Time to Celebrate... with Raw Food?

After all my complaining about my back on Monday, it's pretty much recovered. It's still sore but it's sore on the level of where it was before I picked up the bag of garbage so I'm back to being able to shave my legs and feed my cats. I had a fear when I aggravated it that I'd be back to the start in healing but it appears that was not the case. So while I'm not about to go out and dance the samba, I'm very happy that the return to the heating pad was just a blip in the radar!

Still, I'm not going ice skating at lunch today with Lisa and the crew because of my back so it's still boo-urns over all.

In case it hasn't been obviously clear when reading this blog (and if it isn't, you're probably just skimming), I'm a geek. That is part of the reason why I read the Discover magazine blogs. Every once and awhile, the blogs cover topics which clearly have implications for this blog (and any healthy living/weight loss/running/non-science blog out there) such as with today's post, Why Calorie Counts Are Wrong.

Okay, okay. So I 'Fox News'd' the title a bit, but I thought it was an interesting article about how cooking foods often releases nutrients in them that would otherwise be indigestible thereby increasing the calorie count of that food. I'm filing it under "food for thought".

And just to emphasis that I'm a geek: I read that article, wrote down the book title, and then checked to see if my local library had it. ::pushes up nerd glasses:: Because that's the sort of thing one reads over the holiday season.

This time tomorrow...

Tomorrow I will run my first 10K... and by run I mean 'attempt to run as much as possible'. I had been hoping that I would be up to sustained 10 minute intervals by the time the 10K rolled around (with a 2 minute walking period) but I know that I won't be able to keep that up for the whole race so instead, I'm dropping down to 5:1. I know that I can sustain that for roughly 5K; we'll see how well it works tomorrow morning with double the distance. I'm optimistic if only because I have no other choice at this point. Yay me! I can do it!! Sadly, I'm not really buying my own (false) positivity but my main goal is to beat last year's time when I walked the whole thing and I have no doubt that I can do that (unless, you know, I go ass-over-tit and sprain something). Regardless of the outcome, I will be saying I ran my first 10K!

In preparation for tomorrow's run, I spent today visiting my friend Lisa. I know I don't normally name my friends but then I normally can't say "that's my friend" about someone on the cover of and the author of a book about triathlon training for women. Lisa has consistently been one of my biggest cheerleaders in this whole crazy plan. From the "I'm going to hike the Chilkoot" to "I'm going to run a half-marathon", she been a positive voice in my ear repeating "you can do this". Lisa--who has won Ironman triathlons, competed in (but sadly didn't complete) the Leadville Trail 100, and competed with the Canadian Rowing Team--is currently laid up after some back issues so I went to visit, to help alleviate some of her cabin fever. It was wonderful to see her and to talk about the training I've been doing. I joked about how I enjoy running more than I ever thought I would and she asked me what it was that I enjoyed about it? I had never really thought about that before and it felt good to ponder and postulate ideas. It is definitely something I'm going to give more thought to over the coming weeks as I work out a training schedule for October and try to find cross-training activities I will enjoy just as much.

I stayed at my mom's house last night, slept on the futon in my old bedroom. It was a fairly sleepless night (different bed so I kept waking up, never got any decent sleep) so I'm off to bed extra early tonight so that I'm well rested and ready for tomorrow. All that means that I will need to post another blog as I've still got things from a week ago that I want to talk about!

Books: The Have's and the Have Not's

So far I have surpassed my goal of getting up a blog a week... let's hope the fitness goals are achieved so easily! Something (my sore groin muscle, perhaps) tells me they won't be but I'm giving it the good, old college try (except sober).

In my quest to inspire myself, I have taken to walking to a bookstore each day at lunch to peruse books related to my goal (hiking, hiking in BC, travelling in BC--need to know how to get to and from these places). I have bought one, as a 'present' to myself, Hiking Trails I to help with the planning of weekly hiking trips around town. There weren't very many hikes in the book which I didn't know about, but it's nice to have something remind me of some of the ones I've relegated to some dark, dusty corner of my memory. Sometimes I don't think we realise how lucky we are to live here when it comes to outdoor activities. I know there are places that have better year-round weather for outdoor activities (but who wants to live year-round in Phoenix?), but there aren't many places with so many great outdoor areas, with the great views which are usable pretty much all year-round... if you have a Gore-tex jacket (and let's be honest, we all do). If you're looking to get out more and see more of the local green spaces, I can tell you that this is an excellent book (as well, I enjoy this selection of books)

On today's walk, I ended up at the institution of Victoria's book history, Munro's. I love Munro's. I could spend hours in there (and would if I wasn't positive I'd end up with a lifetime ban) with its high ceiling and old book shelves. I bee lined to the back left corner (language and travel books, I'm in heaven) and felt a joy of excitement at finding Frommer's Best Hiking Trips in British Columbia. Having exhausted every website I had found about the Chilkoot (being the least published of my three upcoming hikes), surely this would have some tidbit of information I could store in a small corner of my memory to pull out to spur me on when I think I just can't make it over that last little hump on Mount Finlayson. Surely, it must! I eagerly pulled it open and scanned the contents. Nothing. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, so I switched to the index. Nada. Now, I understand that the Chilkoot crosses international borders so perhaps they didn't feel it was justified as a 'best hiking trip in British Columbia', but shouldn't it have at least had a mention? It's older and has more historical significance than the West Coast Trail . Plus, on the BC side there's a couple of day trips, couldn't those have had a mention? I was never a Frommer's fan mostly because they're aimed a travel comfort level above mine so they weren't useful for me on my trips, but I didn't dislike them. I kind of do now.