Last Sunday, I went on my first run since the injection. I’m taking it slow: about 2.5 km and 20 minutes of running. My ankle was fine, my knees were mildly creaky, and my pride was only mildly offended by my absurdly slow pace. I wish I could say I was thrilled to be running again, but really I felt paranoid. “Am I hurting myself?” I wondered with every step. At the same time, I missed the care-free days of 5 milers down Town Lake on sunny Austin Sundays. But things change.
Today I went for run #2. This time, I alternated running with walking for 5km and about 40 minutes. The run-walk was, without a doubt, the way forward. I was able to cover more distance while keeping my heart rate up, plus it alleviated most of my paranoia around injury. I also felt great. Gone were the creaky legs and stiff joints of last weekend. I could almost recall what it feels like to run. If you’ve done much running, you know what I mean - it’s that feeling of lightness, where the run feels completely natural, the legs are fluid, and it’s easy to breath - to me, that’s running.
But for now, run-walking will do. Though he hesitates to admit it, Jeff Galloway agrees. From his Book on Running:
Our bodies weren’t designed to run continuously for long distances… Sure we can adapt, but there is a better way to increase endurance than by running continously. By alternating walking and running, from the start, there’s virtually no limit to the distance you can cover… Once we find the ideal ratio for a given distance, walk breaks allow us to feel strong to the end and recover fast, while building up the same levels of stamina and conditioning that we would have reached if we had run continuously.
Link to Jeff Galloway’s website
Link to Galloway’s Book on Running 2 Ed
We even had snow (sort of).
Chai Pani
64 Seymour Street
London, W1H 5BW
020 7258 2000
http://www.chaipani.co.uk/
Category: Indian
Travel: Marble Arch
Open Daily 6pm-10.30pm; Mon-Fri 12pm-2.30pm; Sat-Sun 1pm-10.30pm
Devotees of chicken tikka masala will be disappointed by Chai Pani’s menu, which proves that India brings more to the table than fried samosas and korma curries. Chai Pani is the only restaurant in London to serve the vegetarian cuisine of Marwar, a desert region in west India. With dishes like Bhindi Subzi Vg (okra in “a sauce”) and Ker Saangri (a “concoction of desert berries and desert beans”), the vast menu leaves everything to the imagination.
Times like these, it’s usually best to let the kitchen decide, so I ordered a vegan thaali (another tough choice as Chai Pani offers a staggering 16 thaalis, including wheat-free, low GI and ayurvedic). Everything arrived hot and on time, and the waiter was only too happy to decipher the mysterious array of dishes before me. I now know that “dessert berries” look and taste more like shriveled twigs than actual food, and “sauce” is Chai Pani’s code word for “oil”. Fortunately, other dishes were more inspiring. The veganized raita was good enough to eat with a spoon thanks to a liberal dose of salt and chili. The daal was the best I’ve had in London - simple, fresh and very spicy, just begging to be sopped up with Bajra roti, a traditional Rathasthan millet bread. The chilled Ghugri salad of wheat berries, tomatoes and tangy lemon dressing was a refreshing accompaniment. When it came to endings, however, Chai Pani pushed the envelope of simple cooking a little too far, with bowls of jaggery (sugar) passing for dessert. This was a poor lead-in to the bill, which came to nearly £40 a head (including drinks).
Adventurous diners will go giddy over the eclectic offerings of Chai Pani, and the dietarily-challenged will find comfort in their meatless and wheatless offerings. But others will be confused. Chai Pani means well, but they need to come to terms with the palate (and pocketbook) of its western audience.
Dinner for two with drinks and dessert: £66
I just discovered the Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin published by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), a division of the USDA. The 3-page bulletin is a neat little bundle of facts which are probably only relevant to people who work in agriculture. Still, I find this stuff fascinating (perhaps I was meant to be a statistician after all):
- In Texas locations such as Austin and San Antonio, more than 40 percent of the year-to-date precipitation fell on March 10.
- Elsewhere in Texas, Austin (Mabry) noted a high of 96 degrees F, tying its second-highest March temperature on record behind 98 degrees F on March 28, 1971.
- Elsewhere across the South, a rare urban tornado slammed into downtown Atlanta, GA, on March 14, cutting a 6-mile path of damage between 9:38 and 9:50 p.m. EST. The following day, just after noon, a tornado tore 16 miles across three counties in northwestern Georgia, claiming two lives (one in northern Polk County and one in southeastern Floyd County).
The agricultural summary is less quantitative, but still an interesting look at the up and coming fruit season.
Florida citrus growers reported new growth flush with full, open blooms on orange trees. Grapefruit and tangerine trees were slower to reach bloom. Tangelo harvest neared completion. Elsewhere, California and Texas citrus continued to be harvested.
NASS Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin, March 18, 2008
Published on March 9, 2008
in food.
Tim and I both agree that this is the best batch of no knead bread ever to emerge from our oven. It’s a perfect balance of sunflower seeds, flax seeds, white and whole wheat flour. The nuttiness of the seeds and whole wheat is buttery and wonderful. The white flour gives the bread a spongy lightness. But everything really comes together with the crust. I coat the entire dough ball in olive oil (a delicious trick I discovered accidentally and is much more effective than Jim Lahey’s cornmeal technique) then sprinkle on a generous dose of sesame seeds.
Seeded Whole Wheat No Knead Bread
300g white flour
170g whole wheat flour
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
13g salt
olive oil
sesame seeds
- In a large bowl combine flour, seeds, yeast and salt. Add 350 grams of water and stir. Add more water a little bit at a time and stir until the dough has the consistency of a shaggy ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours, preferably closer to 24. The dough is ready when it’s about double in size and spotted with big bubbles.
- Give the counter top and your hands a generous sprinkle of flour. Turn the dough onto the counter. Pull the dough at either end to form a strip. Fold this strip into thirds (like a business letter). Give the dough a quarter turn and fold in thirds again. I’ll refer to these folds as “seams”, i.e., “right now your dough is on the counter, seam side up.” Cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
- Oil a large bowl with olive oil. Lightly dust the dough ball with flour and put it into the bowl seam side down. Cover with the plastic wrap and let sit for 2-3 hours. The dough is ready when it has more than doubled in size.
- Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, remove the HOT pot and pour in a bit of olive oil. Swirl it around so that oil covers the entire inside of the pot. Now, take the bowl containing the dough and quickly turn it upside down over the pot so that the dough falls in seam side up. Cover the pot with a lid and bake for 40 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake another 5 or so minutes, until the loaf is browned and the sesame seeds are toasted. Cool on a rack at least 45 minutes before slicing.
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
Time’s photo essay, “What the World Eats”, made me wonder what my typical food week looks like. So as of last Monday, I’ve been writing down everything I eat and when. For example, today’s log so far looks like
- 6:15am: Two glasses of filtered water
- 6:30am: Earl Gray Tea with organic semi-skimmed milk
- 7:00am: Organic porridge oats with an organic Gala apple, organic raisins and organic un-sweetened soy milk
This started as a simple project, but it’s given me so much more to think about than just my week in food:
- I eat a lot. And often.
- It’s much more fun to track my diet this way than to tediously count calories.
- The diary is growing in detail. For instance, on February 25th I wrote “Coffee with milk”. On February 29th, I wrote “Clipper Assam tea and Tesco Organic Un-sweetened soy milk”. Today I started noting which foods were organic.
- I am still fighting an addiction to Diet Soda, which has only grown worse by my discovery of Pepsi Max, a beverage I shamefully find delicious.
- Food is much more than a sum of its protein, fat and carbohydrate calories.
Calorie tracking is useful - this is how I painstakingly learned portion control. But I wonder if this could have been achieved by tracking food on this level instead? After all, isn’t our foods’ variety, origin, and quality just as important to our health as our foods’ calories?
This has been such a fun and fascinating exercise that I think I’ll keep it up. Until now, I’ve logged everything in a Google document but have moved it over to the SmarterFitter forums under a new topic, “Food Diaries” (an idea stolen from the FatFree Vegan Board - I hope she doesn’t mind; non-vegans need a place to log their food, too!).
If you’re interested in joining in, feel free to start a new thread with your diary. I’d love to see what other people’s food week/month/year looks like. And I’d also love to hear your ideas on food tracking in general. What works? What matters? What’s easiest?
Link to Food Diaries forum
Link to Monica’s food diary
Link to “What the World Eats”
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
Attendance is dwindling at my Monday night swim lesson. I guess “the new” is wearing off as some people discover they are only in lust with “intermediate swimming” (and the Clissold Leisure Centre). Selfishly, I like this: fewer students means more attention from my instructor. This makes the class more of a lesson than a practice drill.
Last Monday, as I practiced the breaststroke, my instructor reminded me to bend my knees and bring my heels as close to my butt as possible: hard work but better form for faster swimming (I tend to forget this when I’m swimming alone, and do only a half-ass job of bending my legs). We then did the backstroke for a few laps, and he picked me out of everyone to demonstrate good form!
I’m learning how to get a good cardio workout from swimming. It seems obvious now that all it takes is a little concentration and a lot of hard kicking, but when I first started I couldn’t both kick hard and breath properly at the same time. It’s taken over a year to get to this point where I feel comfortable breathing, but that’s ok - I look forward to seeing where I’m at in another year’s time.
Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com
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