As the relay approaches

Two days until the Fall 50 relay. This will be my fourth time being on a five-person relay team for this event, and I am really excited about it. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, we're trying something new as far as leg selection is concerned. Instead of everyone speaking up for their desired legs or trying to strategize and place folks in legs that play to their strengths, we've decided to leave it all up to chance. The morning of the event we plan on drawing names from a hat to decide who's running what. We'll have two drawings: one for the first five (or difficult) legs and one for the last five (or easier legs). We'll all be dressed and ready to go at 9 a.m. when the gun goes off, but only one of us will be chosen to cross the start line based on our random selection minutes before. It should be interesting.

In preparation for the weekend, I baked some awesome vegan chocolate chip cookies today. They have little to no redeeming value health-wise, but they taste good. And, with any luck, the other eight people staying in the house with me will like them as well.  I found the original recipe on the SuperVegan blog.  This has been slightly modified from the original to suit my tastes.  

Here's the recipe:

Wet ingredients

2 1/2 cups unbleached white flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

Dry ingredients:

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

4 TBSP ground flax seed (mixed with 6 TBSP of warm water and left to sit for three minutes)

2 sticks Earth Balance margarine, softened

2 tsp of vanilla

1 cup chocolate chips

1 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

Sift dry ingredients together. Stir together the wet ingredients. Stir wet and dry ingredients together. Add chocolate chips and walnuts. Spoon onto cookie sheets and bake at 300 degrees for 20 minutes. YUM!

Today's attempt at exercise

Followed through on my treadmill routine today.  I wasn't sure if I would due to some general lack of interest on my part, but I got myself going and followed my own advice: act now, ask questions later.  I did this weird hill interval thing, alternating between walking at 10-percent grade and running at 0-percent.  It definitely gets the heart rate up and the sweat pouring, but strangely it almost seems a little easy to me.  Eventually, I would like to up the incline on both aspects of the exercise.  We'll see how that goes.

For the curious, I did my best to photograph what 0-percent and 10-percent grades look like on the treadmill.  Either I am making a mountain out of a molehill, or the pictures just don't do it justice.  I swear the first time you ride the treadmill up, you think it is never going to stop until it starts its engines and fires you off into space.  Looking at the picture, though, I feel like a wuss complaining about it so much.

Unfortunately, walking down the stairs after doing the treadmill, my knee sent me a little reminder that - no - my patellar tendonitis has not gone away, and - yes - I really should do something about that.  I have these exercises I need to do to make the boo-boo all better, but I have really kind of sat on them.  This is really a case of the cure being almost worse than the malady - at least initially, and with all the races I've been doing there just hasn't been a good time to fit them in.  I'll get there, though.  More on that later.

So, with exercise done and then later undone (with the cookies as well as leftover birthday cake), I feel like the day has been kind of a wash on the ol' health-o-meter.  This weekend won't be any better as my ten-mile run will no doubt be washed out by copious amounts of celebratory beer.  Oh well.  What's the good of running if you can't squeak in a celebration every now and again?

Do you have a good treadmill interval routine that you like to do? With winter coming, I need some ideas.  Share 'em if you got 'em!