the gap between the two trapezes

There's no real way to write about a big training week that is fascinating to anyone except the people involved in it (just acknowledging before I proceed, as bloggers do).  I find the daily breakdown of hours, minutes, pace, wattage, elevation to be a general bore, not to mention intellectual property of the coach laying down the ass-whipping, so I think it is best to simply comment that I went to California to ride my bike until my legs fell off or my crotch disintegrated (with a little bit of swimming and running and a lot of being around some of the greatest friends I have), and it is safe to say that I accomplished all of these things.

I love Colorado, I knew from the moment we drove over the state line that I would likely never leave, the peace, the dirt, the canyons, the wide sweet plains of sky, those things are starting to feel like mine, my soul has been wandering for years and now I am home.  I’ve done a lot of skiing this winter, a lot of running with snow chains strapped to my feet, listening to my breath and turning inwards to the silence.  I've done a lot of swimming in water that is 80º warmer than the air, when the sun comes out I run out into the yard and stand with my face open to the sky, I’ve spent a lot of time outside this winter, that is true, and it helps.  But the unrelenting weeks of cold and snow, only to be replaced briefly by 50mph winds, have made my heart ache to be back on two wheels, sun in my eyes, singing whatever song I am currently wearing thin at the top of my voice because if there is one thing I am it is loud, sweat rolling into my ears and ever so indelicately down my crack.  

I have terrible taste in music and an extremely irritating habit of listening to a song on repeat.  I can’t just enjoy music, I need to wallow in it, to feel it in my veins, like water like wine, the kind of song where every time you press the button to notch up the volume it just sounds better.  The one currently getting worn out is an old Coldplay song.  I spent a lot of time running on the eagle trail and at the reservoir this summer, and if you saw a little chunk in short shorts flying downhill singing it’s a wa wa wa waterfall at the top of her lungs, well, that was me.  I plugged it back into my shuffle when I packed last week, knowing that sometimes I want company when I’m going to be spending hours upon hours going four mph in my smallest gear, and company it was.  I would guess that I listened to it more than two hundred times in the past seven days, and that might even be a conservative estimate.  I cannot turn this song up loud enough, I cannot sing the second verse without wanting to fling my arms into the air, I can’t even start to explain how precisely Mr. Coldplay has put a pin in exactly how I am feeling in my life right now but by god I am going to try.  

There are things in life that you can control, and quite a few billion more that you can’t.  Things that you cannot control include the weather on race day, the number of people that are swimming in “your” lane when you show up to the pool, the guy in front of you at the stop light who is trying to go straight from a right-only lane and holding up all the works when you are late for your bikini wax.  Most recently in my life it has included someone slamming into my body 84 miles into an ironman and viciously frustrating bicycle-related unsolvable mystery knee pain and flights taking off without me on them when I am desperately trying to get to South Carolina.  But the things you can control?  Your attitude, your emotions, your reactions, your self-talk.  This particular platitude is usually shared with you when you are losing your shit and is generally unhelpful in the moment; it’s something I say to my athletes and my own coach needs to remind me of it, part of the circle of life.  But like most trite sayings, it is true and I think I finally, really, completely understand it for the first time in my life (yes, I only brought two kits with me and washed them repeatedly).  

It was the third or maybe fourth day of riding, we rolled down the bike path in the sunshine, I settled my sores back into the shape of my saddle as we headed yet again for the canyons.  My legs warmed up and felt solid, not snappy but competent, I think I also learned this week a great deal about what my body is capable of when I think it’s a dysfunctional old pile of rocks and gears, or maybe I actually have no idea what it is capable of because I’ve never really asked it to do any more than enough.  We turned off the PCH and started the first and longest climb of the day, I got dropped pretty much immediately (THAT being the actual theme of the week) and spent the better part of the next five hours alone in my head, the most terrifying situation imaginable to an extrovert.  I can remember this going sour on other training days, the peevish grumpiness that accompanies watching your friends ride up and away, the negative spiral that drops you lower and lower as you climb higher, until you finally breach the rise and can unclip and stomp off the bike.  But none of that came through, I plugged in my single earbud (right ear going deaf far more rapidly than the left), picked a number to hold myself accountable to on my tiny electronic device that was talking to Mark’s borrowed back wheel and started really listening to what was going on inside my mind.  It was quiet, confident, positive, grateful, it was the best possible version of myself and once I relaxed into it, I think I could have climbed forever (but thank fuck I didn’t because the saddle sore situation was completely out of hand).  As the day rolled on and I started to run out of calories and I felt the ughs tapping at my door for the first time all week, I reminded myself, I can control this, I can control my attitude, I can’t control that I am feeling tired but I can control how I am reacting to feeling tired, and with that, I turned the bonktown bullet train to crankypants station right back around.  One more climb up and then we arrived at the best part of the day, the moment where I finally get to ride off the front and spend thirty minutes going forty mph directly towards the ocean, squat little crazy pigtails flying, put your butt on the seat, I can’t stop laughing even though it means I end up eating half a dozen bugs on the way down, weight on the hand, my bike doesn’t need brakes because I wouldn’t use them if you held a gun to my head, thinking how is it even conceivable that I used to be afraid of this moment when it is possible that these are the best moments of my life?

The words I can’t stay away from, this song stuck in my head this week, as Anabel would say I am literally obsessed with it: maybe I’m in the black, maybe I’m on my knees, maybe I’m in the gap between two trapezes, but my heart is beating and my pulses start, cathedrals in my heart.  

That’s the feeling that is predominant in my life right now, like maybe I am in that gap between the two trapezes, weightless, like I am flying through the air with a heavy confidence that I will be caught but for now I am still soaring, defiant, full of heart (and probably just a little bit of bullshit).  I’ve been reading a lot of Brene Brown and this feeling is the opposite of shame, it’s kryptonite to vulnerability, it's connection without definition, it's the goddamn tightrope.  I feel powerful, jubilant, like there is absolutely nothing that can drag me under, I am surrounded by the love of my friends, I am ravenous for challenge, it's the voice in my head that states, firmly, when shit gets hard, I will not back down.  I’m on the other side of fear in these moments, maybe I ran out of watts climbing Latigo but I sure didn’t run out of joy.  That’s what training should be, I wasn't in California to ride my bike for twenty-two hours because I want to PR my bike split in ironman this year.  I went to California to ride my bike for twenty-two hours because there is (literally) not a single thing on this planet that I would rather be doing.  

I’m on the plane back to Colorado right now, I’m listening to this song just one more time which I'm sure my seatmate is thrilled about based on the volume that I am blasting it, and my heart is full.  My legs are tired, my sacrum is probably sideways by now, I need a haircut and vegetables and to buy some of that oil that smells like my grandmother that will heal my special parts, I miss my friends even though I only left them a few hours ago, but I am both sated and starved, I am in the gap, hungry, awake, my spirit is voracious and ready for the next adventure, if I had to use my own words to describe how I feel coming off the week, those words would not be oh man, I'm so wiped, they would be more along the lines of bring it the fuck on.

more letters to the pile

Just a short update in between day after day of brilliant sunny sweaty being the last one up (but the first one down; bless you, off-season) the mountain on the bicycle.  

Last summer when I started building my life towards a place where I could be coaching full-time, I did some research to figure out other ways I could continue to develop my education of the body.  My oft-injured past has given me relatively basic knowledge of the names and functions of the better part of the posterior chain, but it appears that most humans have quite a few more muscles than that so I eventually settled on the National Academy of Sports Medicine - Certified Personal Trainer course and exam.

I chose this one because of the recommendation/certification of a few trainers I know and trust, and it seems to be one of the higher standards for personal training in the US.  There are a lot of different packages available on the website that include different levels of instruction as you work your way towards the exam.  I chose the most basic one, where they mail you a book, a backpack, and a good luck with that, you can upgrade if you fail.

The website does a fairly convincing job of terrifying you into studying hard with their "40% pass rate" gibberish.  I already have a large pile of degrees and certifications still in their mailing envelopes at the bottom of my filing cabinet, so I launched myself back into the same old study/review/test cycle that is how everyone on earth learns.  When you sign up for the course, there's a finite time period that passes before you must either take the test or pay for an extension.  I got a bit busy ("busy") over the winter and studying dropped there, but finally a few weeks ago I called and scheduled the test for the last day before I expired, this past Monday.  I spent the last few weeks brushing up on the material, then most of Monday morning stress-eating my way through a few practice tests and a rather large portion of Phil Maffetone fudge before a quick leg-yanking sesh (most on this soon...maybe) and then I toddled off to the exam center.  Obviously I wouldn't be discussing this if I had royally flunked the exam, so it's safe to assume that I passed, which I did and no, the car was not in motion when I snapped this shot and my god, do I need a haircut.

There are at least four million blog posts talking about how to study for and pass the exam, so I won't waste too much wit on that, but I felt like the exam was appropriately difficult and covered the hot topics of the course well.  Whether or not I had passed the exam, the knowledge that I gained by moving through the education process has been extremely valuable to me, both as an athlete and as a coach.  (I hear the faint sounds of my athletes groaning about strength workouts ringing here).  I know that most coaches have strong opinions one way or another about where when how much strength training to include in triathlon training, and I personally believe that it makes for an athlete that is more durable year over year.  I don't have a strong public opinion about how it is involved in the training load and I'm not even going to twist my mouth to mention Crossfit because I have no interest in contributing to the war being waged on rhadbo by people with less than 8% body fat.

So, more letters, bigger brain (snort), extra liability insurance and I'm out the door to deepen the seam imprints on my battered special places.  Please to pardon a higher level of typos and misplaced words than usual due to the fact that the part of my brain that spell-checks blog posts is on hiatus until the sores revert back into calluses.  And when I'm bitching about saddle sores you know that I am having about as much fun as a girl can have.

so I used to talk about running

January got to a slow start, coming off a month of inactivity was rough on the body.  I think it took maybe two weeks of head-to-toe creakiness before I felt back up and moving cleanly again, before I could get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee without limping.  A thirty minute run covered less than a mile and required ninety minutes of foam-rolling to be able to walk the next day.  The first time I swam over 2000 yards I needed a three-hour nap and let's not even talk about the first trainer ride and what it did to the place where I once had many many callouses.  

I do remember the first really "big" day of training I did, I went down to Denver to train with Sonja.  I think we did a forty-ish minute run (me gasping for air WAIT UP YOU GUYS), noon masters which is a short-and-sweet wham-bam awesome punch of swimming, and then maybe ninety minutes of riding with some hill repeats.  The next day I woke up so sore I could barely roll over to grab the phone and post about it on twitter.  After ten minutes of warming up at masters with my usual coach, he stopped me at the wall and said, in a caring and slightly worried fashion, sooooo...what's going on today? in the way that you know actually means you should probably get out of the pool before you kill someone.  And I laughed, because of the day - on paper - that put me in that kind of hole.  It's amazing how quickly the body adapts to sitting on your ass eating cookies.

But the body also comes around, grudgingly, and mine did.  The swim started showing up first, which was surprising because of my yeah, you probably broke it and actually in a few places elbow situation, or maybe because I am just more stubborn about kicking the ass of swimming with my friends in the water, but whatever the reason, it started to feel good again after three or four weeks.  I've only been riding my road bike since the first of the year and most of my rides have been on the trainer due to the would you like 6º weather or 85mph winds? Colorado winter experience.  So I literally have no idea what is going on with my bike fitness except for the fact that it's alarmingly easy to get my heart rate up but it's starting to get more challenging to keep it there and the ceiling is coming down which I suppose probably indicative of ..something.  And I have made so much peace with the run.  Perspective is everything but my first couple of runs were at a pace that was a good...many minutes slower per mile than what I was running back in November before ironman.  The honest and probably a little bit crazy truth is, I was glad to see that, it means my body got the deep rest it needed and it's kind of fun, starting over on the MAF house.  It also means I get to party like a rock star at tiny milestones that mean nothing, like the first time I ran an hour and didn't have to walk to keep my HR under MAF, that kind of thing.  I know I sound like a sadist but I enjoy the work of rebuilding and have finally almost learned not to give a flying fuck about pace.  

I raced a 10K at some point in January, it's not even worth a race report, just a couple of comments.  There was a yeti, I think that's the most important thing to talk about.  I know he looks tough but I am pretty sure I could whip his yeti ass if I had to although maybe we could reschedule that for April.  

The day was warm so we were treated to some pretty excellent winds AND the course changed last-minute to include running up a huge hill in mile 6, which is a favorite trick of race directors everywhere, post some crap about construction and then put the line of cones in the worst path you can find back to the start line.  I got to run a bit hard, it was nice to see pace in the single digits again and also get a quite-starling wake-up call about the status of my body when it is in less than 5 layers of ski pants/pajamas/yoga pants.  That status was a big red light with a sign over it that said maybe you drank a bit too much wine in December after all.  Although according to this picture I won the race, let's pretend together. 

Racing in January, good for the part of the ego that needs to get hit with a hammer, WHAM.  I kept on running, training, la tee da, and my run just wasn't coming around the way I expected.  I didn't worry about it, other than to mention it to Sonja in conversation to make sure she wasn't worried about it (nope), and kept plugging away, knowing that it will pop up one of these days and I honestly don't really need it until April and really I could do without it until August, so, whatever, RUN, stay asleep if you want.  I did a lot of running, some of it relatively hard, in the week leading up to my first half marathon of the year, and mostly it felt okay.  After spending an entire day sitting in the Denver airport watching planes for Atlanta depart without me on them due to the rough weather on the east coast, I returned home and did the shake-out run that was supposed to be the last one before the race but would instead kick off a weekend of just regular old training.  And there they were, the run legs, feeling good and saying hi, just a little.  That Sonja sure is sneaky.  

I've always been a big fan of functional strength, lifting has been a part of my lifestyle since the first time I got laughed out of a PTs office after a squat assessment.  Last year, however, I was phoning it in more often than not, I was letting it get pushed out of my life by stress and fatigue and "busy."  I kept up the basics for injury prevention, but wasn't pushing myself or trying new things or sometimes doing much more than laying on the floor mat and calling it a plank.  This year I've been working much harder in the weight room, it coincides with a big scary test I am studying for quite well. It was also time to educate myself better about what my body needs, what a triathlete's body needs, and how to continue to keep it fresh and new and sore.  Now that I have a bit more time to devote to these sessions, I am really enjoying this work and what that is doing to my body (translation: I fall flat on my face/ass/floor/Bosu much more often).  My strength is starting to feel less protectively functional and more like actual strength, and I'm excited to see where this tiny part of my journey will take me and clearly no blog is complete without a picture of my still-recovering-from-the-off-season-large-and-in-charge ass.

I've always enjoyed training more than racing, that is true and it probably is wrapped up in fear somehow that I don't want to devote any words to untangling for the fifteenth time right this moment.  Despite that, after a few years of chasing PRs and faster this and faster that, I think I'm finally looking forward to honest strong races.  I know that I say all the time that I don't generally care what is on the clock, also true, but last year I feel like I still had a beef with some finish lines.  I wanted to get a solid half marathon on paper, I had some things I wanted to do in the 70.3 and ironman distance, some goals for legs that kept me motivated when training got tough.  This year I am more motivated by the work, I'm not sure if I can even explain it but this is a blog so obviously I am going to try because rambling about their feelings is what bloggers do best.  Wanting to crack X time on the IM swim or the 70.3 run kept me motivated to train hard and on race day, kept me chasing.  This year I feel like I'm more interested in the reveal, like I talked about back in January, I want to uncover whatever is inside and not settle for simply a PR being good enough.  I'm not satisfied with hitting times or splits or whatever in training and saying, okay, that's all I need for an X half marathon but instead I'm chasing the deeper dig.  When fatigue starts to show up, I think it's easy to recline back onto the good enough instead of hunting around a bit for the best that can be pulled out that day.  

(Picture stolen from Sonja's blog but I heart it so much that it should be on the internet twice).  I've seen that in the pool sometimes, I saw it late in the fall, there were Monday mornings where I got into the pool absolutely beyond smashed after a big weekend of training, and when I let all those thoughts go and just promised my body that I would try, I was consistently surprised about what I could pull out of my ass.  And I know I have room for that on the bike and run, I know that I have soft-pedaled it in at times when I should have blazed forward, looked for the edge.  If there was something (ELSE) that I wanted out of this year, that would be it.  To rise to the surface when hard work gets hard, instead of backing off just a hair and calling it enough.  I've been spending more time training with Sonja (training with your coach is the awesomest of awesome) and I think this is one of the best positive pieces that are rubbing off all over me, second only to a weird new craving for ridiculous hats.  Or maybe it's just because when you train with someone else that is so much stronger than you, the little baby inside your head doesn't want to get dropped all the time, but either way, I'm lucky to have it.  

Next week I'm heading out to California to train with Anabel and a little bit of Yasi which I'm sure will be another really fun weekend of yelling WAIT UP WAIT FOR MEEEEEEEE just like it was last year.  After that the poet and I are going to Utah to race our brains out and then I'm off to another race with some of my athletes as long as I can actually get on a plane and when I look over the next few months of my life and see all the amazing experiences that are waiting for me, well, I just can't find anywhere in my heart that wants to say OMG I don't want to run you guys somebody make me goooooo because I am just so very full of gratitude for my life.  

Graham says hi.

what goes in the piehole

My eating, diet, nutrition, time in the kitchen, whatever you want to call it, has been in a constant state of evolution, most of it tracked right here on these snarky purple pages.

When I first refocused my life on health way back in the dark ages of the blog, I started it by looking at labels and counting calories.  I don't really advocate for this approach, but it was a very enlightening several months.  I had no idea there were so many calories in bread!  Yogurt!  CHEESE!  My precious Doritoes!  It opened my eyes to how much I was eating.  I don't remember a lot about my diet back then, other than when I finally decided to start eating breakfast for the first time in my life (except for in college when I drank a diet coke every morning), I started every day with a huge bowl of dry Cheerios and a large glass of chocolate soy milk.  And I ate a lot of chicken alfredo and grilled cheese sandwiches.

As I turned the speeding bullet disaster train of my life around and chugged towards health, I tried to only make small changes.  I had a lot of friends who were quite good at eating that were willing to help me learn how to cook things that I had avoided my entire life (mainly, vegetables).  I will say it in public, until I was 27 years old, the only vegetables I ate were baby carrots, usually dipped in ranch dressing, or a bowl of microwaved frozen peas.

So I started experimenting with vegetables.  Heather was a fun texting partner in the WTF is this vegetable and how do I cook it game.  Kirstin introduced me to my first spaghetti squash.  I ate a tomato and did not die.  Spinach was a game-changer.  Emily moved in for a few weeks and put butternut squash and eggplant on my precious pizza.  I learned that strawberries are really really delicious in a salad (and any two ingredients, if one is green = salad).  My friend Sarah cooked quinoa for me despite my high level of suspicion (it looks like tiny condoms!).  I ate my first sweet potato not covered in melted marshmallows.  

After a few months of skeptically tasting weird things that came out of the ground with a large glass of water to chase nearby, I decided I wanted to try and take meat out of my life.  So I became a vegetarian, for a while, maybe a year?  Maybe longer?  It forced me to taste and cook the extremely weird white block of protein goo that I feared in the supermarket.  It also forced me to try tempeh (still can't figure out how to cook it so it doesn't taste like a foot), as well as those weird protein crumbles that puff up and have an abbreviation that sounds like an STD or a heart condition. 

Not everything was a success.  The poet loves to tell the story of when the (gas) stove caught on fire and I threw water on it (who knew?) and then ran out into the front yard shrieking call the fire department! while the fire fizzled itself out.  There were a few times when I plated a bizarre recipe and we looked at it, looked at each other, and called out for a pizza.  I still offer the same prelude of doom before serving up a new recipe, I found this on the internet so it might taste awful but at least I was cooking.  Eating.  Exploring.  Discovering that my adult palate was quite different from the one I had at age 6.

I gave up on the vegetarian diet after the poet started describing dreams he was having during marathon training about chewing on cows and I realized that he was probably becoming iron deficient since he wasn't binging on spinach like I was.  We still only eat meat a few times a week but it's in there, I only gave it up to see if it made a big difference in my life and it didn't.  There was the time I tried the carbohydrate depletion method while tapering for a major race, not recommended unless you are looking for an excuse to get divorced.  I tried the "two smoothies and a square meal" method for a while but I decided I didn't like sloshing around all day with a headache and a stomach full of pureed fruit.  Very recently, I decided to overcome one of my biggest food fears/dislikes, the EGG.  The Facebook internet was quite eager and helpful to recommend ways to eat it that don't result in the yuk face and I've cooked and eaten a frittata (after learning what it is) twice now without barfing.  

I've read a lot of books about nutrition, about nutrition for athletes, for regular humans, I am lucky to have plenty of people in my life who are experts or merely extremely well-read on nutrition, I have asked questions, I have experimented.  For the past few years, I've adopted a "90% rule" that is quite common: I make sure that 90% of what goes in my body is healthy, quality calories that are balanced, and when I step outside that, I chalk it up under the other 10% and don't stress about it. I've done a lot of work to repair my relationship with food and my own body, I'm still a work in progress on all of this but yes, there has been progress.  

I train and coach by the MAF method, and Dr. Phil has a lot to say about the inflammatory effects of food on the body.  The first time I read the big yellow book, I discarded a lot of the information he presented about various foods with the I'm an athlete, I need to fuel my body, I burn it all off anyway so it doesn't matter what goes in mentality.  That was hard for me to get over, still is hard to not chalk up treats to how much I am training.  I was having some pretty serious breathing problems two summers ago and many people suggested that I try giving up dairy to see how my body reacted.  I tried quite hard, many times, and I failed.  I couldn't make it through more than a day or so without reaching for the cheese or the ice cream.  And you know what?  That failure is okay.  I wasn't ready, and I accept that.

Last July we moved, just across town, but it was still a move, and it happened almost exactly 30 days out from ironman.  And when you move, you eat through all your food so you don't have to pack it and then you are too busy unpacking and yelling at each other about who put the toilet paper in which box to get in the first major grocery shopping trip, especially when you are training your ass off for ironman.  Those are excuses, yes, good ones but they are still excuses.  So for the month before ironman, I fell into a pattern of not having any food in the house and coming home from a big training session and, finding that early-morning me had still not cooked anything while I was out riding, trotted down the street to Mad Greens (decent) or Noodles (no) or Qdoba (double no) just to satisfy the part of my brain that was DEMANDING calories at the top of its tired little depleted voice.  The solution to this problem is preparation, but I chose to take the easy answer instead of taking the time to prepare healthy food to have when I needed it after training.  Not a good choice, just the choice I made.  And that's okay too, failure, lack of movement, stubborn refusal to continue evolving, those things are PART of evolution. 

So I stood at the line for LP a bit...bulkier... than I usually was, and then I went through the post-ironman binge and my habits never really straightened themselves out through Cozumel.  I was eating healthy food, and a lot of it, but I was also eating plenty of other things that weren't healthy.  It was hard to break the gas station junk food party habit on my long rides, so I didn't.  I was tired (we're all tired!) and reached for the whiny answer, the easy one.

Once Cozumel was over and I couldn't do much, I gave myself the rest of December to enjoy the things I felt like I wanted to enjoy.  But after a few days of margaritas and candy cane jo-jos, it just wasn't enjoyable anymore.  I stood in the kitchen and whined to the poet, I have all these boxes of cookies to eat and I am supposed to want to eat them but I don't.  So I put the cookies in the freezer, filled the fridge with vegetables and started to turn it all around.  That is a really quite large picture of my face.  

As I started training again in January, I started up again the practice of tracking my daily weight.  Now, I don't believe this is essential, especially for those athletes who have emotional pasts attached to the scale, but I'm able to do it in a detached fashion, so I do.  I don't think that weight is the be-all and end-all of health and nutrition and training, but I do like to see the ups and downs against the build and rest of my training, so I step on the scale, note the number, and then move on with my day without attachment.  And in January, that number doesn't mean much.  But as I started thinking about dietary health, I realized that my "90% rule" had become more of a "60%" rule.  The past few years, I have eaten in a healthy fashion the majority of the time, I believe that.  I have made good decisions when filling the piehole.  The questions I started asking myself, though, were whether or not I could be making better choices.  And could those better choices lead to a healthier life?

There has been a lot of buzz and chatter in the last year or so about sugar, grain, dairy, and the effects of those things in the diet, and I finally felt ready to listen, absorb, make changes around those things.  I went back and read the yellow book sections on nutrition.  I read the big red book.  I read Eat Move Sleep, which was mostly a case of nodding along with every single page, yes I should be doing that, yes, that too, yes yes yes yes yes.  One of the best pieces of information that I pulled out of that book was the fact that when your blood sugar drops because you haven't fueled correctly, your body craves high sugar, high glycemic foods because that's the fastest way to fix it.  But if you can stall your body with something high in protein or healthy fat, that craving will drop away.  How many times do we hear people say well my body was craving X so I ate it because obviously my body knows best?  When what actually happened was I didn't plan well so my body got out of whack and called 911 to the pantry for the fastest fix.  This was such an AHA moment for me, a big one.  So how do I stop the 911 call from the liver?  Preparation.

The poet and I, in the interest of both our tummies and our pocketbooks, have made the decision to stop eating out unless we are doing so as part of spending quality time with friends.  And when we do go out, eat out, we aren't going to fuss about who or where or that bean sitting on my plate doesn't go with my [special name of current trend] diet.  Eating out with friends is good for our social health.  But since we've made this decision, we've eaten at home FAR more than we have in the eight months since we moved and created unhealthy patterns.  

We've also decided that, as we toddle off to the grocery store each week, we aren't going to buy dairy or grain or sugar to replace what we've eaten.  Now, that doesn't mean we are launching into a diet of none of those things, mostly because I'm not going to throw away my entire pantry and half the fridge, but as we use those things up, we aren't replacing them.  The cheese and ice cream were some of the first things to go, and other than throwing the lingering bits of goat cheese into the crazy egg dish I made, I haven't reached for it or missed it.  Does that mean I am never going to eat any of these things again for the rest of my life, or become the twitter sugar police?  No, not at all.  But if we are eating most of our meals at home, and I am trying to continue my evolution towards health, these are our next steps.  I also realized in my own self-examination that my "7-10 fruits and vegetables a day" was generally "7 fruits and 2 servings of spinach" per day, and that high glycemic hit from all the fruit is part of why I feel hungry every few hours, so I'm working to bring the vegetable number up there and moderate the fruit.  Another bit of an AHA moment for me.

My point is, I suppose, that I've been my own science experiment on nutrition for many years now, just like many of us are.  I don't like putting labels on the way I eat, the most important factors in my diet are, in no particular order: tastes good, fuels training, is healthy for the body, and that I am never hungry.  Because a hungry Katie is a convicted and jailed Katie.  

Through all of this, I have learned a lot about myself.  I know that I should not ever say, I am never eating X again! because I may very well decide to eat X again in a month.  Two summers ago I wasn't ready to give up dairy, to even really try, and now I don't even notice it's gone.  I've stopped putting sugar in my eight daily cups of tea and after the first strange cup, I haven't missed it.  Small changes, baby steps.  I am curious and I am ready.  And none of this is because of how I look in the mirror.  I am not mad at my body, I am not trying to punish my reflection.  I care about how I look, sure, we all do.  But the bigger question here is whether I can change how I FEEL day in and day out, how much energy I have, how well I sleep, how I can positively affect my mood and general state of being.  So my evolution continues.  Onwards.