Weekly Round Up: When to Fold 'Em

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads. In this week's edition I'll show you what we've been eating lately and bring you up to speed on my running situation.

Eats ==> lunches lately

I pretty much have a batch of air fried soy curls sitting in the fridge at all times for lunch salad wraps and it's serving me well.

My latest venture into the Cheap Lazy Vegan world was mushroom burritos. 

Verdict==>they were good but something was missing.  Rose suggested eating them with sour cream which I found to be just OK but thankfully I had a ripe avocado that I needed to use up which is how I discovered that guac is the answer that takes these from "good but something's missing" to "OMG".

For lunches this weekend, I cooked up a bag of Trader Joe's Thai shrimp gyoza in their crunchy chili onion and served it over Healthy Noodle, which is a product that I got from Costco - soy based noodles that taste like any other noodle.

Eats ==> dinners lately

I've stuck to my part of the plan of letting my family pitch in on the dinner front.

Monday: hubs cooked us up some chicken parm.

 

Tuesday: hubs and stepson #2 made a chicken rice dish which they adored and was not my jam due to my chicken phobia.  I ate a few bites and moved the rest around on my plate.

Wednesday: the boys had dinner with their mom.  Hubs inhaled the leftover chicken rice and I turned to the freezer for a plate of spinach artichoke pasta.

Thursday: stepson #1 did the cooking and hubba hubba that's a good looking grilled cheese samie.

Friday: the boys took off for a weekend with their mom and hubs and I fired up the grill for a round of cheddar bacon ranch chicken burgers.

Saturday: Mexican takeout

Sunday: something new!  A few weeks ago hubs and I brought home a ton of BBQ leftovers from a family party and we've been thinking of nothing else ever since.  I whipped up a batch of Instant Pot BBQ pulled pork (followed the recipe pretty closely except I didn't put in all of the vinegar at the end - it just seemed like a bit much).  This was a hit with 4 out of the 4 members of the family.  I also made some coleslaw for myself to go with it (a hit with 1 out of the 4 members of the family).

Workouts

I ran over 100 miles in July and on a related note I'm very close to giving up on the whole mess.  At this point I have no hope of improving over where I am, and apart from burning a ton of calories running isn't serving much of a purpose in my life.

I've been tossing these thoughts around for a while (exhibit A from a year ago here) but things came to a head this weekend when I finished a treadmill run with a two mile outside run and had yet another really bad reaction to the heat that left me pretty much useless for the rest of the day.  I don't know if my problems with heat intolerance have gotten worse in the past two years or if it's just hotter so that's why I have more problems, but it's bad and I don't have a solution.  The bottom line is that I don't need to work this hard to feel this bad.

I have a half on the calendar at the end of September and this weekend I had the thought "oh good two more months and I can stop running" and the next thought that I had was "why put it off for another two months what you can do today?"

I haven't decided what I'm going to do from here but all options are on the table.  What I suspect is that I'll cut back but not stop running between now and the half and start working in some treadmill incline power walking (that thing that I used to do before I started running that also burns a ton of calories and has no performance goals that I can't live up to associated with it) and also bring in more strength work.  Then I'll make the decision whether I show up and bumble my way to the finish line of the half or just skip it.  Stay tuned.

Watching

Hubs found the silliest most out there show for us: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

For family viewing, the boys are suddenly into noir and we are over the moon!  We watched the first episode of Phillip Marlowe, Private Eye as a family, which is a show that hubs and I saw a while ago.  It's been long enough that I had forgotten it and the boys were glued to the TV for the whole episode.

Reading

I finally finished The Golden State which rates as my favorite book ever about A Woman Who Gets Fed Up With Everything and Moves to a Trailer Park and That's Kinda It.  No seriously, it was a great book and I recommend it.

ISO the next read.