Day 1 of suffering Paleo

Day one and it's excruciating!

How will I ever make it.....what was I thinking??

I had no idea it would be this hard to deal with.

When you drop dairy and grains that really is most of the foods after all right? I mean no brown rice WTF? No beans, cheese, whole grain breads, quinoa, pasta, yogurt,...none of the basic building blocks of what meals are made of.

Well, I didn't come this far to quit in one day so I figured I'd make the best of a bad situation. Here is the crap I had to stuff down for breakfast and dinner today. :(


Turkey bacon, eggs, and spinach... I forgot to get the fresh pear in the pic but I had to eat that juicy bastard as well.



Dinner was worse.

I had to choke down some wild caught Alaskan salmon burgers with spicy brown mustard slathered on top, steamed cauliflower and yellow squash drizzled with Si Racha (how terrible) and sliced cucumbers dusted with course ground pepper.



An hour ago I even had to drink a straight espresso shot that was presenting almost all bakers chocolate and tobacco. Can you even imagine?

Well, I made it anyhow and I'll try to use all my willpower to go one more day tomorrow....one step at a time I guess. Wish me luck with the "struggle". ;)

And now Paleo is happening....

I've looked at the Paleo diet for about a year now and while I did think it was interesting it was clearly not something I was in the right time and place to consider adopting it.

In fact in that space I would have told you (correctly I think) that it is a bad approach for somebody with my goals and motivations at that time. I still believe that if somebody is significantly overweight any "diets" are not the best way to go. Learning how to eat clean healthy foods and making the mental shifts necessary to eat healthy and jettison all the terrible garbage from your diet is most important. A diet could bring you great weight loss success but if you did not pick up the tools necessary to be healthy as soon as that diet if over you are hosed....It's a fairly well established cycle and the "yo-yo" is pretty demoralizing as well.

But without contradicting myself I am in a different time and place right now with slightly different goals/motivations and the Paleo approach might be a good vehicle to get where I am going next. Once I am there the re-evaluation process will dictate.

I won't spend much time describing Paleo other than to say google it if you want and it's basically a diet of meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It cuts dairy and grains because of factors like inflammation, digestion, and the idea that they were not foods around for us to eat WAY back in the day. Tons of controversy surrounds this diet as does tons of research. TONS of reading for anybody that wants to look under the hood.

Anyway, I'll be posting some food pics from time to time while I am on this leg of my journey and I can tell you that I'm very excited to spend the first 30 days with Paleo and see what my body tells me about it. As Always I'll share the good, bad, and ugly truth so no matter how it goes I will report on it.

Paleo Breakfast

Turkey bacon and eggs scramble with a peach.... how simple is that?





One BIG problem with the Paleo diet for me is the dairy as it relates to coffee. Lack of latte is lame. :( There are even schools of thought that say no coffee at all on Paleo but 1)I don't have any interest in living life without coffee. 2) If somebody seriously tried to stop me I would be like Joe Pesci in the bar scene of Casino.... For me a life worth living includes coffee and it's not negotiable.

Taking away my dairy makes me sad but you can still live... so for me coffee stays on the table no matter what diet plan is involved. ;)

Luckily the Italians figured out sometime around 1900 that a quick coffee made just for me would be a cool thing to invent....so they did and I will find a way to struggle and suffer past my lack of lattes the old fashioned way.

Oh man, how rough does this look?

Crazy injury report

Last week I had a perfect training week for where I wanted to be right now.

It went well and there were no complications...

Today I was sitting on the floor and for no reason I can figure my left ankle started to hurt. I thought it was strange because I wasn't putting any weight on it when it started to hurt. I went to get up and see if I could figure out what happened and it started crunching. It cracked about 8-9 times before it started to fold under and I realized I wasn't going to be able to stand up.

Once I made it back to the ground I felt a lot of anger along with the intense pain.

I was super pissed that I'd just damaged the hell out of my ankle somehow. It was tweaked in a sick way and I felt/heard a lot of stuff get crunched when I tried to put weight on it. My ankle has never made those types of noises before. :( I was also pretty worried because the last time I totally rolled my right ankle was about 12 years ago and it's never been 100% from that day on.

Realizing I was going to have to get up sooner or later I got up using the other leg. I tried to put some weight on the injured side and somehow or another....it was fixed. ?? The pain dropped down about 90%. As I type it's dropped off 95%.

I don't know what happened or why it's almost gone but it has me taking a day off and tomorrow we shall see how things are going.

Super weird.

Bum Rushed with conviction II

So it's happened to me again.

I never wanted to climb a 14er... I resisted knowing/learning enough about it to even think about doing it all the way up until I decided I HAD to do it. Looking back I suppose it's fear that tries to get me to veer away from the challenge I know deep down that I really do want to take.

Probably fear of failure is the biggie...makes me try to talk myself out of the thing before I have a chance to get obsessed with it.

So, on with the deal of the day...

I guess it was a few years ago I read a story about the Bataan Memorial death March. Some lunatics gather up each year and locomote their bodies across 26 miles of disastrous terrain in 50mph sand storm winds, fun elevation gains and such other things to commemorate the actual Bataan death march where a "forcible transfer of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war" took place on a 60 mile death march that lived up to it's name. Thousands died on the march...here is the wiki

So these years ago I read the story about the Bataan Memorial and as I was reading the account the reporter gave of it I thought to myself "this is something I'd never want to do". She told all about the conditions of the course and the heat...everything she listed gave me yet another reason to think she was crazy and why I would not ever do this kind of event.

And then there was a paragraph in her report that gave me pause.

She tells it (I'll explain in my words) that somewhere along the trail she has stopped to deal with a nasty blister problem and somebody asks if she is ok. She says that the blister is killing her, blah, blah, blah, and looks up to realize she is complaining to one of the survivors of the actual death march. Not the march she is in where there are aid stations every few miles and 12 checkpoints where a friendly volunteer will hand you a Gatorade...he was in the march where if you move to slow from dehydration/starvation/injury they just bayoneted you to death. Well I think there was humiliation and tears welling up when she realized the gravity of it all and some handshakes happened and she managed to push past the blister problem...

Three seconds after reading that paragraph and I knew that I was going to do the Bataan Memorial Death March before too long. Last week I booked reservations on a cozy little cabin in Las Cruces 3/19 - 3/21 so I can toe the line for the next Bataan Memorial Death March

I've now officially become obsessed with it.

My 14er summit bid for this year has been put in the hands of chance. Training will pretty much run concurrent so I will be in shape to climb if I get a chance to go to Colorado but getting away from the business is hard. Getting away twice is VERY hard and that is the reason I didn't get to do this march last time. I could not get away so soon after the Colorado trip. I say I couldn't but obviously I could if I "HAD" to (gun to the head and all)so it's always a question of making things happen...but the fact is that it's very hard for me to leave.
I will be ecstatic if I can pull off both. I really want to but if I can't do both my next big event will be the Bataan and then I'll get back on my next 14er. I have summit fever right about now that isn't going to go away until I get at it but this Bataan thing is pulling me with great force. I know that I have to do it now when the survivors are still around because it's just something I feel compelled to do for them. Just to be a number out there on that one day a year is such a small thing compared to what they endured.... I have to do it now.

So there it is. This marks the second time I was smacked upside the head with something I clearly didn't want to do...and then all of sudden I knew I had to do it. I can't wait until that nest thing involves me becoming fabulously wealthy instead of pain/punishment but here we go. All systems are go Bataan.

Anybody wanna meet me out there.....you can ya know? ;)

Major congrats to the champ!

I think most people that read my blog probably read Shaun's and/or know him but I lost my password to Feedburner and I honesty don't know who reads my ramblings... ;)

In case There is somebody that doesn't know it the fault will not be with me, but the one and only Shaun Taylor has recently crushed the world at the Worlds 24 hour bike race. He took first place in his category to secure his place in the history books of other such racers that have (like him) put aside all good sense and common knowledge of what the physical limitations of your body are. :o

Serious congrats to Shaun for being out there on the point because 1) somebody has to do it and 2)the rest of us like it to be somebody really kicking some ass....keep kicking ass my friend.

Now, in his own words.....the champ!

24 Hours of Adrenalin 2009

When does close count?

The saying goes that close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades but I'm going to expand that to include latte art.

I have a love/hate relationship with latte art because it refuses to fall in line and show me the shortcut to achieve it. I have not had the easiest time with my attempts at pouring art so this pour was totally unexpected for me when it came out pretty close...it's the skeleton of art anyway and the real stuff is only a few more turns around the bend.

This one was so unexpected that I didn't even check for a cup first and all I could get was this last second, way back in the cupboard, only clean, chipped up mug.

I'm posting it anyway because it's close....the closest I've been so far.

Look, I'm a struggling artist. :)

Today....I can pour this:




Some day.....one of these days....maybe this: