39. The One Where I Had A Whole Day To Do Nothing

26 September 2015

Since I've got six days - eek - to go, I'm now fully into the taper!  I had 10km to do on the schedule today.  I was a bit tempted to do 20km because 10km just feels so ... short ...!  And lazy!  But I soon pulled myself together and realised I sounded like one of those, and put the 10km back on the schedule.  I went down to Richmond Park and figured I'd just do a lap which is 11km, close enough.

Once I'd sorted that out, I had the biggest decision to make ... get up early (again) and have the day free, or sleep in and spend the morning getting to Richmond and running?  Hmmmm ... in the end the day won out and I got down to Richmond for 08:00.


It was sooooooo beautiful this morning!  I've not been able to see Richmond in that sort of light before because every time I've been down there it's been a bit grey and miserable.  Not today!  There was this amazing mist that covered the park with a blazing blue sky above and all the autumn colors in between.  I don't really love Richmond Park but I'm probably the only person ever to say that.  The park itself is cool and all - and there are deer, and deer are good - but it's just not massively my place.  Today though, it was GORGEOUS and I got what people keep telling me - it's lovely!

By the way there is no filter on this - there was condensation on the lens!

I was just doing one lap round the perimeter 'cause it was close enough to 10km and it's easier than thinking about it too much and zigzagging round.  On top of that, it meant that I didn't have to worry about navigation and with the shorter distance, I could just run!  This was exciting - I really really wanted to run today and I absolutely loved 95% of this run (the 5% is the bit where you know, you have to run up a hill and it feels like your lungs could actually explode imminently and your legs are at serious risk of dropping off).

It was nice to be running clean (ie not carrying anything) for a change and it was nice to be able to run rather than try and conserve energy.  I'm not saying I was fast - please, don't think that for a second - and I did walk from time to time especially on the massive hill at the end.  The aim was still ultra-training, so keeping it slow and real, but it was just nice to do a proper lovely run again!

It was also lovely to have a WHOLE DAY without either running or work!  Don't get me wrong; I've had some fantastic days running but yeesh, it's been a lot of training on weekends.  I'm not actually doing anything, seeing as I'm meant to be in lockdown resting (honestly, you can take the girl out of triathlon but you can never take the triathlete out of the girl ... and no-one takes a taper as seriously as a triathlete.  We will taper aggressively and competitively!).  However ...  I've been able to check out my next nutritional adventure!  Check out these bad boys - these are peanut butter banana muffins!  When I said I was going to be doing muffins, my friend Rosh (who is an Ironman and so who I suppose, knows about this sort of thing) told me that I had to think about what sort of Glycaemic Index rating my home-made foods were going to have because otherwise I'd end up eating but not getting the right fuel.  I thought about that and decided to come up with the closest thing to a peanut butter and banana wrap as I could, but in form that is edible to me.  Enter ... peanut butter and banana muffins!  I have - ahem - quality-tested one and I can confirm that it is A.MAZE.  I just got the recipe from Tesco actually but it fits all the bills - it's got peanut butter for fats and long-term energy, oats and flour and bready things for medium energy and sugar and bananas for instant energy.  Perfect right?!

37. The One With the Cheesy Scuffin

23 September 2015

So I was back on the treadmill today for a repeat of Monday - 90 minutes with my heart-rate under 130.  That was the easy bit, especially as my heart was being exceptionally co-operative this morning.  My heart rate hung out at about 121 throughout apart from a couple of spikes up to 125.

The more tricky part was that I'm still working on nutrition.  I just don't think I can do peanut butter in a wrap or sandwich again, and I'm running out of time to test new things.  I was giving this some thought earlier in the week, and my goals are:

1. to get to the end of the run without feeling like I'm weighed down by all the crap that I've been eating;
2. to find something I actually fancy eating in the run; and 
3. to find something that that's not hugely dissimilar to bread-type products like wraps or bread, but isn't either of those things.  

Given those parameters, I thought that savory muffins (the American kind) might be the answer to my problems in life.  I thought if I could do some vegetable ones I might even get to the end of the run with some real nutrients in me rather than empty carbs!  However, in order to ease myself gently into this, I thought I'd try this nice easy recipe for cheese muffins, not least because they only had a few ingredients and I could get them at my local store rather than having to schlep ALL the way to the big store (700m away.  The horror).  I also picked them because cheese.  CHEESE.

I baked them up last night and quality tested one out last night.  I would give it a 7/10 for the muffin itself as a food product ... I said to some friends that it didn't know whether it was a muffin or a scone because it was fully of cheddary paprika (I subbed out the sultanas in the recipe for more paprika and a few chilli flakes because I really wanted it to be savory and not have any hint of sweetness).  Romy then hit upon the brilliant idea of calling it a scuffin - SCUFFIN!  Love that.  So I present to you my scuffins:

I managed to smuggle one onto the treadmill with me today, and I thought I'd test it out after an hour of my 90 minute run.  I have never felt more like a) an idiot; and b) the secret eater in the corner as I tried to eat it unobtrusively (you're not allowed food in the gym, oh well, sorry Virgin).  It definitely worked for energy - I felt great after it!  The only thing was that it was super-dry and when I think about the ingredients, there's nothing there to give it any moisture.  That didn't make it the easiest to eat on the go, so I think I might try something else for my run on Friday morning.  However, since I felt so good after it I'm going to try something similar; maybe a zucchini and cheese muffin or something.  I will decide tomorrow when I'm baking them!

In addition to my muffin investigations, My friend Rosh suggested that we speak to his friend Ludovica, who's a sports nutritionist, and she recommended Feed Zone Portables.

I have actually had this book for ages and never cooked a single thing out of it!  Ha - I think I bought it on a whim at a tri show one year.  I looked through it yesterday and it's got things like sticky rice cakes (but nice ones, not those bits of cardboard you buy in the store), sausage and potato cakes, french toast cakes and scallion pancakes.  Can I just say sausage and potato cakes one more time?!  I want to try some of these to take on my run on Saturday so I think Thursday's going to be full of baking!  I'll report back.