This past week was just incredibly busy — funny since Monday was Labor Day and ostensibly a holiday in which workers all get a rest. (Or, in the US, workers are all bribed with mattress and car sales so as to avoid any sort of pinko agitation. But I digress…)
Due to the holiday and travel, I rearranged my training this week, doing a 45 minute run on the loop near my brother's house on Monday morning. We left midday with the RV in tow. We stayed again in North Hampton, New Hampshire at the Sea Coast RV Park, the same place we stayed when we headed up to Maine in June. I chose the spot for the dining options nearby, knowing that we wouldn't have food packed for me to cook. But as it was a holiday, the Throwback Brewery was only serving snacks, and they'd already run out of cider by the time we got there at 5pm. So we opted to have a pizza delivered to the RV. (From The Community Oven — don't really recommend.)
The other food choice in the vicinity was Donut Love — across the street, so Tuesday morning I ran and bought half a dozen donuts and a couple of coffees before we hit the road. They're not my favorite, but they're fairly decent. And that was, no doubt, the best part of the day. Fucking Google Maps is just terrible at routing, I find, often adjusting the course you've plotted without your permission — I guess in order to save you a minute or two tops. There's also no way with Google Maps to tell it to avoid roads that ban trucks and/or trailers, and sure enough it sent us down one of the parkways in New York with very low bridges. We did make it safely to the place Kin had reserved to store the RV, but when we arrived, we discovered that the clearance there was also too low. So we had to scramble — in almost 100 degree heat, thanks to the current heat wave in the area — to find somewhere to leave the trailer until we could deal with it again this weekend: Liberty Harbor RV Park in New Jersey.
On Thursday, Kin had to go to Boston for the day. In his absence, I tested the new pizza place right next door to us. Meh. But what it doesn't offer in taste, it does make up for in convenience. (That is to say, we stopped in there again for slices on Saturday.)
Elsewhere in food: I made biscuits and gravy on Wednesday (which is a recipe I need to share to the newsletter); I made some marinated lentils while Kin was out of town (it's always lentils when he's gone); I baked some spice cupcakes; I made white bean primavera; I made bbq chicken sandwiches with sweet potato fries. I bought a loaf of bread from Amy's Bread, as well as some sticky buns — she boasts they're the best in the city, and I believe her. We ordered Ess-a-Bagel bagels again for delivery on Saturday. After the show on Sunday, we had burgers at Lovely's Old Fashioned — truly excellent — and stopped in for dessert at Oasis (again).
On Saturday we drove down to Liberty Harbor RV Park, grabbed the trailer, and moved it about an hour east of here — somewhere in New Jersey.
I woke up super early on Saturday so that I could do my 20K run before we left. It was 100% humidity, and it was just one helluva challenging run. I had to stop a lot. I really have no way to assess my fitness for the upcoming half marathon — training in this heat and humidity has just been awful and so many of my runs are brutal. I mean, one way to test is to run a mile speed test. And on Sunday morning, I did indeed run the Fifth Avenue Mile — incredibly cool since just a few hours later, the professionals ran the same course. The 50-59 year olds were the first to run, at 7:25 am. I ran it in 7 minutes and 14 seconds which isn't great, but again considering the humidity (and that I'd run 12.5 miles the day before), I'm not too bad. I picked up my bib this week too as I have the Bronx Ten Miler this upcoming Sunday.
Elsewhere in Training: Lifting went okay — I advanced both my squats and my deadlifts — I'm back over 100 lb for the former (well, I squatted 100 lb) and almost at my bodyweight for the latter. I'm struggling a bit mentally with advancing the bench since there aren't safeties (!!) on the bench at my gym; and I think I'm always so tired by the time I do my overhead press — a lift I already sort of despise — that I didn't go up there either. Swimming was okay, although slower than usual. Biking — at least to and from the gym — is fine too. I completed a survey for my coach Eli, who's doing his dissertation on trauma-informed weightlifting. My coaches Eli and KB changed my life.
My Media: This past week in Second Breakfast, I published a coffee cake recipe, an essay on caffeine as a "performance enhancing drug," and a look at the week's food and fitness technology news. I wasn't cited in The NYT article on UNESCO's report on how ed-tech during the pandemic made things worse, but I did blurb the report.
Others' Media: We watched Indiana Jones and the Ocarina of Time (or whatever it's called). We watched the latest episodes of Only Murders in the Building and Reservation Dogs, and we finished the documentary series Telemarketers. I've almost finished season 1 of Physical while running on the treadmill. I listed to the latest Barbell Medicine and Maintenance Phase podcasts. I finished reading New York 2140 and flew through my friend Meg Kissinger's While You Were Out in one day (another book from the amazing Columbia book-publishing class I took when we lived here last time). I started reading the Baking Powder Wars, but when I say "started" I mean I downloaded it on my kindle and opened it. And for the first time since Isaiah and I saw Book of Mormon when I took him to London, I went to the theatre — Kin and I took advantage of "Broadway Week" and saw Wicked. I read the book ages ago, but had no idea what to expect from the musical. It was pretty friggin' great. Ah, Broadway. New York. I love you.