If it's not food...then what is it?

We are coming to the end of the two month vegan challenge. I've spent the last two months thinking a lot about food. I've talked to a lot of people (informally) about veganism and its benefits both health and performance-wise (side note: I got my lipids tested a week ago for a health initiative for work and was told that they were "perfect"). I've talked to some people who have started on the paleo diet and are having great results on it. I've read several articles about the relationship between chronic disease and diet as well as several articles espousing the so-called "Mediterranean diet". Then today I read this article in the New York Times which was adapted from a book (which is about to be released) called "Fat Sugar Salt" by Michael Moss:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And I realized something (or I guess, was reminded of something). We, as a nation, are forgetting what food really is. The common denominator between all the "diets" (and I'm touching upon veganism here as a choice motivated by health rather than one motivated by morality, so bear with me) that I mentioned above is that if done right, they pretty much eliminate all processed non-food. Maybe, just maybe, it's not the fact that a vegan can't eat salmon or someone on a paleo diet can't eat legumes that make these diets successful, but that neither of them can eat powdered cheese food or Campbell's soup or flamin' hots. So much of what we see on our grocery store shelves is engineered (read the NYT article) in a lab, rather than grown in the ground.  In other words, so much of what we're eating really isn't food in the strictest sense of the word.

Quick Story: When I taught writing two years ago, we read the young reader's edition of "The Omnivore's Dilemma". The other teacher that I planned with came up with a brilliant idea: we let the kids bring in their favorite treats and eat them in class as long as they did the activity that we planned first. Every student brought something in (sometimes when I assigned homework, only 10% of kids would actually do it, but every kid brought in a "treat" that day). The first thing that we did was to ask the students (without looking at the ingredient list) was what their "treat" was made of. The kids were perplexed. So we guided them a little bit. We asked them what part of the food pyramid it would fall into. They were perplexed. No one knew what was in a flamin' hot cheeto, and no one could come close to linking it to anything that actually constituted food without looking at the ingredient list. Even after looking at the ingredients, they were still confused..."well, what is all this stuff?".I didn't know what most of the things on the list were any more than they did (Michael Pollan did- it's corn!). We asked them how often they ate the items they brought in. Most of them responded that they ate things like this multiple times a day.

The NYT article on the Mediterranean Diet pointed out something that should be obvious to us: that real food should be a treat and not a punishment (think about your best meals ever: did they involve processed cheese or breaded chicken nuggets? probably not). We, as a culture, like to convince ourselves that we are being deprived if we choose a salad over a Quarter Pounder with cheese. (There's even whole lines of "I'm depriving myself with non-food" food in the way of Lean Cuisines, Snackwells, those 100 calorie packs of things that resemble cookies, etc.). Marketers have led us to believe that the way to happiness is through our stomachs and that we "deserve" to eat desert with every meal (or supersize our meal, or that we are bad parents for not buying our kids food that is shaped like animals). I would like to make some sort of comment about how I believe in personal responsibility here, but I'm not sure that we, as Americans, have any sense of that anymore (certainly when it comes to food, debatably in other areas as well). Perhaps Michael Bloomberg is right to want to regulate what people eat. When my students ask me why I make certain rules, sometimes I am brutally honest: "Because I don't trust you yet to be in control of yourselves." If we don't learn to control what we eat, the government might be telling us that very thing more and more (and they might not be wrong).

Do you want the good news first...or the bad news?

Starting training this week with a good percentage of people who had never done Ironman before, I couldn't help but feel a little wizened. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still can't swim and at times my bike handling leaves plenty to be desired, but I know enough to laugh at the guy on the trainer next to me (nicely, of course) when he says that he already has a bike and so he doesn't plan to spend that much money on Ironman. So, here is a compilation of stuff I know. Some of it is good, some bad, some of it...well, some of it just is. In no particular order.

1. You will spend a zilliondy dollars before you cross the finish line. You may be the type of person who needs every new gadget out there or you may be a strict minimalist (or fall somewhere in between). You WILL spend a zilliondy dollars. You will spend more money on gas, sports drink, race entries, tire tubes, tune-ups, groceries, hotel rooms, and new shoes than you think you will. Yeah, that number in your head...double it. Triple it if you're that guy that was on the trainer next to me.

2. You will have a meltdown. At least one. I don't care if you're a dude. You will get off your bike and threaten to throw it. You will sit down in the middle of a run and refuse to get up. You will bang your head against the steering wheel in your car after a ride when your legs would barely move or you got 3 flats or it was 100 degrees outside or a combination of all three. You might even cry. Even if you are a dude. It will be epic, but it will be okay.

3. You will feel great when you start getting into shape and then your legs will feel terrible pretty much until you taper.

4. No matter how much of an athlete you feel like today, you will feel like a major badass by June.

5. By June, you are also going to have nothing to talk about other than your training and will have spent enough time in the sun to think that it's actually interesting to people who aren't training with you. It's not. Stop talking about it. Trust me.

6. You are going to meet some badass MFers. You may even think right now that you fall into the badass MFer category. You don't. Trust me. No matter how badass you think you are, you are going to meet some guy or some girl who is so badass that they make you feel like you are riding a pink huffy. ("oh, you're training for your first Ironman? I've done twenty" "Ah. Ironman, I did those before I got into ultraman." "Yeah, I got sick of riding my bike, so I'm training for Leadville"). Be wary of these people. If you listen to them too much, they start sounding less crazy and you might even start thinking that some of their ideas seem like good ones. And then all of a sudden you are flying to Antarctica to run a marathon wearing a snow suit.

7. When you tell people that you are doing Madison, they will mention the swim start. They will show you this picture or one that looks just like it. They will use adjectives like "washing machine". It will scare you. For good reason. But it will be okay.

8. By May you will want to eat everything. You will. With Abandon. I remember e-mailing coach something close (seriously) to the following: "I just ate a whole cake. I mean a WHOLE cake. I'm still hungry. What's wrong with me?". She told me to eat more avocado and nuts. To her credit, I didn't eat a whole cake again.

9. If you are a man, you will do #8 while losing tons of weight. If you are a woman, you will stay the same weight while your waist whittles down and your butt and thighs get bigger.  Invest in a pair of comfy yoga pants that stretch now. Sorry, but it's the truth.

10. By August, you will most likely be questioning your own sanity as you miss birthday parties, baptisms, and weddings to go ride your bike. Sometimes alone, sometimes in heat. You will pee in cornfields and talk to cows on the side of the road instead of doing normal-people things. You will feel abnormal because, well, you are abnormal.

11. That sexy hint of color you got from marathon training? With Ironman training, It will be a full-on suit of too-tan and white even if you wear SPF 100 every time you leave the house.

 

12. If you follow the training plan, you will be ready. Seriously. No matter how crappy you feel through training, you will be ready. The race is just preparation + heart + a hope that your digestive system holds up.

13. It will be worth it when you cross the finish line.

An epic journey...

Welcome back to "I am a Masochist", the Ironman blog (redux). We'll see if I can come up with some new jokes the second time around.

Today is the first day of official Ironman training. I went to the gym today and did the prescribed workout. While I did the strength workout, I stared in the mirror, and looked at my soft, pale arms, and thought, "this does not look like a body that can cover 140.6 miles." Well, and that's the truth...it doesn't look like a body that can cover 140.6 miles because it is not.
My freshman English class just finished reading the Odyssey. One of the things that we talked about a great deal in the study of the Odyssey was the power of journeys. Our hero (no, I'm not saying I'm a hero for doing masochistic things, but stick with me for the rest of the analogy please) starts out unwilling, unworthy, or unable. Somehow, however, through the power of some sort of journey, the hero is transformed. He ends the journey as someone different and is able and worthy to do things that he was unable to do at the beginning of the story. The hero couldn't, I tell my students, have faced the challenge that he faces at the end of the story at the beginning of the story- it wouldn't make any sense- he wasn't fully realized. It is the journey that makes him into a hero, not the other way around.
Here's to the beginning of the journey (again).