Racing and Food

Okie dokie.  So training is going well, just 16 weeks out from the Edinburgh Marathon now.  My long run is back up at 22km and increasing each week.  I plan to be at 32km within 8 weeks or so.  I'm also working on my speed and I've currently set myself three tiers of goals:

• Tier 3 - Worst Case - Complete the damn thing.  No matter if I have to walk, I don't want a DNF (Did Not Finish) on my first marathon.  Or worse yet, a DNS (Did Not Start) due to injury.  Must get this tier at a minimum!
• Tier 2 - Reality Check - 3 hours 30 minutes.  Based on my existing times and proper preparation, I should be able to clock this time.  Not easily, but should be doable.
• Tier 1 - Platinum Standard Awesomeness - Sub 3 hours 10 minutes.  This is my primary goal, as it will get me a good for age place at the London Marathon. It is a stretch, but if I train well, I feel I have this in me.

So there you have it, I've outed my expectations.  Let's review again after I've done my warm up races.

Next up, I thought I'd do a walk through of a recent stir-fry extravaganza!

Step 1: Get lots of stir fry ingredients.  Here I have carrots, broccoli, mushroom, baby corn, Chinese lettuce marinated tofu, and sweet pepper.

Step 2: Cook in a wok until, you know, all cooked and stuff

Step 3: Add some sauce and put in a plate. People like plates, they tend to add a touch of refinement over eating directly from the wok.  Fancy chopsticks are totally optional.

Why I don't have a cooking show on TV is a mystery.  Clearly I'm a genius.

Or not.  You know, since it didn't actually taste that good.  Word to the wise: don't use a BBQ stir fry sauce with tofu that has a completely different flavour.  They compete.  And not in a good way. 

Back to the drawing board...

Day 5 - Stupidity Inc.

Drank way too much red wine last night (no idea if it was even vegan wine) and payed the price for it today.  The evening was great and the (hopefully) vegan curry was delicious... the first time anyway.  Anyway, enough gory details - lesson learnt, again.

I tried out a quinoa vegetable "paella" from Fat Free Vegan for dinner.  I think the recipe was a good one, but once again my tendency to try experimenting with things landed me in bland-land.  I do like quinoa though - I can see myself enjoying that fairly regularly.  Just need to learn how to cook with it properly.  As with anything new, it is a bit much to expect brilliance right out of the gate.

It was supposed to look like this.  Maybe next time...

So, apart from cooking related disasters, anything else worth sharing? Well I am surprised how little I find myself missing meat.  I fully expected some sort of craving for chicken to overcome me, but so far I've had nothing of the sort.  I've also not wanted any chocolates and other sweets, which is a gigantic plus for going vegan in my books.

One thing I've noticed a couple of times now is people's different reaction to my rather radical change in diet.  Some people actually get really defensive when I mention going vegan, immediately explaining how much they love meat.  I've then had people explain to me that being vegan is really unhealthy and I'm going to drop dead of protein deficiency any minute now.  Where does this need to defend meat eating and attack plant based diets come from?  I think that I have given a similar response to vegetarians before.  Why do we do this sort of irrational justification? Not sure - but it is quite an interesting response.  Of course not everyone is like that, some are much more like "that's cool!" and are interested in how I'm doing.  I like these people the most :)

One solution is to take the emotive "vegan" word out of the conversation and instead go with that I'm on a "cleanse" (oh cool, short term hippy stint, I can accept that) or more simply that I'm adopting a Plant Powered diet (taken from Rich Roll's book).  That sounds a lot easier, but leads to far less fun conversations!