Running Chick

I spent the entire day yesterday sitting on the couch, glued to ironman.com watching the pro coverage and tracking a friend of mine compete in the 2009 Ford Ironman World Championship. 

First, swim 2.4 miles in wavy, choppy water.  Then hop on your bike and pedal your ass off for 112 miles on a hilly and windy course.  After that, go run a marathon in 105 degree heat.

Would I want to do that?  Hell no.  Could I do that?  HELL NO.

I prefer to cheer people on from the climate controlled comfort of my couch.  Which is exactly what I did for, oh, about 9 HOURS yesterday.  Hey, it was cold, snowy and windy so it’s not like I could do anything else.

This marks my friend Tina’s fourth Ironman race, her second in Kona.  She was going to compete last year, but a stress fracture in her foot caused her to pull out a month before the race.  This year’s race was a special accomplishment for her because two years ago she shattered her ankle in a parachute jump (for an Army training exercise) and she never thought she’d run again.  But thanks to numerous pins in her ankle, rehab and a lot of patience, she’s slowly been able to work her way back into top condition and has been winning every triathlon in sight down South and even a few up in my neck of the woods. 

Thanks to Josh and his mad computer skillz, he was able to save the live video of Tina crossing the finish. 

She did the swim in 1:13:02, the bike in 5:57:19 (despite losing 12 minutes to a flat and faulty CO2 cartridge), and the run in 3:32:42 for an over all time of 10:51:20 and taking 10th in her division.

This is my friend and she is amazing.

One of the best parts about running the Appleton HM is the food.  Despite it being smack-dab in the middle of the mid-west and being Wisconsin, Appleton has a surprisingly diverse selection of restaurants.  Korean, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Mediterranean, Mexican.  You name it, they probably have it.

We discovered a sushi restaurant called Koreana last year and the food was so good, we just had to go back.  Koreana has a sushi bar as well as restaurant seating. 

Here, the sushi chefs are hard at work preparing our meal.

We started with sushi and avocado rolls.

And then we both had Bi Bim Bahb, mine had chicken and Josh had pork.  It’s basically about seven different vegetables and rice served in a sizzling hot rock bowl.  Oh yeah, it comes topped with a fried egg.  It was really, really good and well worth waiting a year for.

I was looking for a carb-heavy meal on Saturday, which was the night before the HM.  We decided on the Mediterranean restaurant called IL'Angolo.  After looking at the menu, we decided that it wasn’t really to our liking so we decided to just get an appetizer and go someplace else.  We ended up getting Spanish mussels and I found a prize in mine.

That’s called a pea crab.  They’re considered a parasite.  And it was in my food.  Gross.  Turns out they’re completely harmless and some people even eat them.  I showed it to our server who had never seen anything like it before.  She then told another server and he came over for a look.  Pretty soon, my little crab was the hit of the restaurant.  It was a little odd that nobody came over to tell me that it was fine (or not fine) that the crab was in the mussels.  I would have thought they’d do that just as a courtesy, but they never did.  Oh well.

After we left IL’Angolo, we were still on the hunt for Italian food.  The next restaurant had a 45 minute wait, so we ended up at a Spanish restaurant called Tapas.  Basically, it’s a restaurant that serves a bunch of different appetizers.  I was a bit skeptical, but we were hungry and it was getting late.  I had to get up at 4:00 AM the next day to start getting myself ready for the HM, and I wanted get home and get to bed.

I ordered crab cakes (sorry no pic )  and bacon wrapped scallops.  They were really, really good.

For dessert, we split Tres Leche cake.  It was soooo good.

On Sunday, I did the HM.  Here I am freezing my tail off at the start.  It was in the high 40’s and foggy, which is perfect running weather, but not prefect standing around and waiting weather.  Brr.

On a side note, I raced in the commitment skirt from runningskirt.com.  I love this skirt.  It’s got compression shorts underneath, and they do not ride up at all, unlike my beloved Nike tempo shorts.  And, the best thing, it has two giant hip pockets that can easily hold my iPhone and a few gels.  It’s comfortable and cute and I even I got several compliments on it. 

Afterwards, we had some celebratory big beers and big margaritas at Texas Roadhouse.

And that brings us to today with the food recap.  This morning at 3:30 I was awakened by a headache.  It was a searing, throbbing want-to-gouge-your-eyes-out kind of headache that I get more often than I like to admit.  I am plagued by them.  When people ask me if I get them often, I always say that rarely a day goes by when I don’t have a headache.  Most of the time they’re low-grade and I can ignore them, or take an ibuprofen and they’ll go away, but about once a month (except for this month – it’s my second bout with a nasty one) I get a hum-dinger that doesn’t respond to any medicine and I just have to let it run it’s course.  Usually I can go about my day and function without too much difficulty, but other times I have to just lay on the couch and try not to move.  I think I missed three or four days last year due to the nasty ones. Sometimes they’re migraines (complete with floaters and spots) and other times they’re sinus related.  This one is sinus related because my teeth are throbbing as well as my head and eyes.

Anyway, I laid in bed and dozed until 5:00 then finally couldn’t take the pounding anymore so I just got up and stumbled downstairs to my medicine cabinet and took a dose of sinus pills and made a pot of coffee.  After about an hour of reading the intarwebz and cleaning the kitchen, I decided that I needed to do something productive to take my mind off my pounding head.  So, I made a batch of pumpkin scones.  They were so good and made the house smell great.  Here’s the recipe, if you’re ever up in the middle in the night with a headache, or just feeling adventurous.

The original recipe called nuts to be added, but I’m not a big fan of nuts in bakery.  I’m allergic to peanuts, and it can be hard to tell one nut from another once they’re in something, so I find it best to just avoid anything that looks like it has a nut.  But I think the scones needed just a little extra to make them perfect.  So, I think I’ll add raisins to my next batch.

Well, it’s time for me to go mix some booze and drugs.  Here’s to hoping my headache is gone tomorrow! Toodles, all.