Lightweight Eats

Friday was an incredibly busy day! I started out my day with an early trip to the farmer's market. Although the market is scheduled to open at 8am, there are vendors there as early as 6 o'clock. My morning practice didn't start until 9:30 (more on that later..), so I headed over around 7:30 to make sure I got a fair shot at the best produce.



The haul included summer corn and stone fruit, and some walnuts.

Practice was an adventure. My bike has been broken (thanks to a shoddy repair job post flat tire, done by yours truly) for about a month and a half now, so I've been taking the subway to the boathouse. On my way to catch the train to our luxuriously late 9:30am practice, I managed to drop my subway pass.

The ensuing search caused me to miss my train. Whoops on being late to the one practice that is schedule for a reasonable hour of the morning. Perhaps there's a reason they're scheduled for 7am?

The practice itself was all on land. Our coach did lactate testing on us, which involved rowing machines and heart rate monitors and blood samples. How exciting. Although painful (both the rowing machine and the blood sampling), it definitely made me feel like a legit athlete!

Afterwards, I rushed off to meet my mom at the Berkeley Bowl. It's been almost two months since I've been, since my bike has been out of commission (again, more on that later). We were running out of all sorts of pumpkiny spices and were completely out of garlic! ACK!

The shortage is now solved.

And finally, in the early afternoon, I got a phone call from Tip Top Bike Shop--my favorite bike shop--that my bike was ready!! I dropped it off yesterday afternoon for a tune-up (aka them fixing my bike properly).

They showed me all of the things I had neglected to put back together properly and sent me on my merry way with a fully functioning bicycle. Riding home was absolutely incredible!

That was a bit of a ramble, but all-in-all a very, very exciting Friday.

It's only Friday and we've already deviated from our menu plan, but here is what we have scheduled for our week of eating:

1. Pasta with sage-walnut pesto, roasted butternut squash, parmesan
2. Chinese food out (we may skip this since we had salad for dinner tonight)
3. Grain/bean/green bowl: rice, chickpeas, baby spinach, avocado, cucumber, tomato, shredded carrots and Mmmm sauce
4. Dinner at my bestie's house to celebrate Sukkot
5. Mexican sweet potato soup (yea, we didn't have this last week)
6. Broccoli, quinoa, chicken/mushrooms (again, didn't end up eating this last week)
7. Pita with grilled veggies, arugula/spring mix, shredded kohlrabi and fried eggs

Favorite menu item last week:
Tie between the Thai tofu and the grain bowl

Don't forget the sauce!

Our dinner tonight was a way of cleaning out the fridge. We had some leftover peanut sauce hanging around that we were planning to use in a grain bowl. We also had leftover corn (both canned and on the cob) and grilled eggplant lurking in the fridge.

And then I picked up a big bunch of dino kale, and some beautiful purple and yellow beans at the market on Friday that I needed to use up.

So, we made some lentils and some rice. We heated and cooked. We assembled, and we ate. The verdict? Delicious!


Corn is a great way to add sweetness to mask bitter veggies like kale. The green beans provided texture. And the peanut sauce lent a nutty richness that went with the myriad of flavors. And now we have room in our fridge for more leftovers!

Last week, my friend, India, came over and went to the farmer's market with me.


We let the season dictate our lunch, and ended up with some late-summer tomatoes and corn. We threw it together with spring mix, chickpeas, and armenian cucumbers for a delicious (and gorgeous) salad.

What an awesome way to spend a day at home!

After running our 5.6 mile timed run on Friday, and clocking a decently fast pace by my standards, I started poking around the internet to see how much faster I'd gotten.

According to the Runner's World Training Calculator, 5.6 miles in 40 minutes translated to 21:30 for a 5K--much faster than my last 5K race, which took just under 24 minutes. By a stroke of luck, google calendar reminded me minutes later of the upcoming fourth Sunday run around our local lake.

Dan and I raced the 5K last summer. It's a small, casual race, with a $5 entry fee for non-members, and a 5k, 10k and 15k option. Most of the fastest runners do the 10 and 15k distances, which means I'm relatively competitive with the 5K field. Awesome!

I registered last night and jogged the 2 miles to the start line this morning. I got to the course super early, and spent a fair amount of time warming up there, as well.

Bib pinned on, we were off just minutes after 9AM. I tried to position myself towards the front of the pack, knowing my times could put me in the top 20 finishers. There were a lot of kids in front, though, who sprang off the blocks and the died about a mile in. I definitely got caught up in their frenzy, though, and ran the first mile in 6:45--too fast.

I began to reel it back in the second mile, until I got passed by a woman--up until that point, I was the first place woman. My competitive spirit kicked in and I tried to hold on to her, finishing mile two in 6:50. That push definitely caught up to me in the third mile. I slowed down a lot, finished the race at around 6:54/mile average.

Overall, it was great to get out and race. I need to get better at pacing myself, but I was still happy with the huge PR. According to the training calculator, my marathon time should be around 3:25--a Boston qualifying time! Entries just closed for 2013, but maybe I can run a qualifying time for 2014?

Unofficial time: 21:27 (6:54/mile)

This was my first full week back at the boathouse training. We still aren't back to the same training volume as my first few weeks in May, and I'm also a lot fitter, so I've been enjoying more energy than usual.

Monday:
We got everything out of the way with one long morning practice, including some biking, about 17km of rowing with some faster 10' sections, and a 25 minute run to finish out the day.

Tuesday:
The morning practice was simple and sweet: another 17km row, all at a steady pace. I worked on a lot of technical issues, and was impressed with how fresh I still felt at the end--my stamina is improving! In the afternoon, I took a run around our local lake. The loop was about 5 miles, completed in just under 45' (including some time waiting at stop lights!).

Wednesday:
A very short day, we rowed a quick 10km in the morning. The conditions were a little bit rougher, and my row was unexciting--I worked on a few things but generally wasn't rowing very well at all.

Thursday:
Training on our own, Thursday was a running and weights work out. I started with the running--about 50 minutes total, with a few bursts of speed throughout. I'm not sure how I felt about this workout. It was fun to push the speed a little bit, but it felt very prescribed. Maybe I'm just not a fan of short sprints. My left quad also started to hurt during the running, which caused me to go easy on the leg section of the lift.

Friday:
My body was definitely feeling the effects of Thursday. My left quad felt better, but there were twinges of tightness in my right hamstring. Overall, though, felt more sore than damaged. In the morning, I headed down to the boathouse for 17km. As usual, I was the first one to launch and the last one back to the dock. The lightweight women's single is the slowest boat class, so I am always the slowest boat on the water. It can be really disheartening, especially on the days when I get back to the dock and everything has been put away and locked up. Today, I handled it pretty well, although I was pretty drained by the end of the row.

In the afternoon, I jogged down to the boathouse to warmup and met up with the rest of the team there. We had a timed run: four laps on a bridge-to-bridge course near the boathouse, just over 1.4 miles per lap. I had mapped the route at 1.2 miles, but we chose a slightly longer but less gravely route instead.  I managed to hold a pretty solid pace, finishing in 40 minutes flat. Between walking and running, I estimate I traveled around 14 miles on land today, in addition to my row. I ate accordingly!

Saturday:
This morning, we got to sleep in an extra hour or so before heading down to the boathouse to row forever. Actually, we only went 24km, and I sat in bow of our gold medal quad. It felt a lot shorter than rowing 20km in a single, and it probably took less time.


I was definitely tired at the end, but bringing Gatorade in the boat definitely helped prevent complete fatigue. However, I did go home and take a 3 hour nap!

Sunday:
I'm off to run a 5k race! There's a race around our local lake that costs $5 to enter. I raced it last summer and placed 2nd in my age category. Expect an update later!

This week's menu feature a number of leftovers, as well as a trip to the Eat Real Festival, about a mile from our apartment. Usually, we don't hear about these things until the last minute and have already eaten when we go. This time, we're planning ahead, so we can enjoy the food!

Otherwise, we are celebrating the transition to fall with the re-introduction of soup. (Cold soups still weird me out, and therefore soup is avoided for much of summer.)

1. Mexican sweet potato soup
2. Leftover vegetarian chili (in our freezer, from ages ago), with cornbread muffins on the side
3. Black lentils, leftover grilled eggplant, sauteed kale over rice with leftover peanut sauce: this dish was admittedly inspired by all of the delicious grain bowls at Cafe Gratitude
4. Fried rice with the leftover rice from #3
5. Thai tofu w/ long beans: we didn't get around to making this one last week
6. Grilled chicken (Dan), sauteed mushrooms (me), grilled broccoli, quinoa: we still need some sort of sauce for this one, maybe BBQ sauce for Dan, and mushroomy gravy for me
7. Eat Real Festival

I also came up with some lunch ideas:
- salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber (from the garden!), bell pepper, avocado, olives, salad dressing
- hard-boiled eggs, veggies sticks w/ peanut sauce
- hummus w/ pita triangles, fresh fruit
- tacos w/ leftover grilled veggies + scrambled eggs or black beans

A few of these dishes will also help us use up some pantry items, like the sweet potato soup, which uses nutritional yeast!