05.17.13
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Something old, something new

Starting Fresh.

13photoI’ve thought a lot about what to do with this space in 2013, considering that, for the most part, my posts dropped off after I completed the Tough Mudder in December 2012. In so many, many ways, 2012 was a watershed year for me. It began with that piece of paper I stuck on my fridge titled “Goals for 2012” — Give more. Smile more. Forgive more quickly. That list, whose red and blue Sharpie words have nearly faded to grayscale, still hangs in my kitchen, but it means less now because for the most part, I’ve integrated all of those reminders into my daily existence. I don’t need to see them written down to remember to eat good food, to sleep 8 hours a night, to cook for friends, to read more, to work hard but know when to take a break.

In 2012, I broke out of a whole host of shells I’d been keeping myself in. I set, and exceeded, goals for myself. I let go of unhealthy relationships and forged new, wonderful ones. I started moving around every day, working up a sweat, and I started thinking harder about what I consume. I paid closer attention to the people who matter the most, and I paid closer attention to my own needs. I treated myself to a number of adventures, I watched the first of my college friends get married, and I traveled solo just for fun.

So where does that put me in 2013? I’ve been less inclined to write in here because rather than revelation after revelation, I’m instead simply deepening the roots I started putting in the ground last year. The craving for adventures continues unabated — in 2013 so far, I’ve Sweetlifed, skied, road-tripped, scavenger hunted, and half-marathoned. Later this summer, I’ll visit Charleston, go camping and white water rafting, see Paul McCartney in concert, spend a long weekend at the beach with a whole host of friends, and travel solo to San Francisco for a week of exploring – all before moving up to Cambridge, MA in the fall to start work on my Masters degree! I can’t begin to express how lucky I feel to be in this special time of life right now: that harried, busy, 20-something existence that’s all whirlwinds with friends, quiet nights when I want them, and an overstuffed calendar of pure awesome.

Simply put, the good times just keep on rolling.

Which brings me, in this ridiculously roundabout way, to where I’ve decided to take this blog. Kaleshot started out just as a record of my gym foibles and attempts at Zumba. To be sure, there will continue to be more of that, and in fact, I’m inspired to go try out some new variations of exercise just so I can report back.

But I also plan to spend more time on what I’m beginning to realize is my evolving philosophy — where I place my values, why I do what I do, what kind of person I want to be and am becoming. To that end, I’ve created 4 new concrete categories in which every post will be stored: Philosophy, Food, Fitness, and Fun. (And um, General, because WordPress won’t seem to let me delete that one.)

Regarding the first category, I am, I’ve realized, actively, in-this-very-moment in the midst of a process of immense self-discovery that began with that list on my fridge and has continued to mature and strengthen in the year and a half since. And I know what I’m shooting for: a good life, a big life, a life of peace and joy, a life of success and motivation, and a life of laughter and simplicity. How I get there is where this story starts.

02.28.13
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Daily Workouts: Skinned Knee Edition

Huzzah! I survived my first running-related injury! It had to happen eventually, and now I can go ahead and get back to balancing properly when I run.

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See this path? It’s the running path that goes beside the Kennedy Center (on the left) with the Potomac River flanking it to the right. It’s pretty lovely when the sun is out.

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And that? That’s what the path looks like when you’re running on it after the sun goes down. There are no lights at all, and even though there’s usually runners and bikers (with blinding lights attached to their handlebars) passing you on the path, being able to see the bumpily paved asphalt beneath your feet is pretty difficult by moonlight. Especially when you’re like me, and your eyes tend to stray upwards while you run because, I don’t know, stars are more exciting to look at than the road.

I was about 0.6 miles away from finishing up my five-mile run (in record time!) when I thought to myself as I approached the Kennedy Center portion of the path, “Man, it would REALLY suck to trip and fall here! I can just picture flying forward, my phone clattering across the asphalt, and dear God, what if I fall on my face? That would be so painful –” OOMPH.

Apparently thinking about falling leads one to actually fall. I knew there was a rule about this with water skiing, but I guess it applies to clumsily balanced people in general. Just as the thought crossed my mind, my toe caught on one of the slight raises in the asphalt caused by buckling over time, and I went flying forward. My phone flew from my hands and somehow survived skipping like a rock over the path (although it’s been acting up a bit since), and my left leg caught most of the fall.

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Pardon the weird angle – my leg isn’t quite as funky-bendy-shaped as this picture would make it seem. But not too shabby for my first fall! My right knee has a minor scrape on it, but I’m mostly just excited that my face didn’t touch asphalt at any point. This, combined with burns around my ankle from my ski boots being too tight on Saturday, and a long cut running down my thumb after a wildly unsuccessful attempt at siphoning my homebrew into the bottling bucket (making beer is hard, y’all), has me in pretty weary shape at the moment – war wounds from all of my silly hobbies!

Anyways, the best part was that, with blood streaming down my leg, I had every reason to run as fast as possible to get back to the office, so I finished up my five miles at an average pace of a 9:14 mile, which was awesome! What was less awesome was the burning sensation running down my leg like I had just gotten a really bad carpet burn for the remainder of the evening. But what was even MORE awesome than that was NOT awesome was going straight from my run to the Iron Horse, to join fellow Casual Hoya fanatics in watching Georgetown beat UConn in two heart-stopping, need-blood-pressure-medicine overtimes.

Tonight will be an easy breezy three-miler to get me ready for nine miles that I plan to tackle on Saturday. Somewhere in there, I need to get back to weight lifting too, but you know, whatever. One thing at a time.

02.27.13
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#ExerciseShaming

There are few things in life I’m worse at than exercising in the morning. I think, if I had to rank the Top 10 Things At Which I’m Awful, my inability to get out of bed at 6:30am (which is, by the way, a perfectly normal time to wake up in the Adult World) would fall somewhere in here:

  1. Feeding myself real dinners most nights of the week (unless you count cereal, Eggos, or a PB & J as an adequate dinner)
  2. Taking my clothes out of the dryer in any kind of reasonable time
  3. Buddying up socks before putting them in my sock drawer
  4. Running in the morning
  5. Resisting the urge to puppy-shop on PetFinder.com
  6. Checking my voicemail
  7. Remaining patient when my computer malfunctions

 

I’m going to save 8 through 10 for myself, because who needs to know so many things I suck at?

Anyways, I fully intended to go for a 5-mile run this morning before work. All of the elements were working in my favor: I’d gone to bed at 10:45pm, so I had plenty of rest. The mornings are starting a lot earlier now, so there was already some sun in the sky. The high today is 58 degrees, so basically perfect. And I have plans after work tonight, making squeezing in a run that much more difficult in the evening.

So, of course, I glanced at my clock, shook my head, and set the alarm for 7:30 like usual.

As a punishment to myself, I took 10 minutes at work this morning to browse through some beautiful J Crew swimsuits, which made me feel equal parts bad about not running, and absolutely stoked to find time to run later today. Because damn, I’m ready for summer – I even found myself browsing Dewey Beach house rentals yesterday.

Oh, right. It’s not even March yet.

02.26.13
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Diversions: Searching for the Ski Free monster

Despite the more-than-slight throbbing in my right knee after my run on Thursday, I was excited to hit the slopes for the one and probably only time this winter with Xavier on Saturday. We got on the road around 6:45am and headed to Wintergreen Resort, a lovely little mountain in south-central Virginia that was probably about half the size and scariness of any mountain in the Adirondacks and further north, and one-third that of anything you’d find out west. Which is to say, absolutely perfect for me.

Xavier had never been skiing, and I’d only been skiing twice in the last eight-ish years, so we were basically uber-beginner and pretty-much-beginner fumbling around on the Green Dot slopes. As a result, my limited amount of wisdom – “Pizza! French fry! Ski parallel to the slope, not straight down it! Weight on your downhill ski! Don’t hit the small 3-year-old who’s clearly more advanced than you are!” – didn’t stretch too far, and it was more or less the blind leading the blind.

photo (97)Oh and also, we were awesome. After six+ hours of skiing (with a two-hour break in the middle for me to watch Georgetown crush the Orange), I can safely say that Xavier handles wipe-outs like a champion, and that I ski with the speed and balance of an arthritic grandmother carrying a basket of fruit on her head. I didn’t fall, which was kind of my only goal for the day, despite Xavier’s reassurances that picking up ungodly amounts of speed and careening into hills/slopes/spindly branches is actually pretty fun.

My attempt at a skiing glamour shot.

My attempt at a skiing glamour shot.

By the time the sun went down, the snow got icy, and the slopes cleared out to the point where we weren’t in imminent danger of running over a small child all the time, we kind of sort of had a handle on this skiing thing. It was a wonderfully exhausting way to spend a Saturday, and the resort, despite its sub-par burgers, was a pretty nice spot. Highlights of the day included Xavier sailing straight into a fenced-off kindergarten skiing class, watching people who were still years away from getting their drivers’ license take moguls like beasts, and getting in a few last runs in the evening when the moon was out and everything looked sparkly and white.

Yesterday, I had a consultation with a personal trainer, with whom I purchased two sessions through some obscure deal site, so I’m excited to devote some time with a trainer to strength training in the next few weeks. Today I’m knocking out three miles and some weights, and I’m on track for a nine-miler this weekend. I had my fun in the snow for 24 hours this past weekend, and now I’m fully ready for bathing suit season – bring on the sun!

02.25.13
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Daily Workouts: I sort of want to make an Eminem joke here

Before I get into the fitness-y things, I’d like to first celebrate a wonderful two hours of basketball that occurred this past weekend, in which Georgetown:

  • beat Syracuse
  • beat Syracuse in the Carrier Dome
  • beat Syracuse in the Carrier Dome in front of 35,000 Syracuse fans
  • beat Syracuse in the Carrier Dome in front of 35,000 Syracuse fans, breaking a 38-game home winning streak
  • beat Syracuse in the Carrier Dome in front of 35,000 Syracuse fans, breaking a 38-game home winning streak in the last game we’ll play in NY as Big East foes

That, my friends, was epic. 

Moving on!

As promised myself, I dragged my butt out of the office around 5:15pm last Thursday to try to sneak in an 8-mile run before it got too dark. The first sign of trouble was when I realized I’d forgotten my gloves at home, but since the thought of spending over an hour on an annoyingly loud treadmill watching re-runs of The Real Housewives was so unappealing, I decided to brave the cold sans finger warmers and head outside anyways.

My goal was to run a 9:30 mile so that I’d stay steady and focused and not too overwhelmed throughout the run. Of course, I closed in Mile 1 at 8:45, so I’m obviously really bad at telling how fast I’m running. I was feeling like this whole thing was easy breezy as I made it to the half-way point, pausing for a quick second to take a snapshot of the beautiful Capitol building.

capitol
Seriously, this may be the best city to go on long runs in. The National Mall has no stoplights to disrupt your run, and you get to look at this the whole time. You stay awesome, DC.

Anyways, after bumping into Bettina, who was going on a run of her own to train for the Nike Women’s  Half that we’re running together in April, I kept marching along thinking that I totally had this in the bag. Then Mile 5 hit, and I discovered a huge blister on my left foot, toes that wouldn’t stop cramping, and hands that had gone from being mildly chilly to mind-numbingly frozen as the sun dropped below the sky and the temperature went with it. By the time I made it to Mile 6, I was gritting my teeth in discomfort, and the only thing keeping me from walking was the fact that it would take that much longer to get back to warmth.

Needless to say, I was not averaging 8:45 miles by the end there. At the end of the 8 miles, I clocked in at 1 hour 18 minutes, just under the 10:00/mile average. This was thanks to my stellar last two miles, which I dragged in at 10:20 and 10:30 respectively.

BUT! Glorious but! This was the first time I’d ever run 8 miles without walking or stopping. And my goal has always been to run faster than 10:00/mile average, so I squeaked by on that too- frozen fingers, blistered feet, and arctic wind be damned.

It was, all in all, a very successful day. Of course, I haven’t run since Thursday, so I’ve probably enjoyed the sensation of victory long enough and should get back off my bum and go do it again later this week. Onwards and upwards.

02.20.13
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Waking up: I’m back!

Woah. 

It’s been awhile! I’m not exactly sure what caused this long break, but I think at some point I realized I hadn’t blogged in three days, then a week, then two weeks, and it became more and more difficult to figure out how to get myself back into the rhythm. I have some trepidation about returning, because I could fall right back off the map, but I’m going to try not to.

For now, a few quick highlights of what’s been going on for the past six and a half weeks:

Inauguration 2013

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Back in 2009, I really probably should have gone to Inauguration. I mean, I was here in DC, I was hosting out-of-towners who were going, and I probably could have even gotten tickets from a friend who worked on staff during the campaign. But it was SO DAMN COLD that morning (remember? Yeah, you remember), and as a result, I wound up at The Tombs, feasting on a delicious brunch spread, watching the whole event from several large-screen TVs, and laughing with my friends about how freakin’ warm and well-fed we were compared to all of those suckers out there on the National Mall.

So this time around, I decided to go. Except we didn’t exactly start walking toward the National Mall until a half-hour before Inauguration started, so we decided to skip that nonsense and head straight to the Inauguration Parade line, and wait patiently for a three-second glimpse at the Obamas smiling and waving in the street.

Except it’s still January, and even though it wasn’t 2009 arctic-cold, it was still cold, and after about two hours of that, our fingers frosty cold and our toes pretty much immobile, we decided to bounce before the whole thing started and head out… to brunch.

Which was delicious. And, after two Inaugurations in DC, I can definitively state that both times, the brunch was the best part of the day. So, word to the wise: standing in a crowd on a frosty winter morning for hours on end is cool, but home-made pancakes and five types of quiche is way better.

Adventures in local distilling and home brewing

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Fresh off of a night dancing in Columbia Heights sometime in February, we decided to check out the New Columbia Distillery, maker of Green Hat Gin and the first distillery to open in DC since before Prohibition. There’s nothing like sipping on a shot of gin out of a tiny plastic cup to help stave off your hangover for a few more hours. In fact, Green Hat Gin is really delicious, and seeing how the distilling process worked- and how local the owners have kept every step of the process- was a fun Saturday afternoon learning experience.

Beyond that, I’ve ventured into my first batch of home brewing, with an Irish red ale fermenting away in my kitchen. The reveal will be this weekend, when, fingers/toes/elbows crossed, the batch of 52-bottles-worth of beer won’t absolutely, completely suck.

It’s entirely possible that it will! But if it does, I wholeheartedly plan on trying again until I do it right. Home brewing has been a hobby-goal of mine for some time now, and this winter I finally decided to give it a shot. When I master a honey ale and a tart saison, I’ll start looking into permits for opening my own brewery. Who needs to go to graduate school or work in an office anyways?

A weekend in the city of Brotherly Love

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After realizing that neither of us had ever visited our fair neighbor to the north, Xavier and I took a quick weekend trip to Philadelphia so that we could finally consume heaping piles of steak and Cheez Wiz in the city that brought this beauty into the world. I found it more than amusing that the foods Philadelphia are known for, according to a Four Square check-in at the Reading Terminal Market (and thus a completely reliable source) are “cheese steaks, soft pretzels, Italian ice, and scrapple.” You stay classy, Philadelphia.

It was a great weekend though, and in less than 48 hours I’m pretty confident that I can say, without a doubt, that I know how to use the Broad Street Line and that South Street is pretty cool. So, I’d call it a success, and having not been to the city since I was on an 8th grade field trip, I can also assert that being a grown-up in Philadelphia is definitely more fun. And involves far fewer shouting chaperones and holding hands as we cross the street, so that was a big bonus too.

Otherwise, life. 

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Honestly? Things have been pretty quiet around here so far in 2013. Not in a bad way – after the six or seven weekends of travel at the end of 2012, and the obligatory crush of friends-and-family events that happen around Christmas and New Years, it’s been nice to just slow down, spending my weekends here in DC bouncing around bars with friends, snagging free tickets to Georgetown basketball games (HOYA SAXA!), and counting down the days until it’s warm enough to run outside again. For now, life is constant, steady, and predictable – and it may not stay that way for too long, so I’m relishing it while I’ve got it. This weekend will be a ski trip to Wintergreen Resort, and soon, thanks to my awesome boyfriend, I’ll be taking some dance classes again for the first time in more than a few years. These are all simple, good things, which might be what’s led me away from this blog for a while.

But I still can’t grocery shop worth a damn (spent a cool $105 on groceries yesterday and realized I’d only bought two nights’ worth of dinner in all of that), I’m struggling with staying on my half-marathon training schedule (should have hit the 8-mile run mark two weeks ago… haven’t run 8 miles yet. Oops), and I’m constantly bouncing between feeling as though it’s perfectly fine to spend an evening after work catching up on TV/ and that I’m wasting my brain, my life, and my time, and should be producing something creative or taking the time to finally make all of those phone calls to friends and family far away who I haven’t caught up with in a few weeks’ or months’ time. I haven’t been going to church like I’ve wanted to, I still want ice cream way more than I want kale, and if I could somehow manage to go to happy hour every day without getting fat, I probably would. So there’s still plenty to work on and plenty to do!

For now, though, I’m just focused on today, occasionally tomorrow, and definitely the weekend. I’m working to live, not living to work, and I’m perfectly okay with that right now. A phrase I heard at Inauguration (perhaps para-phrased, but this is what I recall) is one that’s been sticking in my brain, and in my heart, recently: Find the good, and praise it.

Will do.

01.07.13
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Potpourri: Getting crunchy

If you glanced at my Books in 2013 page right now, you’d see that I’m currently reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I’ve held off on reading this book for some time because, frankly, I didn’t really want to know what Pollan had to say. I’ve heard enough about Fast Food Nation, watched a couple of minutes of Super Size Me, and enjoyed the slightly-less-notorious documentary King Corn, all of which was enough to know that nothing Pollan wrote about was going to make me feel good about what I’m eating.

And alas! It hasn’t! But, in a spurt of inspiration and in a desperate attempt to figure out if it’s possible to go really freakin’ local with the food I buy, I decided to check out the closest co-op to my apartment in Arlington, VA. Which, of course, was a 30-minute drive away, because there are no hippies in Arlington.

So, despite having a Giant, Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s supermarkets all within two miles of my apartment, I hopped in my car and burned through some gas to make it to The Glut Food Co-Op in Mt. Rainier, MD, just over the DC border.

Glut_Co_Op_Mt_Rainier_Maryland
The co-op was on a little strip with an “eco bakery” and a flower shop, so of course I immediately thoughts it was cool (this is the girl, after all, whose AOL screen name was “artcoffeejazz” when I was 14. Shit like this must be in my blood). Historic Mt. Rainier felt a little bit, in a super small scope, like a neighborhood I might find in Boston. Mentally, I was comparing the spot to the co-op that my friend Erin recently showed off to me in Jamaica Plain, which was pretty phenom.

Anyways. Turns out, food co-ops are one of the most mystifying shopping experiences I’ve ever undertaken. Nearly everything is in bulk, which resulted in me drastically under-estimating how much cilantro I’d need for the dish I was planning on cooking that night (Moroccan lamb meatloaf — it came out delicious!), and as expected, I recognized about 20% of the brands on the shelves. I kind of just walked around in a few circles, trying to figure out where everything was, desperately seeking an onion (there were none), very much wanting to buy 10 lbs of fresh coffee (I resisted), and intrigued by some of the product offerings (black strap molasses, bayberry bark, and “gin-gin” ginger candies).

So this is real.

So this is real.

I walked in there with a list of ingredients I needed for the meatloaf, and walked out with about half of what I’d came there for. But I also got a huge bag of raw almonds for $2.72! So that was cool!

I want to be better informed about the food I eat (without becoming obnoxious about it; I’m in the “learning” stage right now, so I’m talking about it a lot to my friends who, unfortunately, have to listen to me. Hopefully I’ll develop some more ingrained behaviors and can shut up about where my food comes from). I think if I had a co-op like this close to my house, I’d begin utilizing it frequently and becoming more comfortable, and less freaked out, by the kooky gluten-free, chemical-free, machine-free, military-industrial-complex-free, all-bad-things-in-the-world-free food. But for now, visits to The Glut will probably be limited to those days when I’m feeling like a nice Saturday jaunt through DC to its other, less desirable neighbor.

Like anything else I decide to undertake, I’ll likely take this new hobby too far, get a little wildly overwhelmed by all of it, and eventually settle into a happy medium, in which I still consume PB&J sandwiches for dinner three nights a week, but also take it upon myself to scope out farmers markets and vegan/veggie-friendly recipes, and actually give them a whirl every once in awhile.

So get ready for some more foodie-related posts this year, as I’m finally starting to feel like I know how to run around in circles long enough to burn some calories, and now I’m tackling my kitchen. Good lord.