Monthly Archives: June 2017

Pints for Paws+5K Race

Date: June 4, 2017

Author: astottler

How’s everyone doing today? I had quite the weekend (at least Saturday), and I hope you all had a great one as well!

Friday was a work day. I took the morning off of any workouts in preparation for my 5k on Saturday morning. Fresh fruit (watermelon and blackberries) for breakfast, with a flapjacked.

I had my typical salad lunch. This salad featured blackberries, leftover lemon grilled chicken, and burrata cheese. Crackers and a banana on the side.

Afternoon snack:

Post-work, pre-dinner snack while waiting for my mom:

For dinner, we tried out a local salad place that we just discovered. I got a salad with artichoke hearts, sundried tomato, feta, kalmata olives, chicken, pickled onions, roasted chickpeas, and roasted cauliflower (I added that). This was good, but in the future I would get the dressing on the side, since the champagne vinaigrette flavor was pretty strong!

After dinner, we hustled down to San Jose to pick up my race packet for Saturday before it closed. My dad actually ended up signing up for the race at the last minute. He’s never run a race before, and since he ended up not having a soccer game that morning, he decided, why not?

The packet pick up was at a massive sports store, and I bought a ton of new and interesting bars. (See below.) Afterwards, I suggested we stop at Menchies on the way home.

I got vanilla with fudge, and a little chocolate and mint with Nestle Crunch.

At home, I couldn’t resist trying a new find, the Blueberry Quest Hero bar. I’m not a fan of Quest bars, and now I can’t eat any other ones because they all have nuts, but this was astonishingly good. I thought it tasted like a cake doughnut, and my mom thought it tasted like a Danish. Either way, I (surprisingly) recommend!

Saturday morning I was up super early: 3:45am thanks to a certain orange kitty scratching at my door. I gave up on sleep around 4:30 and got ready for the race!

We arrived in San Jose at 6:45 for the San Jose Giants race! The SF Giants race is my favorite race ever. Sadly, I’ll already be in vet school when it happens this year, and since I’m not in the middle of finals like I have been the last few years, I jumped at the chance! (I might have to do the Sacramento race in the series next year! The Sacramento Rivercats are the Giant’s AAA team.) The San Jose Giants are our Class A team.

We might be related.

^Sponsor

^Mascot El Gigante.

My dad and I didn’t really have plans to run together. He wanted to go around 7:55/mile, and for me that’s a solid NOPE.

And we were off!

I wasn’t sure how this race was going to feel, but I knew I’d been getting faster this season. I didn’t go out crazy hard. My dad took off in front of me, and when we passed at a turnaround about a mile in, I saw he was breathing a lot harder than me, so I should probably pick it up!

We ran by the stadium (photos my my mom.) Some of the former SJ Giants, and current Giants’ greats!

About halfway through the race, I realized that a PR was possible if I pushed it a little more. Slowly but sure, I locked in to a faster pace.

We also ran through Happy Hollow zoo! The zoo smell was very familiar to me, haha!

With a mile to go, I thought I had a good chance if I could get a sub-8:00 mile.

Before I knew it, I was entering the stadium. I saw the clock as I entered the field at 24:xx and SPRINTED to the finish.

(I think this picture is hilarious because it shows off my massive blue bruise. I got pretty beat up at the vet this week and my legs were covered in bruises. The worst thing is that big one is from when Chloe came to the vet for her vaccine and was crazy excited to see me.)

I made it!

Guys. I FINALLY PRed! I fastest 5k was my first 5k….4.5 years ago. I’ve been trying (on and off) to beat it since then! Since that first 5k, I’ve gone through numerous injuries, 4 years of college, vet school applications and acceptances, tons of major life events…and I FINALLY beat it! By 10 seconds, but I will sure as heck take it! Official time 24:49. The icing on the cake was I placed first in my age group! My dad placed second! Now I think he has the racing bug at least a little, and we’re trying to find a small race to do later this summer where we might both be able to place again 🙂

We explored the stadium a bit afterwards. It was super cool to see where a lot of Giants greats played!

I wasn’t planning on getting 8am beer, but….

They had Kona Longboard Lager, a great summer beer, so I got convinced to split it 3 ways.

On the way home, we made a necessary stop:

Zest, the local gluten free bakery. They only make doughnuts 2x/week, and after seeing literally half of my instagram feed on Friday as doughnuts (national donut day), I had to jump on the Saturday morning doughnuts (plus, the chocolate ones sell out super early so I wanted to try them!)

^That is perfection. Maple, chocolate, and cinnamon sugar. And a warm and gooey cinnamon roll.

Back home, since Charlie woke me up so early, I forced him to help me nap. Cats are pretty good at that, as it turns out.

For lunch, I was craving a Subway salad, but I made it work quickly with what we had on hand! Deli turkey, tomato, lettuce, grated fancy cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette.

Then, it was time for Pints for Paws! This was literally my ideal event. The Berkeley Humane society hosted a craft beer tasting festival where 100% of the proceeds went towards animals. Even better, the event was dog friendly! Of course Chloe came.

The event boasted 20 different craft breweries, with a couple of cider and wine places as well.

We got classes upon entering. My favorite beer was actually the first one I tried: Apricot wheat from Pyramid.

Chloe met plenty of friends.

Dogs. Beer. What could be better?

^Berry beer.

After the initial samplings, we quickly realized we would have to pace ourselves, especially because our first couple pours were extremely generous! Chloe took some breaks in the shade.

After some initial craziness when we first arrived, Chloe was actually amazingly good. She was (pretty) calm, and was good with pretty much all the dogs and people she met. I think meeting tons of people and dogs at once was a really great experience for her socialization, and with so many new people, no one person was too exciting!

^I tried Guiness lager, and it was really good and crisp! I actually don’t really like regular Guiness; it needs more fizz!

Chloe is a pretty unique looking dog, and I think nearly everyone at the festival (we were all dog people!) wanted to say hi to her! This picture basically sums it up:

I really enjoyed tasting so many different styles and types of beer. At some point, my dad and I were splitting the sample, or pouring out the extra of the ones that weren’t our favorites.

We also talked to a few people for a while and had interesting conversations; one was a parent of a recent UC Davis Vet School and another was a couple who had Aussies. Apparently Aussie and Cocker-spaniels get along well. These two just sat like that for quite a while!

I enjoyed trying different ciders as well; everything from traditional apple to sour cherry, pear, and pineapple.

On the way out, of course I had to stop in the kitten adoption trailer and say hi. Look at these beauties!

And on the drive back:

I was actually pretty hungry when we got back despite all the beer, and I requested dinner from our local Mexican place. I got my favorite chicken teriyaki tacos, and ate the insides.

Dessert was a bowl of Halo Top with a couple of Trader Joe’s snicker doodles crumbled in.

Thanks to an early morning and a big day, I found myself struggling to stay away before 8pm, so I was in bed around 8:15 and it was fabulous. I woke up Sunday morning feeling quite refreshed!

Also, I can’t explain it but somehow the beer seemed to helped my tendonitis! My Achilles was surprisingly good during the race, but started to tighten up afterwards. It was pretty sore walking to Pints for Paws, but the beer helped the pain go away. The funny thing though is even the next day, my Achilles was FAR better than it should have been; hey, I’ll take it! Beer for injury recovery? Why not!

Sunday was low key and productive. I started with a gym spin class; it’s different from the other classes I go to in that it works based on percentages of your threshold, which you find during the first 3 minutes of the ride. It’s cool because it’s all computerized; it determines a number for you, and then the screen displays percentages, and you go off those percentages.

After class, I headed over to Peet’s for a decaf iced latte and some forced time finishing up a write up for my advisor on what the vet school interview process was like for me.

I spent the rest of the day partially relaxing, and partially tackling the confusing and extensive medical requirements for vet school. I tried to stay off my feet because oddly, my stress fracture foot was a little bit sore today. I’m not worried at all, but it’s been a while since it’s done this so I was a little surprised!

Finally, for dinner, we made my Sweetgreen copycat watermelon and feta salad.

With a side of roasted rosemary purple potatoes.

Saturday was literally the best day: 5k PR in the morning, beer and pup festival in the afternoon. BRING ON SUMMER!

What’s your ideal day?

Bread Pudding Fail and Strip It Down

Date: June 1, 2017

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I feel like I say this over and over, but I love returning to the classic blog posts: this is what I ate, here are some ideas for you. But my favorite posts are the one that start off with a little discussion or reflection about something that was of value to me and I hope could be of value to you. So we’ll start with thoughts and move to food adventures. Sound good?

Today’s thoughts are brought to you by the usual: dog walk + Bucci Radio podcast.

(For some reason she’s been sitting on the floor of my car lately?)

This week’s podcast was about changing food habits for long term change, versus just a diet fix, but the podcast went into much more life stuff than that. One thing that got me thinking was a discussion about a woman with a sugar addiction; thoughts about sugar took up so much of her life, that it took away from everything else because it took up so much headspace. Thankfully, I think I’m at a place with food that it honestly doesn’t consume me, but this got me thinking about how to apply this concept to other areas of my life. I know that vet school is insanely hard, stressful, and takes up a massive amount of time. Going in, I can’t afford to have distractions, like spending hours lost on the internet, or stressing out over what to eat. I’m both trying to strip it down, and prepare in the time before school starts. That’s part of why I got my Quick and Easy meal page going. I’ll still need to fuel myself with healthy food, but I don’t have hours to spend scouring the internet for recipes. I’m also trying to strip down my social media; I’ve unfollowing some accounts on instagram that spam a lot, or whose posts I don’t care for, for example.

The guest speaker on this episode talked about a morning routine that allowed for maximum productivity, and I was thinking that I need to spend some time now brainstorming and figuring out the best way to be productive. I need to sit down and make a list of what I value, and what needs to get done, then figure out how to tackle it. I need to organize my life, and be doing this, I need to strip away all the extra stuff that isn’t serving me well; the overhead that causes me unnecessary stress.

I invite you to examine you life; it seems to me that everyone is always crazy busy; what areas can you cut back or simplify to free up some time and mental space?

…and now onto the food.

I have a couple days worth of nearly full days of food. Let’s back up to yesterday, a work day. I had my usual Cheerios (strawberry this day) before Crossfit.

When I plan out my days of meals, I try to balance them as best possible. For instance, yesterday I knew my lunch had little to no protein, so I tried to build a super protein heavy breakfast to compensate. I actually tried something different! I made banana pancakes (and had a heck of a time flipping them…)

I blended up 1 ripe banana with 1 egg and about 1.5 tablespoons egg whites, plus baking powder and a dash of salt. For toppings/dipping, I mixed real maple syrup with some greek yogurt, and served it all with CSA strawberries. this was more delicious than I was expecting, so I may need to add this to the breakfast rotation!

For lunch, I had leftover Miso Noodle Soup with crackers.

I packed a smoothie for snack, which I ended up sipping on around 4-5. I used 1 cup of nonfat milk, half a flapjacked chocolate smoothie mix, 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, and cocoa powder.

For dinner, we had the ridiculously easy spaghetti squash pad thai. The veggies included were stir fry veggies+random veggies that needed to be used up: carrots and asparagus; it worked beautifully!

The main event was of course dessert. We made our family’s recipe for bread pudding, which was a little bit of a comedy of errors. The bread pudding part came out just fine, but the difficulties started when making the rum sauce. First, my mom measured out the rum to add, but forgot if she had doubled the amount of not, so had to measure out what she had. Then, we realized that she had added TEASPOONS and not tablespoons. When we made this recipe last time, the cornstarch made the sauce super jello-y, so this time we wanted to reduce it. However, we were reading the recipe from my blog, and apparently I was already smart enough to reduce it on there, so we had half as much cornstarch as we needed, so the sauce wasn’t thickening. I added the extra tablespoon to the boiling sauce, and it instantly foamed up and boiled over, onto the gas flame burner, making a giant mess. THEN, the cornstarch wasn’t blending well into the sauce so we had clumps. PHEW. Plus, we didn’t end up burning off much of the rum (which was a plus for my dad).

The end result was tasty though!

I didn’t have work today (Thursday), so I wanted to sleep in a bit, but also hit workouts hard today so tomorrow will be a complete rest before my race Saturday.

So, I decided on a 9:30am spin class. For breakfast, I had maple blueberry bread and CSA watermelon (in balled form).

I am still obsessed with this bread, and will need to make more soon.

Spin was fun! It was an hour class, which normally I avoid because an hour on a bike can get boring. Well, it turned out this hour long class was only 45 minutes on the bike, plus 15 minutes of off the bike strength with TRX. We did some arms, single leg squats, and abs, before calling it a day!

Before lunch, I had to make a quick trip to the store because we didn’t have any lettuce, and I had my salad all planned out!

For lunch, I made a salad with leftover grilled chicken and a little deli turkey (I only had 0.5 oz chicken left…), plus fresh peach and burrata cheese. I think it’s starting to be peach season! This one was delicious, and not all made it onto the salad! Crackers on the side.

I was majorly craving a big double chocolate muffin, but sadly didn’t have one on hand. Instead, I tried the ever popular “belt sander brownie,” or so I think it’s called? It’s just chocolate protein powder, cocoa powder, milk, baking powder, and necessary chocolate chips, then microwaved.

This was actually pretty edible! Chocolate chips are key! My only issue is that my protein powder has stevia, and I really hate the flavor of stevia. In a smoothie, you can’t really taste it super strongly because I don’t use much protein. Aw well, got the job done.

Snack before my hour long dog walk was the usual:

This evening, I went to Crossfit. We worked on Oly lifts, and then did a WOD with lots of deadlifts and running. I went lighter on the deads since I don’t want to be too sore for my race!

For dinner, we used up the last of our CSA goodies with a delicious grilled meal. We used the marinade in this Cooking Light Grilled Lemon Chicken recipe and served it with grilled corn and roasted zucchini with garlic powder and nutritional yeast.

Since dinner was on the lighter side, I made quite the bowl for dessert. I pulled a piece of peppermint bark bread out of the freezer and topped it with mint chip Halo Top, fudge sauce, and whipped cream. Yum!

And now I’m finishing this up while watching the Warriors play in the finals. I really wish I actually liked basketball…

What could you strip down in your life?