Yummy supper!

I was very badly craving some pad thai from Pei Wei tonight, but couldn't justify going out to get it because I've been feeling pretty run down today and decided to take a rest day from working out. I searched around on the Internet for some type of noodle dish and then took a few ingredients from one of the recipes and made a super yummy spicy peanut sauce chicken and veggie noodle stir fry. I didn't really measure anything out...just kinda combined ingredients until it tasted good.

Noodles
Boil water and then add noodles. (I used whole wheat linguine.) When they're at the appropriate level of doneness, drain and set aside.


Peanut Sauce
In a small sauce pan over low heat, add a little bit of water and a spoonful of crunchy, natural peanut butter and a dollop of honey. Add some reduced sodium soy sauce, olive oil, garlic powder, ground ginger, lemon (or lime) juice, red pepper flakes (I like heat, so I used a lot of these!), black pepper and stir. Once it heats up, give it a little taste and adjust ingredients as necessary.

Chicken and Veggies
While the sauce is heating up, saute a boneless chicken breast in a bit of olive oil until it's cooked through. Set aside and chop up into bite-size pieces. In the same pan, saute a lot of vegetables (I used Harris Teeter frozen Chinese StirFry vegetables and some mushrooms). Once the veggies are pretty much done, add the sauce, chicken, and noodles and stir and heat everything up.

The whole meal took about 30 minutes to prepare and it's easy to clean nearly everything while it's mixing together at the end.

It was so yummy and not too bad for you if you go easy on the olive oil and peanut butter. The perfect combo of spicy and sweet!

Twelve and a half miles.

(Is 1.5 miles farther than 11 miles.) :-)

Today was my last long training run before the March 27th half marathon. And it went pretty well! All of the stats are up on the Garmin site. My average time was 11:19 minutes per mile and I'm pretty pleased with that because on my last long run (11 miles), I averaged 11:49 minutes per mile (on roughly the same course). My overall time today was 2:21:32.

I'm know now that (barring an injury) I won't have any issues finishing the half. I'm also incredibly stoked because I've finally found the perfect pre-run breakfast to give me sufficient energy without upsetting my stomach. (I won't go into detail, but it's fairly common for endurance runners to have intestinal issues if they don't have the perfect food combos because you're bouncing around your insides for so long.)

Brian and I slept in today until 11 (which was GLORIOUS). So right after I got up, I had breakfast. I had a banana, fat free greek yogurt (with honey on the bottom) (incredible protein source!), 24 (yes I counted!) Cinnamon Streusel Frosted Mini-Wheats (dry), and a bottle of Propel. I watched Friday's Young & The Restless while I ate and afterward went upstairs for a quick bath to shave my legs! (COMPLETELY LOVING non-long-pants season!) Afterwards, I got dressed in the new running outfit I bought last weekend (black Nike capri-length running tights and blue short sleeved Reebok shirt [I can't find a picture online of the shirt!]) and then headed downstairs to mix up some Crystal Light into my water bottles for the Amphipod hydration belt. I also took a Vanilla Bean GU gel.

GU gels are my new favorite thing! In addition to tasting delicious, they really do work! You take one 15 minutes before you start running and then every 45 minutes while you run. They're basically just 100 calories of carbs and sodium to help you sustain energy and replace your electrolytes (if you're sweating like crazy and only drinking water, then your salt balance can get way off). It's amazing how you can feel your body change after taking one. You can also take one at the end of your run to help with recovery. (Sports nutrition science is so interesting!)

I started running at Shelley Lake and then headed south (hoping to end up somewhere around Anderson Drive for my turnaround). This was also my previous plan for my 11 miles; however, I got "lost" on that run and ended up not where I wanted. Well, today, I followed the signs and still wasn't exactly sure where to go and didn't want to waste a lot of time figuring it out (although I did take one spur that ended up being STRAIGHT UP HILL to end up in a damn parking lot!) So I turned around, flew down the hill, and then ran down the Crabtree Creek trail down behind the mall. It was a really good trail and I was able to turn around at 7.5 miles and distanced-it perfectly to finish up right back where I started at Shelley Lake. (GO ME! Completely lucky!)

The weather today was great! Lots of cloud cover and a slight breeze and I felt great all run. At the very end, my butt was a little sore and a few times my toes felt weird, but, all-in-all, I felt fantastic. The hilarious part of the run was the last 1.5 miles back around Shelley Lake. I ended up with these two teenage boys in front of me who would run as fast as they could for  a minute and then end up completely out of breath and walk. They repeated this over and over and would start running right as I was catching up to them. It was clear they weren't doing intervals; they just couldn't pace themselves at all. (I was thinking, "look dudes, I'm at 11.8 miles, I could care less what you're doing.") So anyway, toward the end, they were completely gassed out and then I blew right past them. It was fairly awesome...pretty much like something out of a movie. My motivation song, "Don't Stop Believin'," was blasting on my iPOD and as I was running by, I so, SO, SO wanted to say "ahaha suckers, you got chicked by a slightly overweight 27 year old who just ran 12.5 miles." But I didn't, because I didn't want them to kick my ass. ;-)

So, after I finished running, I found a picnic table and did my cool down stretches and then hopped in the car and drove straight to the Subway in Knightdale for a turkey sub. It was so delicious!

I've pretty much just spent the rest of the day hanging out around the house watching TV. I cooked some whole wheat penne with peppers, mushrooms, and turkey sausage in a balsamic glaze sauce for supper. It was super good.

Oh yeah, and then I made some granola.

A really fantastic day!

Eleven miles ...

• is a long way.
• will make your toes hurt for being in your running shoes for 2 hours and 10 minutes.
• will make your brain stop telling your legs what to do so that when you stop running, it will make you wonder if you're going to collapse and take a good five minutes for the walking to feel normal.
• will make your legs hurt, and your hip, and your knees, and your lower back, and your stomach, and your breasts.
• will make your calves sexy.
• will make you so grateful for the energy gels that you bought at Dick's.
• will make you wish you had bought some type of hydration pack.
• will make you hate the people in front of you at Shelley Lake who are walking six wide with no concept of the fact that people are trying to pass them.
• will make you mad at the City of Raleigh for not marking their trails clearly such that you end up on some random street inside the Beltline or don't take the trail that you wanted and end up on the steepest hill (by Root Elementary School) east of the Eastern Continental Divide.
• will make you feel like crying between miles 9.75 and 10.5.
• will make you simultaneously love and hate running.
• is completely worth it, despite everything.
• will make you so proud of what you can push your body to do.

Today's Run on the Garmin

¡La Biblia Dice Así!

So, if you were to think of adjectives to describe me, I'm pretty sure that religious probably wouldn't appear until somewhere after adjective no. 100. (BTW, hopefully, adjective no. 1 would be humble; hahaha...yeah right!).

Don't get me wrong...I'm not agnostic or athiest or anything, I'm just not the kinda girl who will be citing you Bible verses. In fact, the four years I spent in my high school Sunday school class consisted of walking to the McDonald's and Bojangles or playing Bible Baseball. And let me just tell you, no one wanted me on his or her team for Bible Baseball because everyone realized I knew jack about Bible trivia. In fact, there was only one kid that knew anything about Bible trivia, so everyone wanted to be on his team. By about the middle of my sophomore year, we all pretty much figured out we were screwed if that kid wasn't on our team, so we just said to heck with the teams and read questions out loud while this other kid answered the questions. This probably explains why I suck with religion. :-)

So anyway, I have to say that I was a little concerned when I realized that one of the books on my reading list was the Bible. I knew that there wasn't anyway that I was going to sit down and read it cover to cover, so I sought out my friend Google for help. (The last 15 times I tried to read the Bible cover-to-cover the furthest I got was God smiting Cain.) Mr. Google informed me that there were many ways to read the Bible: cover-to-cover; chronologically in the order that the books were written; or thematically (i.e., pairing an Old Testament, New Testament, and Psalm reading). The English major in me (who firmly believes in how the author's lifetime has an effect on the narrative) led me to decide to go with the chronological order and I'm using the following reading plan:

www.gribblenation.com/personal/laura/Bible_Reading_One_Year.pdf

I should be finished with the whole thing by February 14, 2011. The readings only take about 10 minutes each day, but I'm also reading all of the supplementary material in my Catholic Study Bible as I go (that is, front matter, footnotes, reading guides, and so on). These supplements are really critical to my understanding of everything. It's fascinating to see how different books became part of the canon and how nuances in the Hebrew affect the meaning of the English translation. I'm also particularly struck how each book was formed. Most of the books are pieced together from various sources (down to the verse level), which is incredibly impressive as a literary and historical piece.

One of my history electives at N.C. State was the History of the Old Testament. A lot of what I did in that class is starting to come back to me. I just wish I had kept my notes and essays.

Spiritually, I'm very much enjoying it. It's definitely healthier than Bo-berry biscuits and cajun fries.

BTW, I'm doing all this concurrently with reading Nineteen Eighty Four. And once that's done, I'll be moving on to Vanity Fair.

The Catcher in the Rye

So, the night before we left for New York, I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

I'm not going to do a full book report or anything, but I will say that I am so happy that I reread it. It is very, very good! Everyone should read it; it's very short.

The book follows the protagonist as he travels around New York City alone for a few days after failing out of his fourth prep school. It was published in 1951.

Holden's problem (aside from being mentally ill and possibly sexually abused) is that he can only see people as black or white. He wants to like everyone, but whenever he comes across a negative character trait, he completely writes off the person and considers him or her a phony. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't really like anyone except for his dead brother and his little sister.

I got a lot out of the book. I'm not going to lie, though, I felt incredibly lonely after finishing it. Like more lonely than I've ever felt after reading a book. Most of the book is just Holden's thoughts and although there are some human interactions, it's mostly just Holden.

As a side note, it was very cool to go to the city right after reading it!

Up next on the list is Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, which I've also already read. I've started reading the first 5 pages and I'm already depressed again. After I finish this one, maybe I can find one that isn't so damn depressing. I also need to go to the library so that I can read some books that aren't already on my bookshelf!

The List

No place in the world that can compare | Final Thoughts

• If you're not up on the hip hop/rap scene, my blog titles are lines from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' song "Empire State of Mind," which is all about New York City. It's a really good song, but if you're not all about rap, go download just Alicia Keys' R&B version. It's absolutely beautiful and a lot of the lyrics are the same. Her voice is incredible and the piano part is unreal.
• I love my husband. Brian has probably had NYC roads memorized since he was 3 months in utero and, with the help of his Blackberry, he knew all the pertinent subway trains that we needed. We never got lost and the dude is a freaking genius. He knows which routes in and fro the city require tolls, he knows which subway stairwell to take to come up on the right side of the street, and he knows exactly how to tell the cabbie to get to our hotel so that he doesn't drive all over the place and charge us a fortune. It was fantastic for me. I just followed along and went where Brian told me to go with no stress.
• My first actual experience with Manhattan was incredible. We came up from the subway at night right in Times Square. It was complete sensory overload: everything right and wrong with America simultaneously. My head was probably spinning 360°! I haven't been to a lot of places, but I have been to some big cities (namely, London, Paris, and Sydney) and I haven't ever seen anything like New York. The sheer number of skyscrapers is incredible. The only places I can even imagine having a similar phenomenon would be Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. Whether they do compare, I have no idea.
• The city didn't feel nearly as dangerous as I would have thought. We never felt weird, not even on the subway at night. I would have been 100% comfortable going around the subway and the city (at least to the places we went) by myself during the day.
• I still don't want to live there. It would be a major pain to have to deal with public transportation every day. I like my car, thankyouverymuch.
• It snowed A LOT in D.C. and Baltimore.
• Smart phones can be very helpful.
• Every Top 40 station in America is playing Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" and Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" four times an hour. Fortunately, we liked both songs.
• I do regret not getting to run while I was up there, but it was absolutely freezing and we did so much walking that I was completely exhausted each morning.
• I do wish we had seen the NYC Public Library building and visited the Natural History Museum. We'll definitely be doing both on our next trip.
• We are incredibly lucky. It snowed 2 feet in Washington 2 hours after we left the area, never snowed a flake in NYC while we were there, and tomorrow they're calling for 18 inches in NYC. Go us!

Yellow cab, gypsy cab, dollar cab, holla back | Sunday & Monday

Sunday

Sunday was our appointed touristy day. We made reservations for a bus tour around Midtown and Downtown. It was very cool! You get on the tour bus at Times Square and then it goes all around the city, stopping at different places. You can hop off at any of the stops and then when you're done, you just head back to the bus stop you got off at and continue the tour with a new bus! Very smart! Our tour went to the following places:

• Times Square
• Greenwich Village
• Empire State Building
• Union Square
• SoHo
• Chinatown
• Little Italy
• East Village
• Rockefeller Center
• World Trade Center Site
• United Nations

So, we started the tour and then hopped off at Little Italy for lunch. We had the most incredible lunch ever. The only time I've ever had better Italian was in Italy. Brian had spaghetti and meatballs and I had eggplant parmesan. It was the real-deal-Italian!

When we got back on the bus, we made it around to the United Nations and then hopped off so that we could walk up to Grand Central Station. The G.C. is very cool in that old school way that just makes train stations so romanticized. A few months ago we watched a History Channel special on Grand Central, so it was very cool to see what we had watched on the show.

As we were heading back to the bus stop, we came across a cool coffee shop: Aroma Espresso Bar, where we sat and chilled for a while. One hot chocolate and one mocha later, we finished our tour and then took the subway to one of the areas around NYU to a nice little bookstore: Shakespeare & Co. We spent a lot of time there decompressing and flipping through books.

Afterward, we went back to Times Square and found an Irish Pub to eat dinner and watch the Super Bowl. Our dinner was fair and the bar scene was completely lame, so we decided to go to a free improv comedy show that I had come across in one of the books I read at the bookstore. The show was the Upright Citizens Brigade and it was supposed to start at 9:30 p.m. and we were supposed to get there at 8:15 p.m. to get free tickets. Well, for some reason, they weren't doing a 9:30 show, but we were able to go in to the 7:30 show that was already in progress and watch the rest of it. We got there around 8:05 and then saw about 2 hours of the show, so I really don't think we missed much and it was FREE! It was incredibly offensive, perverted, and over the top, so, naturally, we loved it! We laughed so hard. I highly recommend it if you're not one to get offended.

After the show, we were tired and it was cold, so we decided to splurge and take a cab back from Manhattan to our hotel. It was about $35, including the tip, so it was expensive, but completely worth it!

Monday

Monday was basically a driving day, but we weren't in too much of a hurry to get back (we picked Gatsby up Tuesday after work), so we slept late and then headed out to find a good pizza place for lunch. We ended up at Nick's Pizza in Queens. It was very, very good and the area in Queens was really cool. We were able to get half the pizza my way and half Brian's way and each ended up bringing home two slices, so it was very excellent to get two meals out of it!

After lunch, we drove through Manhattan so that we could see Central Park West and Harlem and then The Bronx (so that we could hit up all five boroughs). There were SO MANY dog walkers out in CPW. It was sooo funny. If I was rich and lived in NYC, I would definitely be a CPW kinda girl. Gatsby is absolutely a CPW kinda doggie!

After that, it was pretty much just driving until we got to Baltimore and D.C. where it was pretty much just driving with 5 feet snow walls lining the roads! :-)

We ate dinner at the Max and Erma's in Richmond (one of our favorite Ohio restaurants) and then got back to Knightdale around 11 p.m.