Darin and me at the annual Beachbody Coach Summit 2012.

Shakeology and Ultimate Reset co-creator Darin Olien was answering questions at the Core at the annual Beachbody Coach Summit earlier this year! I got my chance to ask the hard questions about Beachbody’s new nutrition program, the Ultimate Reset, that I had.

I’ve heard so much fluff and smoke and mirror talk about “toxins” and “cleansing” I just had to ask some uncomfortable questions. I’m not going to use nor recommend a product that doesn’t deliver as promised and that isn’t safe. Beachbody already made it very clear it’s not a cleanse, so that covered the safety concern, but I’m not paying for a safe but ineffective product either.

I really thought the Ultimate Reset was likely to be junk, but Darin has done his homework, it seems. (I should have known.)  We learned at Summit  that a clinical study has been done and is in submission to a journal on the Ultimate Reset. We can’t share the details in order to not mess with the “Have these results been previously published?” question from the journal, but seeing the data sure changed my mind, and hearing Darin’s answers and clarifications of the claims was also reassuring. I also has a chance to look through the program guide and I think I misjudged. Now I understand much better what the Ultimate Reset is and why it’s any good.

The Ultimate Reset looks like a great product, especially for people looking to learn to cook healthy food – all the way to vegan food. One of the DVDs is Tony Horton’s personal chef Missy Costello showing you how to make every single recipe in the meal plan! I’ve often wished there was something like that to give people and now there is! I know someone who’s been fighting that cooking healthy battle and struggling and now there are re-inforcements for her!

Ultimate Reset Key Information

•  Have more energy and greater focus*
•  Experience better digestion and a more positive mood*
•  Enable your body to function more efficiently*
•  Help you lose weight*
•  Improve your overall health.*

What the Beachbody Ultimate Reset is NOT:

•  A starvation diet. (You’ll eat three filling, healthy meals every day – that you made yourself from whole foods, no gimmicks. And certainly no cayenne pepper.)
•  An abrupt cleanse that’s hard on the body. (The supplements work together gradually to gently shift your body’s internal settings.)*
•  A laxative-based, colon-focused cleanse, which fails to truly detoxify the whole body. (You won’t be running to the bathroom every hour!)

To learn more, find out what to expect during the Reset, and read success stories from test group participants, go to my web site at http://myultimatereset.com/fityoginirunner. Or just email me and I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have. Get ready to restore your inner health and learn how to keep it going! I’ll be here to help you through it, if you order it from me – I have been cooking organic, vegan, oil-free food from scratch every day for quite a while now. I’d love to help you, too, do the same.

*Legalese I’m required to point out: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. (Nothing classified as a supplement may claim that it does, and the FDA doesn’t evaluate any supplement efficacy claims either.)

I work in manufacturing. A big part of my job as a process engineer is solving production problems that operators, line technicians, and process technicians couldn’t solve. This means I don’t know from moment to moment what’s going to happen or what I’ll need to deal with, but I still need to do project work and plan my time.

A lot of time management advice focuses on working with priorities and tips like doing your most important thing first, to make sure it gets done. While this is good advice, it isn’t sufficient to navigate a day where you may not yet know what the single most important thing you have to do today is when your day starts.

This is a struggle that many others face too. My dear friend Rana emailed me today with the same frustration! Instead of just sharing how I’ve successfully learned to deal with this problem with her in private, I’m sharing it with all of you here instead.

1. Block out your non-negotiable time – workout and cooking time included

Your personal priorities create some non-negotiable entries on your schedule. Non-negotiable, because you have decided a priori that these are the most important things that you need to get done today to be happy with your life no matter what else comes up. So block them out and consider the time dead to further planning. When new non-negotiable time blocks come up (emergency manufacturing problem escalation meeting, for example), reschedule or simply accept having less time for the category block it went into, see below.

Planning your day: Step 1.

For example, today I have a lunch date with a co-worker, I have to pick up our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share, and I have to work out. I am committed to eating healthy and finishing P90X2 – so these are must-do things for me today. I value informal professional exchanges very much, so the lunch is a must-do as well. (Experience tells me that once you start canceling lunches with friends in order to work more, you suddenly find yourself tired and lonely.)

2. Schedule the remaining time in big category blocks

You probably have a few big types of things that you do at work. Schedule big blocks of time for them. This is how you have a shot at controlling how much time you spend doing one type of thing versus another, depending on which part of your job is most important right now.

For example, I have two main things that I do: I keep the manufacturing lines going and I do research and development on new thin film deposition processes, so the vast majority of things that I do at work falls in one of the two categories. I also strongly believe in scheduling some time for personal development of some sort – reviewing technical advances in my field, learning about something in more depth, learning about how I can improve my “soft skills”, learning more about meditation, learning more about organization or scheduling, etc. This entire post is a result of me taking Chalene Johnson’s 30-Day Push challenge to become more organized, for example. So that gives me three general categories of work time to schedule in blocks.

Planning your day: Step 2.

With my personal time, I have three things that I do: I relax, spending time with my husband or meditating; I deal with food (cook, eat, clean up, make lunch for tomorrow); and I run my Beachbody business. That gives me three more things to block in after I leave work.

The order in which you schedule your blocks throughout the day can reflect doing the most important thing first. I start with the manufacturing block, because immediate manufacturing concerns with current product lines trump research and development work. You are virtually guaranteed to get to items in your first block, so make it the most important one.

For your daily recurring tasks, don’t forget to make them some sort of block. Don’t get sucked into trying to schedule 15 minutes of meditation, 30 minutes of making lunch, 10 minutes of physical therapy, and 15 minutes of cleanup in the kitchen individually. Believe me, I have tried. Group a series of short tasks into a block on your calendar. Big simple blocks is the way to go. If it’s less than an hour, it needs to be part of a block.

3. Keep a detailed to-do list, organized by the blocks of things you do, and select specific tasks from the to-do list for each time block.

I use Astrid as my to-do list manager, but there are many others. Astrid works for me because of three things:

• It is available as a Chrome plug-in as well as a smartphone app. If I’m not close to a computer, I have my phone with me. This constant availability ensures that when I pick up a new to-do, it can go on the list immediately so I don’t forget about it.
• The app is very pushy. The notifications cannot be cleared like other notifications. I have to disposition all the items due today in some way to get my phone to stop buzzing at night. Maybe that’s re-scheduling the task for another day, but it forces me to consider the big picture of what I got done and what I didn’t. This is very helpful in seeing if you are getting the most important things done and letting lesser things slide or vice versa. One is better than the other. I don’t think I even need to point that out.
• It lets me schedule recurring tasks (work out, make lunch for tomorrow, pick a main task for the day) and sort the items in my category lists, so that I can automate getting reminded of quick but not-to-be-forgotten daily tasks and can quickly decide what is the most important task to be working on right now, based on what I’ve generally decided to work on in this time block.

When it’s time for manufacturing tasks, I look at the manufacturing list and pick the most important item to be working on and start with that. When it’s time for research, I look at the R&D list.  At night, I look at the recurring routine tasks list to check to make sure I didn’t forget anything, because at that point in the day I’m getting a little tired. This way, I can balance working on several areas of responsibility at the same time while also easily considering importance and priorities.

Step number three is where the magic really happens in terms of coping with a constantly changing schedule. If I was planning to look at a long-standing but not urgent manufacturing problem when I come in to work, only to find out there’s a manufacturing emergency today, I don’t have to re-schedule my block of time – just which manufacturing task I’m working on. And if the emergency takes all morning, so that I don’t get to the task I originally intended to work on, then it wasn’t that I was a poor planner – the priority of the emergency simply trumped that of the non-emergency within the manufacturing task block. Seen that way, that’s just the nature of working in manufacturing, and I don’t need to feel like the emergency wrecked my day. I stuck to my schedule – I worked on manufacturing tasks in the morning just like I said I would.

I can then decide in the afternoon whether I should extend the amount of time I spend on manufacturing at the expense of research (in which case it’s easy to make the schedule change because it’s in a one-line block of time, not individual tasks) or whether I legitimately just didn’t have time to work on the long-standing but not urgent issue. The big blocks also mean mis-estimating how long something was going to take or someone dropping by your desk to talk won’t immediately wreck your finely tuned schedule. You have ‘slosh time’ inside the block to handle that. As long as the block is long enough to finish your top task plus some slosh time, it’s long enough. This means planning your day takes a few minutes, and re-planning only takes a few more. If you have a hectic schedule like me, you know how important that is if you want to stay with it longer than a few hours!

Heck, even if the manufacturing emergency took all day, encompassing my scheduled research and development time as well, then what happened was that manufacturing took priority over research that day. But looking at my time in these big blocks makes it possible for me to make a decision about what I am going to spend my time on. I get a chance to say “Yes, manufacturing is more important than research today” or “No, the manufacturing to-do list is going to have to wait until tomorrow, because now it’s time to do research.” I decide. Not circumstances. That’s the key. If you just go from task to task to task, odds are you will not control the overall flow of your day. You’ll go from crisis to hallway conversation to page to remembering something you promised to do a month ago and circumstances will decide what you get done. It’s very frustrating and it’s not very effective.

On the flip side, when an important task suddenly doesn’t need doing any more or doesn’t take as long as you thought, you know where to grab a next task: the to-do list for that category block. If I finish my experiment early, I know where to see what else needed doing for research. If a process technician takes are of my split lot for me, I can quickly look up what my next most important thing to do for development is. I will not end up working on that manufacturing improvement during the research block because that’s what happened to come to mind. It may need doing, but not now. This is the second way in which you can use the idea of starting with the most important “thing” – in this case task within a category block – first.

Why does this work?

This system gets the details and the daily chaos aligned with the big picture priorities. It’s simple and executable. It plain works. If you are also in an environment where “things come up” every day and you can count on it, give this a try. It’s helped my peace of mind and efficiency incredibly. It has made it much easier for me to say “no” when that’s the right answer and “yes” when that’s the right answer. Most importantly of all, I now know that when I say “I didn’t have time” in a meeting, I know in my heart of hearts that it is not an excuse, it’s a fact based on our organizational priorities. That, my friends, is a huge boost to peace of mind.

Are you going to give this a try? Let me know in the comments!

My lunch. 1/2 legume & tuber, 3 vegetable servings according to the P90X2 vegan nutrition plan.

I had lunch with a fellow corporate warrior/amateur athlete today. We both brought lunch and sat outside in the beautiful weather in the courtyard.

My lunch was organic heirloom Mexican red bean salad with beets, on the P90X2 vegan pattern of 1/2 legume serving and three vegetable servings, in this case organic beets and organic lettuce. Not the most spectacular culinary creation ever, but when you need to create a stream of healthy food for yourself with limited time, you can’t expect every meal you eat to be Julia Child-complicated.

My friend shared a wonderful insight into how to help deal with the feelings of guilt I think we all face at least occasionally when we have important urgent tasks on our plate at work and feel like working out is self-indulgence.

She said that the people who stay at their desks are likely looking at you, thinking that they should be doing what you are doing and start eating healthy and exercising. They are not judging you; they are admiring you!

She said she only realized this after a conversation with someone in a cubicle nearby hers, where her co-worker said he wished he had the discipline to do what she did. Before, she had assumed implicitly (like I did) that people who keep working instead of exercising are making a great personal sacrifice to do so, but that’s not necessarily true!

I wanted to pass the story along for everyone else to benefit from. Step away from your desk and do your workout, and be proud of that you do!

Grant Family Farms updated what’s going to be in our medium share CSA box and our single fruit share tomorrow:

• Lettuce (red, green, or butter)
• Heirloom beans (kidney, mexican reds or hopi black)
• Bag of rhubarb
• Beets
• Cilantro
• Parsley
• Spinach
• Soft neck garlic
• Radishes
• Spinach
• 1 bag of apricots
• 1 bag of cherries

This means that I’ve now got our eating plan put together for next week. As it were, next week is only two days, because we are going to visit some old friends and as such will not be in 100% control of what we eat. (I anticipate some digestion problems and discomfort.)

I was going to cook another pot of beans and some seitan today, but that turned out not to be possible. My slow cooker has a crack in the crock! I love the slow cooker because it lets me multitask on making some very important staples, like cooking dry beans, making vegan apple sage sausage, and making seitan from scratch.

We decided to get a slow cooker that will let you choose time and level independently, instead of our old one that only had four combinations of heat and time. One is making its way to us already! When we come back, we should hopefully be ready to make more seitan and sausage.

I am going to assume that if you found this worth reading, you know what the Tough Mudder is. In short, it is a 10-12 mile trail run with obstacles along the course. It’s a big organized event (I’d say race, but there’s no timing) with multiple instances across the US, as well as in the UK and Australia, kind of like the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon. Like the Rock n’ Roll Marathons, the specifics of the course depend on the location. Most of the obstacles come off a standardized list, so you’re not entirely in the dark regarding what the obstacles will be on your particular course when you sign up. (Denver Post on the 2012 Colorado Tough Mudder)

Before I delve into my race experience, I want to give you an idea of where I’m coming from. When I was training, I got all kinds of advice from people online, but it often conflicted and I didn’t know enough about the people dispensing advice to know whose advice I should take. So, here’s my training and exercise background in as far as what relates to the choices I made for gear as well as for what to focus my training on:

• Trail runner
• Typical running trails in Colorado Rockies foothills at ~5000 ft elevation
• Favorite long run trail has 1-mile 8% grade trail and ~1500 ft climbing total, partially very technical (rocky) terrain
• Run 3x /week typically but have run only short distances in the last ~6 mo due to persistent IT band irritation injury
• Have completed two trail half-marathons, last one had ~2500 ft of climbing on the course including a section that required rock scrambling rather than running (it was during this scramble that I decided to do the Tough Mudder for next year’s peak race)
• Have run in minimalist trail running shoes (Merrell Pace Gloves) all of last season plus what’s passed of this one (I’m writing in June), finished last half marathon in them
• Have done P90X for two years, after the first round switched the cardio DVDs and the yoga DVD for running (hence 3x/week running, making for strength workouts 3x/week also) and do Anusara yoga two days a week at lunch at company wellness center (Yoga is important! Listen to Tony!)
• Have done Insanity last year
• Have switched in TurboFire DVDs for the P90X cardio and yoga DVDs also in winter when I didn’t want to run in the dark
• Finished phases I and II of P90X2 before the Tough Mudder, doing P90X2 for the first time
• 5’6″, size 2/4, 140 pounds

You may be wondering how all of this is important. Don’t worry, I’ll bring the information back up as it’s relevant!

Why I decided on P90X2 for my training plan

I love P90X. I love the strength training, but I also love that it’s not just strength training. I know from experience that if I have to drive further than 10 minutes to get to the gym, I won’t go. I also know from experience that if I’m in charge of putting together my own training plan, I don’t follow through on it, because I’m so busy second-guessing myself and being “clever”. So, P90X works for my routine, and it’s worked wonders for my fitness. (And my fat loss, but that’s not really related to the Tough Mudder, so I’ll leave it at that here.) It’s an amazing program, there’s a reason pro athletes in the NBA, NFL, and MBL use it to train in their off-seasons. It’s the real training deal, like getting a plan from a trainer but for much cheaper!

So, when I heard the announcements about what P90X2 was going to be like at the annual Beachbody Coach Summit conference last year, I knew (like I’m sure half of the rest of the ballroom) that I was going to do this program when it was released, positively and absolutely. What got me very excited was the focus on athletic performance, and even kicking out a workout day to let you “play”, as Tony put it. To go out there and enjoy your fitness. The long trail run, the weekend mountain bike ride, the Sunday road ride with friends, the climb, the summit, the fourteener, the snowshoeing, the skiing, the cross-country skiing, the ice skating. When P90X2 came out, I was in the middle of round 5 of P90X. I had done the math. I could finish P90X2 nicely before the Tough Mudder. I would simply do what I’d already done before and switch the cardio for running. And the IT band injury that made me limp across the finish line of my last race would be all better, because I was going to physical therapy and seeing a sports medicine doctor, who took x-rays of my knees and said there was nothing wrong with my knee joints and that it was all soft tissue, which the physical therapist said they could help me work out. I would keep my running routine the same as it was last year, I’d use the muscle I built doing P90X to spring into higher athletic performance using P90X2, and I would crush this thing!

It was a good plan. But like all plans, it didn’t survive initial contact with the enemy. There were two big problems: my IT band did not get better very quickly. It got better, but  v e r y  s l o w l y. When I started running outside again in spring, I couldn’t make it farther than 2 miles pain-free. It got up to 3 right before the race. I knew I’d have to run the race mostly in pain, but I also knew that no permanent damage would be done as a result. I chose to do it anyway. (Because that’s how we runners are, according to my physical therapist.) But hey, the entry fee is non-refundable, so even if my IT band would stop me from finishing, I wouldn’t have much to lose.

The second problem was the overtime I put in to help make the capacity expansion my company is going through happen. This got me off schedule with my P90X2 timing, and I only got through phases I (core and stability) and II (strength) before I had to taper for the Tough Mudder. I had really wanted to get through phase III also, because that’s the athletic performance stage with the post-activated potentiation training that is supposed to really boost your athletic ability. But, again, the entry fee is non-refundable, so I had nothing to lose in showing up on race day anyway.

What I chose to wear

Top: Wicking sports bra and long-sleeve wicking Dri-Fit shirt; wicking to be fast-drying after wet obstacles, long sleeves to protect my arms from the obstacles. Worked well. I would recommend this.

Bottom: Black tights-style yoga pants; close to the leg to avoid becoming difficult to deal with when wet, long legs to protect my knees from the obstacles; presumed to be fast-drying also because yoga pants are athletic gear. This presumption was wrong, and my biggest race mistake. They did protect my knees from cuts and scrapes (although not bruises) but dried far too slow. (More on why this was a big problem later…)

Hands: Go Fit weight-lifting gloves from Target; chosen because I don’t really use them much anymore and because they had a tough inside surface. I would not recommend them for the Tough Mudder; they held far too much water and I had to keep taking them off and put them back on when I got to an obstacle. They were not pleasant and ended up making my Tough Mudder more difficult, even though they did protect my hands on obstacles. (More to follow….) In retrospect, I should have chosen gloves with rubber, not faux leather, on the palms and something quicker-drying (no padding necessary) on the top side. Rubber over padding-type inside and thin uppers over padded uppers would be better because all fabric padding holds water, and water is no good. Rubber is gripping but doesn’t absorb water. The gloves also did not help in the grip department.

Feet: My favorite wicking socks and my Merrell Pace Gloves; wicking socks to avoid the socks becoming heavy with water and my standard running shoes because you shouldn’t wear new shoes on race day; plus because they’re minimalist shoes, won’t soak up a lot of water in the water obstacles and get heavy and weird to run in. I would recommend both.

Here is where it matters that I’ve trail run more than a season in the minimalist shoes and that I’ve already completed a trail half marathon in them. Transitioning from cushioned running shoes to minimalist shoes should be kind of a slow process, because what muscles get a lot of use shifts a little right around your foot when you do. Also, trail running in minimalist shoes also means getting used to running on rocks and roots with very little between your sole and the semi-sharp terrain.

I think the softness of the trail makes things easier on your feet to run in minimalist shoes than asphalt, but, you do need to get into a decide-where-you-will-step routine. Race day is so not the time to figure that out. (Ok, event day, my bad. Old habits die hard.) I did not choose minimalist shoes for running because of the Tough Mudder, but that my go-to shoes were minimalist let me sidestep all debate on what shoes to wear. The safe choice from a don’t-do-anything-new-on-race-day point of view was the same choice as was the advice I got from experienced Mudders.

(In case you’re not a runner, the most golden and revered race day advice in running circles – and probably biking and tri circles as well – is don’t change anything on race day. Eat the same things you always eat, wear the same things you always wear, use the same sports nutrition products / dried fruit mix / lucky necklace / whatever you always use. Don’t try new socks, don’t try new sunscreen, and whatever you do, for the love of Shiva, don’t try new shoes. If you think eating a dozen eggs for breakfast and popping an electrolyte tablet every 30 minutes is key to success, you better start doing that in training, too.)

In other words, just because I chose minimalist shoes and it worked out terrifically for me, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a terrific choice for you. I had a guy during the Tough Mudder ask me how I was doing in my Merrells. I said fine, and noticed that his shoes looked like Merrells too. He said he had heard the same advice about avoiding shoes that will become waterlogged and went with his minimalist hiking shoes instead of his cushioned shoes, but that he hadn’t run more than three miles in them before the race, and his feet were getting sore and stiff and it hurt. So, if you want to run the Tough Mudder in minimalist shoes, you better get a lot of miles in in the shoes well before the race, because first you’ll need to plain and simple get used to the shoes and then you need to run in them a lot. Whatever shoes you train in, you should do the race in, to avoid unpleasant surprises. There are plenty of runner stories about what can befall those who don’t heed the golden advice out there. Don’t switch shoes on event day.

The Section-by Section Race Report

The 2012 Colorado Tough Mudder course, reconstructed from Google Earth and the official course map. The course was about 12 miles.

Me in front of the wall before the start corral, about to haul myself up and over more easily than I thought.

Before the race even started, we had to climb over a wall to get to the starting area. There was a of small step for your foot, so you could get over the wall yourself, and that that made me very happy because I got to conquer an obstacle in style immediately. I put my foot on the plank, pushed up, grabbed the top of the plank, hoisted myself up, swung a leg over, turned my hands, swung the other leg over, lowered myself down to a hang, and let go. I was only a few inches off the ground at that point. The lowering down to a hang is the part I’m proud of. Control, grace, upper-body strength. Great morale boost!

1. Braveheart Charge

The DJ pumping a wave of Mudders up at the start.

The Braveheart Charge isn’t a challenge as much as it’s just the event start. Tough Mudder used to have descriptions of their entire repertoire of obstacles on their webpage, but it seems to have been condensed to just the most “badass” obstacles now. Either way, I read a flowery, poetic description of this obstacle amounting to that you should charge into the challenge that is the Tough Mudder. Being from an endurance racing background, I say, heck no. Other than changing shoes, going out too hard is a classic racing mistake. The Tough Mudder may not be a race per se, but for those of us in the middle of the pack in races, who are we really racing other than ourselves, and aren’t we trying to just use time as a way to compare our previous performance to our current performance? In either case expending too much energy early can prove to be a serious raw performance mistake. If you have gas in the tank close to the end of the course, kick then. Speed up, finish strong, but don’t start too strong. How do you know what’s too strong? You need to know yourself. You need to know what it feels like, heart-rate-wise, to hold an effort you can sustain for the duration of the course. Frankly, I treat the first section of anything longer than a 5K as warmup. The excitement of race day will push your pace. At the start, you need to fight that tendency. Start slow.

I started slow. Lots and lots of people passed me immediately. That’s okay, I passed lots and lots of people later in the course, as you’ll see. Since the course pretty much immediately headed up a black diamond, I jogged to the slope and promptly started walking. I’ve climbed up enough black diamonds looking for ski poles and skis to know I will not be able to run up one and then keep going, especially if there are more of them coming. Even if I could have done it with one, knowing that there would be 4000+ feet of climbing on the course just reinforced my feeling that meting out my energy would be wise. Pretty much everyone else walked too, no surprise.

Rough topographical map of the Colorado 2012 Tough Mudder course.

I happened to be walking next to two guys who asked me where my partner was. I tried to talk several people into doing the race with me, including my husband, but no one took the bait, so I showed up alone. I told them I didn’t have one, and they seemed taken aback. We talked a little, and it turned out they were from New Jersey or New York – sea level in either case – and had been on a hiking vacation in Boulder and decided to throw in the Tough Mudder too. They were seriously huffing and puffing already on the first uphill.

This would be where me living and training at 5000 ft elevation matters. The course base may be 3000 ft higher, but if you’re from sea level, the base is 8000 ft higher. That really, really matters. If you’re from sea level, your experience, no matter how well-trained you are, isn’t going to be like mine. You may feel like you suddenly became asthmatic. You might feel like you aren’t getting enough oxygen.  It’s a really weird feeling.

A common figure of merit for adapting in the running community in Fort Collins is that it takes you about three months to acclimatize as much as you’re ever going to, but even so, you will never run as fast at altitude as you did at sea level. And I don’t mean at altitude after acclimatizing, I mean at sea level before you ever moved up to altitude. If you had a PR at sea level and move up here, you will only ever beat it if you travel back from here to sea level and race. You will never beat the sea level PR up here, no matter how long you’ve lived here. So, if you’re from sea level and you did what these New… whatever state people from sea level did and sign up for the Colorado Tough Mudder, understand that for you the challenge is easily twice as hard as for the Coloradoans. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying you shouldn’t do it unless you are ready to embrace taking on one of the most challenging Tough Mudder courses with a handicap. People from sea level can and do finish the Colorado Tough Mudder, but someone should have the grace to tell you what you’re in for so you can prepare.

2. Cliffhanger

The Cliffhanger is one of the obstacles that the Tough Mudder considers “badass”. From the website:

Cliff Hanger is an obstacle all about teamwork and camaraderie: a 40+ foot cliff of slippery mud angled at 45-degrees. The Cliff always begins with good intenions: a muddy sprint up onto the slope and transitions into a crawl with handholds and footholds in short supply. Beware if you attempt this obstacle alone, your futile verticle scramble will likely turn into an uncontrolled slide back down into the mudpit below. Successful Mudders will form a chain link of fellow participants slowly inching up the slope. If you want to train for Cliff Hanger you should find the biggest hill near your house, measure it, then drive until you get to a hill twice as steep.

So what this actually was was a snow cannon in operation that was trickling water all over the slope, making it a muddy mess. It was slippery and the mist the snow cannon was making was a little chilly, but this one really went in the not-a-big-deal book for me. Getting to the obstacle was about the same as getting through it – climb up a black diamond. One foot in front of the other.

3. Devil’s Beard

After climbing some more, there was a cargo net stretched over the ground in the middle of the slope. That was the Devil’s Beard. This one also went in the non-issue department for me. All I had to do was curl into a ball, put my hands on the ground, and keep hand-foot walking under the net. It just slid on top of me. I just did it. No real conscious effort, just curled and went. I was glad to have something in between my palms and the ground, though.

Now, I will say that before I started doing P90X, I found this kind of movement hard when I occasionally had to do it, and maybe this was a non-issue for me simply because the core routines in P90X, P90X2, and Insanity took care of the muscles you need for this. Either way, I have no specific advice to give here.

4. Trench Warfare

Another easy obstacle, at least so early in the event when I was still fresh. It was just a little more climbing after Devil’s Beard. At Beaver Creek, the “trenches”  were just square plyboard tunnels to crawl through. The diameter was large enough to let me simply crawl on my hands and knees in table. (Here’s where me being 5’6″ and a size 2/4 is good reference information.) I crawled. I was glad for the gloves and the length of the yoga pants, so my knees weren’t getting scraped up on the occasional rock on the ground. I’m not claustrophobic, not am I scared of the dark, so this was another non-issue. I almost forgot about this even being there until I looked up the obstacle list, and even then I had to google it to remind myself.

5. Log Bog Jog

Right after Trench Warfare was Log Bog Jog. For a gal who spent a lot of her childhood playing in the woods, learned to walk on a tightrope, does yoga twice a week, and just did months’ worth of weightlifting standing on one leg and/or in a yoga pose (bicep curls in Warrior III, anyone? From P90X2 phase I!), this was just running, hopping and skipping on a bunch of logs tied together. Not much of an obstacle, in my opinion.

The course angling sideways, towards Beano's Cabin.

After Log Bog Jog, the course started angling a little sideways across the mountain. I saw an opportunity to start running. The trail was single-track, but very wide, so passing was quite possible. A few people here and there passed me, but mostly I was running along at my own pace. After hitting up aid station #1, Shocks on the Rocks was next.

6. Shocks on the Rocks

Mudders frequently forget about this obstacle since they’re so focused on Electroshock Therapy – but they shouldn’t. Slide on your belly through frigid water or, even worse, a layer of ice and beware of the shocks overhead. Should you try to crawl on your knees, you’ll be smacked with live wires and your body will compulsively contort. Be sure to protect your head, otherwise you might experience what Big Mudder calls a brain reboot.

This was the first electrical obstacle, and as such, a little scary. I looked at the plastic sheeting on the ground, the tilt of the ground, how the water ran, and the height of the wires, and decided I’d try to “alligator” my way across in the section with the most water (most glide, even though it also would have had the highest conductivity) while in the obstacle alone. (Avoid getting partially shocked from the water if someone else got shocked while I was going too.)

I hesitated a little before actually going in. But after considering that waiting won’t make anything better, and might just let me work up a fright instead, I got down low and slid into the water and started sliding across on my stomach by moving my arms and legs out to the sides of my body.

I heard the electricity crackling and I felt a jolt a few times, but it wasn’t debilitating nor painful. I made sure to keep my head down, so that if I was going to get shocked it wouldn’t be though my head, and perhaps that worked. Hard to tell for sure. I made sure to keep moving forward, not up, at the end, and made it through with the cold water being most of the discomfort. But, it wasn’t too bad, and I watched a few people go through and then moved on.

7. Berlin Walls #1

This obstacle relies on teamwork. Scale three 12′ wooden walls with the help of your teammates, strategically placed for when you are at your weakest during the event. While some Mudders have worked up the strength to ascend the walls alone, most need a boost from a fellow Mudder — they got your back, literally.

This is the wall-scaling style I avoided with P90X and P90X2.

The first set of Berlin Walls was not far from Shocks on the Rocks. They looked about the same height as the wall we had scaled to get to the start. just without the step for your foot. I was wondering if I could really make it by running, jumping, and heaving, but as I was standing there, a team of four people asked me if I wanted to go over with them. Thinking about energy conservation, I said yes. (I figured this could be the strength equivalent of going out too strong in an endurance race.)

The team consisted of two couples. As we were going over the first set of walls, I felt good, because I already knew I just needed a little boost to get over on my own. I did notice that the two other women struggled a little more, but they got over okay. The men followed, the last by jumping and heaving. I went over first on the next wall, and watched the two other women come over. One almost fell down the other side. I almost ran to catch her. I completely understand where they were. I’ve been there for most of my life. But I signed up for the Tough Mudder in large part to find out if my upper body and core strength was good enough for this sort of thing – not reps, not weights, but actually climbing things. A more absolute kind of measure. In that moment, I felt so proud of myself. I pushed myself up and lowered myself down. With control, using muscles. I got over the wall strong.

In that moment, I got the confirmation I was looking for – that I have become much, much stronger since I first did P90X, and that while my husband may still be stronger than me, I am still strong – by seeing my old self reflected back at me in the woman who almost fell down the other side of the wall. My strength is at a completely different level than it used to be. I’ll never know how I’d have done in the Tough Mudder before P90X, when I was just running, and only a few miles a day, but I suspect I’d have been near falling off the Berlin Walls too.

One of the pictures Tough Mudder posted from Colorado 2012 on Facebook shows a woman being helped up the wall by two people, both of her (bent) legs being pushed up. Seeing that picture after the race both reminded me of my personal sense of victory and humbled me. My upper body is strong enough to get me over a wall. Not every woman’s – not even fit woman’s – is. I strived for this, and now I have it. Going over the Berlin Walls strong wasn’t just about going over one obstacle in this one event for me – it was the attainment of a goal I set in November 2009, when P90X made me realize that while I was a runner, I was basically a weakling. Runner or no, I could only do a couple of push-ups from my knees. Girl or not, that’s undeniably being fairly weak. And I can’t stand accepting weakness. I am not superwoman, and there will likely always be women stronger than me out there. (I’m not exactly a powerlifter.) And I can accept not being the most badass. I just can’t accept an outright weakness in something I care about if I know about it, especially when it’s one that has direct bearing on my quality of life. I can accept being bad at FPS. I can’t accept saying I can only do five push-ups from my knees. Now, five rounds of P90X and 2/3 of a round of P90X2 later, the push-up situation has vastly improved, and I only go to my knees to continue doing more push-ups after I’ve reached fatigue from my toes, especially on plyometric instability push-ups. Compared to where I was, I have launched myself into the stratosphere by simply being consistent with P90X and P90X2. (Insanity helped some, too, but the bulk of my strength increases clearly came from the P90X programs.) I followed the programs, I got the results. It’s not rocket science. You just need a good plan and to stick with it.

Few women are outright told they should do push-ups and pull-ups. Genetics excuses aside, you can do a lot within your genetic limitations to change your situation, but first you have to believe it’s possible. You have to believe, because if you don’t, you’ll give up too fast to see any results. That’s why I’ve gone on this tangent about goals and dreams, so show any other women out there who are thinking about the Tough Mudder who might be hesitating because they’re not sure if they’re strong enough or that they ever will be. You absolutely can become so. (If you aren’t already and selling yourself short.) A co-worker’s son hired a personal trainer to put together a Tough Mudder training program for him. That’s surely a great way to go, but cost can be a problem for a lot of us. I’m living proof that you can go from five knee push-ups to scaling walls in the Tough Mudder with confidence by paying $120 for P90X.

Even if you buy the fanciest adjustable dumbbells out there, the most expensive yoga mat, and the most expensive three-grip pull-up bar, you will still come out financially ahead compared to joining even a cheap-o gym in a single year. And if you join a gym, you still have to either pay for a trainer or put together your own workout program – not impossible, but time-consuming. Just getting P90X is much, much easier. You know it works, and you don’t have to waste time re-inventing the wheel. You can spend your time actually working out, not researching how you should be working out. Anyone can order P90X, there’s no secret, there’s no special sauce training tips you need to find. Basic strength training will serve you just fine. Practice makes perfect – just keep doing P90X, and the strength will come, if you keep bringing it. For the Tough Mudder, you should also actually run – so at some point, you should switch at the very least Plyo and Kenpo for runs, and ideally work in a third day of running, too. If you get a shorter yoga routine, you could do a single doubles day where you run and also do yoga. I will post a sample training schedule in another post, in order to stay on topic in this one. This tangent has already been going on for quite a while! But I feel very strongly about being clear about that huge progress can be made simply and fairly cheaply when you’re trying to fill in a fitness weakness – all it takes is the right tools and consistency. And, of course, the courage to go for it. Hesitating women – you can do this thing, even if you know you can’t right now. You, too, can launch your strength to heights that seem ludicrous for you to ever reach right now. Don’t sell your abilities short. Be your own magic strength-granting fairy and start doing some push-ups, doing some pull-ups with a pull-up assist, and some weight-lifting. Start doing P90, or P90X. (P90X2 is for the ladies who are already pretty strong.) You will be surprised how good you will feel, far before you find yourself clicking through the registration for the Tough Mudder. I’ll help you get through it!

So, back to the race description. After we all got ever the walls, we moved along the course together, mostly walking. I kind of wanted to run, but didn’t want to leave the group that had so nicely helped me. I was also a little worried about my IT bands acting up again, and time spent walking was likely an extension on the recurrence of the problem. As we walked, as talked, and I found out that the woman who had almost fallen off the second wall had not prepared in the slightest for the Tough Mudder. Not a whit. As much as that thought scared me, it also made me respect her immensely for having the courage to come anyway. I would not have. The other woman had trained using Insanity: The Asylum! Always nice to meet fellow users of Beachbody programs. They’re good stuff!

8. Hold Your Wood

After a short while, we got to Hold Your Wood. Here’s what Big Mudder has to say about this obstacle:

Make like a lumberjack and carry a heavy log through a section of the Tough Mudder course. If the course is flat, expect to be lugging your log for at least 1/2 mile. If the area is hilly or mountainous, get friendly with your wood because you’ll be hauling it up a steep and challenging ascent.

A Mudder carrying an individual log around the loop.

On the Colorado course, you grab a log at the bottom of a skip slope, carry it around some trees just a smidge further up the slope, and back around.

There are team and individual logs. Us three gals grabbed a team log, and the two guy grabbed another team log. There is quite the variety of sizes of both kinds of logs, I noticed, so the difficulty of this challenge is essentially adjustable.

We just started carrying the log around the loop. I don’t know if it was that I was last, but the log didn’t feel very heavy. The girl in front, who hadn’t trained at all, said she was about ready to lie down and take a nap. Seeing as we’d just hit mile 3.1 before Hold Your Wood (There was a sign saying here’s where a Warrior Dash would end, but you’re just getting started), I imagine she had a pretty rough race.

Once we got back around, we walked on over to Arctic Enema, which was right next to Hold Your Wood.

9. Arctic Enema

This obstacle is all about mental grit. Many athletes use ice baths for recovery, but you’ll have a difficult time relaxing your muscles in this frigid dumpster. First you must bravely jump into Big Mudder’s floating iceberg abyss. Once submerged, find the mental and physical strength to swim through the ice, under a wooden plank and pull yourself out on the other end before you become hypothermic.

In less dramatic language: Jump into a deep pool of iced water, swim under a plank, and get out. So far, I agree with the description. But I’m not so sure this obstacle is all about just mental grit during the obstacle.

Arctic Enema started the change of my experience of the weather conditions from pleasant to very cold. I had gotten the advice from someone I circled on G+ to jump in as close to the plank as possible and just go, in order to minimize the time in the icy water. The trick worked well. I jumped, I ducked under, and came up – and had to push my head through a thick, thick layer of ice cubes. The layer was so thick, I couldn’t move forward toward the edge of the tank. I had to use my hands to dig away the ice in front of me so I could get out. As soon as I could reach the wood plank at the edge, I grabbed it and pulled myself out. It wasn’t graceful – legs went out sideways – but I just had to get OUT. Touching the ice with my ungloved fingertips was very unpleasant, and I had to do it over and over. I could feel the cold seeping into me and realized out, out, OUT was the key here.

A Mudder who just pushed her way through the ice in Arctic Enema.

When I got out, I was dripping wet and cold. I was shivering. I saw some people wrapped in paper-thin silver blankets, and figured they were heat blankets of some sort, and figured that was exactly what I needed. I grabbed one and wrapped it around me. It was very warm for its thickness, but I’ve certainly felt warmer blankets. Maybe there is a trick to using one I don’t know. At any rate, I stood there, trying to recover my warmth, for a few minutes, watching other people jump into the water, swim under, and come back up very cold.

I didn’t see the four-person team I had just been with leave – they had gone through before me – and when I looked around to see where they were, I didn’t see them anymore. They must already have left. I started debating whether to stay with the blanket or move on, in order to get my core temperature back up. I stayed a few more moments, then decided to keep moving.

10. Death March

Just around the corner was a black diamond with a muddy path going up it, with people trudging along, and a sign that said “DEATH MARCH” on it. As far as I’m concerned, a death march is when you have hit the wall (run out of glycogen) far from the finish of the event/race/run. Walking up a steep hill is simply a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and picking your pace such that you arrive at the top with more to give still. I started walking. I noticed a man who had taken his heat blanket with him, who was shivering and walking very slowly. Another man next to me asked the shivering man if he was okay. The shivering man said yes, and added that he’d finished three marathons but that this was a very different kind of challenge. e kept trudging up the hill. The man who checked on him moved on, but I decided to stick with “No Mudder left behind” and matched my pace to the man’s to make sure he would be okay.

Halfway up the hill, the shivering man stopped and grabbed his knees. His arms and legs were shaking visibly. I asked him again if he was really okay, and he said yes again. I wasn’t buying it. I waited for him. He rested like that for a minute, then continued on.

The hill got a lot steeper. I had to look where to put my feet in order to not slip and fall on my hands. My hands were so cold, I really didn’t want to touch anything. I slowed down. The man did too. We stopped a few times for him to rest, but got to the top okay. There were a few people resting at the top, sitting on the top bank of the trail there, and the man walked over to the bank and sat down. As soon as I saw the other people were talking to him, I started running down the trail.

Colorado Tough Mudder 2012 Course "zoom-in."

At this point, the trail angled across the side of the mountain, and tilted slightly downhill. It was single-track, but very wide, and not very technical. I was getting a little tired, but when I started down the trail, it was as if my body knew what to do and just did it. It started running. At this point, I was the only runner. I started passing people walking on the trail, one group after the other. A man yelled after me to be careful with the rocks. It was a nice thought to warn me, but I can only assume he was not a trail runner. As far as trails go, this one was very flat and non-rocky. I kept running. The trail kept going for quite a while, and I was getting into a good running rhythm. I head heard the advice from runners who had done a Tough Mudder that the Tough Mudder is more like running a mile ten times than running ten miles, because the obstacles interrupt any ‘running rhythm’ you would get into on a ten-mile run. But the course after the Death March up to the next one was certainly long enough to get into a rhythm. In fact, on the Colorado course, most of the obstacles were clustered, with at least two adjacent obstacles with longer stretches of running between them.

This may be due to the National Forest Service rules and regulations – most Colorado ski resorts are on National Forest Service land, and have been granted permission to do what they need to do to run a ski resort. However, whenever they want to do anything new, new permissions are needed, including for things like the Tough Mudder. Trail races/events are usually very small – 200 people or less – because the NFS and various local park agencies don’t want hordes of people tromping through fragile land. (They also fill up like nobody’s business for that reason – if you want to run one, sign up straight away!) I imagine such regulations gave Tough Mudder limited choices for where obstacles could be located. Also, the lack of Firewalker is probably related to the semi-arid climate here. Wildfires are a seasonal occurrence as it is – why would you use an obstacles with hay bales on fire in a dry area with wildfire problems?

Anyway, I kept running. I was feeling a little warmer, and being in my comfort zone of trail running was nice. At last, the trail came out into a skip slope, and I could see the course went up the slope, and felt a sting of sadness that the singletrack section was over. I started up the slope and saw the next obstacle, the Gauntlet.

11. Gauntlet

The Gauntlet was at a ridge further up in the ski slope with some snow still on it, with a person with a big hose at the top, targeting Mudders as they passed. The grass right below the snow had turned into mud, and there was a clear line in the grass separating mud from slope. I stopped and watched  a few fellow Mudders run up the Gauntlet. The person at the water cannon was struggling to hit them all, because they were running as a pack. I was running the race alone; I turned around and looks for others to run with. I didn’t have to look far; there were at least ten people walking up the slope behind me. I waited for them to catch up, then suggested we run together. Everyone agreed. We counted to three, then ran.

As it were, two guys and I ran, and everyone else slowed to a walk pretty fast. I had no intention of spending more time in the cold water jet than needed, and since walking is slower than running, I was going to run. While I wasn’t going to try to run up all the ski slopes on the course, I certainly was going to sprint up this section of this particular slope, mud and snow or not. Incredibly, I got away nearly dry! The person at the gun targeted the two guys that were slightly in front of me and nearly completely failed to target me. I was only hit by spray. I was so surprised, I ran up a little further than seemed necessary just in case they realized their mistake and turned the hose further up to get me.

12.  Sweaty Yeti

Further up in the same ski slope, I could see some piles of old, dirty snow. Since I only knew of one snow-involved obstacle, I figured this must be it – Sweaty Yeti. It was. As I was walking up toward it (back to walking up the slopes to make sure I didn’t crash and burn), I was hoping I wouldn’t have to touch the snow with my fingers. My hands were still pretty cold, and the idea of getting them into snow wasn’t tempting. In fact, from a lot of childhood experience with snow, I know that would be really bad because it would set me back significantly in warming my hands back up. They were already starting to go a little numb, so direct contact with snow was definitely not good.

The first snow pile was a mere matter of walking on top of. No problem, no hands touching snow. This being June, the snow was wet but relatively stiff. No sinking, no whirling, just walking on snow. Easy peasy as far as the Tough Mudder goes.

The second snow pile was more serious. It was a little snow hill to climb, and looking at the slope, it was clear that not only would you need help from the top, you wouldn’t be able to avoid touching the snow as you came up. It was just too steep to climb up without touching any snow with your hands, and thus fingers. The angle of the pile edge was nearly 90 degrees. It was so steep, there were white poles at the top for people to help each other up with.

As I walked up to the pile, there was a crowd up on the snow hill, holding poles to help people up with, and a crowd below, waiting to be helped up, with occasional travelers between the two. I watched a few people go up, waited my turn, grabbed a pole that was extended down to me, and clambered on up.

The pole was cold, and so was the snow I touched. I made it further up the hill than I thought before I had to put a hand in the snow, but as I had suspected, I ultimately did have to make my hands even colder. Although I knew I should get moving again soon to keep generating more body heat, I didn’t want to leave without helping at least one person up onto the pile, since someone had graciously helped me and I didn’t have a team. I wanted to pay the help forward. When someone put a pole down, I picked it up, dug my foot in, and lowered the pole down. A man below reached for the pole, but at the same time asked, “How steady are you?” He took the pole, I started pulling, and said “Steady enough.” Someone behind me – one of the women I went over the first set of Berlin Walls with, it turned out – said “She’s pretty strong!”. That was the second highlight of my race – more objective absolute proof I’m not just viewing my fitness and health progress through rose-colored glasses. Yeah! I AM STRONG!

Just a little walk up to the next ridge showed me what the next obstacle was: Hanging Tough.

13. Hangin Tough

Swing Tarzan-style across a series of hanging rings suspended over a pool of ice-cold water. Rings are placed 4 to 6 feet apart. It is important to maintain momentum and coordination while swinging across this series of rings. A strong grip and precise coordination are required to complete this obstacle successfully.

A Mudder swinging her way across Hanging Tough much better than I did.

Looked easy enough. I grabbed the first ring, started swinging toward the second one, wrapped my fingers around it, and promptly fell into the water with my mouth still open in surprise. SURPRISE! I don’t know what happened. My hand must not have really had the ring, whether it be a bad grip or grease like on Funky Monkey. I don’t know; but for next year, I’m planning on finding some rings to practice gripping. I swam across the pool (brrr!) and heaved myself out.

After climbing out of the water, I was pretty cold. I watched a woman peel off a heat blanket and decided to do the same thing. As I stood there, I saw people continuing up the next little hill, still wrapped in their blankets. I decided to do the same. I tried peeling off my gloves, which proved to be very difficult when they were wet. It was a little painful and difficult, but I got them off, and wrapped my hands in the heat blanket, using it to separate my cold hands from the wet and even colder gloves.

The next little hill was not very steep, and I walked along briskly, passing people here and there. I kept the blanket on. So did everyone else with one. After a short walk, a yellow wire divider showed up on our right, as if there were two ‘lanes’ of walking traffic. At the top of the next little hill, there was a beautiful outlook toward the village below with gorgeous mountain views, with a Tough Mudder staffer standing in almost the exact middle of the little clearing. Behind her, a road with people on it headed down toward the base. On her right, a road with people on it headed up the mountain. I wasn’t sure which way to go, so I asked the staffer.

“First, you go up, and then you come back down,” she said.

The course self-overlap or crossroads.

I said okay and started upward to my right. I figured it can’t be that far up. I’m not sure where I got that idea exactly, but we just kept going up. I still kept my heat blanket on, like everyone else with one. I walked faster. I started passing people. I knew I had to generate as much body heat as possible, because my teeth were starting to chatter. The tips of my fingers were turning numb. I knew I had to keep moving and the faster, the better, not just because I’d get out of my miserable wet pants and get to drop my cold wet gloves faster, but also because moving faster should generate more heat to keep hypothermia at bay longer. I passed people on the smooth gravel road. We kept walking up. The road turned left and right, making it hard to get a feel for how long we would stay on it.

I noticed that I was starting to have trouble thinking clearly. I just kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, watching the road and my fellow Mudders and the mountains and the trees. Normally, I’d enjoy such a state of mind, but I also noticed I wasn’t able to formulate a plan. I didn’t know how to tell if I had hypothermia and this didn’t really bother me. I didn’t know at what point I should consider bailing on the event or what criteria I should use to decide. I didn’t care, because worrying was a moot point, since I was unable to come up with a plan anyway. The plan was to go as fast as possible to get warm as fast as possible. It had to work. It was going to work, or… undefined.

I came to another Tough Mudder staffer on the road. She directed me up onto a singletrack trail, saying it was only half a mile to the next aid station with bananas. I don’t know what made her think I wanted bananas, but she was right. I sped up some more, hoping to just push through to the summit of the course – or what I sincerely hoped was the summit of the course, or I’d be in trouble – so that I could start pushing down and finally be on what could be considered the final section of the course. My teeth just kept chattering. I started up the singletrack. I kept pushing. It felt like much longer than half a mile, but I finally got to the end of the singletrack and saw the obstacles at the summit.

It got a fair bit windier once I left the single-track, but one way or the other I just had to keep going. I jogged up to the first summit obstacles – Log Jammin’. Right as I got there, I saw someone – I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman – sitting still like a rock, wrapped seamlessly in a silver heat blanket, curled together into a ball. I contemplated for a second whether I should be doing the same to warm up, and then keep going. But I have almost never been losing a battle with cold where stopping isn’t going to make it much worse. You stop when you have a heat source, in my experience, not when you are trying to preserve your own body heat. So I went for the next obstacle instead.

14. Log Jammin

A Mudder scaling Log Jammin. This picture is from Saturday; you can tell, because it's sunny, not overcast like on Sunday when I ran.

I didn’t want to let go of my blanket, because I was still very cold and it was, as it usually is, very windy at the summit. I tied it in a big knot around my waist and got going.

Log Jammin looked like cake. Climb over some logs, step or crawl under some logs. It wasn’t hard, but it was harder than I expected. As soon as I threw my arms up on the first set of logs, that I was to climb over, I realized that fatigue was setting in. My arms were not quite ready to go. They did what I asked with no problems, but I did have to keep issuing mental commands. I wasn’t moving as fast as I would have in the beginning of the race.

I’m not sure if it was being low on glycogen or actual muscle fatigue, but I think it’s more likely to be glycogen, simply because none of the obstacles really taxed any single muscle in the way you fatigue muscles in training. When I got to Log Jammin, I hadn’t needed my arms for anything other than clutching a heat blanket around me for anything.

In either case, I went over and under and over and under and over again, and moved on to the next set of Berlin Walls. I didn’t want the blanket around my waist for this one, so I reluctantly untied the knot and left my blanket swinging in the wind around the obstacle delineation wire fence, intending to pick it up when I was done. (The course doubled back right next to the walls.)

15. Berlin Walls #2

This set of Berlin Walls was much taller than the first. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to run, jump, and heave on these, especially with my arms getting a little on the weak side. At this point, there also were a lot fewer people around me. I saw a team help each other get over, and another few lone souls looking at the walls. I figured we’d form an impromptu team and get over them together, but another woman saw another solution. She balanced up the supports, grabbed hold of the wall top, and slid down the supports on the other side.

I wasn’t about to go the slide – because it looked pretty risky – but I balanced my way up the support and grabbed hold of the wall top, swung out to hang from the top, and let go. Well, I paused for a moment, because the walls were higher, and for some reason it made me a little scared, even though I rationally knew it wasn’t high enough to get hurt. So I paused, and then I let go, and landed on the ground with bent knees, ready to land softly.

I went over the second wall in the same way. By now, there was a little train of us doing the same thing. I didn’t want to be the holdup and kept going. But this time, when I swung out on the other side of the walls, I paused much longer. “You can do it!” yelled the woman who had gone first. I yelled “Thanks!” but kept hanging for another moment. Then I heard a “Here!” behind me, and a man grabbed my waist, the woman yelled “You can let go!” and I did. I wasn’t sure he’d be strong enough to hold me, but luckily he was. I said thank you, and he continued on. I stood for a brief moment, feeling silly for not having just let go, but then realized I was wasting valuable body heat and kept going.

I grabbed another heat blanket – not the one that had been mine, because it was gone, but I figured it ended up being an exchange – and headed for the port-o-potties in front of me for a quick pit stop. As I walked, I sincerely hoped that this was the summit – it certainly looked like one, but I knew if it wasn’t and I knew so, I’d give up, and so didn’t want to ask. I also knew that if it wasn’t the summit, I could be in big cold trouble, but I just wasn’t able to worry too much about that, took my chances, and rejoiced in that if this was the summit, as it looked like, it was literally all downhill from here.

After disinfecting my hands, I wrapped the heat blanket around me again and headed for the aid station next to the road back down. They had water and bananas. I had a cup of water, even though I didn’t feel like I needed it, because I have never been on a long run at altitude and had too much water with me to drink. I considered that the cold water wouldn’t help my core temperature any, but went for it anyway. I snarfed down two banana halves despite the wind, even though my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and I was wondering if this is the onset of hypothermia or merely being very cold, because I had just experienced the first sign of that my energy was running low. Moving quickly is not compatible with hitting the wall. So I stood there snarfing banana as fast as I could, wet and cold, trying to wrap the blanket as closely around me as possible without losing either it or a banana half, and as soon as I had gotten all of the banana into my mouth, I threw the peels away (no compost, Tough Mudder?) and started walking and chewing. The course headed back downhill and even though I had already felt twinges from my IT bands, I knew this was where to run. The course now ran along a flat gravel access road, perfect for the lift-your-legs-and-fall downhill running method. I didn’t get far before my run was reduced to a hobble. My IT bands really hurt. I could see that Boa Constrictor was not far down the road, so I gave up the running and walked down to the next obstacle.

16. Boa Constrictor

Big Mudder says this about Boa Constrictor:

If you don’t like small spaces, this obstacle will be a challenge for you. Crawl through a series of pipes that force you on a downhill into some freezing mud, then a slippery uphill to the other side. Your legs will be useless in the narrow confines of the Boa, so use your arms to pull yourself through this obstacle. There really is light at the end of the tunnel.

A Mudder coming out of the downslope pipe of Boa Constrictor into the water.

I don’t have problems with small spaces. However, by now, I had a problem with water. I just knew I shouldn’t get wet again, but I also didn’t want to skip obstacles. So in the pipe I went. Just as I was getting in, I heard someone yell “I’M STUCK!” I found myself not caring very much, since there was a staffer at the obstacle. I just had to keep going, so I could get down and warm up.

These pipes were much smaller in diameter than the Trench Warfare ones, and I had to get down into a forearm plank. (I was glad I had long sleeves.) I used my forearms and my toes to inch forward. It was pretty slow on the downhill, which simultaneously irritated and relieved me. I was irritated, because I needed to get through this obstacle so I could keep going down, and I needed to move fast. I was relieved, because the longer it took, the longer I could keep what dryness I had managed to achieve since the last water obstacle, whichever one that was, didn’t matter, water was what mattered.

When I got to the water, I hesitated a split second, knowing I was about to do something potentially stupid, but pushed into the mud. The mud was cold, like me. I wiggled across into the next tube fairly quickly and found that I could go faster on the uphill. Because I didn’t need to brake, I could use a regular plank to move with, and since my palms had protection from the gloves I could place them more carelessly on the ground than my forearms, I was able to scoot through the tube pretty fast. As soon as I crawled out of the wind protection of the tube, I got very, very cold. The staffer had evidently helped the person who was stuck, and was waiting for me with what was left of my heat blanket, which I had left on the other side. As I was taking it, it ripped into two. I thanks her anyway, said something is better than nothing, and started down the hill.

I tried running again. This time, the road was less steep. Or maybe I was just so cold, it was kind of like icing my irritated IT bands. I don’t know, and frankly, I didn’t care. I was just grateful I could run, so I ran. My heat blanket was pretty obviously useless now that I was running and it was in two pieces. I needed to move my arms freely for efficiency, and it really wasn’t doing its job anymore, so I balled it up and ran with it in my hand. I was directed down onto some singletrack by another staffer, and took the opportunity to throw away my heat blanket in the trash can she had near her. (Never litter the trail! Carry your own trash out!) I was shivering still.

Not far down the singletrack, I came up on two men who were walking fast, not much slower than I was running at this point. I was so cold, and my IT band was starting to hurt again, that I fell in line behind them, letting them “pull”. I knew I was on the final stretch to heat and warmth and dry clothes, but the going was getting seriously tough. Following someone else’s lead for a while felt like a rest. They were talking to each other. I wasn’t able to listen. I certainly didn’t contribute to the conversation.

It took all I had to keep moving, keep going, fight the cold, make sure I finish this thing, don’t think about the pain, think about finishing. I don’t know what they thought of me “drifting” but I didn’t really care. I noticed that even though my upper body was basically dry, I could feel the yoga pants as a wet cold tube section around my legs. They just weren’t drying. I had thought I had noticed on the climb up to the summit that my legs were colder than my upper body, and now it was definitely true. Every time the sun hit me through the trees for a few seconds in a row, I felt relief, as if someone was stretching out a helping hand. The sunshine was warm, even though I was not.

The singletrack winded its way through the woods and some ski slopes, and eventually put us back on the road that led back up the little hill to where the climb to the course summit had started. I was so relieved. I was about to really get to what could be considered the final stretch!

Now the two men were walking too slow for my taste, and I started running again. I ran past them on the hill, ran past the staffer directing traffic, and started on the windy road (which is a ski slope called the Cinch in winter) down to the base.

This road was completely non-technical and steep enough where it was easier to run than to walk. One technique for running downhill is to simply to lift your feet and “fall” forward. This uses very little energy and avoids burning out your braking muscles, like your quads. When I realized that, I breathed a figurative sigh of relief. Here was my grace – getting down the easiest way was also the fastest. So I started lifting my feet up and “falling” down the road. There was a stream of people walking down the road. I ran past group after small group of people walking down the road, wondering why no one else was running. I just kept going. Feet up, feet up, feet up feet up. My IT bands hurt, especially on the right leg, but at this point that didn’t really matter to me. Just feet up, feet up.

Occasionally, the road would flatten out, and my run would become a walk without powering the running forward. I was very tired, and by now my upper body was almost completely dry. My yoga pants were not at all dry. I started realizing that while my hands had been the first to be very, very cold, my yoga pants were the biggest problem. They were the millstone around my neck. They had been my biggest race mistake all along, I just didn’t know it until now. The heat I was losing to their effect was making it impossible for me to regain my core temperature. Ever since the Arctic Enema, when I got soaked and very cold at the same time, I had been fighting this losing battle. I could no longer feel my behind, and my thighs were starting to go numb. Ignoring my IT band pain was starting to be downright easy.

17. Spider’s Web

A cargo net was hung across most of the road, from a steel cable at the top. I knew I was tired, but I wasn’t about to walk around. While running down, I had steadily been regretting having gone in the water again at Boa Constrictor, and was weighing the wisdom of skipping all water-containing obstacles against the letdown of skipping obstacles. This one being dry, I knew that I was going to do it no matter how tired I was.

Slowly, slowly, I worked my hands back into my gloves, that I had been dragging with me for most of the course now. I didn’t want to put them on; my hands were still and not very strong anymore. The gloves just made them feel worse, but protection against rough surfaces like cargo net ropes was why I wore them in the first place, so gingerly I put them back on.

A couple was at the bottom of the net at the same time as I was. The guy grabbed the bottom of the net, said “I’ll hold, you go!” and I realized in an instant that without someone holding the net at the bottom, this could be very inefficient and thus hard. I climbed up. It was a little unsteady at the top. I was a little worried I’d lose my grip, but I didn’t. I climbed down the other side and grabbed hold of the net and told the couple to climb. They started going up. The guy made it to the top and then down the other side. The woman got ‘stuck’ at the top.

“I can’t get over”, she said, trying to lift a leg over without moving her hands, which she seemed reluctant to move. “Sure you can!” said her boyfriend. After a few tries, she got it figured out, and came down. I couldn’t wait to take my hands back out of the gloves. I stood there holding them for a few seconds after I managed to work them off of my hands. Then I dropped them. I noticed I was bleeding from my wrist. The steel cable probably did it. It wasn’t much and I didn’t have band-aids in any case, so I just got back to my comfort zone of running toward the warm dry pants I had waiting in my bag.

After a few more turns in the road, I got closer and closer to being down. I could see lift houses. I could see buildings at the base pretty close by. I could also see that there would have to be a whole cluster of obstacles here, because if I had been on skis, I’d have been almost down, but there were at least three obstacles I knew were on the course that I hadn’t gone through.

18. Kiss of Mud

Another Mudder crawling through the wet mud, which I was skipping by then.

I came to an obstacle I recognized, but had forgotten about – Kiss of Mud. This one is relatively simple; you crawl in mud under barbed wire. Having done crawling in mud, muddy water, in tunnels, in tubes, and under electric wires, this one seemed benign – except for the fact that mud is wet. When I saw it, and contemplated getting wet, I knew I shouldn’t. Something in me just told me NO. I had made a mistake all the way up at the summit with going into Boa Constrictor, and now I had had time to dry quite a bit and I was still very, very cold. I shouldn’t undo all the drying. I made the decision in that moment to skip all obstacles with water anywhere. I continued on past this one, down a very muddy hill. I slipped and fell in the mud anyway. I called that my personal kiss of mud.

19. Glacier

At the bottom of the muddy hill, the course made another climb up a snowbank. This one wasn’t very steep – I only had to touch the snow once. When I got to the top – I saw the next obstacle – Shocks on the Rocks, but sliding over the snow. As soon as I saw that, I started running past it, because the absolute last thing you should do when you’re not sure if you have hypothermia or not is to wiggle on your stomach in wet clothes across snow.

20. Twinkle Toes

Indeed, the remaining obstacles were all clustered. Right next door was Twinkle Toes.

This obstacle’s not as easy as it sounds. Call upon your inner chi to maintain balance and carefully traverse a narrow wooden beam or risk falling in yet another ice-laden pond. Mudders are known not only for their strength and stamina, but also for their balance and agility. Just remember to breathe.

The balancing act I was hoping to do.

I knew I was skipping this one, too, and it made me sad. I had been wanting to test my balance here. I think it’s very good. I wanted to see if that was really true. I wondered for a moment if I should try it anyway, have confidence in my skills, but then I considered that in addition to possibly getting completely soaked again, I might lose more time. I’d been racing against time since the summit, and I hadn’t crossed the finish line yet. I knew I had to keep going. Just keep going, because I was almost there, at the dry warm yoga pants.

21. Funky Monkey

Sure monkey bars were easy when you were 5 years old, but you’ll need to hold on extra tight to these. Some have been greased with our finest mixture of mud and butter and if you slip you’ll fall into an icy pond below. Bars are spaced 1.5 feet apart and you will be on an incline upward for the first half of the Monkey and then descending downward for the second portion. Seasoned Mudders keep their arms bent at a 90-degree angle and bicycle-kick their legs to gain momentum.

A Mudder in a tutu doing Funky Monkey. Yes, a tutu. Some Mudders don't take themselves too seriously.

Needless to say, given that I now had trouble making a fist and holding it and that failure here means a plunge into water, I never even considered trying this one and just kept going on my race against hypothermia.

22. Everest

Snowboarders and skate boarders have the half-pipe. Mudders have a real obstacle: Everest. A quarter-pipe that you’ll have to sprint up and enlist the help of other Mudders to hurl you over this beastly summit. Everest is coated in mud and grease, a combination which will likely send you right back from where you came. Call upon other Mudders to catch you as you run up the quarter-pipe or work together to form a human chain so that you can scale someone’s shoulders to finally summit Everest.

This is a dry obstacle, and I stopped to watch for a few moments, thinking that my decision earlier obligated me to do this one, but then I found myself running on again. I couldn’t make a proper fist, and I was still racing time, and I was so close. It would take me quite a while to get up Everest, and I could see that the pace of attempts was slow. I’d have to wait my turn, first. So I kept going.

23. Electroshock Therapy

Sprint through a field of live wires — some carrying as much as 10,000 volts of electric shock. Watch out for hay bales and deep mud, or you will face-plant into some electrifying mud. Some Mudders try to stealthily wind their way through the wires without getting shocked, while others barrel forward to get through as quickly as possible. Either way, you are guaranteed to get zapped with as much as 10,000 volts of electricity and it does NOT tickle. This is typically the last obstacle Mudders must overcome before they cross the finish line.

Me running through Electroshock Therapy.

Here, I stopped, and knew I was doing it. I was scared of the obstacle, for one, and Mudders conquer all fears. Second, it was nearly completely dry, and there weren’t many people in front. I watched one wave of people go through it. I heard someone behind me yell “Let’s go through it together!” and I latched on to the group as they went. I prepared mentally for a big jolt, possibly suddenly finding myself in the mud, as I ran forward with my hands in a plough shape to keep the wire ends away from my chest and face. (Advice from a seasoned Mudder.) I saw a few wires dance up in front of me and got scared; I heard the electricity snapping and felt a jolt, but it didn’t take me down, I kept going.

Finish

The crowning of a new Mudder.

When I exited the field of wires, I almost ran into the team that I’d latched on to. For some reason, they stopped and cheered and high-fived each other right after the obstacle. I ran around and sprinted for the finish line only about 50 m away. I could practically SEE my dry pants! I ran across the finish line about 4 hours and 45 minutes after I started, high-fived the DJ who was standing at the finish line, took the orange head band someone was offering me, and slowed down to a walk. I walked over to the t-shirt stand and asked for a small or extra small. To my pleasant surprise, small was small enough. I took the t-shirt, started walking back toward the bag drop, got handed a beer, rapidly discovered that I don’t want beer a minute after finishing a Tough Mudder, threw the beer away, and continued on toward my glorious dry pants in my bag.

Mudders post-race in heat blankets. I obviously wasn't the only one struggling to warm back up.

I put on all the clothes I had with me I could reasonably possibly wear at the same time, including triple layers on my upper body with one layer having long sleeves, and even so, I didn’t feel warm until I got back to my sun-baked car. My fingers prickled, as if being burned or thawing from the cold, for hours afterward. Some of the prickling even hung around for another full day. As I was sitting on I-70 driving back home with prickling fingers, I knew I did the right thing in skipping obstacles. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I was just babying myself, but it was the right decision.

What's your excuse?

I did some googling afterward, and the phenomenon on my hands is called chilblains, and I did have hypothermia – I’m just not sure if it was mild or moderate. Either way, my assessment that I have a cold problem here and I have to get warm as soon as possible was right.

Now afterward, I’m incredibly proud of finishing. I wonder what happened to the person sitting encased in the heat blanket at the summit when I passed. It was a very hard race, and exactly that was what I was looking for. I got it. I have never been so proud of finishing an event in my life! And you bet I’m running next year again – this time, in water-tested pants.

Grant Family Farms double vegetable share, fruit share, and half mushroom share. Organic, local, and affordable.

This week’s CSA shares contained:

• Cherries
• Apricots
• Two bags of rhubarb (already in the freezer, not in picture)
• Shiitake mushrooms
• Dried heirloom white navy beans
• Two bulbs garlic
• Two bunches green onions
• A bunch of parsley
• A bunch of cilantro
• A bag of snow peas
• Two bags of spinach
• Two small heads of green leaf lettuce
• A bunch of beets

I could sit down and stuff my face with the cherries and the apricots, but unfortunately, this is supposed to last the whole week!

We already know what we’re doing with the snow peas and the mushrooms: we’re having Chinese food. Tofu is going on the Safeway shopping list!

If you are at all interested in eating well, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself at some point if you should buy organic. If you’re like me, you’ve read conflicting statements about whether or not organic produce is more nutrient-dense than conventional, whether or not the pesticide residues are harmful, in fact, whether or not the label ‘organic’ even is any more than a marketing label. If you start googling the subject, in fact, the top hits like the Mayo Clinic article on organic foods, really sidestep the issue completely. Basically, the article tells you to buy organic if you want to, but that the most important thing to do is to eat a healthy diet. It doesn’t really say clearly one way or the other.

I’m sure you’ve also gone over to the organic produce section with good intentions, until you saw the prices. Or walked into Whole Foods thinking yum, that over there looks delicious, until the price made you reconsider your dinner plans.

Yesterday, a thick letter from my certified organic Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm arrived. I opened it up, wondering what could be so thick. It turned out to be a cardboard sleeve with a DVD inside – the movie What’s Organic About Organic?.

There was also a letter from the CSA. It turns out that my CSA farm is featured in the movie, and they worked out a deal with the director to send everyone in the CSA a copy! The owner of the farm, Andy Grant, even donated money to have the film subtitled in Spanish. The movie is only an hour, so I popped in the DVD while I was eating lunch today, and I really learned a lot more than I knew about what organic means, and I thought I was well-informed! I am now very proud to buy my produce locally from an organic farm!

You can watch the preview below for free, and you can even stream it for $3. (Ok, $2.99, but we all know that’s $3.) You get a whole 30 days to watch it five times! The filmmaker is still paying back the cost of making the film, and as an extra bonus, if you stream it from here, Grant Family Farms will get 10% of the price.

I did a little googling on the film and found an interview with the director, Shelley Rogers, on Mark Bittman’s blog. Two questions the interviewer, Paula Crossfield, asked I thought were very good:

Paula Crossfield: Why did you think it was important to explore the subject of organic now?

Shelley Rogers: There is a lot of confusion about all food and organic food in particular. I’ve grown up in an era of ever-conflicting advice about nutrition and health along with massive doses of food marketing and green-washing. It seems every few months there’s a different study out attempting to debunk the positive attributes of organic food. A lot of high-powered interests have a lot at stake in maintaining their status quo chemical agriculture profit line.

PC: What do you think is keeping organic from becoming more mainstream?

SR: Pricing is a challenge for most people to access organic food. Of course, we don’t pay the true cost of most food at the check-out counter. We’ve become accustomed to allocating a small portion of our personal budgets to food, and in doing so, we’ve externalized the costs to our environment and health.

CSA models and farmer’s markets are a great way to cut the price point for citizens, but [these] are not always convenient for people, and in urban environments farmer’s markets can still be a bit pricey.

I think infrastructure and transportation costs are two big culprits. Regional food systems have been systematically dismantled, which makes it difficult for farmers to get their products processed before reaching market (like slaughter houses, etc.) and costly to get the products to market. Plus, retails outlets want fewer contracts to negotiate and they want farms that can supply whole regions for the whole season for the price they dictate. This combination makes it very difficult for small and mid-scale growers to reach the marketplace. Since most organic farms are small/mid-scale, this makes it difficult for eaters to access the food they grow at a reasonable price.

I personally believe that organic farming practices are the way of the future, for sustainability reasons if nothing else. It’s something you can keep doing to feed the population of the entire Earth that will keep working. No superweed will ruin everything. No aquifer will be too low to use. No antibiotics will stop working on the cows and on us, ruining everything once again.

I am also so relieved that I do not need to debate the price issue with myself any more. $28/week for produce for two people. You easily spend that at the supermarket, and it’s not organic, nor is it as fresh as what I get from the farm. Win-win-win. Some people may think I’m a food snob, but I think I’m just practical and frugal. I get the best deal, no matter how you cut it. Can’t beat the freshness, that’s for sure, and the broccoli from the CSA is the most delicious broccoli I’ve ever eaten. As far as I’m concerned, that’s capitalism. The supermarket doesn’t sell what I want at a price I’m willing to pay, so I found someone who has what I want at a price point that I’ll accept. Done.

Look for a CSA farm near you at Farmigo or Local Harvest!

If you live in NoCo, Grant Family Farms also sent out a coupon code for 2012 CSA shares to save 3% – it’s GFFWOAO12. I recommend them, very highly! You can also get mushrooms, cheese, milk, meat, pastured eggs, artisan bread, and fresh flowers through them! They have pickup sites in a ton of places – from Colorado Springs to Cheyenne and Laramie. Distributions start next week (week of June 11)! Everyone in this area has a chance to get their produce from one of the farms featured in What’s Organic About Organic?!

If you have circled me on G+, you have probably seen me promote Community Supported Agriculture.

Over the last 20 years, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has become a popular way for consumers to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer. Here are the basics: a farmer offers a certain number of “shares” to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a “membership” or a “subscription”) and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.

CSAs aren’t confined to produce. Some farmers include the option for shareholders to buy shares of eggs, homemade bread, meat, cheese, fruit, flowers or other farm products along with their veggies. Sometimes several farmers will offer their products together, to offer the widest variety to their members. For example, a produce farmer might create a partnership with a neighbor to deliver chickens to the CSA drop off point, so that the CSA members can purchase farm-fresh chickens when they come to get their CSA baskets. Other farmers are creating standalone CSAs for meat, flowers, eggs, and preserved farm products.

CSAs create several rewards for both the farmer and the consumer.

Advantages for farmers:

• Get to spend time marketing the food early in the year, before their 16 hour days in the field begin
• Receive payment early in the season, which helps with the farm’s cash flow
• Higher profit margins, which helps keep small farmers in business (Only 9 cents of each dollar actually goes to the farmer while 91 cents of each dollar goes to suppliers, processors, middlemen, and marketers. In the U.S., a wheat farmer can expect to receive about six cents of each dollar spent on a loaf of bread-approximately the cost of the wrapping. The money in agriculture is almost all in food processing – the giant agricultural companies reap the profits, while small farmers and ranchers struggle to get by.)
• Have an opportunity to get to know the people who eat the food they grow

Advantages for consumers:

• Eat ultra-fresh food, with all the flavor and vitamin benefits (And vitamin B12 benefits – CSA produce is often still covered in dirt, which means it contains more vitamin B12.)
• Lower price points than the grocery store, especially on organic produce (We pay $28/week for produce for two people. Certified organic.)
• Get exposed to new vegetables and new ways of cooking (Turns out I love kohlrabi!)
• Usually get to visit the farm at least once a season (We went up to our CSA farm to pick up our pumpkin at their harvest festival last year.)
• Find that kids typically favor food from “their” farm – even veggies they’ve never been known to eat
• Develop a relationship with the farmer who grows their food and learn more about how food is grown

It’s a simple enough idea, but its impact has been profound. Tens of thousands of families have joined CSAs, and in some areas of the country there is more demand than there are CSA farms to fill it. The government does not track CSAs, so there is no official count of how many CSAs there are in the U.S.. LocalHarvest has the most comprehensive directory of CSA farms, with over 4,000 listed in their grassroots database. Farmigo is another good online resource.

America imports most of its fresh produce from Mexico, Chile, India, China and Thailand – these imports are foods that can and should be produced locally. The current food system, as convenient and cheap as it may be, holds repercussions for the environment and impacts the economic wellbeing of our local communities. A typical carrot will travel 1,838 miles to become part of a meal. 35% of food is wasted in transit before it gets to us. In 1866, 1,186 varieties of fruits and vegetables were produced in California. Today, California’s farms produce only 350 commercial crops. And do you really think the carrot that’s traveled 1,838 miles to get to your plate is as fresh as it was the afternoon it was pulled out of the ground?

Industrial farming is focused on quantity, not quality. Ever wonder why tomatoes taste so watery and not-tomato-y, especially when they’re out of season? Well, that’s because they’re probably grown in Florida, in sand.  And are of a variety that was chosen for planting because it ships well, not because it’s delicious. A big part of that California crop reduction is that we have stopped growing produce that won’t ship well those 1,838 miles. We even have a new word for those varieties that are tasty and were valued earlier, but don’t work well with industrial agriculture: heirloom.

I don’t know about you, but I like my tomatoes to taste like tomatoes. I like them to fill my mouth with juicy sweet tangy tomatoiness when I bite into one. I like my food delicious and tasty. And I mean that in the most direct, obvious way possible. Who doesn’t?

However, for the CSA share member also trying to follow a particular meal plan, this lack of control over what produce shows up every week can pose a bit of a challenge. Hence, the preparation.

I’m doing P90X2. I am using the P90X2 vegan nutrition guide as a base for eating a whole foods, plant-based diet for an athlete. (I am not vegan in a strict sense; I eat bread made with eggs, and occasionally I’ll even eat eggs, meat, and dairy at restaurants. I eat fish, still. I am also not an ethical vegan, someone who avoids animal products because they feel using/consuming them is unethical, and most people who identify as vegan seem to be of this variety. I’m just convinced by the body of evidence suggesting that whole plant foods as a group are healthier than whole animal foods, and that adding oils to your food isn’t a good idea.) So, how am I going to unite my passion for P90X2 with my passion for my CSA share? (CSA shares, actually – we have a vegetable share, a fruit share, and a mushroom share.)

The answer: I am going to structure my P90X2 nutrition guide servings in the most general way possible. Not a single specific dish is going to be on the weekly menu starting next week, when the share distributions start. It will all be generic, to be ‘filled in’ when we know what we will be getting in our share that week.

Working out the P90X2 vegan oil-free nutrition guide servings for myself.

First, I redistributed the oil serving calories into vegetable and condiment calories. I want to be heart attack proof, so no oil. (Except for my one teaspoon a week for the P90X breakfast potatoes, which really don’t come out the same, and my husband loves them so dearly I can’t take them away, when I’ve already cracked down on meat and dairy.) And frankly, I’ve never heard of anyone suffering because they ate too many vegetables, so oil to vegetables it is. I took the nutrition guide advice and went straight to the endurance food pattern, and since I already know from following the P90X nutrition guide rigorously that I don’t do well on low-carb diets for very long (two weeks max before I start running out of glycogen during workouts (“bonking”) and running out of energy in general) and since I’m into endurance sports, sounds like that’s a pattern suitable for my life anyway.

That means I’ll have two protein servings (200 Cal), one fruit serving (100 Cal), 4 vegetable servings (200 Cal), 1.5 grain servings (300 Cal), 1.5 legume and tuber servings (300 Cal), 2 condiment servings (100 Cal), and two double snacks plus the recovery drink (600 Cal), for a daily approximate total of about 1800 Cal. Which, believe it or not, is still a deficit for me, even after 30+ pounds of fat loss and being a size 2/4. Not a big deficit, but it is one. Also, I’ve gotten used to meals of 400 Calories and two double snacks, plus the recovery drink, so as a pattern I know that works for me.

A screenshot of the interactive vegetannual.

Then, I made myself a little ‘playbook’ in Numbers (I’m a Mac fangirl) with little shapes in different colors with the serving type and the calorie amount to play around with. That way, I was able to move servings around between meals and play with the structure of the meal pattern. I came up with three variants: the day with the bean leafy green salad lunch + standard protein-vegetable-grain dinner, the day with the protein leafy green salad lunch + bean-based tortilla dinner, and the day with the bean-based tortilla lunch + standard protein-vegetable-potato dinner. I’m planning on leafy greens being a big part of our diet, because last year we were awash in more greens than I knew what to do with in early summer. (That was also how I learned that I should eat more leafy greens, because they give me more energy.) This year, I will also be better prepared and informed about what’s in season when, having lived through a cycle of local produce and having become acquainted with the Vegetannual, a fictional illustrative plant invented by Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. An interactive version is available online, which is fairly self-explanatory.

So, now I have three basic meal patterns. That’s going to go pretty far. Seen this way, my grocery list now simplifies into proteins/ingredients for proteins, grains, additional tubers if necessary, and condiments like soy milk and lingonberry preserve. I also get to be creative.

What will go in the salad this week? What dressing? I’ve been meaning to try that citrus garlic dressing, maybe I should make some this week. Should we try that pink rice with the chicken seitan, or stick with brown? Is that tamari tofu over greens recipe any good? Maybe if we get kohlrabi, we could try mixing it in with cabbage in a raw salad. If we get pie cherries, we’re putting them into oatmeal.

Structure with freedom, in the best way.

Last year, the CSA share was a freewheeling experiment in cooking and nutrition simultaneously. It was a good experience, but I do want more structure this time around.

When we ate according to the P90X nutrition guide, using the menu plan the first time through P90X, we religiously followed the nutrition guide as well as our budget allowed. We got the hearts of palm, which we’d never heard of, and the arrowroot flour. We didn’t get the strawberries in December. We were still very specific shoppers. It was also a good experience, but I do want more flexibility, and more of the dishes I grew up eating (boiled potatoes and oatmeal!) on the menu. (I don’t really miss burgers when they’re not on the menu; I do miss oatmeal immensely if it’s not on the menu, and I miss boiled potatoes a lot too. A good yellow-fleshed boiled potato, like King Edward or Yukon Gold, boiled just right, gives me an immense feeling of home and safety. Now that’s comfort food!)

Basically, what I need is a mixture of the rigor and detail of the menu plan and the spontaneity and exploration of simply picking up a box of produce every week.

My yoga teacher told us a story about her dog once. The point of the story was that like dogs, we are happiest with clear boundaries but freedom within them. Her point was more closely related to asana than meals, but I think the same is true for food. We are happiest when we have some structure and boundaries, but can be spontaneous within them. I think this is going to be it.

I am prepared for CSA season.

Postscript:

If you want to do your own plant-strong meal planning but don’t want to do P90X2, at least not right now, you can order just the P90X2 nutrition guide from me. Send me a message on G+ or email me at teresa at fityoginirunner dot com if you’re interested and I’ll walk you through how to order one. It’s no harder than ordering something off Amazon. If you’re an endurance athlete also, I’d bet you’re on a training plan already, given that it’s spring, no matter what your sport. (I’m running the Tough Mudder in exactly a week, so P90X2 was perfect training for me, but it’s also an obstacle race early in the season.) If you’re interested in keeping your diet finely tuned while also getting a CSA share, especially if you want to be eating a whole foods, plant-based diet that also takes into account that you’re an athlete, I’d definitely recommend paying the $40 for the P90X2 nutrition guide. It’s got both the basic meal planning structure (regular, vegan, and grain-free) as well as recipes. It’s very, very useful.

There are many excellent resources for planning a plant-strong diet in good, hands-on detail, such as The Engine 2 Diet, and there are many excellent look-it-can-be-done articles out there about vegan bodybuilders and endurance athletes, but the two rarely intersect. I found one, and I’m loving it. It’s not too tight, not too loose, and adjusting my relative food group intakes has given me more energy, so I’d say it did better than I did on my own. (I’ve done so many things that have given me more energy that I’m starting to take having lots of energy all the time for granted, except for at night when it’s time to sleep. If I hit an afternoon slump, I wonder what’s wrong.)

My mother and my husband are, I’m pretty sure, conspiring to flood my inbox with various articles on things they think I would find interesting. (I am eternally behind in reading them.) Part of the overnight influx from my mother was an article about a thesis that found that low-carb eaters are more likely to get type II diabetes than high-carb eaters.

The study/thesis reporting this was done on 26,000 middle-aged men, focusing on the glycemic index (GI) and the impact of GI on diabetes. And to certainly my surprise, it turns out that low-carb eaters were more likely to get type II diabetes, and that people who substituted fat and protein with carbohydrates were less likely to get type II diabetes.

This study also “discovered” that the glycemic index isn’t a single number. I say discovered in quotes, because from my perspective (manufacturing, repeatability, stability, predictability) it was a given you’re going to get a population average GI for a particular food with some standard deviation, because the same food isn’t going to have the same effect on everyone. I guess the people who made the first GI tables didn’t do that. This thesis found (as an example cited in the article) that if you feed two people the same amount of the same white bread, the GI of the white bread was 42 for one person and 103 for the other. The abstract of the thesis is a little more scientific, of course: “Within-subject and between-subject variations in measured food GI were considerable.” The abstract also told me a few other interesting things:

• Glycemic load also had no bearing on diabetes risk, something I’ve heard very prominently claimed.
• The GI of the carbs in the diet didn’t matter. Neither high-GI nor low-GI carbs increased diabetes risk. All that mattered was the percentage of your calories that came from carbs.
• Regardless of that meat and milk proteins are extremely low-GI because, well, they just don’t contain carbs, replacing them with carbs decreased diabetes risk.

You can see the whole thesis online for free at https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/32388/glycemic.pdf?sequence=1.

Not Starbucks - it's a superfood shake. Yeah, really.

That’s not really Starbucks. That’s my chocolate superfood shake Shakeology. Made with a cup of soy milk, it makes it pretty close to my 200-Calorie snack size.

I was super exited about the new vegan flavor, Tropical Strawberry, and called to switch my automatic home delivery flavor to Tropical Strawberry as soon as it was released in February. I didn’t understand that if I wanted the change to be permanent, I had to call back to confirm that. Apparently they were letting people ordering other flavors to get a single vegan bag to try, which is nice, but I wanted to get away from the whey isolate (dairy protein) in the first place! Not to mention fruity sounds fantastic for summer. So, I had to return the chocolate bag they sent me last month, and now I’m living off of the remnants of an old bag of chocolate I had until my new Tropical Strawberry bag arrives.

Isabelle Daikler, one of the co-creators of Shakeology, said at last year’s Beachbody summit that she was vegan other than Shakeology during a Shakeology information session. So, I figure if she can do that, I can hang in there a few weeks. But I really loved the flavor and the added ingredients did make an additional improvement in my energy level. Apparently Beachbody CEO Carl Daikeler was relegated back to chocolate and greenberry when they got their first Tropical Strawberry bag pre-release, because Isabelle hoarded it, but started adding in scoops of the six new ingredients to make up for it. I think I see why!

When I first started drinking Shakeology, my energy levels went up noticeably. I didn’t even consciously notice until friends started commenting on how much more energetic I was. But by now that’s my new normal. So if there’s an additional energy boost to be had, gimme!

I had a chance to talk to Isabelle at last year’s summit before the big party Saturday night. I’ve always wondered how they decided what superfoods to put in and how they decided on the amounts. I know Isabelle has been formulating superfood shakes for private clients for about 20 years, so evidently she knows something about that people are willing to pay for. Why pay someone to make a shake if you could just dump ingredients in a blender yourself and get the same result? It’s not like there’s oodles of clinical and research studies on every superfood out there, and even if there was, there certainly aren’t on all the combinations of them. I couldn’t help but wonder if it’s kind of like engineering in that you take science and then start testing stuff to see if it does what you want, extending existing knowledge with empiricism. She said her formulations come from a mix of science and experience, which sounds like “yes” to me.

I realized recently that some see Shakeology as a meal replacement shake – i. e. a way to cede control over food choices in order to get it “right”. That seems like such a sadly incomplete view of the amazing ingredients in Shakeology. You have to master making your own food choices if you want to be healthy in the long run. Shakeology to me is my whole foods-based multivitamin/snack. It’s the nutrition value of the ingredients – and what that does for my health and subjective wellbeing – that I’m after. For a lot less than hiring a personal shake formulator and with a lot less trouble than making my own. I know some people are trading superfood shake recipes online, but there are only a few superfoods in them, and I frankly don’t want to have to research reputable quality suppliers of superfoods. I’ve had enough trouble with organic (non-GMO) soybeans. No thanks. Shakeology is a “shortcut” I’m happy to take.