Lightweight Eats

Have you ever cooked mushrooms for an hour? It's highly advisable. In fact, I fed them to two highly unenthusiastic mushroom eaters and got nothing back but praise.

Dan got me a Garmin for my birthday last year. It's one of the best presents I've ever gotten: it's been strapped to my wrist almost nonstop ever since. It's been incredibly useful with the heart rate based training plans I've been following. I've also had tons of fun learning my speeds both on land and on the water, and spent hours analyzing post-race heart rate data to see where I could gain seconds.



But there is something refreshing about leaving it behind and enjoying nature.




Every week, our training plan has time that is labeled as nothing more than cross-training, following by some number of minutes. Right now, we're doing two 60-90 minute cross-training sessions a week. I've gone on some great hikes in the rain, taken spinning classes, and explored the trails by Dan's childhood home. It's a great opportunity to reconnect with the joy of movement.


And in that spirit, I'm also taking the opportunity to disconnect from all the technology. Spinning bikes have nothing but your intuition telling you how hard you're working. And the only thing that makes you stop in the mountains is the end of a trail—no halfway timer or mileage alarm.

Testing out my raincoat in the most appropriate place: the Oregon coast.

During a winter season filled with erg splits and heart rate data, cross-training is a great place to leave numbers behind. I don't worry about calories burned, heart rate zones or minutes elapsed. Instead, I aim to enjoy the experience of moving my body. Usually, I don't test my limits or even push above 'comfortable'. But when I come back to the ergs and the numbers and the data, I'm ready for them. I remember why I'm moving in the first place—I love it.

There is definitely a lifestyle associated with training double days. Serious athletes know the routine: lots of showers, stinky laundry, 8PM bedtime and more.

We've had a cold couple of weeks up in Oregon! It doesn't usually snow (or freeze) this close to the coast. We got a good taste of what's to come.




Icy roads kept me at home instead of headed to the gym at least one day last week. I made up for it by heading out for a run, thoroughly bundled.

Three layers on top, two on bottom. Wool compression socks kept my toes quite warm!

When we visited last year, I was running in shorts.

Turns out, wool socks make great gloves—and they double as a tissue.

I headed out on my favorite trail, which starts a little over a mile from my in-laws house. The trail starts on the beach dunes, weaving in and out of evergreen trees and meandering past (frozen) ponds. After a few miles, you end up in the middle of cow fields.

Cows are huge.

The trail crosses under the highway and heads up into bigger hills and deeper forest. By the time I got there, the snow was obscuring the trail. I turned around early and finished my run on the snowy beach.


The run was beautiful and just tons of fun. My entire core was sore the next day from all the side-to-side jumping on the trail—great cross training!

How do you deal with training in cold weather? Any tips?

A few weeks ago, I was dragging my feet about heading to the gym for a 10K on the erg. All I wanted to do was anything but a 10K. So I looked at our workout schedule and found another workout in the same category: 4 x 2K, same speed, same stroke rate.

My first spring season, I dropped 36 seconds off of my 2000m erg time. My freshman year of college, I dropped 14 seconds from my 2km time, and almost 2 minutes from my 4km time. This season? I'll be happy if I drop 12 seconds from my 6km time.

What's changed?


Well, first of all, each second means more the faster you go. The erg, short for ergometer, doesn't actually measure how far you've got—it measures how much work you've done. (An erg is a unit of work.) The erg looks at how much work you've done in a given time period and tells you how much power you produce—your watts.

The erg then has a formula to predict, if there were 8 of you with perfect technique rowing an eight-man boat, how fast you'd be going. In fact, you can calculate your split for any given wattage: http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/watts-calculator

So let's do that. My freshman year of college, I went from 1:56 to a 1:52.5 split, or 224 watts to 245 (9% improvement). Let's say I want to improve 9% on the watts again—that's 245 watts x 1.09 = 267 watts. That's a 1:49.4 split.

The first 9% improvement, I dropped 3.5 seconds on the split, or 14 seconds overall. The second 9% improvement, I only dropped 3.1 seconds on the split, or 12.4 seconds overall. The faster you're going, the more each second counts. And as I've gotten faster, my improvements seem smaller.


But that's not everything. In high school and college, summer was the off season and boy did I take it off. I was still getting back in shape at the first 2k of the season. Now, we train year-round. And while I may not be in peak 2k shape at the first erg test of the season, I'm not far off. In that regard, I would take a massive improvement in my time over the course of a season as a sign of failure—a sign that something had been sub-optimal in my prior training.

The same goes for weight-lifting. Although I might see some initial improvements when I switch from one lift to another, and there is some variance due to weekly training loads, I'm mostly just lifting the same amount of weight, over and over again.


So if you're not seeing the same massive improvements you saw your first season (or five) as a rower, don't beat yourself up. It's probably a sign you're doing something right!

Passionate about food, eating, exercise and health, I have been a casual observer of the obesity epidemic. From watching the HBO series The Weight of the Nation to devouring article after article discussing new research, I am learning, experimenting and watching.

Recently, I read this really great article called Fat City, basically a collection of thoughts on eating, dieting, obesity and health. The author, Karen Hitchcock, works as a physician in an obesity clinic. She talks quite frankly—touching on the feeling of moral superiority from being thin to the shame of overeating. Most striking to me, though, was a brief section on a man who claimed to be addicted to eating.

That's not possible, says Hitchcock. In fact, the man was poor and had no other sources of pleasure in his life. Food was the only pleasure he could afford, and so he indulged himself.

And isn't that what many of us do? We eat to infuse pleasure in the boring work day, or to curb the discomfort of exhaustion. It's no wonder sleep deprivation is linked to weight gain. The more I considered it, the more I saw this same pattern in my own life. In fact, as the first few days of the Live Below the Line challenge took much of the pleasure from eating, I found myself struggling to consume enough rather than overconsuming.

The Weight of the Nation seemed ever-ready to pin the obesity epidemic on junk food. And while I don't doubt its role, their arguments didn't seem to hold up in my mind. The documentary seemed to imply that the low prices of junk food were what drew Americans to over consume.

But that didn't make sense. First, junk food is more expensive than more nutritious options like rice, beans and other grains. Second, if finances were an issue, overconsumption would appear to be the last issue: how could one afford to over consume without financial resources to do so?

Instead, I'd argue that the real issue is the relationship between pleasure provided, calories and cost. Cheap, old carrots taste awful and provide absolutely no pleasure. Cheap french fries are delicious and pleasurable—their salt and fat comforting. Plain, cheap oatmeal versus plain, cheap pizza? It's hardly worth comparing.

Rather than eliminating fast food—a reliable source of calories—we ought to focus on infusing pleasure into more healthful fare. Fresh, market carrots are sweet, full of flavor and a rich experience. Heirloom tomatoes and tree-ripened peaches fill the aware eater with tingles and gasps. Garlicky, salty eggplant drenched in rich olive oil can give the unsuspecting tastebuds a moment's pause in delight. By focusing our efforts on the positive—rediscovering the joy of eating real, fresh foods—we stand to gain a lot.


Another viable solution is providing an alternative source of pleasure. Computers, television and the internet provide a wealth of pleasurable entertainment, but all of it is sedentary. Why not kill two birds with one stone and replace eating with activity?

Places to play, walk and bike could be the simple solution we are looking for. Is it really any wonder that Colorado is one of the nation's thinnest states? If a hamburger and a day hike provide the same amount of pleasure, and we can convince more people to fulfill their daily pleasure quota with the latter, we could make some real progress.

And this is why it's not enough to simply tell people to exercise for 30 minutes a day. Exercising, for most, is inherently un-pleasurable. Instead, we need to provide the resources to draw pleasure from activity—from bike-friendly shopping centers to walking paths showcasing natural beauty, from community gardens to recreation bowling leagues. Rather than encourage formal exercise, let's make informal exercise a part of our lives.

And who knows, along the way, we might make our cities and our country, a better place to live.