For the main course, my mom and I split a gouda arepa (corn based) and a salad with chicken, avocado, and gouda.   And as my last dinner at home, I had one of my favorites-grilled chicken and peach salad with goat cheese. On the side was some whole grain bread rolled in sunflower seeds.   And then lunch this morning pre-airport was simple-2 eggs, half an avocado, cheese and crackers, and some English peas (unpictured).   Today, I went to my last home Crossfit, got a couple of episodes of Scandal loaded up on my computer to get in the mood, and said goodbye to my kitty.   I’m going to miss him! Catch you all from the other side of the country!

This morning, I ran with Crossfit in San Francisco! We carpooled up to Crissy Field and I ran with my phone for picture taking purposes.

It was an absolutely beautiful day to run. Fairly warm but windy up higher, with some fog around the bridge.

My Crossfit coach’s dog.

Please note how high up the bridge is in these pictures, and that we began at sea level.

A group of us wanted to run the bridge, which was a bit of a ways up-lots of stairs! And the bridge isn’t super flat either! So here are some bridge pictures!

And of course proof that we indeed did reach the other side:

We definitely kept up a decent pace. When we weren’t climbing, it was under 9:30 which is on the fast side for me, especially after the hills! I was basically dying by the end. We ended up doing just under 7 miles and my legs are definitely feeling it!

On the way to brunch afterwards we stumble upon a giant food truck gathering so we stopped there instead.

The first thing I got was the best latte I’ve ever had. By far. It was AMAZING.

Since the coffee took a while and I didn’t want to make everyone wait, I got my food from the place with a shorter line-I ended up with and Indian roll filled with Chicken Tikka Masala.

It was good but MAN was it spicy. I bought a bottle of water and was getting seriously concerned when my water was disappearing faster than the pain in my mouth! I’m the biggest wimp with spicy food!

I then went back home to drop some things off to begin the move out process and ended up getting drawn in by the air conditioning and the cats.

I actually broke my no sugar thing. Sort of. I was tentatively planning on ending it today, and I celebrated with a slice of leftover birthday cake from the freezer.

It didn’t spark any crazy cravings, so here’s to another week! I know what my next dessert will be though-I volunteered to bake a Boston Cream Pie from scotch for my sister’s graduation next weekend!

Like I said, I was sucked into the world of cats at home. I ended up not leaving until late into the evening, and I spent a lot of time with a very purry kitty.

It was such a hot day today, and since my dorm has no air conditioning, it gets pretty bad. I’m sitting here now sweating! I also had dinner at home. We had a spinach and mushroom quiche from Whole Foods, broiled asparagus, and a green bean creation I made. I sautéed up some frozen green beans (we didn’t have a lot on hand in the veggie department) with roasted garlic, green onions, and later some garlic and herb laughing cow. Yum!

A tough run in an awesome place, with awesome people, plus cat time? Does it get any better??

What did you do this weekend?

Today was our last day in Napa. We decided to go out for a nice breakfast at the hotel restaurant. I ordered fruit with yogurt, which was of course delicious.

What really stole the show was the Belgian waffle. Can you believe I hadn’t had a waffle in months? I haven’t had one at school yet-it used to be a weekly thing! My closest dining hall doesn’t have frozen blueberries to top it with (so totally not worth it) and the lines at the other dining hall WITH the berries are insane, so that’s not happening. But this little guy was fantastic! My family ordered one for the table to share.

Topped with vanilla berry compote.

On our way into downtown, we made a stop at Whole Foods-the granola bar I wanted to eat before my Turkey Trot is no longer carried by my local Whole Foods-sadly we struck out in Napa as well so I’m going into the race on an untested breakfast (YOLO). However, we did see that this Whole Foods had a coffee bar, and decided it would probably be a good idea to test it out.

A cappuccino-of course. I also tried some of my mom’s Pumpkin Spice Caramel latte, and I actually really liked it! I normally can’t do sweet coffee, but this wasn’t too sweet (ok, or that coffee-y). Maybe next time!

After walking around downtown, we stopped in an interesting marketplace for lunch. We decided on a Venezuelan place, and each ordered an arepa. 

It should be no surprise that mine had avocado! It also had tofu, plaintain, black bean, and garlic aioli, all on a sweet corn “bun.” Delish!

And since we were in a marketplace, there were plenty of dessert options. I had a pumpkin pie cupcake-it was filled with caramel! I probably could have done without the buttery icing though!

And on our way out, we stopped at an Italian bakery for what were more or less cream puffs-mine was milk and honey. 

Dinner later was a new to me flavor of kombucha, plus broccoli and an omelet with mushrooms, spinach, and gouda.

And of course, I’m enjoying plenty of love from this guy.

Now, I’m off to hopefully fall asleep and dream of trotting turkeys! I have my playlist made (which may or may not be half Christmas music), my clothes laid out, and my alarm set! Now I just need to get sleepy…maybe I’ll go read my textbook for school-that should do the trick! Yayy finals in a week. 

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone! Enjoy your Turkey Trots, but make sure to take in all the precious family time you can get!

Marvelous is…

Moving back into my dorm this week! I actually do think I’m ready for school to start. This has been a very low key summer, which is exactly what I wanted, but I’m getting a little antsy.

Marvelous is…

Jumping onto the pumpkin bandwagon early with a new recipe! Baby pumpkin pie-and it’s microwave friendly! The recipe should be up Monday night.

Marvelous is…

Fig and goat cheese salads. Can’t. Get. Enough.

Marvelous is…

Rocking my 10 mile run today. I beat my last 10 mile run time by over 4 minutes!

This is my last flat long run for a while since my race is hilly. I’m a little nervous because up until this point all my long runs have been flat. As far as today’s run? It felt pretty good. The shoe insert I carved out helped my foot feel better at least somewhat-it didn’t become an issue until the turnaround point. I’m convinced I would be soo much faster if my foot didn’t kill me every run. I’m getting custom inserts made so hopefully that fixes it. Also-I took a look at the carved inserts after my run, and since they’re foamy, they completely flattened, which is probably why the hole stopped helping. Oh well. Also, I rolled my ankle around mile 2. It wasn’t too bad so I shook it off and kept going. I think ice and compression socks may keep it from being an issue. 

Marvelous is…

Post run lunch. WIth a side of ice bucket (for my foot pain and ankle-killing 2 birds with one very, very cold stone).

Lunch was a couple of baby sweet potatoes topped with spinach and an egg with spices. I also had a smoothie-cherry, pineapple, and lots of pineapple coconut water. So refreshing!

Marvelous is…

The fact that no matter what random clothes I pull out of my closet, I always seem to be wearing the same colors.

Marvelous is…

Relaxing post run with an adorable kitty. I’m going to miss him so much when I leave! And the poor thing-he has allergies so right now his eyes are pink rimmed, runny, and itchy. 

Marvelous is…

Soaking up the last bit of summer with one more summery meal. Yes, I realize this contradicts the above statement about pumpkin.

I made Grilled Peach and Chicken salad, except I used nectarines instead of peaches.

And for dessert-some of the last summer fruit in the form of a fruit bowl. Topped with sunflower seed butter-perfection.

What is Marvelous in your Monday? Are you excited for fall or sad that summer is ending?

(Source)

My day has been rather low-key. I actually got to sleep in today, and got 10 hours of sleep! When was the last time that happened?? Unfortunately, my allergies were going crazy this morning. Naturally, that would happen the same day I run out of tissues…I’m not sure what I might be allergic to or why it is such a problem all of the sudden, but it sure is annoying!

I planned to take some homework with me to the dining hall so I could grab brunch and then do work until I was ready for the gym. I ended up having a larger brunch than planned, so I was there for a good two hours, reading about Darwin’s finches (I’m in a class about evolution).

Upon arriving at the Spin bikes, I quickly realized that I was missing part of the shoe that would be integral in using my new shoes. I guess there is some clip that screws into the shoes. I am obviously so knowledgable. My wonderful mother went out and bought one for me though, so whenever I see her next, and I will finally be able to try my shoes!

(Source)

It looks something like this.

I did a short workout at the gym- 2 sets of 10 minutes on the erg, with the stroke rate 18, 20, 22, 24 for 4′ at 18, then 3′, then 2′, then the last minute at 24. I followed that with 10 minutes of abs. Why was my workout short? Because today kicks off my half marathon training! I am going for a 3 mile run with my sister pretty soon! In 10 weeks I will be running 13.1 miles!

I spent most of today doing laundry. Unfortunately, after my first load in the washer, there were no dryers free, so I attempted to hang everything in my room. Luckily, now everything is in the dryer! I usually do laundry early in the morning before everyone is awake, but I slept in today so that wasn’t really an option. 

The only other noteworthy thing from today- I ate dessert. I’ve gone more than 3 weeks without, but I finally caved. I had a chocolate avocado cupcake and some dark chocolate. And you know what? Nothing happened. Sure, I feel a little sick, but the walls didn’t crumble around me, and I didn’t eat an entire batch of cupcakes. Nothing tasted quite as good as I was expecting. I also realized that I am probably eating too many sweets that aren’t technically desserts, like muffins and pancakes. I intend to continue avoiding sweets after this-I just don’t feel that great; however, if something is amazing, I might try it. The biggest downside- I had wayyy too big of a snack recently giving I’m running in 30 minutes. Ugh. Oh well, what can you do? Sorry I don’t have any pictures from today. I’ll compensate like I normally do, with an adorable kitty picture! (And only 2 weeks before you guys get ‘fresh’ kitty pictures!)

Hopefully everyone has a great day! Stay healthy!

What do you eat when you’re sick? Have you ever had Mono?

That’s Charlie! He’s the biggest sweetie! He purred in my bed all night! For some reason last night I kept thinking about vanilla protein powder…I must have had a strange dream! 

A sleepy purring cat led to my 3rd nap in as many days. Because who can stay awake with all that going on?

As I was packing up my stuff to go back to school, he became even purrier. He’s trying to convince me to stay!

And of course the playful kitty, Lilly. 

Ok, now on to the good stuff! Last night I had dinner with one of my high school friends. It was really nice to catch up and introduce her to everyone here!

Mixed greens salad, green beans, curry cauliflower, lentils, and a little bit of thai chicken. The cauliflower was actually really good! Normally I find cauliflower too boring or bland! I also had a few pieces of melon and a slice of cinnamon raisin bread with smart balance. That stuff is actually going to save my on my no sugar challenge! The bread is sooo good and definitely not sugary! After dinner and introducing my friend to my dorm, I went home to visit my kitties. At home, I snacked on pita chips with peanut butter and blueberries, as well as artichoke dip. I had really wanted to try eating popcorn with Nutritional yeast sprinkled on top. Why? I had just listened to a Nutrition Diva podcast on nutritional yeast, and it recommended putting it on popcorn as a healthy cheesy alternative. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any popcorn! How is that possible? We even had nutritional yeast! Ah well. You can’t win them all. At home, I caught up on Castle (love that show!).

What shows do you watch? Any suggestions? I love mysteries, but I also love How I Met Your Mother.

After a night of purry cat and protein powder filled dreams, I woke up feeling refreshed and ready for the day. Breakfast?

Whole wheat toast with peanut butter, and butter and an egg, which I made in the microwave. If it isn’t obvious enough by its square shape. Plus tons of blueberries and raspberries. Yum! I also had a little bit of shredded wheat cereal to eat with peanut butter and berries. I love the combo of peanut butter and blueberries on bread because it reminds me of healthy pb and j. I used to be completely obsessed with pb and j. I would have it every singe day. Ohh how times have changed. After breakfast, I headed to my home gym for a Spin class with one of my favorite instructors. I did a quick set of abs on a Bosu ball beforehand. The class was awesome, as usual. After class, I rolled my legs out a little with a pipe, and then did a quick 20 minute piece on the rowing machine. (For future reference, I’m going to refer to the rowing machine as an erg, for those of you unfamiliar with the term. I’m getting tired of writing out ‘rowing machine’!) I’ve felt better about my erg pieces lately. For the last month or so I don’t think I’ve been using my legs as much, and instead, I’ve been pulling more with my arms. The last couple of times I’ve really focusing on feeling the burn in my legs though, and my times (pace) are returning more to normal. As it turns out, pulling with your arms creates a lot less power. 

For lunch, I snacked on some barbecue baked potato chips from Trader Joe’s.

I haven’t had chips in the longest time, and these were seriously addicting!

For lunch I made myself a smoothie and a salad.

Now it may not be normal to top a smoothie with peanut butter, but it’s seriously delicious, and you should all try it. Like now. My smoothie included frozen cherries, blackberries, mango, and banana, plus greek yogurt and milk. My salad was pretty basic. Lettuce and garlic roasted almond, with Trader Joe’s Spicy Peanut dressing. This salad is 1000x better with avocado (because what really isn’t better with avocado?), but there was no avocado at home because I stole them all for school (all mine! hee hee). At the end of my meal, the peanut butter jar was almost empty, so I naturally had to take care of it. I heated up some frozen blueberries until they were warm, juicy, and delicious, and added them to the jar. Yum! After lunch, I had a minor sugar craving. Not exactly a sugar craving, but more like a feeling that I needed dessert after my meal. But that obviously wasn’t going to happen, seeing as I’m doing a 30 day sugar challenge! Instead, I enjoyed some Ghiradelli baker’s chocolate with nuts and dried fruit. For those of you that are unfamiliar with baker’s chocolate, it is just unsweetened chocolate used for cooking. Warning: this is not for everyone. I happen to love super dark chocolate, so this ends up being delicious to me. Especially with some salted cashews. Which we did not have. Oh well. Still good. After lunch I did some work, then bid goodbye to my cats (wow, I already sound like a crazy cat lady) and headed back to school in time for dinner. The best part about dinner? I managed to snag some bananas on my way out. Score! It’s the little things in life guys. Dinner was predictable for a Sunday night. Meals on weekends are generally pretty predictable.

A spring roll, whole wheat mushroom pot stickers, a shrimp dumpling, and brown rice, topped with sweet and sour sauce. For some reason there never is any soy sauce…Plus a baby salad on the side. Dessert? I really should put that in quotes.

Fruit plus half of a buttered english muffin.

So, today I was pondering my nutrition. I know a ton about nutrition, but I haven’t really applied it much lately. For the most part, I am eating fairly healthy foods, but I don’t think I am optimizing the ratios. One fantastic thing about this blog is it makes it insanely easy to reflect on my nutrition. A picture is worth 1000 words, right? 

I’ve been thinking about my goals for rowing. Obviously, I want to get faster. And let’s be honest, all those Christmas cookies didn’t help this! Nutrition is such a powerful tool when it comes to improving. So what are my goals for the week? First, of course, is my no sugar challenge. This takes precedence over any thing else. At all. Second, I want to work on optimizing my nutrition for performance. How? Well, I’m going to get into a little bit of what I learned in my nutrition class last quarter. Disclaimer: I am not a registered dietician, and I am certainly not telling anyone to cut out carbs!

Carbohydrates are fuel. Glucose, in particular, is used by the muscles in our bodies, as well as by the brain. It’s possible to survive without carbohydrates, such as with the Atkins diet, but it’s not ideal, as it sends a body into a state of ketosis, which I’m not going to get into right now. Anyway, we really need carbs to fuel exercise, but we need them even more to fuel our brains. Muscles can store glucose, but the brain cannot. For this reason, a reasonably frequent supply (as in, roughly every meal) of glucose is beneficial. However, what happens if you ingest a ton of glucose at once? The cells that process glucose and turn it into energy can only process a certain amount per minute. In addition, carbohydrates store 4x their weight in water (ever felt bloated after a huge plate of pasta? this is why). So, if these glucose processing cells were to take in the huge load of carbohydrate that has been ingested, the cell would swell with water and most likely burst. To protect themselves from this, these cells will shut down and not take in sugar to process if the load of sugar coming in is too large. As a result, the glucose cannot be processed and turned into energy, and instead will converted into triglycerides, or fat. In addition, this effect takes some time to go away. After a carb heavy meal, your body may crave more carbs later on, because the carbs you ingested were not used as fuel. Does this sound familiar? After a huge carb heavy meal, you are hungry and crave carbs later in the day? However, depending on the carb load or amount of time since the carb load, the cells may still be in this state and unable to take in glucose. So this really is a lose-lose. 

So as a person eats carbohydrates, the said person is fueling her body. As a person continues to eat carbohydrates, at some point, the person will stop fueling the body and in turn, shut down the process of fueling the body. See the problem here? Carbohydrates are important to refuel from exercise, or to eat for energy, but after a point, too many will actually not fuel muscles. So if I am trying to recover from a hard workout, I don’t want to overload on glucose, and therefore not refuel my muscles at all. So what is this magic point? It’s different for everyone. And unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no great way to tell when one is at this point. However, the body can process glucose much faster after exercise, which is why it is important to eat as soon as possible after exercise. After an intense workout, the first 5 minutes are important because that is when the glucose processing is the fastest. See why I love Biochem? 

So what is the best thing to do? Eat slow digesting carbs. Or better yet, eat some veggies with your carbs. Raw vegetables significantly slow the digestion of carbs, which will slow the rate of glucose entering the cells. In terms of carbs that digest more slowly on their own, beans digest slowly. Coarse grains digest slowly as well. the course the grain, the slower the digestion rate. For example, steel cut oats digest more slowly than whole wheat bread. European style bread is a great course-grain bread (plus it’s delicious!) However, the raw vegetables digest the most slowly of all, so that is the best option. With slow digesting carbs, you can fuel your brain and body for hours after eating.

Don’t like this idea? Another option is try eating more frequent and smaller portions of carbohydrates. For example, split your sandwich into 2 meals, early and late lunch. 

If I sound completely crazy to you, and you don’t buy any of this, I swear it’s straight from my class, so don’t shoot the messenger. Want more? Check out this website. http://www.drclydewilson.com/

I bought the nutrition books, and they are the best and most inclusive of the nutrition books I’ve read. I highly recommend them if you are interested in learning more!

Wow, that was a long tangent! So if you’re still with me after all that Biochem, how does this relate to me and my performance? I’m pretty sure I’ve been overloading on the carbs lately. I believe my professor recommended a serving of carbs the size or your palm for each salad you eat. So my goal for this week is to stick to that and see what happens!

I hope you enjoyed a little glimpse into the world of Biochemistry! I had a ton of fun reviewing what I learned last quarter. That was by far my favorite class I have ever taken. Have you ever loved something so much you have wanted to cry? That was actually me in that class. No joke. That class more than confirmed that I know what the heck I want to do with my life. Especially sugar metabolism, that’s my favorite!  

How much do you want to learn about nutrition? Do you want me to go more into Biochem topics and metabolism?

Feedback would be much appreciated!