Ugh.

Still sick.  Wahh.  But I'm being "patient" and letting myself "recover".  I guess I really did a number on my immune system.  Sorry 'bout that, Immune System.

Anyway, this is day 3 sitting at home slowly working through various house cleaning projects (if you can call doing one load of laundry a "project").  I did get out last night - I made Cody take me to see The Hunger Games.  It was rad-tast-some (rad+fantastic+awesome).  Cody thought they left out too many details from the book, but I was all, "Whatever, dude, if they included every damn detail the movie would be 10 hours long."  

Last night I made this for dinner:

Sorry, that's a really lousy picture.  It's a TLT (tofu, lettuce and tomato) sandwhich on GF bread with homemade kale chips.  I marinated slices of tofu in soy sauce, a touch of vegan worcestershire sauce, and a touch of liquid smoke, then fried until crispy in olive oil.  Except I ran out of propane before they really reached "crispy bacon" status.  Anyway, it was really good.  Bacon's a tough one, as a non-meat eater.  I don't have particularly strong bacon cravings, but there are some dishes that it's just so key in.  Like a BLT.  Or pasta with pesto.  I mean, bacon really makes that dish.  Or quiche.  Maybe today I'll try to make a totally vegan GF "bacon" spinach quiche.  Or . . . maybe some other time.  Anyway, I think the tofu I made last night was the best bacon substitute I've tried.  I've done the fake, pre-packaged stuff (bad, in so many ways), I've tried eggplant bacon from The PPK, and I've tried tempeh bacon, but none of them really did it for me.  But this tofu stuff came pretty darn close.

In similar, picky food preference news, I've decided to capitulate and make Cody's birthday ice cream cake full of gluten and sugar and eggs and stuff.  I mean, it's his birthday after all.  And if I made it all Marian-esque I'd end up eating like, half of it, instead of just a little bit.  Which would be unfortunate, because . . .  

I just pre-reg'd for Tour of the Battenkill.  Yeah.  It's in 2 weeks.  I realized something, right after I did that.  I haven't done a big road race since I crashed out of Cascade.  Um.  Uhh.  So I guess I need to do some heavy-duty positive visualization about riding in a pack on a fast descent.  And stuff.  Whatever, it'll be fun.  Guess I should buy my cycling license . . .

Anywho.  

Well, I'm going to go back to being sick and staring at my 4+ loads of laundry that need to be done and thinking about recipes that I could try but probably won't.  

First World Problem: Boo hoo, I'm sick and can't ride my new bike.

So, on Friday I had food poisoning, which pretty much wrecked my weekend.  I mean, first of all, dealing with getting all the nastiness out of my system, then feeling the residual effects of losing 7 pounds of water weight and absorbing no nutrition for a day.  I missed my last day of hard intervals for March and my long ride.  That was really annoying.

Oh yeah, and it was cold.  Not unseasonably so, but I have to admit to being extremely spoiled by a couple days of 80+ degree temps.  Shorts and short sleeves.  My spandex tan, which had been but a happy memory, started to return (if you squinted at it, in the right light, or if you have a very active imagination).  We started working on getting the boat in the water.  Flowers were blooming.  And then . . . 50 degrees.  I know, HTFU, that's not cold.  But I really do love the heat.  90+?  I'll take it.

Okay, moving on.

On Monday my new bike came in!!!  

Sorry, that's not a very good picture.  Getting pumped to go race that thing, though!

Then on Tuesday I woke up with a sore throat.  Later that day I gave notice on my job at the gym.  Yeah, just bikes bikes bikes from here on out.  Bike fits, bike rides, bike coaching, talking about bikes, etc etc. 
Later in the day I started feeling pretty yucky and spent the whole evening trying to consume every food/vitamin/remedy I could to avoid coming down with what I knew I already had - the flu.  This morning, blech.  Not so good. 

What can I take from this?  That the sunshine turns me into an idiot, convincing me to do things like a hard 1 hr MTB after doing a really hard training ride.  And riding to a group ride that I should have driven to, so as not to get stuck out in the chilly air.  And finally, feeling totally lousy but making myself go do a hard workout anyway.  Lucky for me (um, what?!) the sunshine seems to have left us for the time being and my judgement seems to have returned in its wake.

Springtime in Bad Photography

Last tuesday I drove out to Fitchburg to ride up Wachusett a couple times.  Ouch.  People were trying to ski, which looked miserable.  Seriously, if something looks miserable to a person doing zone 4 hill intervals you know that it probably really sucks.  By contrast, I was wearing short sleeves, and after my ride I stepped into a pond to ice the legs.  Ice is right - that water was bitterly cold.  I pretty much just stayed in long enough to get a picture.  In retrospect it was probably frozen a week before.



On Saturday I made vegan Irish Cream.  It was delicious.  It had coconut milk, sugar, chocolate, coffee, and Jamesons.  Not sure how the name of that company made it through spell check - everyone know's you spell it Jamison.  (haha, right?  We all know that's a joke?)

 I did a hard ride on Saturday, and when I got home I cooked myself this amazing meal.  Salad, homemade Kale Chips (we've established how awesome my kale chips are, right?), and two soyrizo tacos with avocado and cabbage salad.  Holy crap that was good.

And then yesterday (Sunday) we got out for almost 4 hours in the dirt.  Did I mention Cody's home?  For good(ish)?  Yep.  Anyway, it was awesome, even though my legs were kind of ouchie from the training I've been doing.  But we rode in shorts and no-sleeves.  Love the dirt.

See?  No sleeves.  I've determined that if I were to open a paint store I would invent a color called "New England Pale" which is basically the color every pasty person like me turns through the colder months in the Northeast.  It's sort of sad and sickly looking.

Anyway, life is good.  Need more coffee.

Spring Forward

While I rejoiced in it staying light until 7 I've heard many people bemoaning having to get up an hour earlier, then this morning there was a Yahoo headline about how daylight savings time increases your risk of heart attack because you lose an hour of sleep.  Seriously?  Really, are you f'in kidding me?  In my experience  the vast majority of people don't get enough sleep because of lifestyle choices that don't prioritize rest, and experience poor sleep quality due to lack of physical activity and poor diet, yet something as simple as setting your clock forward is a "risk"?  Really?  What's wrong with people?  Of course then there was the "every 6 seconds a child is injured on stairs" headline this morning, too.  Come on folks, the world isn't that scary.  It's going to be OK.  We'll survive the time change, and with any luck our next trip to the second story.  Worry about climate change or losing your reproductive rights, not a time change and your children being exposed to stairs.

Sorry, I'm done now.

It's been a while since I last blogged because I'm pretty boring.  Also, I outlined a list of things I'd be doing while Cody was gone, and I'm sad to say I've failed miserably at being a social butterfly.  Flutterby. 

As for the rest of it, I've been riding lots and seeing definite improvement in my fitness.  That is really cool.  Sometimes you progress in baby steps that are hard to even notice, and sometimes you take these big ol' strides forward, and you add 20 watts in 3 weeks.  That's the best feeling ever.  It's supposed to be almost seventy degrees this week!!!!!!!!  I cannot possibly add enough exclamation points to that statement to convey my level of excitement.  Tomorrow I'm going to drive out to Fitchburg and do some intervals up Wachusett.  I haven't done a hill interval in a year and a half.  Are they as fun as I remember?  I'll let you know.

Hmm . . . what else?

Oh yeah, as probably anyone who reads this knows (because you saw my pics on FB) I went to Philly for a couple days last weekend.  It was pretty cool.  When I got back Cody's brother asked me, "Was it nice to be back in the city?"  I was really puzzled by that.  It took me a minute of. "Oh, um, no?  But, uh, back . . . in the city?" before I realized he was comparing Philly to Reno.  Like I'd feel like I was in Reno because I was in Philadelphia.  WHAT?!  There are what, just under half a million people in the greater Reno area?  And Philly proper has 1.5 million, and you're an hour from Washington DC, 2 hours from NYC, with lots and lots of people covering every mile of that.  I mean, really, in what world is hanging out in Reno like hanging out in Philadelphia?  Hilarious.  Living in Reno is a lot more like living in Gloucester than living in a truly big city, like Boston, Philly, NYC, etc. 

Cody came home from Philly on Friday, but he had to head back last night.  This is ridiculous.  I suggested that if I hit him in the kneecap with a tire iron, not too hard, just enough for a fractured patella, that they would let him stay home, but he declined my offer at this time.  Weird, right?  Anyway, we had a pretty mellow weekend.  On Saturday we went to a garage sale at this unbelievably huge, ostentatious house in Magnolia.  I got a - drumroll please - pasta maker!  "But Marian," you say, "you don't eat wheat!"  But this morning I found a pasta recipe that only uses water, flax meal, and garbanzo bean flour (my favorite GF flour)!!!!!!!  Yes.  More exclamation points.  And the best part?  It only set me back $5!!!!!!  So I'm going to make some vegan/GF pasta.  And it's going to be amazing.

Good Morning, Sunshine!

Somehow it's only Monday.  Not sure how that could be. 

Anyway, I've been super boring lately.  Like, really, really boring. 

I tried to buy Kraftwerk tickets (playing at MOMA in April) but failed, despite signing on to buy them 30 seconds after they went on sale.  No big surprise there, I guess.

Seriously, how mindblowingly awesome would that show have been?

I lost the only key we have for Cody's Jetta.  I was walking the dog at Stage Fort Park and thought it would be fun to scramble around on the slimy rocks (low tide).  I fell straight onto my ass and I think the key fell out of my pocket and into the ocean.  W.  T.  F.  No one but the VW dealership could code a new key for me (damn you, German engineering) so I had to have it towed to Danvers and get new keys ordered.  You know the little flippy, remote lock/unlock keys?  Yeah, don't lose those, they're $260 bucks.  Your typical coded Jetta key?  $70. 

We won't be remotely unlocking the Jetta anymore. 

Cody himself is still in Philly working a glamourous 58 hour night-shift work week.  If he doesn't come home this weekend I'll be taking Amtrak down there for a visit.  For his sake I hope he gets to come home (chances are slim, however) but I'm getting pretty amped at the idea of taking a little weekend vacation to some place I've never been.  I get sort of bummed if I go too long without a good road (rail?) trip, and I'm overdue.

Otherwise it's just business as usual, fitting my rides in around work and life and wishing it could be the other way around.  A friend poked me in the bicep on Friday and told me I was getting soft (I tried to start a fight with him for that comment, but he merely went on calmy with his conversation) so I'm prioritizing doing some upper-body and core work at the gym.  Or I did, yesterday, and today I think my triceps and deltoids are going to detach from their respective insertion points.  It's good.  When I start riding lots I get lazy about doing anything other the biking, a little core, and a few pushups.  It's bad news when my middle-aged detrained PT clients can bench press more than me.  No one will be poking me in the arm and calling me soft.

Latest

Some of you may remember last April when Cody was sent to Philadelphia to work on the Philly Museum of Art - I guess they're expanding it or something.  (This is usually where people ask, "what does he do?" to which I can only answered with a confused headshake "he's a hydrogeologist."  What does that have to do with an art museum in Philly?  You'll have to ask him.)  Well, yesterday he got word that he's headed back there for a couple weeks as the project comes to a close.  Oh yeah, and he's leaving today. 

At any rate, I'm flying solo for a couple weeks.  I'm not particularly prone to loneliness or boredom when I'm by myself, and my productivity tends to go way up when I'm not trying to accomodate another human being in my life.  Don't get me wrong - I'll miss Cody a ton, but that's different than being lonely because you're alone.  Here's what I'll have going on for the next couple weeks:

• Work.  Yeah, some of that.  Getting a new project up and running. 
• Riding bikes.  Week 2 of 2012 training and my legs are already feeling a bit ouchy.  That's rad.  Also rad is that I work in a place that I can foam roller myself when ever I want.  Yes.
• All that off-the-bike training and recovery crap.  I'm not particularly good at that.  I'm working on getting better, but it's easier with fewer distractions.
• Not cooking meat.  Several times a week I end up cooking 2 dinners - one veg for me, one with some kind of animal protein for Cody. 
• Watching stupid movies.  Look, Cody thought that Bridesmaids was too much of a chick flick, how do you think he'd take to watching the new Twilight movie?  (Oh crap, did I just admit to watching Twilight?  Can I take it back?  Please?  F*%#.  Look, we all have things we're not proud of, quit acting all superior.)
• Being social.  Last time Cody was gone I was a total hermit.  This time I'm going to get out, see people, be a normal person, lest he come home to something like this:

Or maybe this:

Ugh.  Sorry about that. 

Anyway, in other, more savory news, Cody picked up take-out from the Organic Garden Cafe in Beverly last night.  I told him that all I wanted for Valentine's Day was dinner from a vegetarian restaurant, because there is hardly a restaurant in Gloucester that serves anything without meat in it.  The Squash Nutbutter Ravioli were amazing.  Cody picked up some of their kale chips, too, but I've gotta say, with no undo immodesty, that my own kale chips are superior.

CrossFit

At the persuading of a friend, and because I like to work out, I went to CrossFit for the very first time last night.  I'd been meaning to check it out during my off-season, so I was running out of time to do so as I'm reincorporating intervals into my time on the bike.  It was FUN!  But it's definitely possible that I enjoyed it because it was running and deadlifts (core, lower body and cardio), and the upper body stuff (my weakest area, duh) was kept to a minimum.  But the fitness of many of the attendants was really impressive and the atmosphere was really fun and supportive.  I can see why people enjoy it, fo' shizzle.

I was talking to Cody about it last night and he was all, "duh, Marian, most people don't like doing 6 hour bike rides by themselves." so I guess it's good for my cycling fitness that I hold such misanthropic tendencies.   Anyway, I'm happy I checked it out and I plan on going back when the next off-season rolls around, or my racing/bike workload go down.

And in the CrossFit spirit, I was introduced to Go Kaleo yesterday.  This lady is incredibly healthy and fit on a vegan, plant based diet.  She incorporates some grains and legumes and soy, and tons of fruit, into her diet.  It's a great model of how I try to eat, and I find it really inspiring that she can maintain that level of fitness without meat or dairy.

But now it's time to go do intervals on my bike, and I'm glad for the sake of my legs that we didn't do a ton of squats last night.