More kids' nutrition news

The Renegade Lunch Lady is in town. Chef Ann Cooper was in Boulder, talking to the school board about ways to improve school meals.

Current forecasts show that the kids in school today will live shorter lives than their parents, the first time ever that this will happen. A big part of the reason is the habits they pick up in school.

This morning I watched kids pouring chocolate milk on their Count Chocula cereal, and watched as they dumped most of their fruit cups into the 55 gallon drum that will most likely find its way to a pig trough nearby. I talked to a couple of them, but I have to be careful lecturing them because it turns them off completely. Instead, I try to let them see me munching on an apple or drinking a bottle of water.

You can hear Chef Ann's spiel here, and read more about the program here.

It's twelve o'clock... do you know what your kids are eating right now?

No news today...

... just needed to post a picture of Z. wearing the Army colors to placate my half of the family.










The 12th man is now officially here.

World Nutella Day

Feb 5th, as I'm sure you all knew.

Story here.

And a homemade powerbar-type recipe using Nutella here.

Happy Trails.

Thinking about Goldfish

Random musings here.

Admitting that you have a problem

The first step is to admit that you have a problem.

We got a call from Pepperidge Farms the other day. They wanted to offer us payroll deduction, in order to simplify our monthly Goldfish bill and consolidate our baked snack expenditures.

It started out innocently, as I’m sure all addictions do. It was time for Z’s dinner, but I didn’t have anything ready yet. But he was hungry, so I put him in the chair and tossed him a couple of Goldfish to keep him happy. I didn’t even know where they had come from... M. had picked them up at one of her twice-a-day stops at Target. So I toss him a couple or three... and I casually pop one into my mouth. Then I open the fridge, dig around for some soup or pasta or something for Z. ... and I unconsciously reach again for the Goldfish. I’m mashing Z’s dinner with the avocado masher... and I take another handful. Z’s a big agitated because I’m taking so long, so I toss him a couple more... and it’s one for him, two for me, another for him, another handful for me. The next thing I know, in between giving Z. spoonfuls of his dinner, I’m tipping up a now-empty bag of baked Cheddar heaven to my mouth and inhaling the last few crumbs.

And like all addicts, I tell myself, no one else saw me, it was just this once, and I’ll never do it again.

And then M. comes home with a bag of the Goldfish with the little fishy pretzels mixed in.

Same story: casual snacking while feeding Zebb turns into me cannonballing a whole bag of crackers.

Now it’s my turn to get groceries, and I’m walking down an aisle that before now I didn’t even know existed. I vaguely remember the concept of the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish snack cracker, but I hadn’t bought a bag in twenty years. Turns out they come in every flavor under the sun: cheddar, parmesan, pretzel, whole grain, toasted corn, and mixed bags. They come in the traditional size and itty bitty baby-sized crackers, and starfish as well. And don’t even get me started on graham and chocolate.

At first it was my shameful little secret, chowing down on Goldfish when no one but Z was looking. But like all junkies, at some point I stopped caring who saw me. I’m making Z’s dinner, and I have a ramikan of Goldfish next to me. I’m making our dinner, and I’m taking them by the handful right out of the bag. I’m at school, and I have a ziplock bag of them on my desk. I’m driving to get Z from daycare and I have a little cup of them in the holder that before now has only ever seen coffee.

I’ve convinced myself that I’m not a Goldfish junkie but a Goldfish connoisseur. I mix cheddar and pretzel Goldfish with pistachios and tell myself I just invented something. Instead of saltines or oyster crackers, Goldfish are in my chicken soup. Crushed Goldfish replace breadcrumbs as a dusting for baked zucchini. The options are endless...

And like most junkies, I’m taking down the people around me. When I hand M. her packed lunch, she asks, “Did I get some Goldfish?” The dogs hover around Z’s highchair waiting for him to drop one, and then they pounce like sharks in chummed water. Even the finicky cats are in on it. I watched Fatty find one of Z’s discards, polish it off with a couple of bites, and then sit there and lick the cheddar powder off of the floor.

Step one is admitting that you have a problem. If anyone knows of a good support group, please let me know.

Next week: Rediscovering graham crackers

Winter Running Tips

Winter running tips from ChiRunning.

Check it out here.

You know you're listening to a die-hard runner when he's talking about taking an exacto-knife to his shoes' insoles.


Also worth reading at Well: Are your kids getting enough exercise?

School Recess Improves Behavior

Happy trails!

The Greasy Skillet asks...

High Plains Update

Don't call it "global warming." Around here, it's called "global spinning around in circles, so don't even try to guess what's up tomorrow."


This time of the year, if you stick your head out the front door at high noon, you have a one in four chance of guessing what season it is. A week ago it was sunny and in the 60s. A couple of days later, below zero and snowing. And now it's back in the 50s. There's green in the fields where everything should be golden, except for where's there's snow. (That says minus fourteen, there on the left.)


Even the geese are confused. They're flying north, south, east, west, all over the place. No idea which way they want to go.




Our neighbors to the east over at The Greasy Skillet are asking what it is that you love about your town.

If I had to build a perfect town from scratch, I can think of a couple of places to start. You'd have a beach a mile away, bike friendly roads, and a little Italian place two blocks from the house like we had in Kailua. You'd have cool clubs and coffee shops like the Exit In and Bongo Java (of Nun in the Bun fame), from Nashvegas. You'd have vineyards right outside your front door and the Alps around the corner, like in Lehrensteinsfeld.

I don't have any of those things here in High Plains country, but I'm not complaining, not at all. It would be nice to have a bit more culture within walking distance, but the big city’s a quick hop down the road. After living in Baltimore, Wash DC, Atlanta, and other east coast big cities, this is as big as I ever want to go again.

The thing I don’t quite understand myself is, this place just feels like home to me. I grew up all over the east coast, but I didn’t realize until I left how claustrophobic I felt there. Especially in Georgia, living under 70 foot pines that didn’t let the day light in until maybe ten a.m. Out here, when Mr. Sun comes up, there’s no doubt about it — he’s looking in your window, telling you it’s time to get up and get to work.

Don’t get me wrong... it’s hard to beat Asheville, NC in the fall for sheer natural beauty, or the hills of western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, or the North Georgia mountains. But to me, those are great places to visit. Living there is a different story.

Back before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started, about the toughest thing one could do in the Army was go through the National Training Center at Ft Irwin, California. The National Training Center is basically in Death Valley, about as rugged a place to train as you’ll ever encounter. And to this day, I’m the only person I’ve ever met (awkward construction, but you know what I mean) who came back from there talking about how gorgeous it was. Yeah, it was a desert, nothing but rock... but if you looked hard enough, you could find flowering plants fighting their up through the rock. In the middle of nowhere, life was finding a way.


And that’s how I feel just about every day here. To some, picturesque might mean forested hillsides or fields of bluegrass or the rich colors of wildflowers. But I personally prefer the hardiness and ruggedness of something that’s just doing it’s best to survive. Desert plants that get by with a drop of water now and then, that are just barely green enough to capture light and CO2 and turn it into oxygen and new branches. Yeah, a magnolia tree on a southern plantation has it’s place, but can it roll down the highway at 60 mph like a tumbleweed? One bad ice storm and those 70 foot Georgia pines will be laying in your driveway (or in your kitchen, as we learned the hard way), but the plants here just shrug it off and silently remind you to quit whining. These plants are survivors.

And the same with the wildlife. Hawks and eagles circle overhead, reminding the little furry critters that they’d better not dilly dally unless they want to be supper. Foxes and coyotes roam the fields, reminding us that dogs were meant to have jobs, to work and play hard, and not to run around an arena, prancing for a judge. Even the cute little bunnies that run around in our yard aren’t hippity-hopping off to find Easter baskets but are part of this fight for existence, digging holes to hide from said eagles and coyotes and trying to survive temps that go from 100º to below zero practically over night.

I have no idea how the product of Pennsylvania and Florida genetic material, with roots in a Mulligan stew of European rolling hillsides, came to feel at home out here. Either reincarnation or alien abduction must be part of the answer. But whatever the reason is, this place just feels right to me.

Thought for the Day

From an interview with food critic Patricia Wells.

Q - You once said, "Americans eat every meal as if it is their last."

A - "And the French know that there will be more tomorrow."

We [Americans] are still not a food culture. We don't have the respect for food. We still have a fear of food. When we sit down to eat, we have too many negatives: no fat, can't have carbohydrates. It's just no, can't, no, can't. We forget what pleasure food can give us. It doesn't have to cost much and doesn't have to be complicated. Just going to the market and buying an apple can be a wonderful experience.

I hate running.

Or at least, I have from time to time.

I've had an on again, off again relationship with running.

As a kid, I didn't think about it. I never ran track, but running was a huge part of conditioning for basketball and soccer. To get ready for the season, I never intentionally laced up my shoes and went out and pounded the pavement. Didn't need to. We ran so much just goofing off and playing that we were always in decent shape by osmosis.

Then I joined the Army, and they proceeded to suck any marginal fun that there might have been in running. It was a chore, something you had to do. And that damn airborne shuffle. Those were the shortest strides I had ever seen, and they tore up my knees. Running in formation, I was taking quarter strides to try to stay in step, so my knees were barely bending. You had to stare at the back of the head of the guy in front of you. You ran around the same loop over and over. There was just nothing cool or interesting or fun about it. So running became something I only did when I had to.

Then, during my first mid-life crisis, I'm not sure what clicked but for some reason I found myself hitting the road to try to forget my problems. And for the first time in my life, I got smart about running.

I was stationed in Korea, and my best friend at the time, a guy named Bryan Chapman (who would go on to run the Kona Ironman a couple or three times and completed the Eco-Challenge back in 2001) taught me how to run smart for the first time in my life. Up until that point, "running" meant 3-4 miles at a constant 7 minute mile pace. Duh, no wonder I hated it. What Bryan showed me was that you needed to teach your body to run fast as much as you needed to train it. You had to show your legs what fast looked like. So for the first time ever, my workouts got smart. Every run had a purpose.

A typical week would include four days of running, with no two days the same. One day was focused on speed work. There was a state park right outside the gate, so I could jog about a mile to this huge expanse of parking lots. There, I could run sprints of various distances. Maybe a hundred meters out, walk back, and repeat. I could run a handful of full-gas sprints, or I could ramp up: two at 50%, two at 75%, two at 100%, then back down. Or I could run laps around the parking lot and make up my own intervals. Whatever, that day was all about speed.

Another day was all about maintenance. Those days were 3-5 mile days, and I'd line up the return so I came back on the PT test route and could time my last two miles.

Another day was for LSD, long slow distance. I usually saved this for Saturday or Sunday, when time wasn't an issue, and it was all about ground pounding. By the time I left Korea, I was casually running 15 or 20 miles at a shot, but it took a long time to get to that point.

And the fourth day was used to keep things interesting. We had a trail running through the hills (a deer trail, really, because we never saw anyone else ever walking, hiking, or running it), and running the zig-zags of this trail was used to target the legs' stabilizing muscles. Or I'd run an ad hoc fartlek course, using my watch timer to tell me when it was time to do some push-ups or sit-ups or lunges.

So part of it was that I was for the first time learning to run smart, but the mid-life crisis part probably helped as well. I finally understood what a runner's high was all about, and I'd come back from my LSD runs thinking I had solved all of the world's problems in my head at about mile fourteen or so, and if we could just get all of the world's leaders to buy a pair of Asics and go hit the road, we could save this planet. There was a one week period when I was training up near the DMZ where I got up around four every morning and did a pre-PT run, and I saw at least a dozen shooting stars right at BMNT each day. I still remember thinking, how many of those have I missed because I wasn't running before?

This period lasted maybe ten years, and during that time, I ran a handful of marathons and whatnot. Whilst in Hawaii, I formed a team that completed the Oahu Perimeter Run, a 134 mile relay race for six-man teams. (Two of my buddies ended up getting hurt and dropping out, so I wound up running about 40 miles that day, along with my COL boss. Our team was one of the last to finish, but I couldn't have had more fun.

And then at some point I started biking instead of running. And the next thing you know, running became a chore again. It was okay, but why run when you can get twice as far twice as fast on two wheels? If the weather was crap, then that's what trainers and stationary bikes were made for. And the most boring bike ride to nowhere on a trainer can be made endurable with an iPod and a decent selection of magazines. So the circle is now complete, and I once again hate running.

But now that we have the kid and time is a premium, I'm reconsidering this arrangement. For one, I don't have the time every day to check my tires, find my duds, load my jersey pockets with grub, make sure the Garmin is charged, count out CO2 cartridges and everything that goes along with going out for a ride. I don't mind doing my own bike maintenance, but during this time of the year, an hour on the bike comes with an hour in the garage, cleaning snow and ice and grime from every nook and cranny of your bike and yourself. All of a sudden, running is starting to look good again. Lace up your shoes and your out the door. Might not be as sexy as climbing aboard shiny titanium tubes and watching the road disappear beneath you, but at this point glitz and glamour are over-rated.

But if I'm going to stick with this, I need to jazz it up again, so here's part of my plan: to incorporate things like this into each run.

Slope Training

This program includes lunges, squats, upper body, and exercises to work your stabilizing muscles and to work your muscles in extension and compression. On top of that, I'm going to add a bunch of plyometric stuff into my runs. There's are park benches along my route, so there's no excuse not to stop for a minute and knock out a hundred step-ups and step-downs.

If you have any good mid-run exercises that you don't see here, please fire away.

Cheers!

Dining Out

We've been letting Z. play with a spoon during meals, but he hasn't shown the slightest hint that he knows what to do with it, other than gum on the rubber end of it and occasionally throw it at the cat, the latter especially when he has dipped it in something orange or dark green.







But then today out of the blue he dipped his spoon into his bowl and proceeded to get about 5% of his food into his mouth, although much of it made several detours along the way, stopping at his hands, arms, and the general area of his face.







Even still, you could tell he was quite proud of himself.








And you can tell Mom was in charge of feeding him today, because she's the half that's smart enough to know to give this kind of thing a shot when you're dealing with plain white yoghurt. Dad would have picked roasted beets or maybe spaghetti sauce for the day he tried this little experiment, and then would have cussed the deep red stains on the ceiling for months until he got around to dragging the ladder out of the garage to hose down the place.




The funniest thing was, about half-way into the meal, Z. looked at me and said, "How about chilling the salad fork next time, will ya? Have we forgotten everything in Cadetiquette?"