When you’re traveling, there’s a lot of sacrifice when it comes to the fun and uniqueness of your food.  Since eating Paleo can be really challenging, I’ve found some staple meals (roast chickens, salads, Paleonola…) and run with them.  And when you find ways to mix it up and make them a little more exciting, it’s a good day.

I’ve been craving peaches lately in a BAD way…yes, I am fully aware that they’re about as far out of season as you can get.  Mostly because I couldn’t find them anywhere…until this week, when I paid an arm and a leg for some extra small, extra hard ones (that’s what she said) at Whole Foods.  I had to leave them on the windowsill all week, but they were finally soft this morning–they cut like butter and were everything I always dreamed.  Anyway, I cut up a couple of them and threw them in a bowl with some almond milk and let it all sit for a while as I got dressed, then threw some Paleonola on top of it all…and voila!  Peaches n’ Cream.  Oh. My. God.  So good.

It’s the little things.

Today’s workout was some more speed work.  Gotta love it.  No, I hate it, but it’s so good for you–both in terms of getting faster and stronger (duh), enhancing cardiovascular strength, and tapping the ol’ fat stores (wedding in three months, people).

5 x 400m @ 7 min/mi
5 x 400m @ 6 min/mi

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1
Push-ups
Hanging leg raises

I was watching Saturday Night Live on VH1 during the running portion, but about 10 minutes in I realized it wasn’t SNL at all…it was Mob Wives.  Have you guys heard of it?  It’s ridiculous…if my hubby was a mobster I’d probably be content laying low, but these chicks put it all out in the open.  I mean, boobs and lips like I never thought possible…and this coming from a Real Housewives addict.

OK, The Man is on his way to San Antonio for the weekend and I have to shower.  I smell like toxic waste right now, and that’s to me.  I don’t even want to know what the people on the elevator ride up were thinking.  Sorry y’all.  

Last night I had a dream that I was both being chased by dinosaurs and dating this guy I haven’t seen since high school…whom I never actually dated and frankly would never, ever want to.  Not sure which part of that scenario is scarier.  And oh, by the way, I was living in a penthouse apartment in the middle of the prehistoric redwood forests.  Terrifying.

Oh, my gracious, y’all…I have some great recipes in the works…I just need to get home, first.  Just a week and a half!  Somehow I just now remembered that Valentine’s Day is less than a month away.  Valentine’s Day is great because it’s completely up to The Man to put on all the lovey-dovey romantic show-and-tell, and all I have to do it sit back and recieve.  No…don’t worry…it’s my job to make a killer meal.  But let’s be honest, I put on great meals all the time.  For this occasion, I have to set out a great/stupendous/foodgasmic meal the likes of which the world has never seen.  And dessert.  There MUST be dessert.

Anyway, rest assured there are a few dozen recipes in the works and I will be sharing them all.  I actually have four different desserts planned, too, which is awesome because I love dessert more than anything in the whole wide world.  Except that I totally won’t be eating any of them (such a lie, btw…) because my WEDDING is 3 months from Saturday!!  Eek!

ANYWAY…

My legs were absolute Jell-O after last night’s squatstravaganza, but it’s been way too long since I gave my upper body a fair shake.  It’s also been an atrociously long time since I’ve been anywhere near a swimming pool.  In case you didn’t know, I was a fish in another life.  I swam competitively for 12 years before college and continued recreationally until I deployed and haven’t been since.  Well, today was the day, people!  In addition to reuniting with the water and replenishing my chlorine stores, I got a hell of an upper body workout.

500 m Warm-up (Free)
250 m Stroke only (Free, using the leg buoy)
25 m Breast (Rec.)
5 x 50 m Sprint (Free) w/ 5 Poolside Push-ups in between sprints
25 m Breast (Rec.)
5 x 50 m Sprint (Free) w/ 5 Poolside Push-ups in between sprints
25 m Breast (Rec.)
250 m Stroke only (Free, using leg buoy)

Killer.  I’m much more out of shape in the water than I thought, though.  I need to make this a regular thing.

Dinner tonight was some “Vanilla-Pepper Roast Chicken” (I got a whole chicken this time, so it should last 3 or 4 days) and roast veggies.

I’ve never heard of “Vanilla-Pepper Chicken” before, but I’m absolutely going to recreate it.  No, really, it’s on my growing list of recipe-inspiration.  I know you all are probably sick and tired of me being away from the kitchen and doing this whole All Talk/No Cook business…so please, please, please don’t worry.  The best is yet to come!

I both love and hate The WOD Shop.  I love it because it eliminates any need I have to be creative when it comes to my workouts.  I hate it because it causes me physical pain.

Today’s WOD:

3 Rounds for Time:
400m Run
50 Squats

Since it’s a randomly generated WOD and has no name, I shall call this one “Cecilia,” because she broke my heart.  When I told The Man about it, his initial response was, “Oh, that’s cool.  Good for you!”…you know, which actually meant something like *Oh, you wussie*

Whatever.  Say what you want.  I know she looks harmless, but she HURT.  I finished in 14 minutes.  I’m sure there were extra seconds added on to that but I used a wall clock to time myself, so deal with it.

Breakfast this morning was an old favorite…Pumpkin Spice Hot Cereal.

Obviously I don’t have a food processor at the hotel, so I just used 1/4 c almond meal instead of the ground pecans.  I was also missing the spices but it was just fine without them.

Today was another loooooooooong day of class.  The course is pretty intense but that’s a good thing because I’m learning a lot.  However (comma) I have to admit that I’m a little worried I may be developing a bed sore on my ass from sitting nine hours a day.

Central Market had a special on today for brisket–one of my favorite things about Texas–so clearly I had a patriotic obligation to eat it.  A lot of it.  With B-nut squash and a ton of sea salt.  Natch.

During/after dinner, The Man and I watched the State of the Union together via Skype.  In fact, one of our first dates was watching Obama’s first State of the Union address.  Don’t judge.

I’ve been forcing myself to sit still all day.  The whole week was crazy busy in class, and I was on the go pretty much all day yesterday with a planned relaxing evening that was promptly ruined…first, the blog had its little hiccup and then my TV went out.  I know, life is soooo hard.  Whatever, it was stressful, ok?

What I’m trying to say is…I needed a day in.  And I kind of had one.  I woke up late-ish and got my first assignments for the semester, did laundry, and read a little.  I also spent two hours of my life–that I will never get back–attempting to move the blog over to WordPress.  I failed.  Miserably.  It’s really confusing for someone as computer illiterate as me, so I ended up deleting everything in what I’m sure was a very colorful fit of rage.  I’m not giving up on the idea because WP can make a really nice-looking blog, but if it happens it’s going to be because I successfully recruited some poor schmuck to do the dirty work for me.

After said tantrum, I realized that if I stayed cooped up any longer, bad things might happen.  There was a farmer’s market down at the Quarry, so I headed over and then had lunch and did a little shopping at Whole Foods for the week.

Officially, this is my new favorite salad…spinach, kale, dark meat turkey, cherry tomatoes, roasted mushrooms, sea salt, and EVOO.  With coffee…obviously.

Even after I got back in from my little outing I was really restless, so I put together a nice little workout I could do in my room.  And let’s be honest, I was dying for an excuse to test a new top I got at Old Navy this morning…super psychedelic and only $10!!!

The workout is nothing crazy, involves nothing but your sweet self, is only 16 minutes, and got rid of any excess energy I had left.  In fact, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

Warm-up (3 x Rounds of 10 Jumping jacks, 10 trunk rotations, 10 push-ups, 10 split kicks)
1 round each (20 sec work/10 sec rest):
Burpees
Sit-ups
Push-ups
Air-Squats

Had to blast the AC afterwards…I was schweaty.

For dinner tonight, I picked up a roast chicken from WF.  My Mom is probably the biggest fan ever of the whole chicken for quick meals, and I’m ashamed to say I really never understood the joy and ease of it until today.  A whole organic chicken is only $8.99 and I can just keep anything I don’t finish in the fridge.  It’s pre-seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper, sage, and thyme.  It’s tender.  Juicy.  Crispy.  What’s not to love?!

Just a heads up, this is going to happen again…probably at home, too.  Every grocery store on the planet has a stand with whole roast chickens, so why the hell not??  (At Sam’s you get two per bag!!).  I This would also be a great idea for anyone on the road.

I shredded as much as I could eat onto a plate, nuked it, and had it alongside some broccoli crunch salad (broccoli, almonds, raisins, bacon)…

Delicious.  Back to class tomorrow…I’m already planning on doing “Michael” (it’s Monday’s WOD at my Crossfit gym) here at the hotel gym.  I love the simpler ones that I can take on the road!

So I changed my blog layout.  Again.  This time, though, it was after something went horribly wrong and the layout got completely undone and no matter what I tried I couldn’t fix it.  I’m also inept at anything involving computers, and I’m positive that something got screwed up with the HTML.  I was playing around with a lot of fun blog-cessories I found on the Food Blog Alliance…and let’s just say I got a little carried away.

Long story short, I had to revert to one of the “Classic Templates” for the blog because for some reason, only this and a couple others would move everything back to where it was supposed to be.  If anyone has a better idea, please let me know…

What does this mean for the blog?  Not a whole lot, but I was pulling my hair out for a good part of the afternoon/evening yesterday so I want you to feel my pain.  No, I don’t really.  But I am going to keep working on the issue until I can find a better solution because I’ll be honest, this layout is so 2006.  If I can’t resolve everything on this domain I’ll probably just say Screw It and move everything over to WordPress.

More to follow…and hopefully you won’t even notice the fact that everything is totally, utterly, obviously, blatantly, strikingly different.

-C

I am a morning person.  My whole life, I’ve loved mornings.  Like, really looked forward to waking up kind of love for mornings.  It’s just when you start waking me up way earlier than I’m comfortable with only to rush me out the door (I never even have enough time to brew a pot of coffee) that I get really b*tchy and become one of those people no one can tolerate before noon.  I don’t have to go to PT while I’m in class in San Antonio, so I’ve been getting back in touch with my roots lately–my alarm goes off at 6, I go prep the coffeepot, go back to bed and lay around until said coffee is done, consume said coffee, make breakfast, then putz around in my pajamas until about 8.  Amazing.  (And yes, I know 6 is early but keep in mind that I usually get up at 4:30, so bite me).

Oh, and another nice thing about not getting up at the a**crack of dawn…I have so much more energy to work out on my own.  I mean, sure, I usually get a second workout in at some point in the afternoon, but when you’re actually well-rested (I’ve been sleeping an average of 10 hours a night this week…oh yeah) I can work out once a day and get a whole heck of a lot more out of it.  Funny how that works.

I have both an APFT and the Austin Half Marathon coming up, so I’ve been making a point of running a bit more–or at least doing some sprint and speed work.  I’ll tell you, I don’t miss running a bajillion miles every day.  At all.  My run yesterday was short but I guarantee you I got more out of it than any 10-miler of yore.  This was on a treadmill but you could easily take it outside…it’s basically 1 minute of max effort and 3 minutes at a slow jog.

5 min – 10 min/mi
1 min – 6 min/mi
3 min – 10 min/mi
Repeat x 7 (Total 30 minutes)

I also worked my 5RM on shoulder press and the leg press machine…leave it to those Navy guys to hog the squat bar…

I’ll admit, I’m being extremely experimental by consciously not running much to train for the half.  In the past I’d be throwing at least two 8-10 mile runs in a week at this point and running up about 30 miles a week at minimum.  But over the last year I’ve gotten so much stronger and faster not doing that, and I feel better.  The first test was the Super Spartan in December, and The Man and I both did awesome having Crossfit-ed a whole lot without having run more than maybe a 10k for months (I hadn’t run that much in over a year thanks to being deployed)…I finished 4th in my age group and 12th overall out of 600-something women.

The Man finally got me dabbling in some of the Max Effort Black Box programming and adding more and more max effort lifts into my routine.  I’m no fitness expert by any means, but I like the philosophy behind it–you get stronger when you actually exert your max effort once in a while.  I’ll tell you, after a max effort lift, I’m generally ready for a long nap, so believe you me…your world can be sufficiently rocked in a couple minutes under a barbell.  What’s more, with my history of adrenal burnout, I like Mark Sisson’s point that it’s a lot harder to overtrain this way…when you’re hell bent on running long distances or slogging through a metcon every day, you’re more likely to complete the workout when you shouldn’t and cause damage to yourself.  When you’re trying to lift heavy and you’re burned out, you’re simply not going to be able to do it. Either the bar goes up or it doesn’t, and in the case of the latter you get a free wake up call–Hey, dummy, take a break.

OK, I know you all don’t care about that and will laugh until you cry when I attempt to run this half marathon and end up passing out and falling in the lake.  Whatever.  I would totally laugh at me, too, so no love lost.  You guys are great

Oh! Oh!  My blog is featured on Shape.com in Fitness Bloggers Reveal: What’s in Their Gym Bag…all of the other ladies have way better pictures than I do, but mine was taken at work and I always look terrible at work…Special thanks to Charlotte Hilton Anderson of The Great Fitness Experiment for putting this up!