  The boys ate with gusto, leaving not a morsel behind.  It didn't hurt serving the sloppy joes with tater tots.  Ever since that night, I've wanted to properly thank the man for such a kind gift, but I never heard from him again.

Beery Good, Spicy Italian Spaghetti

Time for a recipe!  This one turned out beautifully today!

Beery Good, Spicy Italian Spaghetti
1.5 lbs spicy Italian sausage (6 links)
1/2 vadalia onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced (or 1/2 tsp dried)
1/2 bottle pilsner beer
1 large can of tomato sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp Savory, dried
1/2 tsp Thyme, dried
1/2 tsp Oregano, dried
1/4 tsp Rosemary, dried
1/2 tsp Marjoram, dried
Salt and Pepper
Olive oil
1 lb Spaghetti
Parmesan Cheese

In a 12" skillet, brown the sausage in a little olive oil.  If you're using links, heat them up first as links, then take them off the heat.  Let them cool and slice them up.  Clean the skillet and sautee the onions in a couple tablespoons of olive oil until soft (5 min), add the minced garlic until fragrant (30 seconds).  Add the sliced sausage back to the pan and pour in the beer.  Reduce, 5-10 minutes.  Add the tomato sauce and herbs, sugar, and salt and pepper.  If you didn't have minced garlic, add the dried garlic now.  Mix, cover, and simmer 15+ minutes.  Cook the spaghetti in boiling water until slightly al dente.  Transfer the noodles to the skillet with the sauce and add 1/2 cup of pasta water (the water you just boiled the noodles in).  Cook for 5 minutes.  Transfer to a serving bowl!  Garnish with Parmesan and serve with a lettuce salad, maybe some garlic bread.


Remember to add pasta water if you need to thin out the sauce.