Didn't just run yesterday...

I made some bread.

Up in Cuevas, we've got a giant field of potatoes and Saturday night Hugo and I dug out 2, 5 gallon paint buckets full of them.  Needless to say, I've had potato in some form or another every day since then.  They're tasty.

Monday night I roasted a batch, and yesterday turned that yumminess into Roasted Potato Bread.  I'll spare you the recipe this time; it's straight out of Hamelman.  I accidentally doubled the pre-ferment on Monday night, but that's the good thing about those recipes:  If you've got the ingredients, it's easy to adjust on the fly.  I ended up with 4 loaves, one which I gave away, another which got eaten yesterday (except for the scrap you see in the picture below), and 2 for the near future.

Anyway, it seems that my run yesterday was a bit overzealous so I'll be taking it easy on the foot today.  It is achy, and won't let me walk without a hitch in my step.  If it loosens up today, I may try to get some form work in later on.

Thanks for reading and be safe out there.
J

60% Whole Wheat with Oatmeal and Chia Seeds

Baking bread is something of a hobby for me.  It's one of the reasons I could never become a "Paleo" dieter - grains are off the menu.  The reasoning seems sound, but frankly I like grains and legumes and that is that.

Anyway, today I made my first original recipe bread.  I'm actually sure it's not original, but I don't have a recipe for it, rather I applied techniques I've learned by baking from the book Bread.  That book isn't for everyone, but it sits squarely in my wheelhouse going into meticulous detail and teaching why a baker would do something.  It's written more for the professional baker, but I have found that it suits for my kneeds.

One of the reasons I like the book so well, the recipes are all written to scale; every amount is given for large batch cooking, home baking and as a percentage of the total weight of flour.  That means that if you use 1 kilogram of flour and a recipe calls for 68% water, you know you need 680 grams (or ml) of water.  Guess work gone.  That's tremendous.

Here's the recipe, I'd give cups and tablespoons, but I use a scale because of the variability in weight of a cup of flour.

Prefermented Flour.
300g Whole Wheat Flour
200g Bread Flour
3g Yeast
500g Water

Simply mix the ingredients above in a bowl and let them sit on the counter overnight.  It's likely you'll see a ring indicating the dough inflated and deflated overnight.

Soaker.
150g Rolled Oats
50g Chia Seeds
40g 24g Salt
180g Water

This also got mixed the night before.  Use hot water, allow to cool on the counter, then stick in the fridge.

Final Dough.
300g Whole Wheat Four
200g Bread Flour
90g Water
50g Honey
Soaker
Pre-ferment

Combine all of the above ingredients together in a bowl and kneed for a while.  (I usually look for 10 minutes of 600 strokes whichever comes first.  The gluten will develop more as the dough rises.)

I let the dough rise for probably 2.5 hours and I folded it twice during the rise.  Your results may vary depending on the temperature of your house. Once risen, preshape the dough into rounds and then form whatever type of loaf you like.  Pan loaves, I like hearth loaves, rounds...

The final rise took this dough 1.5 hours during which time I ran a couple of errands.

Cook in a hot oven with a pan of boiling water on the bottom shelf.  The recipes I used suggested 450 degrees, but my oven has temperature marked out as 5,4,3,2, and 1.  I had the setting on 4.  Bake for 40 or so minutes and allow to cool before cutting.  The hardest part.

I can report that this bread is delicious and the chia seeds give a really nice texture to the bread.

Thanks for reading and feel free to send me your bread recipes, I'd like to see what you like.
J

Thinking about food

One reason I've always led an active lifestyle is it's given me pretty much a blank check to cash in on whatever food and drink I wanted.  That's great because I love to eat and drink.

Recently however, I had been struggling with my weight.  I was well over 220 lbs and often found myself tipping the scale at 230.  I drank a fair amount of high octane beer, and had a diet which seemed reasonable at the time, but I'm not so sure anymore.

Something about my diet changed when I got to Bolivia.  I don't have a scale, but I can see in the mirror that I've lost quite a bit of weight - my gut has clear left, middle, and right sections and veins are popping out all over the place.  In Colorado, I was soft - for sure.

Again: something about my diet changed when I got to Bolivia.  It's hard to pinpoint what precisely, but I haven't been eating this:

Though I want to be...

The thing is.  The diet here isn't much different than what you see on that plate.  Up there is pork, cheese, potatoes, cheese, onions, chilis, garlic.

I think I may be more restricted in my caloric intake in general.  I've had ice cream like twice, maybe 3 times since moving here in February.  I eat a lot more fruit.  I eat breakfast.  I've swapped out normal beer for microbrew.  I have about a normal human's size portion of food for lunch - today: 1 Chicken Thigh, a good sized helping of potato salad, which included probably 1/2 a tomato, 1/2 a green bell pepper, and 1/2 a carrot.  Last night's dinner was about 2 servings of Lentil Salad.  Breakfast was probably 2 and a half eggs and a peanut butter sandwich with 1/2 a glass of yogurt and 1/2 a glass of milk.

Not having a scale is interesting, and I expect I will have one soon.  I'd really like to measure my sweat rate for one thing (another post for another time) and I'd like to start tracking my weight again.  If I end up actually lining up for 2 one hundred mile races next year, I'll need to stay on top of my nutrition.

That brings me to the whole point of this post in the first place.  Recently I listened to a very interesting podcast which talked about race day fueling and other things nutrition.  Based on that I posed a question to Joe Friel on his recent blog post.  One part of what he had to say in response to my question, I found to be quite provocative (emphasis mine):

Sugar is closely monitored and processed by the body as it is viewed almost as a toxic substance. So the body does unique things with it (e.g., converted to glycogen, glucose or fat very quickly after processing) that it doesn't do with fat or protein.

While running yesterday, I was mulling that statement over and remembered that Joe is an advocate of the so called Paleo Diet. I googled alot about it last night and this morning.

Essentially it is a diet which is centered on lean meats, fruits, nuts and tubers.  The kinds of foods that hunter gatherers would have eaten before we settled down in Mesopotamia.  I'm usually quite skeptical of stuff like this, but a lot of the arguments for a "paleo" diet hit the same "that makes sense" button that the barefoot running advocates I've come to subscribe to tag.  One interesting article is found here:
http://thepaleodiet.com/published-research/cordain-anthropology-of-sport-chapter/
It's a quick read, and worth the time.  If for no other reason than to familiarize oneself with the arguments.

I don't expect I'll ever fully subscribe to a paleo diet, but I may begin to incorporate some of its principles into my daily eating.  I first need to get my brain around what that really means...

Thanks for reading, and try to understand why before actually doing.
J

Frustrations and Form Work

Everyone here has a car alarm.  For some reason, last night ours decided to go off.  I'm not entirely sure why we have a car alarm - our car looks like a beater.  Maybe it is a beater.

Anyway, the doors locked outside of the market where Nataly was buying diapers and wouldn't re-open.  She was actually able to break in through the back window (effective alarm I know), and drive it home, but now we can't reset the damn thing.  It's incredibly frustrating.  She's supposedly going to call the mechanic who'll hopefully come help us out, but for now I'm not going anywhere - and I need to buy coffee.

On the other side of things, yesterday I worked on a couple of Danny Abshire's form work drills for natural runners.  Similar to the high cadence stuff I've been doing the last several form workouts, I did intervals with 1 minute on and 4 off.  I alternated between high knees and butt kicks.

The high knee drill kicked my but you might say.  In fact, 1 minute long intervals were on the fringe of being too long.  Toward the end of my workout my lower back was screaming toward the end of the interval and I was doing things to compensate.  I should have cut the intervals short, but it didn't occur to me during the workout.  I'll have another chance to be a better self coach.

Got a tough workout on tap for today and I'm feeling tired.  We'll see how that goes.
Thanks for reading and be safe out there.
J

Mmmmm...Pizza.

...Author's note, this first section was written yesterday on my phone and I don't care to change the date references and such...

This here was arguably the best pizza I've ever made.  Dinner last night, couldn't help but gloat.

I'm currently stuck in Santa Cruz awaiting the magic hour of 2:30 at which time I'll be able to pick up a piece of paper which I needed renewed. Then I'll go wait in another line and hopefully, finally get my residency paperwork finished and off to La Paz.

My run today is a sacrifice to the gods of bureaucracy.  Yesterday though I got a number of running things done.  One thing I've never done is to really work on my form. So I Googled about and found some form drills for barefoot runners. The first link had a bunch of good stuff which isn't terribly surprising considering the author.  While I'm not a fan of his shoes, I am a fan of his philosophy...

The drills consist of things like running in place with a focus on high cadence or knee lift,  butt kicks and jumping rope.  So I spent quite some time chasing and/or being chased by Deneb around the house all the while doing these silly drills (except the rope jumping). He thought it a good time.

I also set up a track consisting of thirty bricks in an oval which I then proceeded to do laps around barefoot. I had thought Deneb would dig this too, but I was mistaken, he rather quickly decided I was working in the (author's note - end of stuff written yesterday) yard and complained "No Ayu-u-da"...

Speed work done, I put on my vffs and got out and ran another 5.5 miles slowly while I thought about picking up my foot rather than pushing off with it.  I actually got in a mile more than I had anticipated because, even though I was tired from the previous 2 days efforts, it just felt good to be running.  I didn't really want to stop.

This photo was taken about 2.5 miles into my run, and the one below is at about mile 3.

Much of my running here is on sandy dirt roads.  Depending on what the weather has been like, the sand can be pretty deep.  Makes for an interesting workout.

Yesterday (really), I finally got my paperwork approved and off to La Paz.  In 3 weeks I'll have a sticker which says I can stay in Bolivia unmolested for a full year.  I was done with that finally around 6PM.  When I called Nataly to hopefully have her pick me up, instead she said, "I've got a few more things to do could you come over here?"

I ran.

Pretty nice spectacle too.  Tan dress slacks, blue cotton button down short sleeve wide open, dress shoes.  More than one person actually laughed at me.  Whatever.  I got 31 minutes running on a day I thought a run would be sacrificed to the gods of bureaucracy - should that be the name of a band?

thanks for reading

J

Week in review.

So, last week was a waste.  On Saturday some Enanitos Verdes* moved into my chest.

I only wish they serenaded me with something more than a percussive cough.  A year or two ago, I developed pneumonia because I went too hard when I was developing what I thought was a minor cold.  Will never do that again.  Pneumonia is no joke.  Sucked.

I didn't run from Sunday through Wednesday.  Finally on Thursday I had to grab the Beanery from his school and I ran over there with Jackson and the Chariot.  I was still coughing up stuff, but it was a nice frothy white rather than rather dense green.  Friday I was off again, but that was mostly caution and Saturday and Sunday I ran the same 4 mile loop each day.  Today I'll be back at it full time.

One thing I did to mitigate the temptation to go hard on my runs was to run barefoot when I did get out.  Those 4 milers were longer than any previous barefoot run and now the balls of my feet are a bit chaffed.  I'll be running in my Vibrams today to allow for some healing.

Another weird injury occurred because I wear a belt leash around my waist so that I have both hands free when running with Homey.  I have always had a "sensitive" lower back.  It'll go out for little to no good reason and for a week or so I have trouble bending over and picking something up.  I'd never had a problem with the dog around my waist before, but this weekend he was pulling pretty good and I noticed it occasionally messing with my form by rotating my hips forward at the top.  Jackson isn't typically a puller, but he was hyped for the running Saturday for sure, probably because we hadn't been out because I was sick.

Otherwise, I've gotta praise my Eagles for their really nice win yesterday.  They played seemingly well in all phases of the game, and MV7 wasn't the quarterback meaning I could cheer the plays and the players.  Why do I bring this up?  Well, first off, I've been an Eagle fan since before their first super bowl appearance and second, because I was one productive house husband this weekend.  During the game, I baked bread and did laundry and after the game I made dough for pizza.  That was a score!

Thanks for reading.
J

*Enanitos Verdes = Little Green Men (or Green Dwarves)...