More inspiration - Keeping it up

So I'm reading this tomatonation advice entry about someone who is beating herself up over having a letdown after a marathon and not exercising for a while after that. Suffice to say that she is being too hard on herself and giving yourself rest is the best thing you can do. I take a week off after a race and the next week I only do low-impact like the elliptical.

But key to this is making sure your goals are YOUR goals. One commenter recommended this guy as someone to keep folks inspired. I read the website and I am impressed. I am proud to be a penguin, knowing that I will be firmly in the middle of any pack I run. BUT I do better with each race and, on occasion, in costume. He makes a great point thusly, "We—the few, the proud, the plodding—very often train as much or more than faster runners. At a blistering twelve (or even ten) minute pace, a fifteen mile week represents a major time commitment."

As I've said before on the blog. It's about the doing. Our bodies are temperamental things. They retain weight. They react badly to medication. They get injured. Sometimes we can't control the body but we can control the mind. We can decide to do something. And we can decide to keep doing it. As I stay on this journey and get off course, the times I slack off means I get to start again. And in true penguin style I think this way, "The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start."

In the words of Gloria Gaynor - "It takes a lifetime to become the best that you can be. There's no return and no deposit, so you have to like what's in your closet."

Satisfaction

So today I went for my yearly opthamologist appointment to check on the health of my eyes. For those of you longtime readers, you may remember that the way I found out about my diabetes was an eye doctor found the beginnings of blood vessel damage in my eyes which led to the diagnosis. A year and a half later and a whole lot of better numbers I go back to the eye doctor and he says..."Are you sure you're diabetic?"

SCORE!

Unlike a lot of chronic disease, I actually REVERSED the effects on my eyes and there's NO TRACE of damage to my eyes.

Well that makes the running, the food long, the carb counting and the classes worth it.

Bay to Breakers 2010 - Kicking Ass

So Bay to Breakers. This year I couldn't get it together to do a costume. It would have been great if I did because it was COLD. Andi Never get cold. But being in a wet t-shirt for hours means you are a little more vulnerable to the elements. The funniest thing that happened was seeing a dead ringer for Sarah Palin - bouffant hair, lipstick, glasses - asking for her picture and her asking me why. She wasn't in costume.

I thought I did fine. Probably better than last year but not by much. I was way back from the start line because my shuttle bus was late so the time one the clock was 1 hour 12 minutes (a little under a 10-minute mile pace) but I know it took me four or five minutes to get to the starting line. Hayes street hill kicked my ass but the rest of the course was flat. My first three miles ended up averaging 10-minute mile pace (because I was walking the first half mile because of the crowds. I really cranked it up the last half. My mile five and six were something like an 8 minute mile. I slowed to about a 9 minute mile pace in mile 7.

And the verdict? I finished in 1 hour, 6 minutes, and 40 seconds. That's an 8 minute, 56 second/mile pace. Sub 9!!!!! I would have never guessed but then again. Last year, with significantly less training I did 9 minute, 11 second pace. ROCK ON! It's seems to be a theme this year that I can't really gauge my speed and races seem to be a tougher slog. It feels like I am running slower but clearly I am not.

The funny thing is that the world is running faster because I finished 2875 out of 24303 runners and 726 our of 3201 people in my age group. That's worse than last year but it's all about the finish.

It's such a badly organized race. I will do next year for the 100th Anniversary and that's it. The logistics blow. I did a park and ride shuttle from Emeryville to SF that would drop you off at the start and take you back at the finish. Sadly, it was a mile walk to get to the damn pick up from the finish line AND it didn't leave until noon. Which meant I was sitting there in a wet t-shirt for two and a half
hours.

The hidden costs of Bay to Breakers is insane:

Parking for Park and ride - $10
Shuttle - $22
Replacement t-shirt to not get hypothermia - $15
A runners' fanny pack (because there's no bag check in) - $20

The best costume by far were two guys dressed as homophobe and hypocrite George Rekkers and his "travel companion."



And Jersey Shore references were thick on the ground at Bay to Breakers. Case in point:

10 miles ran beeyotches!!!!

Goal met! Yesterday I seriously kicked my own ass and ran the Presidio 10, but this year it was the Presidio 10 MILE as opposed to 10K. And I ran it in one hour, 31 minutes and 57 seconds. To give a little perspective on how far I've come, I ran the Presidio 10K in 58 minutes and 27 seconds - a 9 minute 25 second/mile pace. This year, running a little less than four miles further, my pace increased to a speedy (hah!) 9 minute 11 second pace. Now that progress! Some other numbers for you dear readers: I placed 334 out of 714 runners and 212 out of 315 men - pretty much in the middle of the pack.

The true fun of the race is the utter beauty of running right against the rocky cliffs of Northern California. There's something about running right across the Golden Gate bridge and seeing the headlands of Marin County and the seeing the tip of San Francisco that takes your breath away. That's a good thing, because this race KICKED MY ASS. It didn't help that a few days earlier when I was doing a training run my calf cramped it at still felt tight. And the course itself kicked my ass with a 1/2 mile stretch where I was running uphill at a 45 degree angle.

This was not an easy race for me as I just felt like I had to push for most stretches, except for when I was going downhill. Like my last 10k, I totally felt as if I was just shuffling along and not really getting my stride but I am pretty impressed with my pace. Unlike other races, I was totally spent at the end, although I still managed to sprint the last 200 meters. Knowing I don't train outdoors, I knew my race pace would be much slower than what I do on the treadmill. But this was actually very close to my 9 minute mile treadmill pace.

While everyone has different motivations, I find mine to be racing. I always keep up my running knowing that my ass will be kicked on the race course if I don't keep up with my training. The other motivation is blogging about it because it is satisfying to shout to the world I RAN 10 MILES BEEYOTCHES!

Thank Goodness for Diabetes

So I was in Minneapolis this week for work and I was sitting at a coffeehouse with my co-worker. I notice the man sitting next to me was really out of it and sweating profusely. In Minnesota. In the dead of winter. Then I noticed something - his blood glucose meter. Everything clicked and I realized the man was severely hypoglycemic.

I asked him if he needed something to eat and he said he was fine. Then everyone around him was asking him if he needed help and he insisted he was fine. My co-worker and i talked about what to do because we could both tell he was not doing well at all. My co-worker then wen to the coffeehouse staff and asked if they could check in on the man. While he was talking to the staff, two women sitting near the counter overheard and came with the management to ask the man for help. As it turned, out the women were nurses and insisted on helping out man.

While they were getting the man to drink orange juice, they asked me to check the man's blood glucose since I knew how to use the glucose meter. His reading was a scary ass 36. That is literally Shelby in a coma territory. Thank god the nurses knew how to be insistent.

In the end, the paramedics were called and they came and monitored the man's blood sugar as he drank more juice and ate a few brownies. After an hour, the man alert and able to take care of himself. When the EMT checked his blood sugar is was 140 so he was fine.

I have never been so grateful to be diabetic and be able to spot hypoglycemia. It's a blessing to have gone through extensive training on living with diabetes (however problematic) and get the support I did to understand the disease.

Thank goodness for my disease and hte knowledge it gave me.

Giving Thanks for Running

The theme for this Thanksgiving should be the Olympian - stronger! higher! faster! because I ran my ass off that weekend. Along with eating a truckload of food.

Eating
On the eating side of things, I did a sorta stupid/sorta smart thing - I barely ate anything leading up to Thanksgiving dinner. You see, I would be having real food professionals over for Thanksgiving. We picked up a maple and rosemary-brined turkey from Cheffie Mark. We would be having a cheese plate selected by the cheesemonger at the wine bar where Bellisima works. And a trio of soup shooters. And that's before we even sit down for dinner. So leading up to the big meal (and I mean BIG meal), I ate a grand total of 30 grams of carbs. 15 grams from a roasted pepper frittata and 15 from an apple. I also had a salad during the day. While I am sure it was playing havoc with my body and my metabolism, I wanted to eat my Thanksgiving meal with abandon. And I did. It was spread out over the course of six hours and all of it was delicious. The great thing about this meal (where we had a summit to plan the menu!) was that we all floated in an out of the kitchen. Noone was slaving over anything because we all contributed.

So yes, we started with the cheese and pate (homemade!) platter with onion jam, fig and raison compete and a red currant gelee. That was followed by soup shooters of tomato soup with a quark dollop, beet and carrot soup with a coriander sour cream, and a cauliflower soup with a bagna cauda drizzle. And then everything settled in our stomachs and we were already full. But we plowed on to eat mashed potatoes, mashed acorn squash, the aforementioned turkey, green beans, homemade rolls, and a kale and sweet potato casserole. We sent everyone home with dessert bags because noone could touch the pumpkin tarts or the apple cobblers. We spent the post dinner part of Thanksgiving nibbling on J's homemade truffles and cheese and pears.

The great thing about this was the bounty of vegetable dishes and the fact that J made truffles with dark chocolate which are intrinsically low-carb (although high fat). by the next morning my glucose level was a surprisingly low 97.

Running

Thanksgiving weekend also entail a good amount of running. On Thanksgiving day, Muffin and June actually found out about a 5K that was within walking distance of our house. It was a great way to start the day. This was a totally informal race set up my a neighborhood gym. No big clock or starting gun. To keep my ankles and knees ok, I run on a gym treadmill. It was definitely different (and more exhausting run on cold, hard concrete. And definitely exhausting to run uphill for a quarter of the race. But all in all, I ran strong and had a good time.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I ran the Run Wild for a Child race in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It was very interesting to run because I thought there were part where I was running pretty slowly. But in the end I ran the entire 6.2 miles in 51:41 minutes which is an 8:19 minute pace. This is well ahead of the 9:11 pace I ran for the Presidio 10K in March. Yay me! It's interesting to see how much I hate running up hills and how badly I am about gauging my pace.

I'm very Thankful I have this disease under control and am I very thankful I am in a position to get stronger, higher and faster. And, of course, thanks to all of you out there, especialyl stef, who's been an invaluable sounding board.

Check it - This is what healthy living looks like

One of the great things about living in the bay areas is the plethora of outdoor activities that are within 15 minutes of our urban centers. In the East Bay we're lucky enough to have the Oakland a Berkeley hills and skyline drive that follows them. It was a gorgeous Sunday and I wanted to give Kaya some exercise. As it turned out we both got a lot of exercise along with breathtaking views of the San Francisco Bay. It was nice to do a strenuous hike where our wonder dog could climb steep hills and jump over fallen logs. And she was an angel Sunday night.

Learning Together

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Dad has always been the real cook in our family. I've been so happy bonding with him over recipes over the last several months, and I know he got real pleasure out of sharing some of his expertise with me and seeing me get really excited about one of his favorite hobbies. (Gardening was another, ditto.) I'm going to miss that, incredibly.

But... something new may come out of this all.

One of the very first things my Mom said when she got off the plane returning home from her horrible ordeal in China was "Well, now I'm going to have to learn how to cook." My ears pricked up. Mom said she'd been so used to Dad cooking for the last 41 years - how long they'd been together - that while she knows the basics she really let the kitchen be his domain and she just enjoyed the fruits of his labors.

Now, however, she needs to find her way around again in the kitchen and learn to try new things to find out what SHE likes after all these years. So, I've made it my mission to help, and to let this be something Mom and I can do together.

On my last visit here, my brother and I took turns doing most of the cooking. He, like my Dad, is a grillmaster, so his meals basically involved lots and lots of meat cooked in the great outdoors. But I got the chance to introduce both of them to the tilapia and asparagus dish (from HungryGirl) that I've come to love. Mom really liked it, being a fish fan and a huge asparagus lover, and as she ate it she kept asking me questions about how I'd made it.

Now that I'm back here for another week, we made plans that I would do a lot of the cooking. Yesterday, I made the HungryGirl Asian broccoli slaw as a side to eat with Mom's broiled teriyaki salmon, and it was a big success. Mom ate 2 big bowls of it! And she kept asking what was in it, and said this was something she could make to take to her picnics and pot lucks since it was a good healthy recipe. Tonight, I'm cooking up a lasagna, Dad's healthy veggie recipe made in Dad's own pans. I hope she likes it, cuz I know it meant a lot to me to be cooking with his knives, and his pans, in his kitchen. Later in the week, I'm going to show her the South Beach breakfast mini quiches I love, and I'm going to whip up some of my spinach-potato-cannellini bean soup.

I think this will be good for us. Mom's always been a really healthy eater, and I know she's looking for creative things to do more than just salads. And I want to keep learning and having someone to share it with. We both have Dad's cookbooks, and I will continue exploring. And Mom doesn't know this yet, but her birthday is this Thursday and I ordered her a gift subscription to Cooking Light. So, even though Dad is no longer with us physically, his spirit will live on in our kitchens as well as in our hearts.

DC's Newest Local Food Source

More good news from Michelle Obama!

Dining & Wine
Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Vegetable Garden
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: March 19, 2009
On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II.

The Obamas Lead the Way?

Great article here about how Michelle Obama is providing a great example for healthy lifestyle choices, especially looking for locally grown, fresh produce:

Dining & Wine
Michelle Obama’s Agenda Includes Healthful Eating
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: March 11, 2009
In her first weeks in the White House, Michelle Obama has emerged as a champion of healthful food and living.

Suck it diabetes!

Consider your ass kicked! So i had my quarterly blood tests on Saturday and just got the results. My A1C went down from 5.5 to 5.1. Normal range is between 4.6 to 6.0. That means I might just need to worry about eating MORE carbs. Rock on!

Even better, my microalbumin result. "A microalbumin test checks urine for the presence of a protein called albumin. Albumin is normally found in the blood and filtered by the kidneys. When the kidneys are working properly, albumin is not present in the urine. However, when the kidneys are damaged, small amounts of albumin leak into the urine. This condition is called microalbuminuria." When I was first tested, my microalbumin was at a frightening 122, where normal is below 26. Five months later, my microalbumin is 21.5.

As I head into running a 10K over the Golden Gate Bridge, having brought down all of my numbers to normal, I'm surprised how quickly the healthy living stuff has become normal. It really does feel like being vegetarian. You eat what you eat. It's stopped being about all the things I can't eat because I can eat them. I just need to eat them in moderate portions. Last Saturday, I ate SUSHI. If you look up the carb content of sushi rice, it's a whole lot higher than even white rice because they put sugar into the vinegar mixture that flavors the rice. But I gorged myself on sashimi (tuna toro you tasty, tasty!) and salad greens so eating the six pieces of sushi was fine.

Looking towards the future, I am actually hoping my weight continues to plateau and my weight loss stops at some point because I am enjoying what I am doing. I like running. I like seeing Danny Glover at the gym. I like playing tennis with that guy who looks like Hugh Jackman. I like going to the farmers market and getting salad greens and freshly picked vegetables. I like eating Scharffen Berger chocolate. I don't really want to exercise less and I don't feel the need to eat more.

Kicking some diabetes ass

So I got my blood tested today. Less to check the progress and more to check whether I need to adjust some medication that regulates my blood pressure and the protein in my blood (called an ACE inhibitor). I guess since they were drawing blood, the lab decided to run a whole bunch of tests including my lipid panel (fats and cholesterol in my blood) and my fasting blood sugar.

As it turns about everything went down, except for my HDL (the good cholesterol) which stayed the same. But the overall cholesterol level went down 100 points, the triglycerides went from six times the normal level to normal range, and the fasting blood sugar went down 150 points. WOO!!!!!

Yes, you can get your body chemistry under control by writing down everything you eat, exercising like a mofo, and regulating your carb intake. The upside is that I've made sure to eat regularly and not get hungry. Getting hungry is the worst thing to do because your liver thinks you're starving and dumps glucose into your blood. I've been lucky to have a regular enough job to eat snacks and do brief spurts of exercise to keep my blood sugar down.

Speaking of staying full, the meal I had tonight has been a mainstay of my post-diabetes cooking.

Seared ahi tuna with salad

1 1-inch ahi tuna steak (about 3/4 of a pound. This will be expensive but worth every penny)
2 tablespoons of sesame seeds (optional)
3 cups of salad greens
1/2 red onion, thinly sliced
a mustard-muscat vinegar vinaigrette
- 2 tablespoons muscat or riesling vinegar (Trader Joe's has a good orange muscat vinegar)
- 1 teaspoon dijon mustard
- 2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat a nonstick pan or cast iron skillet to smoking hot. Brush one side of the tuna steak with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper and sesame seeds. Place oil side down on the smoking hot skillet and let it sear for two minutes. Brush the non-oiled side down and repeat the sprinkling. Flip over and let sear on the other side for one and a half minutes. Take off the grill and put on a plate and cover with foil to the the tuna steak rest. While the tuna is resting, assemble the salad. WIth a sharp knife slice the tuna into 1/4 inch slices on the bias (agaisnt the grain of the meat). Artfully place on top of the salad. Eat with abandon and remember to eat a few slices of bread for carbs.

MLK Jr. - Good for Civil Rights and Healthy Living

In the wake of the passage of California's Prop 8 I had to post this (which are good words of encouragement for those of us changing our lives in any way):

"I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future."