The Best Ingredient! #4--Food!

Since I burned 8,738 Cal extra during the Muffin Man, I made the most of my caloric intake.

First of all, the gels:

My friend, Stephanie introduced me to this flavor.  It's now my favorite.

A seasonal flavor from Gu that is amazing.  No weird aftertaste, just pure peppermint goodness.

If you eat this with a Chocolate Outrage Gu, I swear you will think you were eating German Chocolate cake.

I always had water and a bottle of Endurox on my bike or in my car for after runs.

I prefer the Tangy Orange flavor.  The Fruit Punch has kind of a fruit-punch-flavored barf smell and taste.

This gave me the chance to indulge in two of my favorite restaurants, East Village and Tender Greens.

A Monk's Bowl at East Village.  It's really bi bim bap.  So marvelous with the rice and the meat and the veggies and the egg. 

Tender Greens' salt-and-pepper roast chicken, spinach salad with goat cheese and hazelnuts and mashed potatoes.  They make really lovely mashed potatoes.

I had some good home-cooked meals, too, and lots of deli turkey with crackers or as a wrap or something.  I also had a burger and fries at Smashburger with a scoop of Baskin-Robbins' Peanut Butter and Chocolate ice cream for dessert.  On another day, I had a Peanut Buster Parfait from Dairy Queen.  It was a very good week for food.

And the piece de resistance!  Homemade blueberry muffins on Saturday morning to celebrate!

Muffin Man Ingredient #3: Perserverance

Remember these people?

Yes, my peeps who pulled a handcart across the plains.  Whenever I was having a hard time, I thought of them.  My pain was self-inflicted.  I could have stopped at any time, and who would have cared?  But I come from stubborn stock.  I made a goal and I wanted to stick with it.  

However, this clip from Sealab 2021 came to mind several times.  How to keep from being incredibly bored?  Podcasts like "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!", "Car Talk" and "Fresh Air" were more helpful to me while riding and running than music.  Swimming was just a mental game, trying to think of ways to break down the laps into manageable bites.

It would have been nice to have people to train with, but:

1)  I'm socially kind of backwards and have a hard time asking people to join me and
2)  It's hard to find people with the same interests, pace and time (but that can be overcome, if you are not socially backward).

Another way to break the monotony is to pick different locations for your run, ride and swim.  I do know people who had to do much of their Muffin Man indoors due to time and other constraints.  I am lucky to live in a beautiful city, and I was able to have this scenery to get me through:

The Coronado Bridge from Tidelands Park

Coronado Beach

Lake Miramar--a 5-mile loop

Lake Murray--a little over a 5 mile loop

Lake Murray

  Windansea Beach, La Jolla

San Diego Temple!!  I finally took the Rose Creek path to the Rose Canyon trail and over to the temple.  So easy!

Muffin Man Ingredient #2

The next ingredient is Time.  Like a good physics problem, the Muffin Man equation involves time and distance.  The distance if fixed, so it helps to have adequate time to complete the goal. Fortunately, I had the week off of work, with only three appointments to consider:  the Toro y Moi concert on Tuesday night; temple baptisms with the Youth on Wednesday night; and a dental appointment on Tuesday afternoon.  I had time to do long rides and runs, time to recover and replenish, and time to get to the places I wanted to do my events.  In total, I worked out for 16 hours over the six days of my Muffin Man.  (An Ironman has a 17 hour time limit, for reference.)   Remember, I am a slowpoke, and I hadn't been training much before that.  My runs were often run/walks.  Your results may vary.


My recording devices were my good, old Timex for the swims and MapMyRun app on my iPhone.

This was the time for my first 1.2 mile swim.  The next one, two days later, was ten minutes faster.

The longest ride was just over four hours (50 miles), and the longest run was two hours (11 miles).

What Makes a Muffin Man?

I finally did a Muffin Man!  That was 112 miles on a bike, 26.2 miles on foot and 2.4 miles swimming, all completed in six consecutive days.

What does it take to do a Muffin Man?  Over the next few days, I will share with you how I did mine.  Maybe you will be inspired to do your own.

Ingredient #1:  A Plan

You know what they say, "Plan to work; work the plan".

First, I broke down the distances into segments.  If you want to do something every day, the breakdown is this:

Run--3.75 mi/day
Swim--24.1 lengths/day (25 m pool)
Ride--16 mi/day

I wanted to finish it in five days, and I had most of each day to do long rides or runs.

Next, I worked the plan.  Not to say that I stuck to it exactly, but pretty close.  If you get behind, it just makes things more difficult.  On Friday, instead of riding 20 miles and running 5, I had to run 11 miles, in addition to riding the 20, because I didn't run 5 miles on Wednesday like I'd planned.  I also had to finish up with a 2.2 mile walk on Saturday.

Nulliparous

nul·lip·a·ra

  [nuh-lip-er-uh]  Show IPA

noun, plural nul·lip·a·rae  [nuh-lip-uh-ree]  Show IPA . Obstetrics .

a woman who has never borne a child.

I thought I had fully mourned my lack of genetic posterity, but lately, I've had several discussions with various people about various aspects of fertility.  It's made me a little bit melancholy at times and definitely introspective.

It started when I had a first visit with a new Gyn to explore ways of managing perimenopausal symptoms.

"How many babies?" she said.

"Huh?" was my reply, partly because I don't hear clearly.

"How many babies have you had?"

"Well, none," and left it at that.  

"It's a long story," I thought.  Married thirteen years the first time.  We weren't particularly careful during the first part of the marriage, but I never got pregnant.  From what I have heard, he and his second wife were having trouble reproducing, so maybe it was a "boy problem", as my Reproductive Gynecologist friend, Li-Sheh, says.

It was a troubled marriage from the get-go, so a good thing that there weren't children involved at the end.

Rowdy had three kids at a young age, and had a vasectomy at 24 ("Best $600 I ever spent," he told me).  I never expected to marry a man with kids, but not only did it feel completely right to marry Rowdy, it felt completely right to have J, K and M in my life.  Now I have son-in-law who is a wonderful addition to our family.

Besides that, I have lots of amazing nephews and nieces.  I'm even an honorary auntie to the neighbor kids.  I've been called "Uncle Diane" by more than one kid, and I think that it isn't just a function of the particular age of the child.  I think it might be that 1)  I tend to roughhouse with the kids in a way that aunties usually don't and 2)  I'm not someone's mom.  So I must be an uncle, right?

I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity, through church service, to work closely with children from 18 months to 18 years old.  It's not "mothering" in the strictest sense, but it's a chance to learn from children, learn about children, and positively influence children.  I love seeing them grow and develop spiritually and intellectually.  

Our wonderful Beehive advisor taught a lesson about parenting to all of our YW last month.  She used as a teaching tool a conference talk that probably is the most-divisive talk in LDS-dom in the early 21st Century, "Mothers Who Know".  She handed it out, and I cringed.  One of my counselors gave me a reassuring wink.  She could read my mind.  

By sheer luck of the draw, I was given the first section to discuss, titled, "Mothers Who Know Bear Children".  Ohhhhhh...uuuuuuggggghhhhh.  How to deal with this?  I could and maybe should have told the girls that sometimes, there are Conference talks that make us really have to dig deep in order not to be offended and to figure out what we can learn from the information presented.  But what I did say is that I was having to really think to find a way to present my section in a way that I felt comfortable with.  The point of the section was that children are important.  We need to value them.  This is important whether or not we have children of our own.

Fortunately, my YW board is wonderful.  It turns out that none of us were 100% comfortable with the way that the talk was presented originally and in print.  Eventually, thanks to all of our silent prayers about how to teach the girls about mothering in particular and parenting in general, we changed the title of the talk to "People Who Know".  People who know value children.  People who know are leaders.  People who know stand strong and immovable.  People who know are teachers.  People who know are nurturers.

My sister, Karen, shared a great quote with me from Ardeth Kapp (who herself is a nullipara)L

                     "You need not possess children to love them. Loving is not synonymous with possessing, and possessing is not necessarily loving. The world is filled with people to be loved, guided, taught, lifted and inspired." 

I love that our Heavenly Parents have a plan that makes it possible for me to be a part of a family and to have the opportunity to mother in a lot of different ways, now and in the eternities.  Do I sometimes still wonder what it would be like to raise children that were half "me"?  Yeah, sure.  But I don't feel like my life is any less-rich than it would've been had I borne children.  Things are never the way that we imagine them, anyway.

Eternal Rest

In Hurricane, Utah, presented without further comment:

These Are My People

My forebears figured in our recent trip to Southern Utah and Yellowstone.

On our way up to Salt Lake from Zion National Park (quite beautiful and the subject of a subsequent post), we took the back way that included Parowan, Utah.  My great-grandma Dahlstrom, nee Marybelle Wardell, was born there.  I wanted to swing by the city cemetery to find any of my ancestors' gravestones.

I found John Wardell's headstone first, but Alexander Orton and his wife, Jane Holmes, took some doing.  Here they are:

 I don't know why his wife that I descended from wasn't buried next to him.  His other wife has a headstone to the right of him.  I need to find out if I have any biographies from that family in my files.

 I like that it says at the bottom:  A tender mother and a faithful friend.  What a lovely way to be remembered.

Rowdy was impressed that they had this plaque affixed to their headstones. They were in the Third Handcart Company, dragging their possessions across the plains in a small cart.  No horses, no oxen, no nice wagon, just a handcart. Yup. That's my people.  Faith in every footstep!

One night in Jackson Hole, we were eating at a pizzeria.  We had spent the entire day in Yellowstone and had not much but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for nourishment, so we were very hungry.  Rowdy ordered an 18" pizza.  We were seated next to a party of elderly Europeans, and as people of that demographic are wont to do, they STARED at us and our pizza.  I realized that I could play it one of two ways, either be irritated and offended that they were obviously thinking that we were piggy Americans, or smile and make conversation.  So, I chose option two and started talking to the little old man sitting next to me.

It turns out that they were from Denmark.  Aha!  My great-grandma was Danish!  Huzzah!  Thanks, Grandma Chaffee!  That made big points right there.  He and his wife and several others were on a three-week trip across North America, starting at San Francisco and ending in NYC.  He said, "I wanted to see how two young people like yourselves could eat all of that food", but I said, "No, that would be unwise.  We are going to take most of it home and eat it tomorrow."  He was very impressed that we would be so young and fit because, as he said to me, "Isn't it true that many Americans are fat?"  We chatted for a few more minutes, until they had to leave and catch their bus to continue their trip.  He gave me a handshake, hug and kiss on the cheek and Rowdy a handshake and hearty clap on the back of the neck.  It was fun to turn things around and make friends.  I hope that they have a great trip across the country.