…

Just wanted to say that I’m still here. I’m planning to get back to regular posting after the weekend. In fact, I’ve got a lot to write about! But it’ll have to wait, as I’m getting ready to head to Hartford, CT for NIRCA Regionals. Yikes.

Look, I Cooked Something!

Specifically, chickpea broccoli casserole, from Vegan with a Vengeance. As it’s written, this is basically the blandest recipe imaginable, so I altered it considerably, adding paprika, garlic, black pepper, extra salt, and lemon juice, and swapping the olive oil for tahini. I was hoping for a pretty pronounced tahini lemon flavor (sort of reminiscent of this version of tahini lemon rice & beans, which is delicious), but unfortunately it’s fairly mild. I think the leftovers will probably be better; that tends to be the way it goes with casseroles. Still, next time I’ll increase the tahini from 3 to 4-6 T, and use 2-3 lemons instead of one.

Obligatory bad-kitchen-lighting shot

I had some for lunch with a side of steamed kale; yes, there is a skull on my desk

Thank You, Google

To the person who found this blog while trying to determine whether it’s “okay to eat apple pie as a pre-half marathon meal”: the answer is yes. Also, you are my hero.

As for you, Mr./Ms. “apple on the carpet makes me sick”: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I apologize for not having any information on the subject available. Your condition sounds unfortunate.

Should I Even Pretend?

To be doing VeganMofo, that is. Yikes. I’ve been slacking! Here’s to a better week, though to be honest I’m not optimistic, for a variety of reasons. Still, I will try.

So, first off, running. I ran the Women’s Distance Festival 5k yesterday. I began the race with fairly low expectations, as it was on a very hilly (by my admittedly candy-ass standards) cross country course, and I hadn’t felt especially lively during my warm-up. However, I cruised through the first mile in 6:33 and realized at about that point that I was having more fun than I’d ever had during a race, and feeling much, much stronger, too. I’m not sure why, exactly. It could have been the course, which was tough but varied and interesting—there was even a small stream-crossing just before the 2 mile mark. I’m sure that my pacing strategy had something to do with it, too. I started out much more conservatively than I usually do, and although it was psychologically difficult trailing five or six women over the first mile, it felt great to fly past them when they started to fall apart later on. Unfortunately, my splits don’t reflect my experience very well; I finished the second mile in 7:08, and the final 1.1 in 7:38 for a net time of 21:20—nearly a full minute off my PR. I’m going to chalk that up to the course, though. I was ‘on’ yesterday; I’m confident that I’d have broken 20 in a flat road race. Seriously: the winner, a local meteorologist, three time sub-3 hour marathoner, and top 10 age group finisher at the 2003 Ironman World Championships, finished in 20:21, and I think that her other recent times are in the high 18s/low 19s. In any case, I came in third place and won myself a trophy and a $30 gift certificate to The Running Place. Perfect timing, as I’m in the market for some spikes.

Here are some pictures:

Somewhere in the third mile

Coming into the finish; the most unflattering picture of all time

Check out the dude in the pickle suit

With the 1st and 2nd place runners, awkwardly refusing to look at the camera

Today I planned to run an easy 12 but I scrapped it in favor of resting up for tomorrow’s 20 miler, though I did sneak in a quick 4 mile jaunt late this afternoon, as I’m constitutionally incapable of taking a full day off. Today’s low mileage kept me below 70 for the week, which I’m not terribly happy about. However, knowing that I’ll hit between 90 and 100 next week is helping to ease the pain. Here are the week’s totals:

Total miles: 67.1

Average pace: 8:15/mi

Time spent running: 9 hours 12 minutes 42 second

And here are last week’s, while we’re at it:

Total miles: 81.2

Average pace: 8:07/mi

Time spent running: 10 hours 58 minutes 0 seconds

Onto the food. Not much to note here; we have been lazy. We did make a pizza tonight, though—faux pepperoni and vegan mozzarella. Dinner of champions.

I love these plates so much

Oh, and we made an apple crisp, too—with the apples we picked, um, three weeks ago. It was delicious! We used the recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking. That book has never let me down.

Even our placemats are Halloween-themed

Now, off to sleep…

VeganMofo Days 4-5

So much for posting every weekday, huh? These last couple of days have been hectic; I’ve been preparing for a presentation that I have to give in my aesthetics seminar tomorrow afternoon, and on top of that, I’ve been running (a lot), meeting with various professors, attempting to put together a dissertation reading schedule for myself (at my advisor’s request). The list goes on. The presentation is the big thing, though, and I hope to get back on track here after that’s over, as I’ve got some good projects planned for VeganMofo. Just bear with me for one more day!

This will be a short post, as I’ve got a bit more work to do tonight and I’d like to be in bed as soon as I possibly can—I’ve got a 6:00 AM 10-miler to contend with, and it’s not going to be much fun if I’m terribly sleep-deprived. I’ll leave you with a picture of the dinner I came home to: a delicious BBQ chicken pizza served with steamed broccoli on the side. Andy made this for me despite being sick with some sort of stomach flu. Pretty great, right? It’s been one of my favorite kinds of pizza since high school, when my then-boyfriend introduced me to it at a little place in Raleigh called I Love NY Pizza. It’s remarkably easy to veganize, especially if you’re willing to make use of ultra-processed convenience foods like Morningstar Farms Chik’n Strips and Follow Your Heart Mozzarella—which we are, especially since we rarely eat them in other contexts these days. However, it wouldn’t be too hard to throw together some chicken-style seitan and cashew cheese to use instead. In any case, all you’ve got to do is roll out your dough, top it with a layer of BBQ sauce, some thinly sliced red onion, and your chicken and cheese of choice, and bake for 15 minutes at 500 degrees. Sometimes I add broccoli, spinach, and/or chopped tomatoes, too, but Andy kept it simple tonight.

Vegan MoFo Days 3-4

Yesterday, I traveled to Princeton with the Penn club XC team for our first meet of the season, the Princeton Running Club Invitational. I was a mess of nerves going into the race: the terrain (grass) and distance (6k) were unfamiliar, the competition looked stiff, and my body felt heavy and tired and unresponsive during my warm-up. I nearly threw up when the gun went off, but I pulled myself together quickly when I realized after 400m that I was holding steady in 6th place at the tail end of the lead pack of five. It was time to bear down and focus; I knew that I’d gone out too fast, but I also knew that I’d have to do everything that I could to hold on. I resolved not to let anybody pass me, and for the first 5k, I didn’t, despite fading considerably for a couple of minutes in the second mile. Toward the beginning of mile 3, I even managed to pass someone myself, though in the final 800m, I slipped back into 6th; I just had nothing left, and there was nothing to be done about it. My official time was 25:43, 43 seconds off of my goal of 25 flat. Still, I was thrilled with my placement, especially since the top 10 individuals won awards. And I was first on my team, which felt good. We placed third behind Virginia and James Madison and achieved our primary goal of beating out the other Ivies, so we were happy. There’s a little write-up about the race at NIRCA’s website; you can check it out here, if you’re interested. Here are some pictures, courtesy of my dad:

Doing some strides as a team before the race

On the starting line

Somewhere in the first mile

Now, hard racing calls for good food, right? Andy knows what I like; he surprised me with a slice of peanut butter bomb cake from Satellite, a little cafe around the corner from our apartment that stocks Vegan Treats baked goods:

Looking at this is making me want another piece right now

I ate this in bed while watching The Mist, which was, incidentally, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I think it was decently received, too, which is baffling to me. The monsters, the dialogue, the stupid Marcia Gay Harden-as-religious-fanatic subplot—ugh. But I’ll spare you the detailed analysis. The important thing to stress here is that the cake is undoubtedly the best cake available for purchase in the Philadelphia area. Vegan or otherwise. It is rich and moist and I would be in big trouble if I ever learned to recreate the peanut butter mousse at home because I would probably attempt to make it the cornerstone of my diet and I’m not sure that it contains all of the nutrients essential to my continued existence, although, of course, peanut butter is kind of a miracle food, so maybe I’d make out okay.

VeganMoFo Day 2

Last night’s brutal hill & track workout ruined me; I woke this morning so stiff that I could hardly stand and proceeded to shuffle through seven miles of unadulterated agony. The Plan called for ten, but that was out of the question. I did 10 on Monday, 10 on Tuesday, 14 on Wednesday, 15 yesterday, and I’m racing a 6k with the Penn team tomorrow, and my body is crying out for mercy. Here we are, two days into October, and a month of the most grueling training I’ve ever attempted to put myself through stands between me and the taper. They call it the Monster Month. I can see already that the name is apt. Post-run, I stumbled onto the trolley to make my way to class, and as I sat massaging my tired quads and dreaming of a slow descent into a cold tub of ice, I realized that I’m going to have to start taking better care of myself if I’m to make it through the next four weeks in one piece. That means more sleep, more stretching, more leg strengthening exercises for my hamstring, more food, more water, more icing, more foam rolling, more core work. Everything counts.

Now, onto the good stuff. As part of VeganMofo, I thought that I’d try to do a little series on the best cheap vegan food in Philly. Cheapness is of course a relative notion, so by way of qualification, I’ll say the following: any meal over $10 is not cheap, any meal under $5 is, and any meal that falls within these limits may or may not be, depending on its other attributes (size, quality, convenience). If you are reading this and thinking to yourself “Wow, Emily must be really poor,” then (1) you are correct, (2) I hate you, and (3) feel free to take me out to a restaurant that’s more your speed (I’ll even write about it!).

First on the list (both temporally and qualitatively) is Magic Carpet, Penn’s legendary vegan & vegetarian food cart. There are two of them, actually: one at 36th and Spruce, and one at 34th and Walnut. Both are less than five minutes away from the academic building where I ‘work’, providing me with a quick, convenient, reliable, delicious, and wholesome option for lunch whenever I ‘forget’ to prepare and pack a meal for myself at home. When it’s cold out, I go for the veggie chili, which is hearty and spicy and filling. Otherwise, I go for one of the special wraps—whichever one is being offered that day, basically. I think they rotate them. My favorites are the chipotle BBQ tempeh, the samosa, and the peanut sate, but today I went with the tofu spinach: a blend of ‘delicately seasoned’ spinach, baked tofu, and brown rice, served in a spinach tortilla. Here is an awful picture of it:

It was great! And only $4.50! I paired it with a full three heads’ worth of broccoli that I roasted yesterday morning and had myself a very satisfying lunch. My only real complaint about Magic Carpet is that it’s obscenely busy from about 11:30-1:00, so if you go at lunchtime, you can expect lines roughly twice the length of the one seen below (I’d already been waiting 10-15 minutes when I took the photo):

Still, it is definitely worth the wait.

VeganMoFo

Hello, October! I’m going to be participating in the Vegan Month of Food (VeganMoFo) this month, which means that I’ll be posting about vegan food on this blog every weekday straight through to November. I’ll continue to write about my training, too, of course; in fact, I’ll likely find some way to integrate my thoughts about running with all of the food-related business. If you have any suggestions concerning topics I should cover or themes I could work with, please do leave a comment or send me an email.

Look out for my first ‘real’ post tonight!

I’ve Been Delinquent

It’s been over a week since my last post! I’m going to try not to let that happen again. I’ve fallen behind on my weekly reviews, so here are my stats from the last two weeks:

9/14/09-9/20/09

Total miles: 53.3

Time spent running: 6 hours 59 minutes 32 seconds

Average pace: 7:53/mi

This was the week of the PDR, and it includes two rest days: one scheduled (as part of my ‘taper’), and one unscheduled (due to posterior tibial pain, and on which I biked instead).

9/21/09-9/27/09

Total miles: 80.5

Time spent running: 11 hours 2 minutes 28 seconds

Average pace: 8:14/mi

This was my second highest mileage week ever. I jumped straight back into training after the half and drove myself to total exhaustion; I backed out of a 5K that I was scheduled to run on Sunday because I felt too beaten up to race, and I spent the weekend moping and spontaneously falling asleep while reading philosophy papers. I did get in a couple of quality workouts by some divine miracle: a 16 miler with my marathon training group on Saturday, and a track session on Thursday (my first!) with the XC team, in which we did a short fartlek (30s easy/30 hard/60 easy/60 hard/90 easy/90 hard), immediately followed by a 2 mile tempo (my splits: 6:52; 6:48) and another short fartlek (90 hard/90 easy/60 hard/60 easy/30 hard/30 easy). Oh, and on Wednesday, I fulfilled my dream of running to Santa Fe and devouring a tofu burrito in all of my sweaty, tapped out glory. See, on paper, it doesn’t sound like such a bad week. But, really. It was. I’m still feeling slightly off, though last night’s perfect 10 miler did go some way to restoring me to health (mentally, at least). I’ve got a double on schedule today: 4 at the gym during my lunch break, and 10 at 5, after my aesthetics seminar. Here’s hoping for a good day of running; the weather seems to be cooperating, at least.

As far as the rest of my life goes, I soldier on, I suppose. School is destroying my soul, and I’m not getting enough sleep, but Fall is here, I’m wearing sweaters, Andy and I are working our way through our Halloween-themed Netflix queue, and I found vegan candy pumpkins for sale at a local farm. So, things could be worse. My birthday was last Tuesday and I spent the day picking apples with Andy and my family; then, that night, my parents made an excellent dinner for me, and we played games and ate cake. Here are some pictures of the meal:

Pumpkin gnocchi with an olive oil & nutmeg sauce, broccoli, toasted walnuts, sundried tomatoes, and vegan cheddar; warm multigrain bread; roasted brussels sprouts

Peanut butter cake with peanut butter frosting & peanut butter prailine in the middle, and peanut butter frosting & chocolate ganache on the top

The cake was unbelievably good; my mom came up with the recipe herself!

Andy took me out for dinner the night before, and I have some pictures of that, too. We went to Vientiane, our favorite local Thai restaurant:

We started with a bottle of Riesling, of course

Tofu satay with peanut sauce

Grilled mixed vegetables with peanut sauce

Pad kee mao with tofu

It was all delicious, as always.

Time to shower!

Philly Distance Run

Coming into the finish

Being nerdy, going over my splits with Andy

Post-race Ezek

The medals they give out are pretty nice - and I think they're the same every year, which is sort of cool

With my parents

The Philly Distance Run was perfect. I couldn’t have asked for a better race. Here’s how it went down. Saturday, Andy and I drove down to Kelly Drive (yes, we drove, even though it’s only 2 miles from our apartment – hey, I wanted to avoid the hills!) and I ran 6 miles there to test out my new Brooks racers. As I knocked out the last mile in 6:49 without a struggle, I fell deeply in love with them and decided to wear them in the race, even though I had no idea how they would feel over a longer distance. I know that a lot of people approach racing kind of conservatively—wearing clothes and shoes they’ve tested over several outings, eating only what’s been successful for them during training, planning out every split to the second—but, though I’ve tended in that direction in the past, I went into this race feeling strangely bold. I wanted to see what I could do, and I was ready to take some risks in the process. The flats felt light and responsive and fast, so I went with them.

After the run, we made our way to the Convention Center for the expo. I couldn’t resist the draw of the Newton booth and wound up being fitted for the stability trainer; I ran around in them for a couple of minutes and for the second time in an hour fell deeply in love with a pair of shoes. This love, however, is bittersweet: $175 stands between me and its consummation. You might recall that I am a grad student. In philosophy. This relationship doesn’t stand a chance, does it?

Anyway, the rest of the expo was unremarkable. Andy bought a shirt but I left empty-handed after failing in my quest to find a green singlet to match my racers. Luckily, I was able to find one at City Sports later that afternoon; I’m wearing it in the pictures above. Back at home that evening, we cooked a traditional pre-race meal of whole wheat spaghetti, Nate’s meatless meatballs (Zesty Italian!), garlic bread, and roasted broccoli, and kicked back with a couple of episodes of The X-Files. I had a banana with peanut butter at some stage after dinner and went up to bed at 10. Of course, I wasn’t able to fall asleep until 1, thanks to the usual pre-race nerves and my neighbors’ streetside partying. My alarm went off at 5, so I had to make do with 4 hours of sleep; however, I wasn’t too worried about it, as I’ve read in multiple places that it’s more important to get sufficient sleep throughout the week leading up to the race, and I definitely did that. I got up, got dressed, ate a banana and drank a bottle of water with a Nuun electrolyte tab dissolved in it. I decided not to eat a full breakfast beforehand because I’ve been doing most of my training on an empty stomach; this was a bit of a risk, as I’d never raced this way, but I think that I made the right call—I had some GI trouble in the latter stages of the race, and I’m sure that it would have been even worse if I’d had more food in me.

Andy dropped me off downtown at 7 and I made my way down to the starting line. I did a quick 10 minute warm-up just to loosen up a little, then got in line for the porta-potty; I ended up having to wait for nearly 30 minutes, and by the time I was through, it was 7:42—3 minutes away from gun time! I made my way through the crowds to corral 2 to find it already packed with runners; a large group of us had to wait outside of the barrier until the first corral was let loose and the people inside our corral were able to move forward to make room for us. I crossed the line about a minute after the gun and started my watch. I planned to go out at around a 7:15-7:20/mi pace, since my goal time was 1:35:xx; however, the streets were quite congested and I had to do a fair bit of weaving through the throngs, so I figured that I’d be closer to 7:30 for the first mile. Imagine my surprise when I checked my watch at the marker to find that I’d breezed through it in 6:49! I panicked for a second, as this was much, much faster than I’d intended to run. I had to make a choice: rein in the pace and hit my goal feeling strong, or risk it all, hunker down for sub-7:00s, and shoot for 1:30. I decided to go for it, knowing full well that I could blow up halfway through. As I mentioned above, I was feeling bold, and I really wanted to put myself to the test.

So, here are my splits (annotated):

• Mile 1: 6.49 (feeling great)
• Mile 2: 6:42 (feeling really great)
• Mile 3: 6:47 (feeling a little scared about maintaining this pace, but still going strong)
• Mile 4: 6:49 (loving my racing flats)
• Mile 5: 6:52 (coming out of the city and heading up to West River Drive, dreading the next three miles)
• Mile 6: 6:59 (not liking West River Drive, trying to settle in with a pack of runners but most people are either starting to fade or starting to speed up, neither of which is too appealing to me)
• Mile 7: 7:04 (losing focus, irrationally worrying about my d-tag falling off of my shoe, feeling mentally tired)
• Mile 8: 7:01 (feeling better mentally, anticipating the turn-around point)
• Mile 9: 6:59 (crossing the bridge, coming back into the city along Kelly Drive, figuring out my strategy for the final miles)
• Mile 10: 6.59 (feeling very strong, happy to be nearly finished)
• Mile 11: 6.59 (passing lots of people who appear to be struggling, feeling confident)
• Mile 12: 6.58 (getting ready to bear down on the final mile)
• Mile 13: 6.53 (legs feeling utterly shot, stomach a mess, spirits high)
• Final .1: .41 (grimacing, coming through the finish in considerable discomfort but feeling downright high)

My official time was 1:30:40, and I’m still feeling pretty elated about it two days later. I suspect that the happiness won’t wear off for some time. I was 14th out of 674 in my age group, 89th out of 6,394 women, and 647th out of 12,247 total runners, and I really couldn’t be more satisfied with my results. I suppose the new goal is to go sub-1:30, but I’ll deal with that later. For now, my focus is on the marathon, which is exactly two months away. My training is starting to wear me down; I’m tired and achy nearly every day and with school back in session I’m finding it difficult to get enough sleep. However, I think that it’s normal to feel this way at this stage, so I’m not too concerned. In fact, I’m feeling very optimistic about the race; everything is going according to plan so far.