Week 4 begins

Posted on Mon, 10 March 2008 by Mel Green

I’m calling Feb. 18 this year the start of my fat loss program this year, & as that was a Monday & so is today, that makes this the first day of my 4th week. I don’t know that I’m going to be posting every day, but I’m posting today anyway.

As mentioned in the last post, I started the 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout program yesterday — at least, started in the sense of doing a full workout, rather than just the warmups, which I’d done the week before (if only to get myself used to doing squats again). Because TT workouts are structured for only two or three workouts per week, with days off in between, I won’t be doing one tonight. Which is as it needs to be anyway, because Monday evenings are reserved for spending time with a friend (as are all Wednesday evenings).

But, I’m still doing the March Madness rowing challenge — 5000 meters a day keeps March Madness at bay! — so I got up this morning early enough to put in my erg time. Errrrrggggg. I chose a 30-minute workout, which at my current level of fitness & rowing expertise would get me my 5000m & then some. Hadn’t done a 30-minuter in awhile, & wanted to see if I could better my previous ranked distance for that duration.

And indeed! a personal best: 5634 meters, with an average per 500m of 2:39.7, which puts me now at 198th ranking of 257 (77%) of in the women’s heavyweight aged 40-49 rankings. Hahaaaaa… I’m slowly getting better. And this was with the first 5 minutes being done at a slow “warmup” rate too.

But I was pretty wiped out most of this morning, leading me to believe that perhaps I’d been overdoing it over the weekend. However, now I think my wiped out feeling might be due rather to not having eaten enough yesterday, because with each additional meal today (I’m now on number 3), I’ve been feeling gradually better & more energetic.

Tonight’s for relaxation, & to bed at a reasonable hour. I sleep pretty poorly last night — got to bed late, & kept having to get up to use the bathroom. I’ve been doing my best to do get more sleep this month, in part because insufficient sleep is bad for fat loss, & in part because I’m more prone to getting rundown & especially getting depressed without enough. Hard thing for me, because historically I’m a night owl.

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A progress report

Posted on Mon, 10 March 2008 by Mel Green

Restart & progress since February 18. I started up again on getting exercise again just two & a half weeks ago, on Monday, February 18, doing about 30 minutes dancing with my iPod each morning before I went to work.

Incredible how even that little bitty bit improved things. I felt more energy throughout the day — even though I had to get up earlier in the morning to do it. I even lost some weight: 1 pound by that Friday (Feb. 22) &, incredibly, another 3 lbs. by two days after that. A lot of that was water weight, I’m thinking — because I’d been having ongoing problems with edema, & all of a sudden it was gone: I could see the veins in my feet again! A sign that my circulation is improving as a result of exercise — I had a similar experience in 2006. So it was a very good kind of water weight loss, that.

Last week (March 4) I kicked things up a notch or two by hopping back on my erg to do some daily rowing. It helps to have a challenge — in this case, Concept 2’s March Madness challenge to see how many days in the month of March I can row 5000 meters or more.

On top of that, I’ve at long last started on Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training program, starting with his 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workouts. This involves three 45-minute workouts per week combining high-weight/low-rep strength training with interval training — in my case, done on my rower. Because I’m still on the lower end of fitness, I’ve chosen to start with the “introductory” workouts even in advance of the beginner level, so my program will be a couple of weeks longer. Last week (Tuesday March 4 and Thursday March 6) I did only the warmup exercises plus the “beginner intervals”: this amounted to

  • 2 circuits of prisoner squats (10 reps per circuit), kneeling pushups (10 reps), and split squats (10 reps)
  • intervals on the erg. In both cases, I began by rowing a 5-minute warmup & rowed another 5 minutes of cooldown after the intervals themselves (usually about 830-840 meters per 5 mins.) The intervals on Tuesday were 4×1:00/2:00r, which got me 904 meters at high intensity & 1278 meters “resting.” On Thursday, the routine I followed was 3×2:00/2:00r, which got me 1277m + 947m rest.

This amount of exercise, in combination with tightening up my nutrition (i.e., excluding all cheats) has me now supposedly 8 pounds down from when I started three weeks ago, according to my not-completely-accurate-but-internally-consistent scale (down to 192 from 200). (For those of you who think in kilograms, that’s a 3.6 kilo loss — 87.1 kilos down from 90.7.)

Today I did my first full Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout: Workout A of the Introductory Level, for anyone familiar with that program. That means the warmup bodyweight exercise, plus four supersets mostly of bodyweight, plus beginner intervals on the erg (this time 3×1:00/2:00r), with warmup before & cooldown after, a total of 3356m for the entire erg workout. (Earlier in the day I had done a lighter rowing workout totaling 2042m so I could reach my daily “March Madness Challenge” distance of 5000m. I also danced for 15 minutes just cuz it’s fun).

So, I have now officially begun Turbulence Training, which is right now the most important of the cardio & strength training legs of my overall fat-burning program.

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My nutritional approach (state of my art)

Posted on Mon, 10 March 2008 by Mel Green

Originally written for my Burn the Fat Inner Circle progress journal.

My nutritional approach

History. On December 21, 2005 (winter solstice), I made the crucial decision to heed the warning brought to me through the grief of my mother’s death the prior month from complications of diabetes. Because I was (& so far as I know, am) prediabetic, the first sources I went to in order to figure out how to follow through on that decision were sources about prediabetes & insulin resistance.

I’m not a great believer in doing everything with drugs — I knew that the best first thing for me to do was to revamp my diet & become more active with exercise — & I got lucky in the very first source I found on diabetes prevention: How to Prevent and Treat Diabetes with Natural Medicine by Michael T. Murray, N.D. and Michael R. Lyon, M.D. Besides learning a thing or two about the metabolic issues that lead to insulin resistance & eventually (unless it’s brought under control) diabetes, this book is where I first learned about the glycemic index (GI), which measures how quickly various carbohydrates turn into blood glucose. Thus, GI is also somewhat predictive of how much insulin will need to turn out in the blood to deal with the glucose. The upshot of it is: an insulin resistant person would be well advised to choose their carbs from the low glycemic end of the scale. Murray & Lyon also advised that insulin resistant people should snack between meals — healthy snacks, of course — in order to keep blood sugars level (& also to help prevent eating too much at regular meals).

As a result of reading this book & learning more about the glycemic index from websites & books specifically about GI, I pretty immediately threw out of my diet some of the bad habits I’d accumulated over my four decades of existence. No more vending machine food. No more boxed cereals. Indeed, very little boxed or prepackaged anything — refined carbs had to go. Instead: fruit (but not fruit juice), whole grains (but not too many of them), & lots & lots of nonstarchy vegetables.

When I ran into Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle in February 2006, Tom Venuto’s nutritional advice immediately made a great deal of sense to me, & what’s more, it pretty much squared with the best advice from Murray & Lyon & other people on the more enlightened end of diabetes prevention & treatment. (Note that I do not personally consider the American Diabetes Association as being among the “enlightened.”) Instead of three meals & a couple of healthy between meals snacks, simply turn them into five or six small meals — that made a great deal of sense to me. But even then I had a sense that the baseline diet of “50-55% carbs, 30% protein, and 15-20% fat” that Tom Venuto recommended on p. 149 seemed to me a little high on the carb end for a prediabetic. I didn’t want a low-carb, Atkins-style diet, because I wasn’t convinced they were all that healthy.

(Since then I’ve since met many diabetics online who swear by low-carb diets, especially that of Dr. Bernstein, but I’m still not entirely convinced. Besides, I find that if I personally eat too few carbs, I am too easily depressed. Since depression is already a lifelong issue with me, I’m not about to go down that path, thanks. BTW, I don’t use drugs for depression either, & never have. I’ve learned to deal with it in other ways, esp. through watching my stress levels, getting enough sleep, eating healthily, exercise, & often — just time alone.)

I floundered around for a bit figuring out just what my macronutrient ratios ought to be, until finally reading a book that had been, in fact, recommended to me on the night I made the decision to revamp my diet: The Schwarzbein Principle by Diana Schwarzbein. From whom I learned a heckuva lot about how insulin & other hormones — especially cortisol — function to put on the fat. Schwarzbein, in fact, refers to the adipose tissue around an insulin resistant person’s midriff as the “insulin meter.”

Although some classify Schwarzbein’s recommendations as “low carb,” I would characterize them as moderate carb. While I have some disagreement with her in regards to length of workout & also about which should come first, muscle building or fat loss, I’m very much on her side when it comes to dietary recommendations.

Basically, then, you could say that the nutritional approach I found that works best for me came out of a process of balancing between the best advice from doctors treating insulin resistant/diabetic people — Murray, Lyon, & Schwarzbein — with the best advice I could find from those I regard as the most experienced experts on fat loss & muscle gain — bodybuilders & personal trainers like Tom Venuto, & those who work with them, like John Berardi.

What I’m eating now. My standard eating approach, then, since about March or April 2006 is to eat five small meals per day, each meal comprising:

* About 20-25 grams of low glycemic carbohydrates.
* About the same amount of protein, including lots of fish — sardines, kippered herring, salmon, tuna. Also: chicken (white meat, usually boneless skinless chicken breasts), bison meat, & beans/legumes.
* Healthy fats — extra virgin olive oil, fish oils or the oils in the fish I’m already eating, occasionally flax seed or its oil, coconut oil, nuts & seeds.
* Lots & lots of nonstarchy vegetables.

I don’t really count carbs, or anything else, for that matter, though I did in early 2006. But I got to know how much was enough, & because I avoided packaged foods & mostly prepared my own food, I felt it was pretty successful. Even when I got offtrack somewhat, I have never yet gone back to the vending machines or packaged refined carbs that use to comprise the staples of my diet.

I will add that as of about a week ago, I’ve modified my diet a little by adding in a meal replacement drink, SlimStyles brand by the company Natural Factors. This is the first time I’ve used a meal replacement supplement, & so far results have been pretty good. This brand in particular because of another book by Michael Murray and Michael Lyon called Hunger Free Forever: The New Science of Appetite Control, which touts a proprietary superfiber called PGX (PolyGlycoplex) that has been clinically proven to promote satiation, reduce cravings, regulate blood glucose, & help obese people including those with diabetes & other forms of insulin resistance to successfully lose weight. SlimStyles meal replacement drinks are basically whey protein & PGX plus some other added nutrients. Now, I don’t particularly suffer from carb cravings myself, & because I eat lots of nonstarchy veggies & a fair amount of fruit, I have a pretty fibrous diet; the main effect of using these drinks for me has been to help me lower my caloric intake without causing me to feel too hungry. I use the drink to replace one, sometimes two meals, but continue to eat what I’ve come to call second breakfast, second lunch, and dinner.

Tweaking. As of fall 2006, when my exercise fell away, I was just getting set to tweak my diet further with the help of John Berardi & his Precision Nutrition program. Well, I haven’t done that yet, but in due course as I continue revitalizing my path towards health, I will. I need the time to read first. When it comes time to do that, I will probably also keep a food diary for a wee
k
or more & actually count up my calories & which of them come from which macronutrient category. But right now, I’m satisfied that I have a pretty reasonable & health eating style, & my efforts at the moment are mainly directed at getting my workouts well-integrated into my daily life.

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Motivation & goals

Posted on Mon, 10 March 2008 by Mel Green

Because one of the keys to motivation with me is keeping track of what I’m learning & doing & also writing about it (hence this blog), & doing so within a community of other people who are doing the same thing, I decided today to keep a progress journal in the membership forums at Burn the Fat Inner Circle, which is one of the primary communities for people following the Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle (BFFM) program. But of course the only people who can read the stuff there are members, so of course I’m gonna post most of that stuff here as well.

Here’s what I just wrote there about my goals:

My goals

My ultimate goal is to be healthy, insulin sensitive, fit, & to look good according to my own esthetic criteria. I summed this up a couple of years ago in the affirmation (stated in present tense as Tom Venuto recommends): I am lean, muscular, healthy, & hot! Practically speaking, this goal includes:

  • Weight in the area of 130 to 140 lbs. with a body composition of no more than ~15% fat (which is considered a slightly above average lean for women). At present I’m having a hard time getting an accurate body fat measurement, but I estimate I’m at 35% to 40% body fat.
  • Blood glucose readings consistently in the area of 80 to 90 mg/dL. Currently I hover in the prediabetic range — 100 mg/dL. [Note: Actually I’m not totally sure of this, as I haven’t done a blood glucose reading for a long time. But that’s where my fasting b.g. readings tended to be back in 2006. I should be getting some more test strips after next pay day, & then will be monitoring myself again.]

12-month goal. I think I can reasonable expect, with consistent practice, to reach the weight & perhaps even the body composition goal within 12 months, perhaps even in time for my 50th birthday in February 2008.

3-month goal. I’ve already lost about 8 lbs. since starting up again on February 18. That’s three weeks, & consistent with the info that people with higher than 30% or so body fat can often lost more than 1-2 lbs. a week in the early stages of their program. From now to say the end of May, my goal is to have lost a minimum of 12 more lbs. of fat, which would bring me to about 180 lbs. (give or take adding muscle). Complete or be near completion of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workout program (Craig Ballantyne).

Weekly goals. To lose 1-2 lbs. of fat per week consistently through healthy diet and exercise. To do a weekly weigh-in & measure how many inches I’ve lost around my waist, hips, bust, etc. to help evaluate body fat loss. (At some point, then, I’ll have lost enough fat around my abdomen to be able to do a fairly accurate body fat reading with skinfold calipers. Can’t do that now.)

Daily goals: (1)To consistently follow my workout program. For cardio & interval training, I’m using a Concept 2 Model D rowing machine (erg). I also dance, walk, & in the summer will be biking. For weights, I’m mainly depending on bodyweight & barbell/dumbbell exercises, with plans to get a fitness ball & resistance bands. For the first three or four months dating from today, I am using Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training for Fat Loss program, which combines strength training & high intensity intervals. (2) To consistently eat healthily with a minimum of “cheat” meals or meal skipping. (3) To get enough sleep!

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Refresher

Posted on Sat, 8 March 2008 by Mel Green

I started up again on getting exercise again just two & a half weeks ago, on Monday, February 18, doing about 30 minutes each morning before I went to work.

Incredible how even that little bitty bit improved things. I felt more energy throughout the day — even though I had to get up earlier in the morning to do it. I even lost some weight: 1 pound by that Friday (Feb. 22) &, incredibly, another 3 lbs. by two days after that. A lot of that water weight, I’m thinking — because I’d been having ongoing problems with edema, & all of a sudden it was gone: I could see the veins in my feet again! A sign that my circulation is improving as a result of exercise — I had a similar experience in 2006. So it was a very good kind of water weight loss, that.

This week I kicked things up a notch or two by hopping back on my erg to do some daily rowing. It helps to have a challenge — in this case, Concept 2’s March Madness challenge to see how many days in the month of March I can row 5000 meters or more. On top of that, I’ve at long last started on Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training program, starting with his 14-week Turbulence Training for Fat Loss workouts. This involves three 45-minute workouts per week combining high-weight/low-rep strength training with interval training — in my case, done on my rower. Because I’m still on the lower end of fitness, I’ve chosen to start with the “introductory” workouts even in advance of the beginner level, so my program will be a couple of weeks longer.

Dietarily speaking, I’ve been cutting most of the occasional cheats out of my eating (less cheese, less rosemary garlic pistachios, less beer, fewer steak & portabello mushroom burritos from the Bear Tooth, &, of course, no pizza at all), & ensuring I don’t skip meals. Over the past week I’ve also been trying out a high fiber meal replacement drink, with great results. I’ll have more to say about that in another post, but I can say here that this, in combination with the notch-up in exercise this week, has resulted in further weight loss. Supposedly 8 pounds now since I started, according to my not-completely-accurate-but-internally-consistent scale (down to 192 from 200). (For those of you who think in kilograms, that’s a 3.6 kilo loss — 87.1 kilos down from 90.7.)

The other big thing I’ve been working on is refreshing my knowledge. I learned a lot from a variety of sources back in 2006, but one begins to forget this & that. So I’ve been making the rounds of some of the books & websites that helped me so much two years ago. I’m not nearly done, but so far I’ve been revisiting:

Diet & nutrition

  • GI News, updated monthly, gives the latest news & research about the glycemic index, which every person who is looking to lose weight — especially those who are insulin resistant or have actually developed Type 2 diabetes — should be paying attention to.
  • The LowGlycemicEating discussion list at Yahoo Groups is support forum for people who are giving up the highly refined carbs-out-of-a-box that most people who eat Western-style diets are eating, in favor of whole grains, fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, & the other “good carbs” that don’t send you blood glucose sky high & make you really fat. I’d been nomail oin this list for awhile, but not anymore.
  • Precision Nutrition is a nutrition system designed by Dr. John Berardi, an expert on exercise nutrition. PN includes “7 guidebooks, a gourmet cookbook, our online digital audio/video library, an online membership” — a permanent membership, without annual membership fees, that itself is worth the price of the program because of the forums & numerous articles, with new articles added regularly & frequently. I have hardly even tapped this.

Fitness

  • Tom Venuto’s Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle, or BFFM to its many fans. One of the things I learned two years ago is that if you want to lose unwanted fat, the best experts aren’t all those stupid fad diets all over the place: the biggest fat loss experts in the world are bodybuilders & personal trainers. Tom Venuto is one of them — a natural bodybuilder who’s never used drugs or steroids to get his great physique, & for several years now he’s been teaching countless people, including overweight middle-aged women like me, how to take off the tub to get healthier. I first wrote about him in February 2006. Venuto also has a Burn the Fat blog, but for the best of the best of what BFFM has to offer, the Burn the Fat Inner Circle is well worth a membership.
  • Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training. I discovered TT in July 2006, & what I wrote about it then is a great overview of what the TT program has to offer. Namely, lots of well-designed workouts that are geared towards maximum fat loss & muscle gain in just three 45-minute workouts per week, & just as suitable for everyday overweight people like me as they are for professional bodybuilders & other athletes. Ballantyne also writes a Turbulence Training blog which is updated frequently, usually every day. He also has a TT program designed especially for women.

I’ll have more to say about what I’m learning or relearning at these sites, & also through other books, blogs, websites, etc. as I continue to improve my own health & fitness.

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Reactivation

Posted on Wed, 5 March 2008 by Mel Green

Reactivation in the sense of getting off my duff & getting active again.

Reactivation in the sense of writing this blog again.

It’s been nearly a year & a half since I’ve done either with any consistency — not since mid- to late October 2006 when I posted the last blog I wrote about my participation in the second iteration of my workplace’s Start Walking program. I’d done pretty well with the first iteration of the program overall, & thought I was geared up for the second go-’round too (I’m pretty sure I did it all the way through the Bioneers weekend recounted in that last Start Walking blog, at least) — but then a number of circumstances conspired within my mind to bring me to a . . . well, not a screeching halt, exactly. Just a slump into the grey, one of the several forms that my old demon depression takes with me. And even after it kinda sorta dissolved, I found myself still in some kind of energy-less limbo, another of depression’s manifestations in my life.

And so I kinda sat around on my couch a lot, feeling the dark of an Anchorage winter close all around me, along with all the looming huge crapload of boxes from the move we had just made, that for awhile there I was the only person present to deal with. Or not deal with. And even after my mood picked up a bit, I didn’t pick my body up & do much exercising of it. Plus, I found these really tasty pistachios seasoned with rosemary & garlic sold at the Natural Pantry (the store I do most of my grocery shopping at), & ate way too many of ’em, ate too much of the tasty raw cheddar cheese there too, & occasionally had a pizza or one of the refined-carb-heavy snacks someone brought in to work, & managed thereby to gain back all the 18 lbs. I’d lost over the course of my 2006 activities.

But there’s good news too.

I didn’t gain back more than that 18 lbs. Gaining back more than you lost is pretty typical with a lot of “diets,” but that didn’t happen with me. That’s because of the second piece of good news:

I didn’t go back to my old, pre-2006 style of eating. Sure, a few more pistachios or pieces of cheese than I should have had (both healthy foods, but too much of a good thing, y’know?); sure, the occasional pizza with it’s refined carb crust & greasy pepperoni — but overall I lived by what I’d learned about how to eat. I didn’t return to the vending machines (haven’t eaten anything out of one in over two years now), I didn’t go back to boxed cereals & other heavily refined carbs as a daily part of my diet. I continued to eat lots & lots of veggies, low glycemic index carbs, lean meats, coldwater fish, nuts & seeds, etc., just as I’d learned.

I didn’t lose my knowledge of what works. I know how to lose fat (not just weight, but fat, especially the nasty adipose tissue that lingers around the waistline): I just have to do the work.

And now that I’m doing the work again, well — piece of . . . . Hmmm. Not piece of cake, for cake is so very high-refined-carbohydraty. Nor, really, is the work quite “piece of cakey” anyway: rowing 5,000 meters on an indoor rower takes a bit of sweat, you see.

Oh yeah, & I made some good gains in the interim, too. For example, last October, with my Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, I bought myself an erg — a Concept 2 Model D indoor rower — something I’d had my greedy-for-fitness eyes on since the year before. I even got myself going on it quickly enough that I was able to meet the first of the online rowing challenges that Concept 2 sponsors every year, to row 31,000 meters over the week leading up to Hallowe’en, & got myself this cool Skeleton Crew challenge certificate. (I still need to order my t-shirt.)

And I started making some really good kick-ass soups, full of legume & vegetable goodness, like the lentil soup I posted about in January. Nowadays I typically make a big enough pot on Sunday evenings to cover maybe half my meals from Sunday night through Wednesday lunch — & all low-GI & healthy.

But came time to be a bit more organized about it all. Fat loss, exercise, nutrition, diabetes prevention — & yeah, given I’ve had a couple of bad bouts in the past year with old demon depression, that too. Health — which if I haven’t mentioned before, is what terveys means. (In Finnish.)

So a couple of weeks ago I broke out my iPod & started dancing in the morning again, as I did of yore. And I broke out my old Excel spreadsheet (now done in OpenOffice Calc) that I used to use for keeping track of my Start Walking stuff, updated it to 2008, & started keeping track again of my walking, rowing, dancing, strength training, & come spring probably biking too. Started participating in another workplace health program that, come March 31, will also include Start Walking round 4 (I missed round 3 altogether). And dusted off my Turbulence Training program materials that I had barely started tapping a year & a half ago, to pursue it in earnest this time.

And started, as of this post, to write this blog with some regularity again. Which also helps me toward my health goals.

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Lentil soup

Posted on Wed, 9 January 2008 by Mel Green

Some lentil soup I made tonight, with onions, carrots, celery, carrots, pickles, & kale.

Recipe

Okay, here’s how I cooked it:

2 cups uncooked lentils
1 cup brown basmati rice
8 cups water
1 onion chopped
2 carrots chopped
2 celery stalks chopped
2-3 large leaves of kale chopped
3-4 large dill pickles chopped
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 bay leaves
1-2 teaspoons salt (I use Celtic sea salt)
~ 2 teaspoons white vinegar

Mix all ingredients except the vinegar in a large pot & bring to a boil, then simmer covered until the lentils are soft, about an hour usually. Then add the vinegar. This makes enough of a very thick soup to feed several people, or several meals for one or two people.

This is based on a recipe for Greek lentil soup I learned long ago from Laurel’s Kitchen (famous vegetarian cookbook originally published 1976); main differences is I tend to use about twice as much veggies as the original called for, & I added in the rice & the kale (or any other dark leafy green), & I leave out the potato b/c I seldom have any on hand (I don’t eat much potato b/c it’s high glycemic). I also added the pickles, which I use a lot to add a flavor variation to various dishes.

Note that by the end of cooking, the kale will be quite a different shade of green than in the photo above, which was taken at a fairly early stage of the cooking. You can keep it closer to this bright shade of green by adding it closer to the end, but don’t wait until the very last minute: some of the good (nutritional) stuff in kale (& some other leafy greens) isn’t fully bioavailable when it’s too uncooked.

Variations: Add more water if you want a thinner soup (or lower the amount of veggies). You can skip the rice or use a different kind of rice if you want, or use different vegetables or different quantities of vegetables. For example, potato, turnip, any dark leafy greens. Fresh tomatoes (which I like best added near the end, so they aren’t as cooked). If you’re not a vegetarian, you can also add some meat — my favorites are well-browned bison stew meat or precooked boneless ham. Tofu might be good in there too, but I’ve never tried it.

Like most soups made with beans/legumes, this (1) easy to make — most of the work is just chopping up the veggies; & (2) you can vary it a lot based on what you have on hand in the way of vegetables or type of beans/legumes. Just be aware that some types of beans/legumes take a lot longer to cook than lentils, & may need to be soaked overnight before cooking. But lentils are really fast; blackeyed peas are pretty fast too.

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10,533 meters

Posted on Wed, 5 December 2007 by Mel Green
 

My first go at a really long row: 60 minutes, in which I rowed 10,533 meters (that’s 10.5 km, folks) with an average time per 500 meters of 2:50.9. I’ll probably want to give 10,000m rows a few more tries before trying anything even more ambitious, such as a half-marathon.

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Skeleton Crew challenge: met

Posted on Thu, 1 November 2007 by Mel Green
Skeleton Crew challenge: met

I bought a Concept 2 Model D indoor rower with my Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend last month, & got started using it right away, just in time to participate in Concept 2’s annual Skeleton Crew challenge to row over 31,000 meters during the week leading up to Halloween.

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Didn't notice when I took it….

Posted on Tue, 23 October 2007 by Mel Green

First day of snow in Anchorage this year, though doesn’t look like it’ll last. Enough that I had to brush the snow off my car this morning, & take it real slow & easy driving to work. At lunchtime I decided to take a brief walk to take pics of the snow for Flickr contacts who had a lust to see snow. (Whereas I’ve been rather dreading it.) And took a self-portrait along the way. Didn’t completely notice until I downloaded this pic to my camera that I don’t seem to be feeling too wonderful… well. It’s October 23. My mom‘s birthday. So I’m thinking about her a lot today. Yet hoping that this mood doesn’t carry through to another day. She’d want me to be happy. But today, Mom, I’m missing you bigtime.

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