WOD - 12.31.14

Mile run - 10:00

Pull-up drill A - 3x12 banded pull-ups, 3x12 curls - 12lbs

Front squat - 3x3 - 105lbs

Conditioning - 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1

Snatch - 43lbs

Burpees

Thoughts: Last workout of 2014. Guess what? It sucked. A lot. 

Goals for next year: Work on squats and snatch. Get first pull-up. Don't miss class. Ever.

BREAKFASTING

Ever wonder what goes into those little bottles of green juice?  Well. Its this.  Got a heard-start on Dryuary this morning by preparing the first of many healthy breakfasts.  I'm coming down with a cold so figured I might as well start early.  (Guess that Zinc isn't working after all.)

Made my favorite breakfast of all time -- sweet potato hash with sausage topped with a fried egg and a little avocado.  Add a little coffee and my morning's just about perfect.  I'm getting better with my presentation too. 31 more days of this doesn't sound bad at all.

BAM!

The paperwhites bloomed.  The winter garden is here!

WINNING

So it seems Apartment Therapy isn't the only one with some resolution-based Challenge for 2015.  CrossFit South Brooklyn has announced their six-week "Look, Feel, and Perform Better Challenge" which seems like as good a thing as any to get me through this impending Dryuary.  The rules are pretty simple...you sign up, pay $30, submit a "before" photo to their website and perform a trial WOD as an initial benchmark.  You then log points on their online spreadsheet daily.  Points are awarded as follows:

(3) Full Clean Day:  Ate Zone balanced meals all day
(1) 1 Item Off List:  Ate one slightly off balance meal
(0) 1 Full Meal Off Plan:  Ate one way off balance meal
(-3) More than One Meal Off Plan:  Ditched the Zone for more than one meal
(1) Fish Oil:  Took 3 grams of EPA/DHA in fish oil tabs
(1) Sleep: 7 solid hours of sleep the night before
(1) Active Recovery: 15 minutes with a foam roller
(1) Hydration: 72 oz of water daily
(1) WOD: Trained either at CrossFit or elsewhere

Winners of the Challenge will be judged on positive body comp changes as demonstrated by the before and after photos, total points earned during the six weeks and overall improvement on the trial WOD.

It seems the greatest number of points one can achieve in a single day is 8.  Which means a perfect score at the end of three weeks is 336...but that means you'd have to work out every single day which is brutal and not great for you.  Its been a goal of mine to supplement my CrossFit days with some good ole fashioned Tracy Anderson workouts on my off-days, but it remains to be seen how difficult that will be.  I'll just have to take it day by day.  The hardest thing will likely be the initial workout on January 1st after a whole night of celebrating...

The Grand Prize is two whole months of unlimited membership free which would be pretty sweet...and you guys know me, I always love a good a challenge!  I say bring it.  

THE VITAMIN SCAM

I don't know when this blog became so health-focused, but I'm away from home and all my DIY projects so there's not much else to write about for the time being.

Lately, I've been a little vitamin-crazed.  It all started a couple years back when my doc discovered my Vitamin D and B levels were literally at zero...most likely because I'm lactose intolerant and wasn't eating a whole lot of red meat.  I began taking a daily supplement of both, started eating a ton of beef and, lo and behold, my levels improved.  The increase in Vitamin B is more likely a result of my diet than the actual supplement since it can't really be absorbed by ingesting.  (I keep taking it anyway just in case.)  I've always taken a multi-vitamin, two Vitamin C gummies and fish oil along with my high blood pressure meds so that brought me up to 9 pills every morning. Then a few months ago, a facialist recommended I start taking primrose and flaxseed oils for my skin so I added four more to my cocktail.  And then I got worried about getting sick over the holidays so I started popping zinc tabs for a grand total of 14.  Thats a lot of vitamins.  And a lot of money.  And after some dedicated reading on the subject, I have a sneaking suspicion I've been quite literally flushing both down the toilet.

The multi-vitamin debate is a pretty boring one, but I'm beginning to side with those claiming they're a scam.  How could I be taking One-A-Day for years and still not have a shred of B or D in my system?  The minute I changed my eating habits and popped a daily Vitamin D, my levels changed.  Very suspect.  So that's the first to go.  I'll probably nix the Vitamin B gel too since its more likely that my diet has fixed that problem.  Then there is the question of whether the zinc and the vitamin C is actually doing anything worth while.  I haven't been sick yet this winter (knock on wood) so I'm not bailing on them yet...but I wouldn't be surprised if I've been popping glorified gummy bears all this time.  There's some compelling science behind the fish oil so  I'll keep that going and I have noticed a difference in my skin since taking the primrose and flaxseed oils. Not bailing on that homeopathic garbage yet!  So I'm down to 12.  Which still seems like a lot to me.  But whatever works.

Man.  I need to get another project going already.

HACKING THE BLUEPRINT CLEANSE & USING IT WISELY

If there's once thing I'm good at, its a good ole fashioned juice cleanse.  I'm the best at it.  If juice cleansing was a job, I would be CEO.  If there was an event at the Olympics, I would be the gold medalist six years in a row.  If I could juice cleanse for the rest of my life and somehow not die, I would do it in a heart beat.  Why?  Because its easy.  Its brainless.  Do you know how much of my week is spent figuring out what food to shove in my face on a daily basis?  What recipes to cook, how and when to cook them, when to schedule a grocery run, how much to freeze, how much to parcel out, and then actually remembering to bring it all in to work? Its exhausting. And anxiety producing.  If I could live off a magical pill every day, and not have to think another minute about it, I would do it.  So the concept of drinking 6 bottles of vitamin-rich juices on a daily basis is very appealing to me.

The supposed effects of the whole thing are more of a bonus, really, even though they are not what everyone hopes they are.  (i.e. Instant hotness) In my opinion, all juice fasting does is cleanse your pallet and give you a mega-dose of vitamins and minerals you're probably not getting in your every-day life.  Post-cleanse you can suddenly taste the difference between, say, a cherry tomato and a stick of celery; not only that, but you also have a newfound appreciation for texture.  You're so tired of that sickly-sweet green juice, that something as bland as jicama is suddenly delicious and gratifying simply because its crunchy.  Even water is a miracle! I also find juice cleansing to be a phenomenal de-bloater -- its the most obvious benefit, and a good reminder of what limiting sodium can do.  Plus your mind is sharper, your skin is glowing and you begin to resemble what I imagine a pure-bred human being might look like.  But it is not a good way to lose weight.  You may drop a pound or three, but it all comes back the moment you resume eating real food.  Not really the goal here.

And then there are all the downsides.   #1.  The cost.  (A full week of Blueprint will set you back a couple hundo).  #2.  Withdrawal.  Somehow, I have never experienced the dizziness, hunger or grumpiness most people describe during their first three days of the cleanse.  Maybe its because I don't eat much white flour or dairy to begin with...maybe its because I cheat and drink an occasional cup of black coffee or green tea.  (I know that interferes with the "real" reasons for doing a cleanse, but I don't believe in all that holistic mumbo jumbo...the benefits of fasting or clearing out "bad bacteria" or whatever.  The science doesn't add up and its seems kind of dumb to me.)  But the biggest drawback by far is #3.  It severely limits your activity.  I once did a full week of CrossFit while cleansing just to see what it was like, and got a stern talking to by a coach who caught on to my little experiment.  He basically said "Don't do that" and if I did choose to do it, "Don't come to class."  Fair enough.  For all the convenience of popping bottles six times a day, seven days a week, it can't be all that good for your metabolism either.

So.  In 2015 I'm going to incorporate all the positive benefits of juicing without the negative effects of juice-fasting.  And I'm not going to spend a million dollars on it either.  Some smartipants "hacked" all the Blueprint recipes and it turns out making these from scratch only costs about $2.  My goal is to make a fresh juice every morning after the gym as a quick pick-me-up before work. Here are all the recipes to make all your juicing dreams come true:

GREEN JUICE:
For 16 ounces, gather organically-grown:

• 5 Ribs of Celery
• 1 Cucumber, Halved
• 2 Large Green Apples of Your Choice
• 3 Kale leafs
• 1 Ounce of Lemon juice
• 1 Handful of Parsley
• 3 Romaine leafs
• 1 Handful of Spinach (Don’t be shy. It doesn’t bite)

P.A.M. JUICE:

• A Third of 1 Pineappple
• 2 Large Green Apples of Your Choice
• A few pinches of Mint, to taste

SPICY LEMONADE: 

(I am suspicious of the benefits of this one, though it sure does taste good!)

• 14 ounces of Filtered Water
• 3-4 juiced medium Lemons
• A few Dashes of Cayenne Pepper
• 1 Tablespoon of Agave Nectar

C.A.R. JUICE:

• 1 Green Apple of Your Choice
• 2 Beet, with the greens left on
• 3 Large Carrots
• 1 and 1/2 Tablespoon of Ginger
• A 1/2 ounce of Lemon Juice (to taste)

CASHEW MILK:

(My favorite!  This is probably better as a dessert or late afternoon snack)

• 4-5 ounces of Raw Cashews soaked over night in...
• 16 ounces of Filtered water
• 1 Tablespoon of Agave Nectar
• 1 teaspoon of Cinnamon (ground)
• 1 two-inch piece of Vanilla Bean (or 1 teaspoon of extract)

WOD - 12.27.14

Mile run - 8:31

Pull-up drill B (10 5-10 sec negatives)

Back Squat - 3x5 - 125lbs

AMRAP 12:00

40 goblet lunges (20lbs)

30 jumping pull-ups

20 push-ups 

Thoughts: Added 5lbs to my back squat! No erg at the clubhouse so did a modified workout. Still not easy. Got through 1.5 rounds for a total of 80 lunges, 60 jumping pull-ups and 20 push-ups from my knees (lame). Tried to run a cool down mile but legs were jello.

PALEO TRAIL MIX!

In the nine months since I tried this whole paleo lifestyle thing, which not only cured my lactose and gluten intolerant woes, but also lowered my skyrocketing blood pressure, I've had some fun rooting out some killer recipes online.  Of all the blogs out there on the interweb (or the cloud or whatever it is they're calling it these days) my hands-down favorite is Michelle Tam's Nom Nom Paleo.  She understands that eating healthfully doesn't mean eating disgusting, bland or boring foods. Her recipes are creative, flavorful and filling, and her iPad app is probably the most beautiful and functional online cookbook I've ever used. Her meals can convert even the staunchest of white-bread and pasta lovers in this world -- I really cannot say enough good things about this Martha of the primitive community.  

Anyway.  I recently tried her "Paleo Trail Mix" made from a mixture of toasted coconut flakes, pepitas, sunflower seeds, slivered almonds and dried pineapple.  Its downright addicting and you can even eat it in the morning with a little almond or coconut milk if you're missing those days of housing bowlful after bowlful of Lucky Charms.  Here's the recipe in its entirety but its basically the following:

PALEO TRAIL MIX:

• 16 oz. roasted, unsalted sunflower seed kernels
• 16 oz. raw, unsalted pumpkin seeds
• 8 oz. roasted, unsalted almond slivers
• 6 oz. dried pineapple, cut up
• 5 oz. dried flake coconut (I prefer to toast them if I have the time)

Pour ingredients in a bowl.  Mix together.  Eat.  

The End.

WOD - 12.22.14

Bench press - 3x5 - 75lbs

Deadlift - 1x5- 135lbs

2 mile run (16 min)

Pull-up drill A

Thoughts: Could have probably lifted heavier with the deadlift. Also. This pull-up thing is gonna take a long time :/

PROJECT: VISION QUEST

Last night I booked a flight to Costa Rica. By myself. This is not the kind of thing I normally do on a whim, but I did it without thinking about it too hard and I gotta say I'm pretty stoked. The plan is  pretty simple: I'm going to live on a beach for 8 days, surf every morning, root around in the jungle, scuba dive once or twice, write a whole bunch and hopefully meet some interesting people. Who knows. Maybe I won't come back at all. Or maybe I will and walk around reborn like some blissfully zenned-out Matthew McConaughey. I'm open to either possibility. 

One of the good things about this trip is its going to shake me out of these winter doldrums. No more holiday benders. No more hitting snooze at 6am and missing the morning CrossFit classes I pay way too much to skip. No more lamenting the icky stretch of monsoon winter yawning ahead for the next three months. It's goal time. It's Oprah time! Time to get back to the best version of myself or whatever it is she's preaching these days. Which for me means going back to the strict Paleo lifestyle and building myself into some kind of living, breathing machine. The freezer's filled with meat of all species, the pantry's stacked with nuts and berries, I'm popping vitamins, oils and herbs like candy and generally prepping for a very different kind of 2015.

As part of this new mentality, some friends and I have decided to start the year off right with something we call "Dryuary."  This means not drinking alcohol for an entire month, which for any red-blooded New Yorker, is a very challenging thing to do in the wintertime.  Our theory is, the more people we can swindle into committing to this, the fewer drinkers there will be to peer pressure us back into the normal life of happy hours, weekend ragers and boozy Sunday brunches. So far, our straight-edge crew consists of five brave souls...but we welcome any new members with open arms.  Dryuary means something different for everyone; for some its a annual reboot both physically and mentally, for others, its a period of spiritual soul-searching, and still others, as a means to drop all the holiday poundage.  In my world, Dryuary very simply means going back to CrossFit 3 times a week, cooking for myself daily, focusing on work and getting back into the swing of a regular, daily routine.    Basically, re-learning how to be a functional, adult human being.

That said, we're gonna have a lot of free time on our hands and we'll have to get creative in filling it.  Lucky for us, my favorite source of home inspiration, Apartment Therapy, has launched their annual "January Cure" challenge which should eat up a lot of time.  Each day, the site emails you a new task to help clean and organize your humble abode.  I was really proud of how much I cleared from my hoarder's paradise last week (two lamps, a bedside table, and a ton of old magazines)...until I followed it up by purchasing a better bedside table, a French hat rack from the 70s and a weird wooden arrow emblazoned with a Native American decal.   (I thought it would be a good place to hang my keys).  Oops.

French "Glass Bottle" Hat Hanging Rack!

New & improved bedside table!

This is weird.  But I love it!

There will probably be a brutal assignment down the line where I'll be forced to pick, Sophie's Choice-style, between my vintage mason jars and Cricket's teepee and I will weep real tears of remorse and fury trying to figure out how to save them both.  But. Lets cross that bridge when we get to it, shall we?

WINTER IS COMING.

Do not let these balmy 70-degree days and week-long tropical monsoons fool you.  Winter is coming and preparations must be made.  Getting the backyard ready for winter has been a laborious, Sisyphian task, mostly because the neighbor's giant oak tree dumps about 6 trillion pounds of leaves into my yard on a weekly basis.  I've spent an average of three hours a weekend raking and fishing rotten foliage out of the koi pond, doing my best to avoid the cat scat and stuffing the the whole mess into a whole box's worth of contractor bags. At the end of the day, I'll feel relieved and accomplished and then wake up Monday morning to exactly nine feral cats squatting in another 6 trillion pounds of leaves and have to do it all over again.  There's probably one more weekend's worth of work before its really finished, but today I've had enough of this game.  No more of this battening down the hatches business; the leaves and the cats can wait.  Its been a while since I came up with a good ol' hare-brained DIY project and its high time I got down to business.

Over the holiday, I was inspired by my mother's "Winter Garden" in the foyer...she'd put together a lovely collection of trees and flowering plants and I decided I'd like to give one a try this season.   I already have some aloe and succulents sitting in the kitchen window and that weird little baobab tree I got from IKEA seems to be hanging in there too.  My mom gave me a handful of paperwhite bulbs that I forced in some water so there might even be some real flowers growing here in a month or so.

Couple methods happening here.  Will see which grows best.

This morning's "Winter gardening" episode culminated with the purchase of a Spruce tree for the holidays which I arranged nicely between Our Lady Guadalupe and a pair of darling garden gnomes.  It sure is festive, but if I'm being really honest, this place is looking more and more like a hoarder's den every waking day. So I took it upon myself to start clearing out some of the more superfluous furniture.  Now that there's a teepee in the kitchen, I need to let the rest of the house breathe a little, know what I mean?  So I removed a couple old lamps, got rid of a bedside table, stashed a couple poster tubes in the closet and voila! Although, in all honesty, you can't really tell the difference. But that's just the plight of a maximalist for you.

And the last thing on my winter to-do list?  Ever since I re-upped my lease for another year, I've been wanting to do a little upgrade to make things feel fresh and new again.  Now, I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no.  I have officially given up on the bathroom.  Outside of a total gutting of the kitchen/bathroom/hallway area, there is nothing in the world, not even IKEA, that can make it a better place.  I'm not going to cry about it, its just the way it is.  Showering at my house will always feel, at best, like camping and, at worst, like climbing into a water-coffin, and it will always be possible to sit on the toilet AND wash your face at the same time.  You won't ever do it, but you'll always be thinking it.  Every time you go.  But thats just the way it is at my house, and if you want to hang with me, you're going to have to deal with it.

So instead, I've decided to give my tired kitchen cabinets a quick little refresh.

I've been recently inspired by all the gold kitchen accents featured here and here by Apartment Therapy.  I was also quite taken with this this fun, little vintage kitchen from Design Sponge complete with an eye-popping toe-kick.

How easy it would be to swap out my nasty, plastic cabinet handles with some art deco-inspired hardware and paste some gold contact paper to the kickboards on the bottom of the cabinets!  After pouring through scores of vintage drawer pulls and cabinet handles, I settled on these bad boys:

Give 'em a fresh coat of gold spray paint and pair it with this fun vintage contact paper and wowee. Or so I hope.  Now I just need my landlord to agree to a brand new SMEG refrigerator in mint green and all my vintage kitchen dreams will come true.  Results to come!

 

 

**UPDATE***

The Etsy shop wouldn't sell me 10 of those floral handles so I found something even better for less. These slender enamel and gold pulls are more delicate, don't require tacky spray paint and they even come with free screws. (That's what she said.)

THE TEEPEE IS HERE.

BAM.  TEEPEE.