Mmm...food

Other than trail food I don't talk food much, but those who know me well know that I love to eat. Let me qualify that, I love to eat when the food is high quality and the company is as well. Yesterday I wanted coffee but given a variety of minor health issues, caffeine is a really bad choice right now so instead of spending $4.00 on a random hot drink I went shopping for red chai and almond milk and returned home with nearly $70 in groceries. Go me! I'm single handedly working on saving the economy.

On a whim I purchased a few new (and expensive!) products to try: Teese Mozzarella Vegan cheese and Honest Granola Planks.

I love that there are more and more vegan cheese options every day: Sheese, Chreese, Teese, Follow Your Heart, VeganRella, Tofutti...and I wanted to love Teese as an alternative to Follow Your Heart, BUT I don't love the consistency. Teese melts, but then it develops watery pools so you have to wait a little while for it to re-solidify so it doesn't slide off your dish. Once it resolidifies it has an unappetizingly rubbery consistency. The flavor? Its a little sweet--which I didn't mind, but its disarming. It also tastes, sadly, rather like processed "cheese food." All this being said, I think it might work really well in recipes (other than pizza) where cheese is not the focal point.

The Honest Granola Planks were fantastic! A little high in cals and fat but what granola isn't? Great flavor, good mouth feel and texture (soft and chewy, but held up well in coconut milk yogurt) and conveniently packaged for breakfast on the run, post-gym snack or out on the trails. Two paws up on the granola front for sure!

So, to recap: skip the Teese for pizzas but give it a try on sandwiches if you have the room in your grocery budget (retails for approx $5/tube) and want something different. And if you enjoy granola or chewy and grainy snack bars you will dig the Honest Granola Planks

Still crosstraining

The rain is killing my workouts, I can't bring the dogs out in a downpour because they refuse to walk too far when its wet out and I can't leave them alone inside on a rainy day because they are totally stir crazy.  *sigh*  Yep, excuses--I have many.   

I did a brief trail run yesterday once the rain stopped and cross trained on the TRX today.   We are in for a rainy week so I'm planning for many lunchtime run/crosstraining workouts.  This will all hopefully help me feel more prepared for the half in two weeks.

I'm having a few issues with my current road shoes and am hoping to address them in a few weeks.  

Hitting the trails/rocking the roads

In three weeks I run my first trail race of the year and then my schedule is all over the place: Komen 5K, another trail half, a trail 50K, the Nike Women's Marathon, and possibly JFK if my budget supports it. So I'm splitting my weekends into one day of trail running and one day of road/light trail running. I have no plan in mind yet other than to run and think, to drink and eat and run, and to run more. My work/school life are scheduled enough that I'm not sure I want my running life to be the same. We'll see how that goes. Just another few strides in the grand experiment.

Happy Trails.

I dream of running

Last night I had the craziest dream involving an ultrarunner houseguest, my father (who passed away nearly 10 years ago) and the idea of running, but I never ran more than a few feet in the dream. On one hand I want it to have this weighty symbolism, but I'm sure it was just a brain dump. I've been thinking about running so much lately and doing very little of it (other than the rainy trail miles on Sunday) that this was probably my mind's gentle reminder. Time to hit the trails for sure. Time to do, not just dream.

I'm so ready.

Yes, I am

Okay, I'm biting a Melissa Etheridge line to finally come out of the fitness closet: I am nearly 60 days into P90X and I love it! The time commitment is HUGE, but I feel stronger than I have in a long time and I think my running is/will benefit from it. I'm still figuring out my race schedule for the year, but I do know that I have a trail half coming up in May and I need to get on it!

In other news I am super duper jazzed about seeing the boys in a little over 10 days. Its been a long time coming and I'm really excited to share the experience with KJ (and to run on the beach!!!).

The whole world is watching

Yesterday (hell, the whole weekend) was AMAZING! Sometimes I really love living in the DC Metro area. We were about 1.25 miles away from the Capitol behind the Washington Monument, but we felt every moment of pride and excitement right along with those actually seated/standing at the Capitol. I'm still awestruck and sleep deprived. More later...

Happy New Us!

KJ and I spent NYE playing RockBand with two of our favorite people. I broke out of my public singing shell and handled the vocals because I just couldn't get the hang of the other instruments. You'd think someone who dances/skates/trail runs would have better hand-eye (hand-foot?) coordination, but not so! Our friends were gracious enough to allow me to hog the microphone and to indulge us until 4 AM. The perfect low stress way to sing in the new year. ;)

On New Year's Day we took two of the pups to Maple Tree for some quiet and outdoor bonding. It was coooooooold, our wood stove had a few "technical glitches", our neighbors in the woods indulged in a little 11 pm drunken target practice, but overall it was really beautiful. At night we could see miles of stars that seemed so close we could nearly touch them and during the day we took the dogs out for a ramble on the Appalachian Trail.

We also made a few agreements (resolutions? who keeps those anyway?!) with each other and with ourselves. So, here's to a brave new beginning to 2009.