Lightweight Eats

I've mentioned this before, but food is one of our major recurring expenditures. Even being careful, we spend nearly as much money on food as on rent. Still, we've cut down our food costs significantly in the past two years, which means more money goes into our savings accounts. Glorious.

Cutting out packaged foods has made a huge difference in our grocery bill. For example, we no longer buy crackers or cold cereal, opting instead for larger meals (not snack foods) and hot oatmeal. In fact, just the switch from cold to hot cereal has saved us a bundle.

The two of us eat a box of cold cereal every two days, plus the cold cereal required about a gallon of soy milk a week. Even with cheap cereal and milk, we were looking at $13/week for breakfast (not including bananas or other tasty toppings).
Now, we buy steel cut oatmeal (the most expensive kind of oats, and worth every extra penny). We go through 4-5# a week, with only a half gallon of milk, dropping us below $10/week. We use the extra money to buy walnuts, raisins and sunflower seeds, to make our breakfast more nutritious, delicious and filling, for the same cost.

Ok, maybe not the best example, but ultimately that breakfast provides us more calories, meaning we don't buy snack foods, meaning we save money.

I guess the lesson is that focusing our meals around large, filling, whole foods has helped us avoid more processed and packaged foods that used to fill the gaps between meals.

That being said, we do rely on some packaged foods because they are filling and inexpensive. For example, although our homemade vegan sausages are delicious, they are more expensive than buying Tofurky Italian sausages from Trader Joe's. When we throw in a load of potatoes and a bag of frozen veggies, we've got an inexpensive and well-rounded meal that is really quite filling.

Similarly, we buy some pre-made sauces, like soy sauce, peanut butter and sriracha. We simply don't have the time to make these things from scratch. We do combine these pre-made sauces into other tasty concoctions, like homemade peanut sauce for our stirfries. We also make all of our own salad dressings.

As an added bonus, less packaging means less waste!

Our top five packaged foods:
1. Peanut butter!
2. Soy milk
3. Bread (although I'm keeping an eye out for a bread machine on freecycle)
4. Tofu & Tempeh
5. Raisins

What do you buy in packages? Do you make your own sauces or buy pre-made?

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The house has finally filled out with warm bodies. My teammates have returned from Oklahoma City, Houston, and Worcester, and we are all training hard for our upcoming 6k and 2k erg tests.

Unfortunately, the extra warmth hasn't melted all the snow. I expect we'll be indoors for another month or so. Hopefully we get at least a week on the water before the first national selection regatta!!

This is where Dan works. He started last week.

The lake was thawed for one day when we arrived. Now it's a sheet of ice.

Our poor west coast car doesn't know what to do.

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Sometimes, my athletic improvement stalls. Usually, training volume or intensity increases, and the fatigue cancels out any positive fitness gains. A month may pass without improvement.

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe (source)

Those times test my resolve, but I've developed a great strategy for getting through; I extend my time scale. Instead of looking back to last week or last month, I look back farther.

I started keeping a workout log in 2012, when I started at CRC. I have a record of my weight lifting, my rowing and my erg times. Going back farther, I've also recorded my erg times in my online logbook. And I generally have a sense of what I could do as far back as high school.

Some favorite examples:
- When I first started rowing, I couldn't run a mile without stopping. This week I ran 4.5 miles as part of a second workout of the day.
- My first 2K test, I pulled 2:12 for 500m splits. I recently pulled 2:06 splits for nearly 24K!
- In college, I celebrated breaking 2:00 splits for a 4K. Now I'm disappointed by a 6K average split of 1:59.
- In November, I lifted 45 pounds for 6x20 benchpulls. My last lift, I did 45 pounds for 6x150 benchpulls!

These examples remind me that improvement comes over years, not months or weeks or days. They are also a great reminder to judge my speed on my previous results, rather than on the speed of those around me. Ultimately, I will have to beat others, but to get there I first have to improve upon myself.

How do you stay motivated when progress stalls? Do you ever look back?

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When I started training, I was always curious about what other people were doing. A lot of athletes don't share their training plans, which made it difficult to gauge my training versus the typical. I have found a few resources like this national team training plan from 1998. The University of Michigan also provides a lot of information about their training programs.

Still, information is remarkably difficult to find! Perhaps athletes and coaches believe that they'd be giving away trade secrets, but I've come to realize that it's less about what training you do and more about actually doing it. Moreover, this training quite personalized and wouldn't have the same affect on me as my competitors. Finally, I would hope that my competitors have access to enough information that they don't need my training plan!

Certainly, there are weeks I would rather not share. I have bad days and bad months, where I do fewer workouts than I should or split workouts into pieces just to cajole myself into doing them. So when I say this was a typical week, keep in mind that a typical week also usually involves some departure from the training plan.

That being said, last week was a fairly typical week of training. Some weeks we do more long, slow work; last week was primarily focused on speed work in preparation for a 6k erg test this coming weekend.


Monday:
AM - 2x50 minutes (HR167-174); 2:09 splits, burned ~1000 calories
PM - endurance lift, 3 times through: [[120 bench pulls, 20 leg presses, 20 leg lifts, 15 bench press, 120 bench pulls, 60 squats, 20 sit ups, 8 pull-ups, 2' back bridge]]; burned ~ 700c

Tuesday:
AM - 2x1500m at max HR; 1:55 splits. plus 30' warmup, 10' cool down. burned ~550 calories
PM - 75 minutes (HR149-167); 2:16 splits, burned ~700 calories

Wednesday:
AM - 3x10 minutes (HR180-189); 1:58 splits. plus 15' warmup, 15' cool down. burned ~650 calories.
PM - 60 minutes (HR149-167); 2:11 splits, burned ~600c

Thursday:
AM - 75 minutes (HR149-167); 2:11 splits, burned ~ 750c
PM - endurance lift, burned ~675c

Friday:
AM - 2x40 minutes (HR167-174); 2:07 splits, burned ~850c
PM1 - 60' run on treadmill, 6.5 miles, burned ~500c
PM2 - 75 minutes (HR149-167); 2:14 splits, burned ~ 700c

Saturday: I had a long day of job training, so I ended up post-poning the workout to Sunday morning

Sunday:
AM - 10km (HR180-189); 2:07 splits, burned ~625c
(we do this workout pretty often, and none of us did very well on it; we clearly had some residual fatigue from the week)

NOTE: I used calories burned as a measure of relative work load: the more calories, generally the more difficult the workout. I have actually stopped counting calories from a food intake perspective, because I find the numbers to be so inaccurate and inconsistent.

What does your training plan look like? Are you ever curious about what other people are doing?

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In college, I had the opportunity to take two computer programming classes. One was a general engineering requirement, and the other was specific to my major. I absolutely loved both classes, even when they were difficult or frustrating.

Still, I found computer programming to be a lot like mathematics: very intimidating as an inexperienced woman.

It's not that either department at Princeton was unfriendly to women. Certainly there were successful women in both departments, many of whom were friends and acquaintances. They were perfectly lovely people who all had one thing in common: they were really quite good!

Of course, most people who attend Princeton are really quite good at most things they do. It's the culture of the place—a difficult, stressful, fun culture. But as a woman, already out of place in those male-dominated fields, feeling doubly out of place for lack of skill was just too much. And as such, I shied away from male-dominated fields.

("Wait, didn't you major in civil engineering?" you might ask. Indeed, I did; and not only was our department at least half women, it turned out I had quite a knack for it.)

Clearly, I am not pursuing a career in my chosen major. There is a lot of fun work in civil engineering—lots of problem solving and number crunching, both of which I love. But the reasons I have chosen not to pursue civil engineering are too many to list here.

Instead, I've considered a number of other options: studying chemistry and gaining admission to medical school; earning an MBA and going into business; pursuing a graduate degree in nutrition; taking accounting classes; and more. But ultimately, I can't justify the expense of these options, especially not while pursuing rowing.

After a few failed attempts at MIT Opencourseware, I finally stumbled upon something built for me: Codecademy. It's an online introduction to programming, so I can refamiliarize myself with coding logic and learn the syntax in various new languages.

I'm not sure where this will take me. There are a lot of fun projects I'd like to work on, including re-designing this blog. I will waste time and make mistakes, I'm sure, but I suspect even that will be pretty fun. And maybe I will eventually be able to produce something useful.

Any programmers out there? Any advice for getting started? Any cool projects I should attempt?

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As we headed out from Oregon, I had ambitious plans to work out 10 times a week, while driving 5+ hours a day. And for the first half of the trip, I was fairly successful.

Our first day on the road, we stopped at Cape Blanco, the westernmost point in the continental U.S. I got in a 60' trail run along cliffs and across the beach. It was beautiful, and exhilarating. And the next day, I ran through the giant redwoods.

The streak continued, with a few days of erging at lifting at my parents' house in Berkeley, and even a 90' row at the SoCal Scullers in Long Beach, CA. In Vegas, we rode our bikes down the strip, and in Arizona, I did stairs in our motel before tossing around suitcases as weightlifting.

My favorite day of the whole trip: we spent the better part of a day in the Grand Canyon. The altitude made it awfully cold, but we got in a 3-mile hike and I went on a 7-mile run along the rim trail. I could spend a week running in that place and still not see all that I wanted.

But after a week, we were only in Arizona, and we needed to spend more time driving each day. That's when things started to fall apart. Cold weather interfered with plans for a stop in Oklahoma City to row. I managed a few solid days of training here and there, including a 90' bike and a 90' run one day in Florida.

In the end, though, I got to Connecticut with some serious catch-up to do. So, instead of beating myself up about the past, I just got started. My first week back, I put in three workouts a day, capitalizing on easy equipment access and well-rested muscles. And the last 15 days in January, I averaged over 20km a day on the erg, plus some solid weight sessions.

What's the lesson in all of this? Do your best when the going it tough and do better when the going gets easy.

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In a stroke of brilliance, Charter managed to come turn off the cable TV and internet to the house on Saturday morning. We had asked them to move the main input line around and they decided that we could wait a week between de-activating the old input and activating the new input.

Wonderful! Just in time to not be able to watch the SuperBowl.

So Dan and I headed out to a local sports bar to watch the game. We're definitely on a tight budget, so we managed to nurse a beer apiece for most of the game. Still, it was definitely worth the splurge.

Being from Oregon, where there is no pro-football, Dan grew up a Seahawks fan. And starting with a safety on the first play of the game was a real treat. Between fumbles, interceptions and 90+ yard punt returns, the night was filled with astounded mumblings of, "Wait, did that just happen?"

I'm super glad Dan dragged me out—I was ready to call it a night at 5PM, but he convinced me to come along.

To top the night off, the sports bar was having a raffle. And in typical me fashion, I won tickets to the Dave Matthews Band concert in June! So I guess what I'm saying is, thanks Charter. I appreciate your fuck-up more than you know.


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It has come to my attention that most women wear make-up. Many of my favorite bloggers have done "in my make-up bag" posts, where they describe the contents of their make-up bags to readers. Usually, these posts include an "everyday" category and a "special occasion" category.

Looking at their photographs on their blogs, it does become obvious that they are wearing make-up. Still, I find it a bit off-putting that we so expect women to wear make-up that I don't even give it a second thought. Obviously that is the point of make-up, but if you saw a man walking around with make-up, would you notice? Probably.

So I decided to do an "in my make-up bag" post as well. As an athlete, I find make-up incredibly impractical. I shower often enough; I don't want to also pre-wash my face for workouts.

I have certainly gone through phases when I felt like wearing mascara or foundation, and one of the four items in my bag is a remnant of that era: foundation. It's from L'Oreal; I currently use it less than once a month.

The second item in my bag: tinted chapstick. It's Burt's Bees, from an era before I was vegan. If that doesn't give you a sense of how often I use it, I'll make it more obvious: about twice a year. The stuff doubles as blush as well, when I'm feeling rosy.

The final two items in my bag I use all the time: chapstick and lotion! I put chapstick on most nights before bed and use Aveeno lotion daily on my face and hands.

So that's just about it. I keep my skin moisturized, eat well, and sleep enough. Since sunscreen makes me break out, I also try to stay out of midday sun and wear hats/sunglasses to protect my face and eyes.

Do you wear make-up? Do you have an every day routine or just a special occasion routine?

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