The Wrong Feet Forward

Date: September 19, 2013

Author: astottler

Hey all! A lot has been going on lately, so let’s do a bit of a brain dump.

1. Today I half-moved into my dorm. I unloaded all the stuff from a storage unit, plus my bike and food. Which turns out to be pretty much everything except for clothes and me.

2. Instead of carting my protein powder and cocoa powder to the dining hall to make a smoothie, I put together some “smoothie mixes” with cocoa powder, xantham gum, and chocolate protein powder. Just add milk, banana, and ice!

3. I absolutely killed this WOD last night. I knew it was up my alley-any time when we do only a few reps of a heavy lift is my forte. Since lifting over speed is more of my strength, I’m never the first to finish the workout. Well, on this one, I lapped everyone in my class and was the fastest of the day. I didn’t Rx it-hardly anyone did, but I still did the deadlift heavier than almost everyone. #winning

4. I decided to start my Mini Whole30 today, instead of having an entire day to think about and go crazy eating all the things I won’t be eating for the next week. Success? I think so.

Mango iced tea, chicken chop salad, plantains.

Egg whites, potatoes, onions, peppers, mushrooms, spinach; topped with avocado and nutritional yeast, plus bruscetta. A side of papaya.

5. It was really awesome seeing some of my friends again! I love all my blog friends, but it was great to see real live people.

6. I recently ordered a ton of things online, and my boots just came! Thoughts?

7. I had THE WORST run today. It was a 5 mile run-I started off at a good pace, but I made a poor shoe decision. GIven I can barely stand to run in my normal shoes, wearing my Brooks (which cause me the most foot pain) was probably not the best move. For some reason I got it in my head that they would be better. Running is becoming kind of tortuous. I had to keep stopping to walk because it felt like I was running on knives. And it’s so annoying because it’s definitely a shoe issue-I just can’t find any shoes that work. I think minimalist shoes would be better. Anything with a completely flat inside. The problem is the part on the inside of the shoe where it’s slightly raised where it’s supposed to be between your foot and toes. That just digs into my foot, hitting a nerve. After today’s run, I can’t even imagine my 11 miler this weekend. I got custom inserts made, but I conveniently don’t get them until AFTER both my 11 and 12 milers. Awesome. I have one more trick up my sleeve to try-my old running shoes which I LOVE (but are really old and worn out) plus a cushier insert to help take out some of the impact. It’s just REALLY frustrating. I swear, on some of these runs I’m THIS close to going shoeless. Grrr. Well, at least the scenery was pretty.

I hate my feet folks.

8. I’m a little bit Crossfit obsessed. I know I really SHOULD skip it tomorrow-I’ve gone a lot this week, plus have to run and go to Spin tomorrow, but I’m sort of drooling over the workout. I guess I’ll see how my legs feel tomorrow evening.

9. Today was my last day in the kitten nursery. 🙁

Happy Friday!

What’s going on with you right now?

Fig and Goat Cheese Salad

Date: September 13, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Friday! I have about a week left before I have to move back in. While I had a great summer, at the same time, I’m ready. I can’t wait to see my friends again. If it weren’t for the blog world, I would have gone crazy this summer. My school friends all went home and my home friends all stayed at school for the summer session. Awesome.

Yesterday was my second to last day at the kitten nursery. I worked with 2 litters, and they were all black. I LOVE black cats. The litter of 4 was so sweet-all they wanted to do was climb on me and cuddle. At one point, all four of them had climbed onto me. I had to syringe feed them, which was difficult when at least two kittens were hanging off me at a time. One little girl loved climbing up my arm, onto my head.

And now-a recipe! I’ve made this once before, but never bothered posting the recipe for some reason. If you look on my recipe page, you’ll notice a lot of the recipes are some type of salad with chicken. What can I say-I love them!

This recipe is sort of a variation of my Grilled Peach and Chicken salad. That salad is a little more summery; this one is more fitting for fall. Especially since I recently learned that fig season in California lasts until December. Yay!

Fig and Goat Cheese Salad

Serves 3

Ingredients:

6 fresh figs

1 bag of lettuce

3 heaping T goat cheese

3 small chicken breasts (grilled)

Dressing (from Cooking Light):

3 T balsamic vinegar

2 T olive oil

1 T minced shallots

1 T chopped fresh parsley

1 t Dijon mustard

1/8 t salt

1/4 t black pepper

1 garlic clove

Instructions:

Mix up dressing.

Toss together lettuce, figs, chicken, and dressing.

Top with goat cheese.

Enjoy!

For this recipe, you could use rotisserie chicken, but the slightly smoky flavor of grilled chicken compliments the tart balsamic and sweet figs better.

Goat cheese is my newest salad obsession. Slightly tart, but very creamy, it’s the perfect complement to the sweet figs in this salad. Share the love-try this out!

What do you like in a salad?

The Enforcer

Date: August 24, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hey guys! I haven’t shared a general life type of post with you all lately so let’s go through some highlights!

I of course have obligatory kitten nursery pictures. I only have a few more weeks-crazy! I’ll miss seeing those faces every week!

After the nursery, I drove one highway exit away for training run #2. I ran by the bay where I normally would do my long runs. It wasn’t my first location choice for a shorter run, but one highway exit was all I could manage in that traffic!

Being the smarty pants that I am, I failed to bring my Garmin. That wasn’t really an issue for me. I planned to run for time, but I kind of failed with that too. Luckily, when you do enough hard, long runs in a place, you have a very good sense of when you have 2 miles left. Since my run was 4 miles, I hit that out and back point from memory and it was fine. I felt kind of tired-the run felt long. At the same time though, I think I was going at a good pace. My original plan was 3x per week of running, but I think I’m going to bump that up to 4 for the next few weeks. Unfortunately, me feet weren’t great by the end-my new inserts aren’t the solution…

Overnight oats were exactly what I was craving for lunch, so I whipped them up from my vanilla yogurt that was on its last legs. 15 minutes of waiting, and they were good enough for me!

I listen to an audiobook on my long runs. I had the idea a week or so ago that in the afternoons, instead of reading a book, I should just take my audiobook and go for long walks. This summer, I’ve felt pretty sedentary when I’m not working out.

I really enjoyed it-my walk ended up being 2 hours long and very hilly. I’m thinking these walks will be decent training at least for the downhills of my half, sicne the movement is pretty similar.

Here are some of the views:

I didn’t sleep enough Thursday night. I had a 5:10 wake up for spin Friday morning. The thought of staying in bed could have crossed my mind if it wasn’t for this.

At 5:08 am, this guy busted my door open (not really sure how…) and started meowing his lungs out for me to get up. Not for attention, not to be petted, but so I would get my rear end out of bed. So, on 5 hours of sleep, I got up before my alarm. I don’t understand how he knows. When I wake up early for a workout (or the kitten nursery) he always wakes up and gets ready with me. I’m not sure how he can possibly know the day and time, since Thursdays I wake up an hour later. I swear, that cat!

After spin, I refueled with a plum, and eggs with kale and chive and onion cream cheese.

After a quick nap, I helped my mom take our car in for service. While the car was being worked on, we headed downtown in search of a coffee shop.

We happened upon a little place that attracted us with its produce and Blue Bottle coffee. Blue Bottle for some reason sounded familiar to me, so we decided to check it out.

I ordered an oat bar and a cappuccino.

How adorable is this??

We got talking about health, nutrition, weight, eating plans, and life. We ended up staying for 2 hours, leaving only when the parking meter was going to run out. This little discussion sparked my last post, as well as another one I wrote at the same time, which should appear on Monday. It was really, really nice.

That evening, I went to Crossfit and was able to Rx the workout (go at the prescribed weight/height of box). The workout was 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 of kettle bell swings and box jumps. The kettle bell swings were a non-issue. The box was higher than I was expected…And I thought for sure the workout would end with me picking pieces of Aurora out of the box. I have a bit of a fear of box jumps-and a pretty little scar on my shin to prove it. I’ll spare you the pictures of when it first happened. When I first began working with my trainer 3 years ago, I bashed my shin REALLY badly in one of the first sessions with him. He later told me he thought I’d never be back after that! I did it again a year ago, and now box jumps always make me nervous when I know they’re not a super easy height.

I was worried also that I’d be tired at the end and mess up. It took intense focus, and a lot of nerves, but I successfully Rxed the workout! I don’t care that I was the last to finish-I still did, I pushed my boundaries, and had a ton of focus.

That evening I visited my sister in her new apartment where she invited a whole bunch of friends over. It was a ton of fun-pizza, boba, games. The highlight was learning how to make paper airplanes-which of course degenerated into all out paper airplane warfare.

That’s all I have for you today! Also-expect a recipe coming your way soon!

What did you do this weekend? What is one exercise you’re terrified to do?

Kitten Updates

Date: July 11, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hey guys! I haven’t posted in a couple of nights so let’s go through a 2-day recap! Wednesday morning started with a kefir/granola/sunflower seed butter cup, with a side of a plum.

Note to self-this is not the best pre-run fuel. I was getting a little tired of my pre-run breakfast, so I went with something different and it was not a great idea. I had a stomachache before the run even started but it ended up not being too much of an issue.

I pushed the pace a little bit more than I have lately, but here are some scenes WHILE running, since I ran with my phone for music.

This was my attempt to catch a picture of the bunnies I saw. You can sort of see them in the distance!

After my run, I had to go down to school to work in the lab, and then go to class. I drove half an hour down there, only to realize I forgot both my key card to get in the building and my key to get in the door. Awesome. I had to go all the way back home, losing an hour. That was a pain.

After class, I had a slowpitch softball game. The difference? I was pitching. Yikes. For those of you that don’t know, I was a fastpitch pitcher for…well basically forever. Our normal pitcher was gone, so that left me to give it a try. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Fastpitch and slowpitch are slightly similar, but very different, which basically made it a mess. Let’s just say that pitching fastpitch does NOT translate to slowpitch. Plus, in slowpitch there are these weird rules that females bat with an eleven inch ball, while males bat with a twelve inch ball. As a pitcher in the past, I was super sensitive about different BRANDS of balls (I could name the brand and model of the balls with my eyes closed). So you can imagine what different SIZES of balls did to me. Needless to say I drowned my sorrows in froyo.

YUM. This is my favorite froyo place. I got salted caramel pretzel and chocolate with heath bar on one side, and tart mango and tart with fruit on the other side. Since my goal this week was no gluten, I had to make the sacrifice of choosing heath instead of brownie. I know, I have a hard life. I was going to blog last night but then I made the smart decision to actually go to bed at a reasonable time!

This morning, I was up early for the kitten nursery. There aren’t a ton of litters right now, so that all was fairly quick. A lot of the kittens are sick-nothing serious, just eye injections and colds, but it was spreading at an alarming rate. When we deal with kittens and clean their cages, we bleach EVERYTHING. Everything is bleached between litters, including the scale we weigh them on. Well, it turns out someone replaced all the bleach bottles with water, which is why things were spreading. Anyways, I did get some pictures of the youngest litter. They were even smaller last week!

The kittens are very vocal, especially when they’re hungry!

We actually had a little issue with this litter. As in, one kitten went to the bathroom right on top of ALL the kittens paperwork, which included where we record their weights and eating habits 3x a day, for al long as they’ve been here. So that was an issue.

This is from the litter that we bottle fed a few weeks ago. How on earth did they get so BIG? It’s crazy!

Here’s the steps going up from the kitten nursery to the cat shelter. I love this.

After finishing up at the shelter, I had to hurry down to school to meet with my research professor, only to get there and find out the meeting was cancelled. That wasn’t a huge deal because I had to be down there anyways to do research.
After lunch, I headed out to the bay to run. I wanted to see how far north the trail I’ve been running on goes-I had previously thought I was at the end but then I discovered another path. Before my run, I made the decision to take it at a super easy pace. I pushed the pace yesterday, and this is my heaviest week of my training plan, so I want to just get through it. It turned into a no music run because it was too windy to hear anything. I actually enjoyed the run, although it seemed to take forever. And as it turns out, a slower pace is way harder on my calves. Which have been sore ever since I didn’t wear compression socks after my long run. Smart.
For some pre-Crossfit fuel, I whipped up a smoothie with the dark chocolate almond milk in danger of expiring, a handful of spinach, half a frozen banana, a pinch of xantham gum, and a handful of ice.

This came out a lot better than I was expecting-I could only taste a hint of spinach, which just made it all the more refreshing. Oh how I love my Vitamix.
My afternoon was spent hanging out with my cat, wearing compression socks, and catching up on blogs.

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I love that guy.
While doing the WOD at Crossfit today, it occurred to me that I should probably consider the running I do in Crossfit. I mean, I ran a mile in Crossfit today, which pushes my mileage to 5 for the day. I might stick to 3 tomorrow instead of 4 because it’s likely I’ll run more at Crossfit tomorrow. Thoughts?
Dinner tonight was a good one.
Guacamole for the vegetables: the before and after.

Plus turkey burgers (my current favorite thing) and zucchini fries.

My dad also grilled up some pineapple, which I ended up adding to a little vanilla frozen yogurt.

Overall, it was a good day! And, now I have brand spanking new tires so I can nail those hairpin turns going 60. I kid. Have a great week everyone!
Do you have any funny pet stories?
Hmm maybe mine is the time my GIANT black cat chased the pet sitter around the house? The pet sitter refused to come back!

Kitten Pictures-You’re Welcome

Date: July 4, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

First of all, Happy 4th of July to you all! I’m meeting up with my high school friends for a BBQ for lunch, and then this afternoon maybe I’ll see a movie. My family is grilling tonight, so lots of barbecues!

Normally, we make flag cake for 4th of July-Devil’s food cake, vanilla buttercream, and decorated with blueberries and raspberries.

Last year, I was trying to cut back on sugar so we made strawberry shortcakes instead (with a major fail from me-I put a little too much egg coating and ended with scrambled eggs on top-it was still delicious though!). This year, I decided on Blueberry Crisp because A) it’s the best thing ever and B) I had devil’s food cake for my birthday.

Blueberry crisp is so delicious, but that devil’s food cake sounds pretty perfect just about now!

I have to share dinner from last night with you guys-so delicious!

Butternut squash and roast chicken soup, Paleo Zucchini fries, and balled honeydew. Everything is better in balled form. That’s a fact.

And ketchup is a food group. Here’s the zucchini fries recipe. They were sooo good, but a tad salty. I think we’re going to try the same recipe with other veggies as well. Suggestions?

And let’s keep this post light with probably the only reason you clicked on it-kitten pictures! Some of the previously really tiny kittens moved into the main nursery this week (and my favorite litter left 🙁 ). It’s crazy how grown up they are, given I bottle fed them a few weeks ago!

I bottle fed that little tabby in the front and he fell asleep on me!

What are you doing for 4th of July?