Running Snacks

As those among us who unfortunately find ourselves living in Europe would know, Saturday’s sunshine was a fluke. For someone who was born along the equator, I find it almost impossible to believe that I’m outdoors running in a thin cotton T-shirt one day, and watching flurries of snow outside the window a short 48 hours later. So it was back on the treadmill yesterday for a 9mi (14.4km) run that was over before I knew it.

The returning cold and disappearance of light does several things to me, the worst of it feeling like I have no energy. I can only keep my fingers tightly crossed that we will see sun on race day, or else my engine may fail to start. On the other hand, it could also be because my lunches have been looking mostly like this:

Delicious…

But not exactly balanced.

During the medical check-up to get my clearance for the race, after going through my usual diet, the doctor advised me to eat less leafy vegetables. I thought my ears were deceiving me; surely I must be the first person in the world to be told this? She went on to elaborate that switching to starchy root vegetables and pulses will deliver the same vitamins and minerals, but also give me more energy, and reduce digestive distress which running can sometimes create.

I’m not in denial; I take enough photos of my meals to have all the evidence before me that I do indeed eat quite a diabolical amount of vegetables, and it does concern me what may happen on race day. I’m not willing to give up my favourite meal completely, but I am willing to tweak its contents to be more runner-friendly. This is a simple trick I’ve learnt that will help people lose or gain weight. It’s not about cutting out something completely, but making small changes to existing habits that will add up over the long run.

In this meantime, this runner’s been busy getting the energy from elsewhere…

Drink your food, eat your drinks

Earl Grey Muffins

150g flour
100g brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg 100ml milk
50ml earl grey tea, brewed and cooled (save teabag)
4 tablespoons oil
2 teaspoons vanilla essence

Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).
Mix dry ingredients in one bowl.
Mix wet ingredients in another bowl.
Snip open the earl grey teabag and add leaves into the wet ingredients.Yes, they’re edible. No, you won’t die.
Make a well in the dry ingredients, pour wet ingredients in, and fold. Don’t overmix.
Spoon into muffin pans, pop into oven for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

When I was in my early teens and had just picked up running, I recall eating a lot of bars. Energy bars, granola bars, trail bars, basically anything with the word “bar” in it. I realize now that it’s just mostly processed carbs glued together with a lot of corn syrup and sorely overpriced. If I’m going to be eating refined flours, I might as well eat a fresh homemade version of it, instead of something that’s wrapped in foil and been sitting on a supermarket shelf for the last 8 months.

Now if only someone can enlighten me on how to make muffins portable during a long run…

The Secret to Happiness…

Is trying something new. I was going to title this Pushing the Boundaries, but trying something new doesn’t necessarily have to be tackling something complex, frightening, or brag-worthy. The foreignness of “something new” already has all that elements, be it running 5K for the first time, or cooking a meal for the first time, or falling in love for the first time.

I’ve got a backlog of food photos I’ve been meaning share on here, but I’ve got something far more exciting than just throwing out the recipes for them, so I’ll simply let the pictures do the talking. Perhaps someone will find inspiration for tonight’s dinner, or use them as friendly reminders that vegetables are awesome.

So good for vegetarians in so many ways.

Canned fish for hasty lunches…

It does taste as good as it looks.

Whaddaya know, salads make fabulous desserts too.

No matter how proud I am of all those, I will be the first to admit that throwing things together and giving them a quick toss is hardly called cooking. It’s called arranging. All it takes is a lazy person with a penchant for pleasing visual effects on the plate. Indeed, what scares me a lot more is baking.

There is a very simple explanation for why I never got the correct results in school at chemistry class – I could never get the measurements correct. Truly, I would follow instructions to the T, abiding by specifications and yet… Anyway, pipettes and mmols are a lifetime ago now, but I continue to experience the fear of precision every time I bake. Which is why I raised a few eyebrows when I announced I was going to make my own bread.

My first obstacle was discovering that bread recipes called for yeast. I did not have yeast. I did find one that used beer as an ingredient, but my beers are too precious to experiment with. I finally had the sense to Google a recipe using baking soda, and of course, I got Irish Soda Bread.

My second obstacle was buttermilk. Some even wanted me to add white wine vinegar. That sounded like it could induce explosive chemical reactions, which I do not wish to attempt in my kitchen. I found another recipe calling me to mix milk with yogurt. That, I can do.

So I did.

TADA.

As soon as it was sufficiently cooled, I sliced up a chunk despite not being hungry. It’s only professional to taste your creations after all. Then, like the song tells me to, I brewed some “tea, I drink with jam and bread”, except it was homemade bread which makes it far more awesome than the bread in the song, and the tastiest carb in the world.

Tempo Running and A Good Meal

Thank the FSM, today’s run was fantastic. I am still in the go-easy-on-the-sore-spots mode, while I have now reached the part of the training plan where the mileage is increasing faster than some countries’ national debt. I do tempo runs on Wednesdays, but surely, 8mi(12.8km) is too long for a tempo run. All right, I actually have no idea what the perfect distance for a tempo run is, and I cannot find any meaningful literature to tell me, so I suspect no one else really knows either. Runners who read this post, please share info/links on tempo run distances if you can. As it is, I run at a hard-to-talk-but-not-completely-breathless pace that I can sustain for over 40 minutes.

This works out to 10kph for 5mi(8km). I’ve been tempo-running this distance and speed for a few weeks now, but any temptation to push harder was mitigated by a whole week off running. Fitness gained quickly can also be lost quickly, it seems. I knew from experience that this is a hard run, so I simply broke the last 3mi (4.8km) into warm-up and cool-down jogging, at 8.3kph since it worked well on Monday.

Well here’s an observation. Running fast takes effort, but running slowly does too. In fact, it’s a different type of effort. When I calculated the energy output per mile at those two difference paces, I was shocked to find that it took more calories to run a mile at the slower speed. Before anyone gleefully concludes that jogging trumps running for weight loss purposes, though, let’s not forget the post-exercise burn. I’m no physicist so don’t ask me to account for aerobic/anaerobic differences. All I can tell you is, running fast is hard on the heart and lungs, running slow is hard on everything else.

So, that’s one more good run under the belt, with no pains whatsoever. It was a hard enough challenge, but not impossible to complete. I simply had to celebrate.

Because tempo runs work up a decent appetite.

And because runners need extra fuel right? Come on! I just burnt a gajillion calories, man.

That’s oatmeal raisin and walnut cookies, if you’re curious. Eating oatmeal porridge so often is starting to make me feel as if I were a horse. (Right, I will stop horsing around with the horsemeat reference. Maybe.) I’m sure it’ll give me extra horsepower.

What Makes Me Run – Milk

From what I understand, post-workout is the best time to feed oneself. Whether it’s for gaining weight or losing weight, eating after a workout is apparently a good idea. It’s not magic that the same advice can produce two completely opposing results, it all boils down to quantity. Want to bulk up? Eat more. Want to trim down? Eat less. Lots of literature exists extolling the benefits of eating after exercise: recovery and repair, improving fat metabolism, muscle growth, yadda yadda… yawn.

For me, it’s much less complicated. Eating after a workout means the meal becomes a nice motivation to exercise. I am literally running towards my food! Think about it, (or don’t think about it; animals don’t seem to need to) what else can make one run faster than the idea of food? Perhaps the idea of becoming the food itself, but until the day I see Godzilla, Jaws and King Kong emerge from the bowels of the earth, I leave this concern to grass eaters of the Serengeti.

Like all meals, a good post-workout feed should include a balance of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Now, much as the idea of chili con carne or chicken korma appeals to me, it’s not always easy to stomach a complete meal after intense physical effort. On long run days (like today), just thinking of having to chew my food exhausts me. Instead, I drink my calories.

Mmm… Cow juice

I’m not lactose intolerant/vegan, I just love the taste

It’s such a shame to think that once upon a time, children drank milk at the rate that the children today drink soda. Growing up in the 90s and 00s, there was this hysteria over saturated fat – the kind in full cream milk. I became one of those folks who drank cloudy water (a.k.a skim milk) to the point where I was so accustomed to the taste, that full cream milk in huge quantities made me slightly ill. In Singapore and Australia, I was spoilt for choice in cafes as to what kind of milk I wanted with what kind of coffee I fancied.

Not so in this (and many other parts of) France. Coffee normally comes as an espresso, or a long black. Often if you ask for milk, you are given these piddly 10ml UHT cartons of milk – the kind you find on your meal trays on airplanes – to pour into your coffee yourself. Sometimes they make you pay for these atrocities. In the cases where they do have coffee machines, the ratio of coffee to milk never tastes correct. Frequently, you ask for a cappuccino and you’re given a mocha. I know, it makes me cry too. And in the few instances when they do have milk, and can make a proper café latte, the only type of milk they offer is full cream milk. I started braving the full cream, and slowly realised it has such a rich mouth-feel that I am very quickly sated with one drink. Try sipping a fat-free diet soda and see if it sustains you for five hours.

I drink my milk in this:

It was a less-than-subtle gift from my sister telling me to cheer the f*** up. No points for guessing what my nickname is. Anyway, it works – who can stay grumpy for long when drinking from a crazy straw? It is hours of fun, I tell you. After my 11 miles today I worked through a litre (about 34 fluid oz) of milk, which may seem like a horrific amount until you stop to think about the soda buckets in 7-11 or McDonald’s.

Bottoms up, folks. Here’s to the drink we all enjoyed when we first arrived on this planet.