2013/05/13

if cinderella wore minimalist runners

I ran enough to kill a pair of runners!

This is a milestone moment. I hope my Official Runner badge from the Order of Proper Runners is in the mail.

Nike Frees, rest in peace, we had a good innings (and ran a half marathon together), but your days are done.

This feels especially exciting because I’ve been on the bench for the last few months with a lung injury (yes, only I would manage to injure a part of my body that is pretty much protected from the entire world) and have only recently been given the okay to lace up and pound some pavement again. My runs have become precious moments, something to be savoured – even when I face the Epic Hill on my way home, which is so steep it cowes cyclists and makes me feel like I’m falling forwards on a Stairmaster.

As I’ve got to lace up my shoes once again over the last few weeks, I have realised how lucky I am to be able to enjoy this time outside, running. I’ve tried hard not to fall into complaining about being injured or feeling like a giant blob (as the girl who routinely concocted ever-more-unlikely excuses to skip PE class, it still amazes me that I miss running now if I don’t go), and to remind myself that there are lots of people out there who don’t get to run at all. I’m one of the lucky ones.

I realised I’ve now been running in some combo of barefoot/minimalist shoes for over two years now. (I also listen to bands that don’t even exist yet.) Barefoot running seems to have tipped over from the edgy days a few years ago when I’d run around East London in my shocking pink Vibrams and people would stop and stare, or ask what on earth was on my feet, or on one notable occasion, tell me they disapproved of my footwear and that my shoes would injure me (fact: Vibrams may cause youth to revolt); although I’d say that I still don’t see many people running in a full-on barefoot shoe, as opposed to hanging out or working in MEC. I still head-nod when I see a fellow Vibram-wearer on a run.

I still put a fair amount of mileage on my Vibram Fivefinger Bikilas and my Komodo Sports. If anything, I slightly prefer the Komodo; while they are a wee bit heavier than the Biks, my Bikilas always slip slightly on my heel and while they don’t chafe, it slowly drives me crazy over the course of a longer run. Vibram chatter indicates this is a common problem, so YMMV. The grip on the Komodo is also WAY better; if it’s more than sprinkling out (in Vancouver: likely) I leave the Biks at home because they are pretty much grip-free on wet pavement and I have enough trouble focusing on my run without also having to put the ninja brakes on every time I go round a corner. The Komodos are grippy and comfy up to about 8-10km or so; anything over that, I find I get very conscious of the front part of my foot hitting the ground.

As an aside, if you’re hiking steeper terrain, I did once do the Grouse Grind trail in the Komodos and couldn’t have been more miserable; my calf muscle locked up about 10 minutes in and I ended up limp-running to the top, so if you’re taking a pass at nature’s stair master, you may be better off with a regular running shoe. Just not high heels, okay?

The Nike Frees have been my everyday workhorse shoe for the last, oh, 18 months (I know, I know, but I’m not a bazillionaire; new runners every six months gets pricey fast and I have a tea habit to feed). We ran a half marathon together last summer with nary a chafe nor a slipped heel, and over the last 9km or so I was glad of the extra cushioning versus my Vibrams. But in the last few weeks they’ve suddenly started to feel pinchy in odd spots and I’ve been footsore especially after hill work, so I realised it was time we started seeing other people.

As I write this, I realise that all my shoes share the same colour scheme. For neon coral makes you go faster.

So given that my Nikes and I have come to the end of our road running journey together, it was time to find a new running partner in crime. Enter someone a little new, a little different: a fresh pair of New Balance WR-1400 racing flats. When I put these on, the lady in the shop exclaimed in surprise and commented on how they fit me like they were made for me. These guys feel light as a feather, even changing straight from the Frees into them. While they may look in pictures like they have a whole lot of cushion to them, in the quick lap I did around the block they felt more minimal than the Frees: giving you a plugged-in, conscious road ride. The toe box has plenty of room in, they run a little narrow but nothing to blow your mind, and overall, they fit me like my very own pair of Cinderella glass slippers. I powered home with the box clutched under my arm, already plotting our first adventure.

I feel grateful and excited that I get to take them out for a spin real soon.

2013/02/03

seeing the corners of the world from the corners of your mat

I have a confession to make. For the last week, I’ve been having private yoga lessons in my living room with Eoin Finn.

OK, so he’s on my laptop screen comin’ at me from his Bali retreat and I’m stretching out to the sounds of my clamorous West-Coast city waking up, but still, I think there’s been a connection.

But Steph, I hear you say. You live in Yoga Central. You’re surrounded by rinky-dink studios with saunas and spas and massages and Fire Rooms and podiums and world-famous teachers. Why would you ever do yoga in your living room?

Well, friend, the huge advantage of online yoga is that I can go from being studied-out and stiff to unrolling my mat and scraping my hair into a ponytail ready to go in five minutes flat. On my first dark, cold Vancouver evening, my shoulders knotted from puzzling over buying jargon all day, no sooner did I position my laptop on a chair and shove the textbooks out of sight then my chosen video opened to the sounds of lapping Bali waves and I could feel my shoulders start to creep away from my ears. It was a far cry from from my usual mid-week trip to the yoga studio: a racing round trip that had to be “fitted in”, involving a quest to locate yoga gear, packing my huge yoga bag, hunting for mat strap (always filed under F for floor), running for the bus, sitting on a city bus trying to avoid thwacking people with my yoga mat, and finally bustling into a busy studio class with thirty other post-work yogis.

Online yoga’s popping up all over: My Yoga Online and YogaGlo are two of the biggies, and most offer free trials or coupons (try RetailMeNot for up to date ones). You can search by class types, favourite teachers, or time you have available, from 20-minute ‘quickies’ to 90 minute hip-slayers, newbies to serious yogi-babes. It’s a great way to stop those “I don’t have time” excuses in their tracks: I don’t think there’s many of us who couldn’t find 20 minutes in our day to chill and bend between the four corners of your friendly local home mat. And if you love the yoga and surf drawl of Eoin as I do, you can even download free podcasts to practice with from iTunes. Slap it on your ‘pod, you’re hot to trot.

I love the energy of a packed, laughing, supportive studio class, and the in-person class instruction, camaraderie and challenge is second-to-none. New studios have also taken me to on adventures to new parts of the city, from red-brick downtown studios to tiny upstairs suburban sweatboxes. But at the same time, there is something fun about flipping through my list of teachers on a cold, rainy night and thinking “Ooh, who do I want to practice with today? Chris Chavez? Eoin Finn? Clara Roberts-Oss? Shall I go to Mexico tonight?”

come away with me... — come away with me…

Online yoga can be an escape from a hectic day where you didn’t get to do anything that was just for you, whether it’s been an epic office slog or a eye-burning study session over ever-gianter cups of coffee. In the videos I’ve tried so far I’ve travelled to Bali and taken classes with teachers I’ve never managed to cross paths with in real life (hello, Ryan Leier!). It’s been a window of fantasy and escape on dark winter days. For people like my parents, living in a rural area with the closest yoga studio an hour’s drive away, I can only imagine how awesome having a database like this at your fingertips would be (and now they’ve beat me to buying an iPad, they’re good to go!).

You can even recreate a little bit of the spa-like atmosphere of a fancy yoga studio in your home: trust me, it makes a big difference when you tidy away the work papers, light a scented candle, and promise yourself a nice cup of chai tea afterwards. Practicing at home also helps me to have less of an attitude with myself than I usually do.

Nothing stops the little voice in your head in its tracks like listening to the sound of the surf and the voice of your teacher reminding you, “Don’t want to bind? Nah, I don’t blame you. It’s so overrated.”

2013/01/30

running: the secret ninja art of getting where you were going anyway

I spent most of this weekend on my couch listening to Korean language-learning tapes from the early 1980s (thanks, strep throat; pick up your stuff on the way out). While this was super fulfilling for the fabulous hairstyles alone, it did not make for a good week of sleep and energy level. As I grumpily What’s Apped a friend of mine while having my eyeballs burned by the Carrie Diaries, I saw my excuses coming out in whiny textual form: Oh I never have any tiiiiime. I don’t know how other people do it, I just don’t have time. And if I do have time I’m too tired to work out. We commiserated over our busy schedules and enjoyed a good old type-A exchange of our lists of commitments, assignments, deadlines, and late-night Excel sessions. Then a little app called Juice popped up on my phone with a handy little no-bullshit graph, and dropped me back down to earth.

Juice asks you, every day at a specified time, to enter a few bits of basic info on your energy level, sleep pattern and nutrition for that day. Then at the end of the week, it draws you a little graph to show how they correlate to each other. Yes, stats geeks, I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s interesting info nonetheless.

Mine looked like this:

Surprise! On days when I went for a run, I experienced more energy throughout the day, not less; and I know at least a few of those days were ones where I’d dragged myself out for a run despite feeling pretty tired. So when Juice popped up its little reminder for me to use it, it cut through my but I’m so buuuuusy and I knew it was time to get back on the running wagon.

So for the next couple weeks I’m trying to look at running in a different way: not a chore or something that will sap my last quart of precious hand-squeezed energy juice, but as an investment in improving my energy for the day. It also helps if I don’t think of running as a Giant Huge Deal, but rather a part of my day that doesn’t require a lot of faffing about. If you have a place to go, why not get there moderately faster by running?

Today I ran to a meeting instead of taking the bus (though I may have stashed a teeny hairbrush in my backpack to avoid scaring the person I was meeting with Post-Run Headband Hair). I actually got there faster, I enjoyed a lovely view as I ran, and all it required was a tiny bit of planning (stuff that backpack and you’re good to go pretty much anywhere) and a change of mind: no longer seeing running as ohmygodIhavetofindtimetoRun, have I my GPS, my sport beans, my water bottle, my new playlist, my favourite ear warmer, etc etc etc.

Plus, as an added bonus, if you run with a backpack you may get headnods from fellow runners who seem to assume that either you are running an immense distance and therefore need to carry supplies (crampons?) or that you just came back from an ultra and decided to jog home just because it wasn’t quite enough challenge for you. Own this! It is your backpack-enabled destiny.

Nod nod, baby.

2012/10/24

the grand green thumb adventure, or can you really grow food on your windowsill?

that's me told, then — that’s me told, then

Since making the switch to paleo eating I haven’t thought much about where all my new found meat and veggies have been coming from. There’s no doubt it’s a more expensive way to eat than cruising the aisle for two-for-one pasta sauce deals, though, and so I’ve got used to finding off-beat little grocery stores with discounted local produce (and foreign Coke! observed, not purchased – put down your pitchforks), and picking up packs of ‘are these still good?’ strawberries, knowing that they’ll have to be used the same day.

In a way it’s been quite refreshing. While at first I found it frustrating how fast this locally-grown produce would go bad, I flipped it around and reminded myself that food was supposed to be eaten fresh, not blasted with chemicals to turn an appropriate shade of yellow. (Bananas, I’m still sad.)

Anyway, last week was the lululemon lab‘s second Patch Planters and Victory Gardens workshop, focused on showing us teeny-apartment dwellers how to grow our own food without tripping and falling into a pruning-Baby Bio-to mulch or not to mulch-abyss. My primary motivation for going was that my pineapple sage is getting so rampant and enormous I felt like it needed a green friend to keep it company, but my gardening efforts so far had been mostly limited to rescuing doomed cuttings from the back of the supermarket’s unloved plant shelf.

So I didn’t know much about Patch or Victory Gardens going in, but it turned out to be a thought-provoking evening. Patch focuses on helping people how to grow food in really small spaces – windowsills, balconies, or even spare nooks in your apartment – not just because it tastes good, but because eventually our current food infrastructure is apparently going to crash and burn. Victory Gardens describe themselves as “urban farmers for hire who specialize in transforming all types of urban space for food production” – in other words, they tell gardening newbies like me how to use the spaces they have available to grow useful stuff. (Also, how to make awesome jam.)

So what is a Patch? It’s a wee container garden with its own water reservoir that you fill up with lovely things like annual plants. Rocket (I still find arugula a hilarious word), mint, kale and lettuce were among the suggestions and we got to plant up our Patches with a combo of cuttings and seeds. Mixing up almost-ready cuttings and seeds was a good plan because as a newbie gardener, I feel like it satsfies my dual needs of “I want to see progress NOW” and “egad, it’s winter, is anything alive in there?”.

The planter packaging is very cool and compact – could be a good pre-Christmas gift for that mate of yours who already has The Balcony Gardener on their bookshelf. And you can post it! Through Canada Post!

There were several designs available. I think universally all girl attendees selected this one. The guy next to me chose a very badass ombre.

Even my notorious lefty-hands could easily assemble the Patch. It snaps together a bit like Sticklebricks.

so a bunch of type-As try to assemble a Patch... — so a bunch of type-As try to assemble a Patch…

I do think they need a big red warning that states “YOU NEED TO PLUG THE FEED TUBE. NO REALLY”, as it’s crucially important to tamp down the central reservoir with earth to let the watering system do its job.

Once assembled, you fill it up with soil and fertiliser and pop in your cuttings and seeds. Being a bunch of type-As, our table had many questions on how best to arrange and separate the cuttings for maximum aesthetic and practical effect.

Best thing about the Patch: it only needs to be watered every couple of weeks, and it produces small, manageable amounts of food – suitable for apartment-dwellers who need salad top-ups but wouldn’t know what to do with an entire bed of potatoes (maybe that’s a goal for next year).

I’d definitely recommend stopping by a Patch/Victory Gardens workshop. It helps to have someone to wave your newly-assembled filtration system at and ask questions.

If you’re skeptical about the idea of us all turning into impossibly hip self-sustaining farmers by 2020, consider that the almighty Usborne Book of the Future predicted this way back in 1979 (bottom left panel):

Should you doubt the prescient power of the Usborne Book, consider this:

I couldn’t WAIT to get a risto as a kid. I suspect that I pretty much wore out my brother’s copy of the book reading up on risto-stats alone. I took the word of Usborne as absolute fact and considered it only a matter of time until I had my own risto (which still sounds cooler than iPhone).

One of the few points on which the book got it wrong (apart from predicting we’d all have personal robots by ’99) was that it reckoned one of the features of the Risto would be that it would be almost impossible to be late, as you would always have up to the minute time and travel info on you. Little did they know we only made it easier to send iMessages telling people we were late when in fact we hadn’t even started getting ready.

2012/10/17

i am a crossfitter, or why putting your health last is like eating a crayon

she's a mean one, that fran — she’s a mean one, that fran

Today’s WOD – Strength Cluster Training

At the end of August, I made the ‘wise’ decision to give up Crossfit – that’s right, give up my favourite form of exercise ever, stay with me, I swear this seemed logical at the time – to focus on work and school. I could just do lots of yoga! I’d get motivated to run outside again! Through September I dutifully unrolled my mat, sweated it out, was the best darn tree I could be, and jogged around the block to Gangnam Style. I downdogged and ran hill sprints while wondering what I’d have for dinner. In between, I was rushing home to do work, or rushing to work itself. It seemed like no matter where I went, I was always in a hurry and always falling behind.

yoga, it's not you, it's Crossfit. — yoga, it’s not you, it’s Crossfit.

No surprise that when October rolled around I was aware that something was off. Good things had come from my hiatus – I’d discovered yoga teachers and studios I’d never been to, and had almost fallen over in shock as my entire foot appeared over my head for the first time in standing bow pose at Bikram class – but something still felt out of whack.

Last week I was talking to a friend who had just come back from a trip to Whistler, the weekend before we’d had three big deadlines to meet. She’d partied and gone hiking, and looked refreshed and revived, even at 8.30am – no mean feat. “But how could you?” I asked her, in between necking my Tim Hortons as fast as I could while simulataneously typing furiously and reading a text message (I know, I know). “We have so much work!”

She gave me the sort of look you give a kid who just ate a crayon – Gosh, did that seem like a good idea at the time? ”I make time,” she said, “and I hand in crappy stuff sometimes.”

It probably says something about my type-A overachieving nature that it had never even occurred to me to put health, eating well, or heaven forbid, having funbefore work. I’m not sure it sunk in at first, but it sure as hell did when I sat down to rewrite my goals last week. I was having trouble setting one-year goals that weren’t just “survive cray schedule.” I went back to basics and drew two circles; one, with what I wanted more of in my life, one, with what wasn’t really serving me right now. There it was, staring at me from a hard-underlined box in the middle of my ‘want’ circle: Crossfit.

Oy vey.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that any ideal day of mine would involve a squat-tastic sweat sesh, and that Crossfit loomed as large in my vision as that almost-legendary Boston Terrier I will have one day. So why was I cutting out something that did me so much good? When I saw this WOD on my gym’s website it was like it’d been designed exactly for me – all my favourite things, swinging, back squatting AND pressing?

A. Back squats 1.1.1.1 x 4 ; rest 3 min

B. Press 1.1.1.1 x 4 ; rest 3min

C. For as many minutes as possible…

1 Toes to bar 1st minute

2 Toes to bar 2nd minute

3 Toes to bar 3rd min…….

I powered off my Macbook, turned off my iPhone (true story: I do this so rarely that I had to work out how to do it all over again) and dug out my trusty gym grips from the bottom of the laundry basket where they’d been quietly generating an awesome smell and covering other things in chalk. There was no way I was missing this one. For once, health was moving way up the priority ladder and work would just have to park it.

Let this mark day one all over again.

2012/09/24

being cool is easy, staying cool is hard

I can’t be the only one rather crushed that we’ve gone from this:

to this:

in the space of a mere 28 years? I guess now that we’re all living in a walled garden of services & apps these days, companies don’t need to blow our minds with product design to the same extent – they know we’re locked in to their cloud services for our data, and we’re just shopping for a suitably slick-looking device to read content on.

I miss the rebellious marketing of the 1984 era, though, when we weren’t just buying slightly bigger iDevices, we were changing the world through cool. Even the Telegraph, bastion of all things hip and edgy, reckons the iPhone5 is boring. I’ll be sitting this one out.

2012/09/22

today, in the bikram trenches

for starters. — advice from today’s bikram class.

I went back to Bikram today on a whim. God, I love Bikram. All the things that seem to distress others – the bossiness, the weird rules, the constant corrections, the fact that you are being taught by someone on a sort of podium-cum-yoga throne – I love it. How can you not love a form of yoga where you don’t wear an outfit, you wear a costume? If She-Ra, Princess of Power has taught me anything, it’s that you can accomplish anything while wearing a costume.

Me and yoga, though, we’re on again, off again. Sometimes we break up for months at a time, and I hide my mat at the back of my closet like it’s a bad boyfriend’s sweatshirt. (“I should just throw it out. But it’s so comfy…”) But hey, it’s fall, and when that little nip in the air came around this week I suddenly thought — yes! it’s time to hit the studio!

As I fought not to throw up in camel (sigh), I started wondering if it’s possible to have a “favourite” Bikram teacher. After all, they all seem to use the same cues (“GO back. FALL back. LEAN back”, although today’s rebel mixed it up by throwing in a “BACK back” at the end — quick, get on the bat line!). I like wellandgood’s take on Bikram: “a hot-mess road through delirium, near breakdown, and miraculously still alive at the end” (I require green smoothie blended with ice post-Bikram or I tend to conk), but it does a great job of reminding me that there are certain things that no matter how much you flail against them, you just gotta let ‘em go.

2012/08/11

fear versus FOMO, or how I ran my first half marathon

The alarm went off at 5.45am and I got up, and then immediately fell back into bed. Nope, no point in getting up – I hadn’t trained for the race. In fact, I hadn’t ever ran further than 12km in one go, and had only got a few short runs in in the last 2 months as life, work, school and Crossfit training had taken over. I had accepted I probably wouldn’t run the Seawheeze Half Marathon since falling off the training wagon way back in June, and I’d only set the alarm on a whim – picking up my race package had got me fired up, and I was toying with the idea of walking the course just to take in the sights.

Then I thought, what if I just run and see what I can do?

Doubting thoughts crowded my mind. What if I failed to finish? What if I limped home, last of all the runners? What if I looked like a dork running with my ginormous, four-bottle hydration belt? (Disclaimer: that last one is totally possible.) As I lay in bed I realised how fear of failure was holding me back. It was my one year anniversary of being in Canada today and I was going to spend it lying in bed? A huge feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out) came over me. I knew this race would be the talk of the town next week and what was my story – didn’t want to try, and risk failing?

c’mon let’s do it put your back in to it

(Disclaimer: I do not recommend that anyone goes out and runs a half marathon without training properly. You could probably get injured and stuff.)

By the standards of the running world I did everything wrong for this half – no distance runs logged, wore a brand new fuel belt I’d never used, forgot to carbo-load (challenging when primal) and I’d never taken gels or other fuel while running so I just grabbed some water and headed out. Once off the Skytrain I headed to the very last corral, fully expecting to finish up walking at a snail’s pace. I told myself that just to finish would be a great result given my lack of training and the dire things on t’internet about what happens to those who run halfs without proper preparation (seriously, what is bonking?). As we waited I laughed with other runners about how of all the corrals, ours seemed to have the most gear (“Just in case!” they said; “Undertraining compensation!” said I). As I was waiting in the corral I resolved to try and run as far as the race’s three cheer stations. At two of them I knew I would see friendly faces and I thought running to them would be a good goal. The last cheer station was at around 13km, so that would still be the furthest I had ever ran in one sitting. If I had to walk from there, I was confident I could still finish.

As the race began I forced myself to go slow. I was super-conscious that I could not go out too hard in my underprepared state. Adrenaline was pumping through me and I longed to let it rip but I focused on slowing myself down to the melodic strains of Lil Wayne’s “6 Foot, 7 Foot” as we left the downtown core via the Cambie Bridge.

if only all races had a man in an animal suit on a paddleboard.

Along the race course there were so many sights to take in. Some I had an inkling about, but others were a lovely surprise. One that really struck me was the group of paddleboarders – including a guy in an animal costume on a paddleboard! – as we came around the seawall by Science World, cheering and saluting us with their paddles. There were so many great cheer signs throughout – the entire army of cheerleading kids with “Go Random Adult Go!” signs made me laugh, and later on around English Bay I saw this awesome little girl standing on a bench with this sign. This was absolutely what I needed to see as I was leaving civilisation behind!

As we came towards the Burrard Bridge I felt a burst of strength. This was familiar, I had cranked over this bridge before, many months ago, and I knew that my stubbornness would get me up that hill. As we cruised by the lululemon head office I was astonished to see there were neon-clad yogi-abseilers throwing cheer moves off the side of the building and waving to us. We turned up 4th Avenue and while the Cypress to Arbutus hill was baking hot, I knew the West 4th cheer station was coming up. Gotta keep running to those guys!, I thought. As we crested the hill I saw a blur of friendly faces clad in neon pink and leopard print at the turnaround and got at least one high five in, then I was past them (and past the 9km mark). As I pounded down the hill I knew my friend Alfie was leaving the English Bay cheer station to go to work soon and I was suddenly determined that I would make it, I would see her! I forced myself to pick up the pace, back up the Burrard Bridge and down onto the seawall. I knew vaguely that there was a system of 10s and 1s I should probably be using but for some reason I was convinced that a walk break would finish me off and that the only solution was to keep running. As I blitzed through the English Bay cheer station I felt a moment of sadness as I realised I couldn’t see her - then I caught a glimpse of her packing up her sign and almost ready to leave. I screamed and we had a triumphant mid-race hug (sorry for sweating on you, dude). That cheer station and half a banana powered me up and I was surprised at how good I was feeling at the 13km mark, heading into the park. I had fully expected to be walking by then. Hmm – might as well keep running.

The last third of the race took us around Stanley Park via the seawall and it was here I started to pass people. From 13km to around 16km I felt really, really good and longed to put the hammer down but I still forced myself to rein in the pace, conscious that the Stanley Park seawall always goes on for way longer than you think it will and not wanting to get stuck out there miles from civilisation (or a portapottie). I almost couldn’t believe how good I was feeling. I have felt worse on 5km training runs! I think this drove home to me how much of my struggles with longer runs is mental. Without the boredom factor and without the option of quitting, my mind quieted down and I could enjoy just running. I focused on emptying my mind, feeling the breeze, and looking out for friendly faces along the way.

managed to avoid venturing into race portapotties en route, but i thought this sign inside one was hilarious.

In the final part of the race, from 18-21.1km, my feet suddenly announced that they weren’t overly happy with me and I was conscious of the growing heat making me hella thirsty, but by then I was thinking “The sooner this is over, the sooner you can eat waffles and find a real loo! RUN FOR WAFFLES!” The last 2km felt so long (I didn’t even stop to take a picture of the cheerers in mermaid costumes on a rock in the park!) but as soon as we left the park I knew we were close and I could hear the roars coming from the finish line. I have to give a shout out to a random cyclist (not a race volunteer or cheer squad member) who was waiting patiently with his bike to cross the race path. As I ran by he leant in and said, directly to me, “You are doing great!” in a heavy Spanish accent as I was starting to tire coming out of the park. Thanks, dude, I needed that. As I passed the corral area I’d started at all that time ago I tried to sprint for the finish as I’d done at the Sun Run (my one and only other race) but by then, my toes were threatening blisters and I settled for a steady, determined run. Hearing my name called over the announcer’s tannoy as I crossed the finish line triumphantly blew my mind. I had (somehow) done it! My first half marathon was complete.

After some hugs, high fives and a delicious water mist at the finish line (sorry iPhone!), I finished up by eating some of the best waffles in my life and a giant slice of watermelon at the post-run runners’ brunch. I couldn’t stop smiling. What better way to spend my 1-year ‘Can-niversary’ that a sunlit run through beautiful Vancouver with a bunch of neon-clad new friends? I have to say, I think Crossfit helped me with the mental grit to get to the finish. When in a tough WOD I always tell myself “you can do anything for ten minutes, right?”, and that mentality definitely helped me out here. I am also proud that I allowed myself to exist in possibility rather than in fear of failing. While my time was nothing to shout about, crushing my half-marathon goal off my list at the eleventh hour (where it has sat for over a year) felt amazing and gives me fuel to take on more challenges in the upcoming year.

As I was chowing on my watermelon I have to say my mind immediately jumped to when I could run my next half marathon – and I plan to put the training in for this one!

2012/02/11

primal, one year on (or, how to keep your almonds to yourself)

I’ve known for a while I wanted to do a blog to celebrate coming up on a year of primal eating. But the motivation to write it all down didn’t really come to me until I faced today’s WOD – a classic example of ‘train your weaknesses’.

When I saw this guy pop up on my box’s site, I seriously nearly stashed my iPhone, turned around and went home. This is a combination of my three worst movements:

12 Box Jumps

6 DB Thrusters (35lbs/45lbs)

6 Burpees

AMRAP 15 minutes

And yes, it really sucked. It didn’t, however, suck quite as much as I thought it would. It didn’t kick my ass quite as hard as it would have a year ago. And the reason? Not more training, just better eating.

I can remember the exact point at which I realised I seriously needed to change my eating habits: it was when, during a WOD - between sumo deadlift high pulls in fact – I had to stealthily munch down half of a cereal bar to stop from fainting. I’m not proud of it, but to my conventional-wisdom conditioned brain, this was a sensible approach to workout fuel. I just had to finish the WOD, right? Wrong. Clearly something had to give.

Having already fallen to the first prong of the Crossfit holy trinity by giving up my marshmallow trainers for Vibrams, reading Mark Sisson’s “The Primal Blueprint” didn’t seem too hard. Being packed into a tube carriage with it squashed up against my ears became part of my daily commute. At first I was sceptical – cavemen? Really? Didn’t they get eaten by dinosaurs for a reason? – then increasingly thoughtful, as I recognised many of my own eating habits being debunked in a surprisingly scientific way. Finally I came to see that if you take out the funny lingo, the message was that we should be eating the foods our ancestors were designed to eat, not foods we are maladapted to process.

Still, my cynical mind thought this was going to be a breeze, another ‘challenge’ to tick off after 30 days. I’d eat this crazy caveman diet for a month to prove that I could do it, and then I could go right back to my ‘healthy’ diet of whole grains, cereal, and rice.

Never happened. My cranky immune system, which had never seemed to recover from a bout of glandular fever in university? Turbo-charged. You could sneeze in my vicinity and I wouldn’t instantly get sick three days later. My energy highs and lows? Also a thing of the past. I’m certainly not saying that primal or paleo eating is a miracle cure for all ills, but speaking personally, I’ve seen a sea change in how my body feels since what I’ve come to call the big change-up.

My top three tips for making your own change:

1. Be firm, but gentle, with your friends. Some of them will support you, many more will be curious, and a few will be outright hostile. While for a long time I baby-stepped around the subject, now primal eating is just a part of me, take it or leave it. At the same time, the excitement of the improvements you see on primal/paleo eating can have a tendency to turn you into an almond-pushing evangelist, and that isn’t cool either. If you’re asked about it, share some knowledge. If not, keep schtum and eat your almonds.

2. Know before you go. Pretty much any restaurant can understand and accommodate ‘gluten free’, so that’s a good jumping off point. A bit of reading up on the menu beforehand can avoid too much flailing when in restaurants. If in doubt, the good old burger with dressing-free salad can be had pretty much anywhere.

3. Plan, plan and then plan again. Pretty much all of my slip ups have come from times when I’ve been ill-prepared and haven’t had the right supplies of beautiful fruits, colourful veggies, and other primal treats in the house. When the cupboard is bare, that bowl of noodles starts to look a whole lot more attractive. Go back to the mindset of your student days and cook up a big pot of something that’ll last you through a hectic workweek. Trust me, ‘cheat days’ do not feel as good as you think they will.

And what’s next for me? The next change-up: I’ve started a gradual transition to paleo eating, including conquering my almighty love of the latte. Good thing is, I know this is a change that’ll stick.

2011/06/05

primal, one month on (or meet my new friend, mr brazil nut)

get off the suger rollercoaster — pastries, i'm breaking up with you. i just don't feel the same anymore.

It’s been almost a month since I made the commitment to eat primally for a month, having read the Primal Blueprint over the course of many long commutes and deciding that there might be something in this whole eat like a caveman thing.

In terms of Crossfit performance, the numbers kinda speak for themselves: I’ve upped my thruster weight by 8kg, deadlift by 10kg, and power clean by 5kg, in the space of 3 weeks. I’ve done no extra training – if anything, I’ve trained less – and haven’t made any other lifestyle changes. My strict push ups and chin ups have also seen an improvement and I’d like to think I’m chasing down more buses attempting to leave me in the dust than three weeks ago.

Outside of chasing buses and power cleans, having more consistent energy levels throughout the day has made a real difference. I had got into a negative cycle of energy high, energy crash, that impacted on my workday as well as my workouts. I thought of myself as eating relatively healthily, but depended heavily on cereal and snacks to power myself through the day. Eating primally has freed me from having to find food at certain times, and has meant that I can make it through a three-hour strategy meeting without stealthily cracking open a snack.

Throughout the month I’ve had a real feeling of abundance and freedom as to what I can eat, rather than feeling restricted and deprived as I’d thought. No more trawling up and down supermarket shelves throwing beige things into my basket – a quick visit to the meat and veg aisles and I’m done. I stood in the fruit & veg aisle this morning and thought “wow! I can eat all this awesome, colourful food, in the quantities that I want, whenever I want.”

I have really felt an appreciation for colour and texture in food this month, and have made some awesome new food friends (Mr Brazil Nut, I’m looking at you). The crunchiness of curly kale and red peppers has more than made up for the loss of Weetabix and brown rice. Most of all, I haven’t missed the foods I’ve cut out, making me realise that the best parts of the meals I had been eating weren’t the beige bits (rice and pasta), but the colourful ones.

Here’s my top learnings from a month of going cavegirl:

- Tupperware is your best friend. You will be keeping much more fresh produce around than you may be used to, and a good set of tupperware can help you get more bang from your fruit and vegetable buck by keeping things fresher for longer. They’re also great for transporting primal-friendly snacks like hardboiled eggs to work.

- Get around the sticker shock. Switching to primal eating can be expensive, especially if you attempt to follow the organic grass-fed meat recommendations in Sisson’s book. (I like to have money left for rent.) Whilst I’ve added pounds to my grocery bill, there are workarounds: hit the Brick Lane fruit markets to pick up huge boxes of fruit for the price of a teeny-tiny supermarket pack, and if you’re brave enough to go a little off-track, offal is cheap and not as nasty as you may think.

- Accept that people may be challenged by the changes you make. I have never had so many questions about what I was eating, and why, in my life. Over the course of the month I’ve got comfortable with laying the changes I’ve made out there, for people to take or leave as they like.

- Get to know that weird health food shop you never go in. When I read the Primal Blueprint I was cynical as to how many of the ingredients and foods recommended would actually be available outside of the Californian utopia the author lives in, but in fact many of them were readily available two minutes from my house in the back of a Chinese herbalist-meets-health-food-shop I’d never explored before. I picked up a whole range of nut butters, coconut oil, and almond milk, right in my neighbourhood.

Here’s to Primal, one year on.