However, last night I made up a potato soup that was pretty awesome!

All I did was

Dice and sauté 4 stalks celery, 1/2 red onions, and 4 carrots.
cut and peel 2 russet potatoes and 1 sweet potato – boil in 2 cups of water
Combine and simmer whole concoction for 15min
Season with paprika and black pepper
Mash with potato masher

…anyway, this is the first post in 2012. A year when I want to blog a bit more about eating, cooking, and ironman training.

But since my blog readership hovers around 30… and that only when I push it to Facebook at the high hours of time-waste (i.e. work hours) and these are personal challenges, I’m not too worried about my ability to re-set the challenge here in August.

Just to fully catch up, in May I tried to go gluten-free for the vast majority of the month. It was kinda awesome (honestly, I could tell a difference from a digestive standpoint, but will refrain from going into details). I have been attempting to keep it up, but goddamn it’s not an easy thing to do at all, and I missed beer. A LOT… and I forget that Soy Sauce has gluten any time I get sushi! So, I might get a renewed focus, but right now, I’m definitely not consistent, and so therefore, am not gluten-free.

June I biked to work at least half of the days of the week. This is probably another reason why the car incident was so frustrating… I would have normally been on my bike!

It’s only a 6 mile route to work, and I often found it rather refreshing to do the bike commute. Sometimes I had to skip it because of plans in the evening that were too far to bike to.

For August, starting on Aug 8th (cause I’m just resetting right now… so it will end on Sept 6th), I’m going to try to only use cash for purchases. I’ll allow my auto-bill payments to stay, and I can pay off my Student Loan and new car payment with my bank account, but all “extra” purchases — food, clothing, going out, etc. etc. will have to be cash. I’m going to set a limit for myself too — more to come on that budgeting process, but I think it will be an interesting challenge. I generally love getting miles on my credit card and don’t often think what it means to put $2 at 7-11 on a card, but I’ll be curious about the new perspective.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that “in terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, [people eating less meat] clearly is the most attractive” way to fight climate change.

In March, I decided that I would go back to a dietary challenge and instead of eating something different, I just made myself record everything I ate. I used the Calorie Counter app for ipad because it was both free and had good ratings.  The first few days it was pretty easy — I would come home from work and record my breakfast and lunch; I would cook dinner and then record it’s particulars.  Generally, the app had most fast food restaurants I would eat, so my discretions were noted diligently.  It brought another level of awareness to my day and actually was paying off. I lost a couple pounds during the month as noting the whole foods cookies, or other snacks was distressing to say the least.

April was another attempt at bettering myself and my experiences by trying to tear myself away from the text messages, facebook-ing, and emails and learning how to reconnect on the phone with friends and family.   I made it my goal to call someone every day; I had a list of a cousins, friends from college, b-school, and previous jobs.  It was a relatively random grouping, and ranged from people I talk to quasi-regularly, and a few friends that I hadn’t seen in years.

It’s generally amazing how phone calls have almost become “events”… partially through the month of April, I started to consolidate my daily phone calls into one or two evenings because I knew that the phone call wouldn’t be a quick one and I wanted to savor the conversation.  I actually used my ‘commute’ to the mountains as prime time to make these calls because it was a relatively static two hours that I could focus on the person (while safely navigating i-70, of course).

I generally think that there are two types of people in this world: Callers and Callee’s.  Often in life I have fluctuated between these two classes of people.  In high school, and part of college, I was a Callee.  I wouldn’t be the one who made the plans for my group of friends, I was the one who just let someone tell me where to go and what to do.  When I lived in Park City, I became a Caller… I was a sort of central connector between people I worked with and was friends with, and people my roommate knew. It was a pretty small town, so there was a lot of overlap, and I definitely used this to my advantage to create circumstances to bring people together.  When I moved to LA, I was less comfortable, so I moved back to that Callee roll and would go where the masses went and the large b-school events were planned.

You often learn which type of person someone is relatively early into knowing them, and you fall into a particular roll naturally depending on the people you become friends with… my buddy Steve, he is definitely a Caller — almost like clockwork, he’ll call once a month to ask some random question, just chat about work, or complain about how a mutual friend of ours hasn’t returned his calls.   I never have to call Steve, but I love that he calls me.  One of my best friends from undergrad, Lauren, used to be a Callee, but since she had a baby she has become a bit of a Caller.  This role reversal generally makes sense as her time schedule has forced a bit of a change.  And so on down the line — with some people I’m always the one who calls, with others, I am not shocked when I see their name pop-up on my BB.  For the month of April I was making a concerted effort to be a Caller, and I tried to call both types of people.

It was funny the first few phone calls I made — especially the random “wait… is everything ok? why are you calling” calls that I definitely made.  I would kinda explain why I called versus emailed, and we’d have a few minutes of awkward, “i think i saw that you were blah-blah, how is that going?” but then it would become more natural, and it would end with a “let’s definitely do this again soon…”

Facebook is awesome, because it keeps you aware of your friends, their activities, and daily musings, but because it’s so public, you end up only getting  glossy version of life.  I generally feel like I’m close to my friends, but becomes of this new phenomenon, I don’t realize that I’m missing the real person until I have a phone conversation with them and get the full picture of what is going on.

However, I left a bunch of messages throughout the month… that’s the good/bad about the phone vs. a text/email. I may have had time and intent to converse and catch-up with the person that I called, but sometimes it was an inconvenient time for them. If I had texted, we probably could have slid in a short little chat, but with a phone call, it’s something you have to come back to, something you put on the to-do list… and after every call I’d have, I’d think of a couple more people I should add to that to-do list, and I definitely ended the month thinking that I should keep an hour blocked on my sunday night or saturday afternoon so that I can continue to have these conversations and these reconnections.

However, for February I tried to mix it up and focus on my mental health by reading one book a week…

I had borrowed the book Born to Run from a colleague of mine, and made that the first book. I had heard how this book changed lives, started a barefoot running revolution, and was really inspiring and interesting.  I had wanted to read it for awhile, but often found myself distracted or busy or just lazy in front of the iPad or TV.  This gave me a chance to refocus my efforts and give it another try.  It was an enjoyable read, but wasn’t as into the “secret tribe” as I was the other athletes and how they got into running and racing.

The next book that I started (I’ll admit I didn’t finish it… yet) was Linchpin by Seth Godin. At my old company, the VP of Marketing and CEO were a little bit obsessed with Seth Godin’s approach to representing company strategy and telling business-based stories.  Now, I believe that Seth Godin is a very smart man, and has a way with words, but I think primarily he is good to putting those common themes together in a neat package with a cool metaphor (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, etc.) as opposed to being the ‘be all and end all’ of how your company should work like those men made him.  Linchpin was as I expected… it had good tidbits, some representative stories, and some thoughtful items for focus. However, I couldn’t really get into it enough to read all the way through!  Part of the reason that I think I struggled was because I think I’m in a “Linchpin” like position at my current company and don’t need to eat up the ‘kick-in-the-pants’ prose to get myself to a different level.  I have it on my table to pick it up again if I ever feel complacent, and I know that Mr. Godin has those anecdotes to look back on.

For my third book, I read one of those books “everyone” has been talking about — “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Now, obviously it took me a few years to catch onto this trend (hey, I’ve been in B-School for a couple years!) but I’m glad I did! It started a little slow, but once the murder-mystery part started, I was sucked in.  Additionally, it was my first book using my Nook App on my iPad, and though I’ll admit I missed being able to really “understand” how far I was in the book by holding the pages in my fingers, I actually really appreciated having the book wherever I had my iPad (which was a lot of places — I heart that thing!).

My last book was supposed to be Freedom by Jonathon Franzen since it was my book club book. However, it’s an epic-ly long book and the person I was supposed to borrow it from was moving as slowly through it as I assumed I would. I’m definitely interested in reading it, but it didn’t make it during the February Challenge.

I did make it through a fair amount of my “Economist” magazines this month, which are more dense and all-inclusive than most non-fiction writing.

Next up… March: Food Diary! and April: Becoming a phone talker.

For my first 30 days of 2011, I decided to try to eat only “natural and non-processed” foods. Now, I’m not really an unhealthy person or eater, but I will partake of some pre-packaged dinners from lean cuisine or a yummy, cheesy bagel sandwich from Moe’s Bagels in Denver… So, I thought that this would be a worthwhile first challenge.

I started off strong too! Inspired by the normal Jan 1 healthy binges, I went to Whole Foods, I checked labels, I filled my basket with even more veggies and fruits than usual… Generally, it was amazing the difference between what I was making myself eat and my basic food choices. My default bread products had too many “natural and artificial flavorings” to make the cut, and macaroni and cheese obviously wasn’t unprocessed. Because I wasn’t going “raw” or anything that extreme, I allowed somewhere between 3 and 4 ingredients on a label before it was nixed, but those ingredients were not allowed to have sub-ingredients. I was being more conscientious, but I also had to spend a lot more time and money to get products or meals that made the cut. This ended up making my dinner sometimes a bunch of pieces of fruit, or weird combos of uncooked items. Luckily I live alone and no one really witnessed these feats of “cooking”

The thing I didn’t take into account is the anti-resolution philosophy of “fat January”… Coined by a colleague of mine, fat January is the opposite of what most people attempt when they start a new year. Instead of dieting and turning over a new leaf, you have one month (plus the excess days of February including the super bowl) to eat those last few unhealthy meals, those desserts, and those sinful dishes that are so often expelled during diets. Now, I didn’t fully embrace this concept (especially not those first two weeks) but when we had a vendor dinner at ChoLon Bistro i very much enjoyed the dishes (and the real butter, the real cream, the innovative dishes that i couldn’t necessarily start to explain and the joy) that I wouldn’t have allowed myself otherwise.

That, and beer… I heart beer, and though I don’t go out a lot, I like to have an après drink sometimes, and beer probably doesn’t fit the original plan for Jan. So, I tried to restrict my drinking, and my eating out. I would hang with friends and look for an organic beer option, or just have one drink.

Just the thoughtfulness of the January challenge made it worthwhile, even if I didn’t succeed every day. I have fallen back to a little more of my routine, but trying to carry through some of those lessons and that awareness.

Next up, February challenge – read a book a week!

In 2010 I participated in 2 marathons: LA Marathon in March (4:30:02) & Nike Women’s in Oct (4:44:50).

I was a member of 2 Tri Clubs and participated in at least 8 first Thursdays, 6 Tri Chicks rides, and one Wildflower training weekend with the expansive LA Tri Club in the first part of the year and had my inaugural race (the Dip ‘n Dash) with the RMTC in July.

A “few” centuries (official like the Ojai Vallley Century& Tour de Palm Springs and not-so-much-so like just biking till I get lost in Colorado.)

2 Half-Ironman races: Wildflower in May (7:16:02) & Vineman in July (6:36:36)

and my IRONMAN! IMLV in Aug (14:15:36)

…as well as a variety of shorter races, trail runs, and ocean swims that are unnecessary to note here.

All of this plus training meant that I spent about 6% of my year working out in some capacity.  Now, just to frame this… I’m assuming that about 33% of my life was spent at work (8hr/day, but that’s probably a low estimate — at least for the 2nd half of the year), and 33% was spent sleeping (probably a high estimate since 8hr/night is a goal not always achieved).  So, in actuality, I spent 18% of my “free” time working out, and since I lived in LA for greater than half the year, the remaining time was probably spent on the 405.

I didn’t start really tracking until 1.31.2010, so the numbers are a little short of actual, but they are still a little nutty.  In 334 days of 2010:

*I covered 3,775 miles via swim/bike/run. That’s the distance from my old apt in LA to my new apartment in Denver with a side trip to my parents house in Ohio (and back to Denver!)

at least i wasn't actually IN nebraska

*I averaged 87.4 minutes/day of working out (346 workouts logged), with a max training day of 8 hours (5 hour bike + 3 hour run).

*The most vertical I did in any one session was the Copper Triangle at 5,981 feet gained. My most frequented “uphill” was probably Encinal (1,450 ft over 5.5 miles) but could have also been Mulholland… (oh, and I totally wish I tracked my vert better!)

*I probably need to swim more — 12% of my hours were in the pool, with 42% on the bike and 27% spent running (the remainder were skiing this december and random pilates & bootcamp this fall).

*scratch that, i need to get on the bike! in terms of frequency only 38% of my workouts were bike based versus 22% were swimming and 40% running.

*all in all I spent the equivalent of 20.25 days (or 486.06 hours, or 29,164.13 minutes) participating in exercise.

full chart of kp stupidity

So, what does this mean for 2011? Since I’m not doing an Ironman, probably hard to comp.  However, it does give me some good goals to shoot for.  Biking is a real issue for me, so I’d love to make sure that I have closer to 50% of my workouts in the saddle.  I also would like to keep even on the swimming since I know I didn’t get into the pool enough. Oh, and I want to keep that “other” category high from all the skiing this winter.  Additionally, and most importantly, I was to have fun!

Here’s to a better 2011!

—

I’ll admit that among the 85* different news sources, online publications, bloggers and twitter-people that I follow, (not to mention my astute, overposting facebook friends), there are a lot of things that I skim & mentally note, or re-post/tweet/cycle but don’t necessarily act on.

However, for a little while, I have been following Matt Cutts, a Googler and SEO/webspam guru who often has very interesting comments on the intricacies of the inter-webs.  Since mid-2009, he has been setting 30-day challenges for himself that range from the physical health-changing, to the mental health changing. Each one is pretty interesting, and I’ve enjoyed reading about them.

Since 2010 was generally focused on one major IRONMAN challenge, for 2011, I’m going to attempt 12 smaller challenges.  I’m also thinking that I’m going to approach it from an “add something good” as opposed to a “take-away something bad.” However, we’ll see what happens.

Tentative List, in no particular order — Very open to additions!

1. Go Complaint-Free

2. Volunteer (tutor or help out somewhere)

3. Learn Spanish

4. No chocolate (or refined sugars) (i know this is an eliminate, but it’d be a tough challenge!)

5. Do a crossword daily

6. Floss (i floss now, but probably like 5 days in a row, skip 1, etc.)

7. Read 10(?) books

8. Cook dinner (or a meal) every night

9.  Swim every day

10. Run every day

11. Bike to work (provided I get new bike wheels)

12. Work on my finance blogging/make it a book

13. Only use cash, no credit cards (set a spending limit)

…So, let’s see how this goes.

*estimation, it’s probably worse than that if I actually counted….

I turned to the inter-web to see what people said about the race and while both had glowing reviews of being well-supported, beautiful, and super-fun, they both had some significant drawbacks.

Boise, has traditionally VERY cold water, some crazy stories of wind, and an unorthodox noon start.

Kansas, is hot, hot, hot, and also seems to have the only hills available in Kansas.  Additionally, it’s, well, in Kansas, which for a girl currently living in CO is just about the opposite direction of where I ever want to go.

Meh, I don't think the numbers lie.

Anyway, I debated and hemmed and hawed about the decision, but finally remembered that RunTri had an analysis of full-ironman races, so I figured it would compare the 70.3′s too. Luckily it did, and the drastic difference between boise and kansas leads me to want to pad my hopes for a fast race! Kansas, here I come!

In the meantime, the sandbox is still big enough and Google isn’t (quite) the schoolyard bully.

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