A chilly pre-dawn Sunday morning last month was the culmination for several weeks worth of training and a goal I’d set for myself a year ago. That Sunday marked my second time running the Georgia Half Marathon, 13.1 miles, a race that will probably hold special meaning for me for life, since the 2010 race was my first half marathon ever. (To be fair, although I’ve done a couple triathlons and several shorter races since then, the 2011 race was only my second half marathon!) After finishing the race in 2010, I was sore, injured (thanks to a flareup of hip bursitis the week before the race), and managed to cross the finish line just over the 3-hour mark. It was days afterward before I could walk without feeling some sort of pain. Still, I was proud of myself and looking forward to doing the race again in 2011.

Getting in one last stretch

Flash forward a year, and here I was back at the starting line. This year, I had trained better, incorporating hills and tempo workouts as well as endurance runs into my workouts. I felt stronger, faster and more confident. By race day, I was 50 lbs. lighter than I had been the year before, which helped as well. The scene for the race was pretty much the same: downtown Atlanta in the predawn darkness, surrounded by thousands of other runners as we stretched and shuffled, trying to keep warm and calm our nerves in the minutes before the start gun went off. One difference was that this year my running partner and I were a little further up in the start corrals, as we expected to have a better time. Our plan was to run a 10-minute mile pace throughout the race, and walk for a minute after every 14 minutes of running. It was our goal to finish the race in 2 hours and 20 minutes, 40 minutes faster than we’d done the race last year. It was a significant difference and a goal that I felt more than a little anxious about being able to accomplish. I told myself I would be happy with anything under the 2 hour and 30 minute mark. I was ecstatic when I rounded the final corner and saw the finish line clock and realized that I would finish the race well within our time goal. In fact, our finish time was a very respectable 2:12:36!

Proudly sporting my newest race medal!

Here are some of my memorable moments from the race:

Being in one of the hundreds of portapotties while the national anthem was sung … hearing AC/DC’s Thunderstruck (one of my favorite running songs) on the loudspeakers as the race began … running across one of the downtown interstate overpasses and seeing the Atlanta skyline as the sun came up … high-fiving my race partner Tammy every time we passed a mile marker … passing a guy who *looked* like a Kenyan on one of the hills around Mile 7 .. having a stranger from the sidelines yell “Go Lesley!” around Mile 9 … feeling myself hitting a wall around Mile 11 but pushing through it … realizing that I was going to finish the race well beyond my highest expectations … getting a big hug from my husband after the finish.

I’ve already signed up for the 2012 race, and hope to have an even better time next year. I’ve also got a couple of other half marathons on the schedule for this year, including one in Savannah this fall where my husband will be joining me for his first half marathon.

Besides the physical training, one of the things I did in the weeks leading up to the race was to mentally prepare, including reading about other people’s running experiences. One of these was a book by Mina Samuels, called Run Like a Girl.

I’d first heard about the book on Irongirl’s March e-newsletter, and thought it sounded like a great book. So I was both surprised and delighted when the author contacted me out of the blue just a few days after I first read about it, asking me if I would like a review copy. Why, yes, I would! The book is a female runner’s manifesto, a call to lace up your running shoes and hit the pavement – or whatever athletic pursuit gets you off the couch and towards a better you. She includes inspiring stories from other female runners, from young women and girls discovering their inner athletes to professionals and trailblazers like Kathrine Switzer as well as her own personal story. It was the perfect pre-race reading and helped stoke the fire in my belly. I particularly recommend the book to women, especially those who are mothers, who may not consider themselves or their daughters athletically-inclined or are wondering if they have what it takes to do sports activities. Run like a girl? Hell yes, I do!

Thanks to Mina for sending me the book. If you’d like to win my copy, please leave a comment to this post. I’ll randomly draw a name on April 30th.

Edit: And the winner of the drawing is Stephanie! I’ll email you for your mailing address. Congratulations!

Lest you think that my commitment to healthy living and losing these last few pounds means that I eschew all indulgences and live a spartan food existence, let me point you towards Exhibit A: Real Food Has Curves, by Bruce Weinstein (the chef) and Mark Scarbrough (the writer). This is an excellent primer on selecting, preparing and enjoying a wide range of food. It is also quite funny and down to earth – I wish I lived in their neighborhood so I could finagle my way onto their dinner party invite list! (Actually, what I’m really jealous over is the book club that Mark oversees at his local library.) Basically their approach is that how much we eat is dictated more by what we eat than we think. If we choose high quality, real foods, we’ll enjoy them more and be more satiated than if we eat the junky processed stuff. For quite some time now I have tried to gear my eating more towards whole, natural foods and minimize the processed stuff. I’m quite proud to say that my grocery cart is full before I even leave the produce section of the grocery store, and my trips down the center aisles are minimal. So Bruce and Mark were preaching to the choir in that respect, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy reading their stuff any less. I also learned quite a bit and as you can see from the photo above, I tagged a bunch of recipes that made me salivate just by reading them. I will definitely be getting my hand on their other books and am quite interested in their newest one, all about goat. (The goat milk corn pudding on the cover looks like ultimate comfort food.)

I hadn’t even finished Real Food Has Curves before I was trying my first recipe, Oven-Fried Fish. We eat fish a couple of times a week, so I’m always up for a new method of preparing it. I paired it with one of our favorite vegetable dishes, sauteed kale with goat cheese:

Oven Fried Fish with Kale & Goat Cheese

The recipe posted on their website is similar but not quite the same as what’s in the book (the book called for egg whites, not buttermilk, if I recall correctly) but it still formed a flavorful crust on the fish, mimicing a fried batter. But I think we’ve been eating non-battered versions of fish for so long that we found the addition of the crust a bit heavy and unnecessary. So while I’ll use the herbs they suggested for this recipe again (I’d never thought of using paprika with fresh fish before), I think we’ll skip the extra calories from the baked crust. But for those of you who really enjoy fried fish but are trying to watch your waistline, this would be a great substitute!

One of the other foods touted in the book is the use of flavorful oils. I have used olive oil as my mainstay oil for years now, but have never really branched out to try anything else. Prompted by this book, I went to Whole Foods and bought a bottle of walnut oil. Bruce and Mark also tout the virtues of cheese and they’ll get no arguments from me! I’d never tried Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese before, though – the grated stuff notwithstanding – so I also bought a chunk of P-R during the same Whole Foods trip. I used both of them on our supper that night, pan fried chicken (using a no-salt spice mixture from Trader Joe’s and the walnut oil) and roasted asparagus brushed with walnut oil and then, just before I pulled them from the oven, sprinkled with an ounce of freshly-grated cheese. Can you say delicious? We sure did! 

Pan-Fried Chicken Breast and Roasted Asparagus

One of the first recipes they provide in this book is for Chocolate Pudding, which uses real chocolate as an ingredient is partly prepared on the stovetop. My past experience with making pudding has been opening a box, adding milk and stirring, so this was a real departure for me. But it was suprisingly easy to make and the results were well worth it! The pudding formed that delicious ’skin’ on top, so I was able to place a couple of fresh strawberries on top as a garnish. I’ll never go back to store bought pudding again.

REAL Chocolate Pudding

My most recent recipe (so far) from the book is their Honey Walnut Bread, since I was itching to try something else with the walnut oil. The walnut flavor comes strictly from the oil rather than actual walnuts and the sweetness is provided by including bananas and just a bit of honey. I actually discovered when I was in mid-recipe that I only had about half the amount of honey on hand than what was called for, so while mine was probably a bit less sweet than the original recipe, it was still delicious, especially warm with a pat of butter spread on top. So good!

Honey Walnut Bread

This final dish isn’t actually from Real Food Has Curves, but another foodie book I found in the library stacks, called Things Cooks Love. This is a beautiful and useful book for cooks, both novice and advanced. Divided up by ethnicity (e.g. Mexican, Indian, Asian, etc.) the book outlines the tools, foods and methods employed by the different world cuisines. It’s about the size of a coffee table book and includes gorgeous photos of dishes from around the world. One in particular caught my eye and tingled my taste buds: Three Alarm Tofu with Oyster Mushrooms and Spinach. I couldn’t wait to try it, so I made another trip to the grocery store and got the necessary ingredients. My store didn’t carry just oyster mushrooms, so I ended up getting a ‘gourmet blend’ that had oyster, baby bella and shitake. I don’t think the meal suffered by substitution! Here is my version atop some brown basmati rice. The tofu cooked perfectly and the dish, while flavorful, was not overly spicy. Definitely a keeper recipe!

Three-Alarm Tofu with Mushrooms and Spinach

So that’s it from my kitchen for now. What’s cooking in yours?

Once again I’m behind in my book blogging! Here’s a few of my most recent reads, bookended by two really good ones, both terrifying in their own way:

Dan Simmon’s  The Terror was one of those books that had the unfortunate destiny to be purchased by me upon its initial release (I bought the hardcover shortly after it was published), spurred on by the arctic setting and promises of being scared silly. I say unfortunate because then it sat on my bookshelf for the next FOUR years, gathering dust as I by turns willfully ignored or completely forgot about it. (By the by, Nick Hornby makes reference to such ill-fated books in The Polysyllabic Spree, where he notes the tendency of certain books to go from the bookstore to the bookshelf, never to be seen again, so at least my copy of The Terror eventually did see the light of day again.) Anyway, back when I was home sick for a couple of days, I wanted something to read that would take me longer than a day to read it, a book with some meat on its bones. I spied The Terror on the shelf and thought, why not? It’s waited patiently long enough.

It took only a few paragraphs before I was hooked and it was a good thing I had nothing to do but convalesce, because I didn’t want to do anything else but read this book. Set in the Arctic in the mid-19th century, Simmons takes the mysterious fate of the doomed Franklin Expedition and offers a terrifying explanation. The expedition was comprised of two ships, The Erebus and The Terror, the latter commanded by Captain Francis Crozier, an Irishman who’d made the British navy his career and his life. When the book opens, the two ships, containing over a hundred men between them, have been stuck in the arctic ice going on two years. Worse than the dwindling food supply and the searing cold is the fact that something is stalking them from the ice, killing men and instilling a superstitious fear that this is no mere polar bear. But what is it? It will take almost the entire 700+ pages to find out. And for me, that was an exquisite sort of torture, as I wanted to know, wanted to keep reading and hurry to find out what it was that treated these men as prey to be toyed with and killed, and if anyone would make it out alive. But at the same time, the story is told so well, the details and descriptions so rich, that I didn’t want it to end.

Even if Simmons hadn’t imbued this book with elements of horror and fantasy, it would stand on its own as a gripping historical novel. The conditions that these men were forced to live with and through were horrific enough in their own right: frostbite, starvation, hopelessness. The effective mix of these genres into one sumptuous book made me one happy reader. If you’re looking for chills and thrills, you would do well to board The Terror.

You may recall that back in January, Georgia was hit by a winter storm that blanketed our area in a layer of ice. Because of that, my church book club’s meeting was cancelled. I knew it would be, and used that knowledge as an excuse not to read the book, a nonfiction work by Bruce Chilton called Rabbi Paul. Instead, the discussion for that book was postponed until February, which allowed me to rationalize that I had plenty of time to read the book. Except I didn’t. Subtitled An Intellectual Biography, the book is an exploration of the Apostle Paul’s life, mainly post-on-the-road-to-Damasus-conversion. It was enlightening and I learned a lot, arguably more than I ever really cared to know, about this most influential figure in early Christianity. I just shouldn’t have waited until days before book club to read it. There was a lot to take in and absorb, and I probably did not do the book justice by speed-reading it like I did. Even still, I came away with a better understanding and appreciation for this oft-maligned and misunderstood man.

Next up was my library book club’s February selection, Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel The Help. Yes, finally I succumbed – it’s one of our basic ‘rules’ for the book club that any books chosen must be available in paperback, since some members prefer to (or because of demand, must) buy the book and we agreed they shouldn’t have to fork out almost $30 to read a book club selection. So, because the publishers have kept postponing the release date of the trade paperback, I kept pushing off assigning it for book club. When I heard last fall that the projected spring 2011 release had been pushed back yet again, I decided to make an exception and put The Help on the book club list. Many of the members had already read it and there were ample library and personal copies to go around.

I won’t go into details about the storyline, because I’m sure pretty much everyone has either read it or read about it by now. In fact, that was a big part of why I didn’t read it for so long. So many people raved about it that of course, that set off warning bells in my head and my stubborn side kicked in, too. No, I would not be one of the throngs of people who fell in love with this book! (Picture me stomping my foot here.) And so, when I finally did borrow a library copy and start reading, a fully expected to be disappointed, even, if I’m being honest, hoping to find tremendous fault with the book. But I can’t say I did. In fact, I quite liked it! Would it rank among my favorites of all time? No, but it was still a good book that held my interest, that had interesting and likeable characters (as well as some not-so-likeable ones) and got a lot of people thinking and talking about a subject that probably hasn’t gotten much attention before, at least from the masses. It reminded me a lot of The Secret Life of Bees, both in the tone, the story and the popularit of the book itself. I imagine the film will be a blockbuster as well – and yes, I’ll be lining up to see it, just like everyone else.

Apparently I didn’t get enough scares from Dan Simmons, because a couple of weeks later, I found myself checking out a library copy of Alexandra Sokoloff’s supernatural thriller, The Unseen, after reading Susan’s review. I was one of those kids that read a lot of books about the paranormal and supernatural, but I’d never heard of the Rhine parapsychology lab at Duke University in North Carolina. The controversial lab, which operated for thirty years and utilized methods such as Zener cards to study ESP. Sokoloff uses this info as the basis for her thriller, where Lauren, a young college professor discovers the forgotten files of the mysterious lab. Partnering with Brendan, a charming and charismatic fellow professor, the two set out to reenact the final Rhine experiment, one that had devastating and lifelong consequences for all involved. This, of course, involves a creepy old mansion, menacing strangers and plenty of bumps in the night. It’s a fast-paced and somewhat frightening story, but just when I felt it was starting to get really good, it was over. It did whet my appetite for more ghost stories, though. Any suggestions?

Flash forward a few weeks – and a few books – later, and I once again returned to the frozen northern waters, this time for Cassie Brown’s book, Death on the Ice, which I picked up last summer when we went back to Newfoundland for a visit. Since I moved to the mainland when I was 11, I wasn’t among the Newfoundland children who read this book as part of their class curriculum and only became aware of the book’s existence a few years ago. Subtitled The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914, it’s written in a narrative style and tells the story of the men involved in a tragedy which, as tragedies often do, needlessly took the lives of so many.

The seal hunt has been a part of Newfoundland culture for generations and in the prewar years, it was a hugely profitable venture for the ship’s owners and the merchants both at home and overseas. For the poor men who worked the ships and hunted the seals, it offered the promise of wages, pitiful though they typically were, and weeks spent living in harsh conditions in the freezing subarctic waters. Brown vividly describes the wretchedness of the time aboard the sealing ships and doesn’t shy away from the brutality that the seal hunt entailed, either. As she explores how the disaster occurred and all the mistakes and negligence that led to over a hundred men being trapped on the ice for two days, I was riveted and felt a mixture of empathy and horror. Death on the Ice chilled me to my very bones.

Death on the Ice obviously counts as one of my Canadian Book Challenge 4 selections and I am also using it as my ‘Life Stage’ selection for the What’s in a Name 4 Challenge.

As I mentioned back in January, one of my blogging goals this year is to include aspects of my life related to things other than books and reading. Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to live a healthy lifestyle and part of that has included a commitment to getting fit and being an active person. And to tell the truth, I don’t just do it now because I’ve committed to living this way, but because I love it. I love feeling strong, pushing my body, and discovering things about myself that I never knew.

Case in point: I am a runner. No one is more shocked about that than me! Granted, I’m not a fast runner (although I’m faster now than I was two years and even a year ago) and I still remember the first time I tried to run, at 300+ pounds. It was such a foreign, uncomfortable feeling – my teeth even rattled – that I stopped within a few yards and gave it up. Then on my 35th birthday in 2008, I joined Operation Boot Camp, an exercise boot camp. It was my birthday gift to myself, although I never would have considered it if a friend (thanks Christal!) hadn’t suggested doing it together. For three weeks in December, I got up every weekday morning, gathering on a field with other exercise masochists at 5:00 a.m. in the predawn darkness. We were like the postal service; neither rain nor sleet kept us from our appointed tasks. And one of those tasks was running. I was slow, always at the back of the pack and had to take walk breaks, but I survived that boot camp. And proved to myself that I was stronger than I thought I was. That led me back to the gym and helped put me on the road to a fit, healthy life.

Fast forward to 2011 and I’m training for my second half marathon. I’ll be running in the Georgia Half Marathon with my friend Tammy, who is also my running and Weight Watcher-buddy, as we try to beat our finish time from last year’s race. My husband has also taken up running (although his heart belongs to cycling) and has committed to running at least one race a month in 2011. In February, that race was the Heart to Heart 5K, held in support of one of our local schools. I hadn’t planned to run since it didn’t really fit in with my training schedule, but then I found out it was a Peachtree Road Race qualifier, and I thought, “Well, maybe I could set a new personal record and snag a better start time at the PRR …” I passed that tidbit along to Tammy and we both decided to sign up and run.

It was a bit chilly that morning and kind of a hilly course, so none of us set any records (I finished in 29:50) but Tammy and I did manage to win 2nd place in our respective age groups! Mike had the disadvantage of being in one of the more popular age groups, so although he finished in just about the same time as we did, he wasn’t rewarded. Here’s a photo of us showing off our new medals:

As I said, Mike’s real passion is for cycling and while I enjoy many aspects of running, including the accessibility of it (i.e. I can do it anywhere, not much in the way of expense and equipment, etc.), I do love to ride my bike. I feel strong and fast and am pretty good at it, all things considered. It’s also a lot of fun. My husband says that when he runs, many times afterwards (or sometimes, during), he’ll think, “F this! I hate running!” but that he never has that thought about cycling. And while I don’t think I’ve ever hated running, cycling just has never worn my body or mind out like running sometimes has. So if at some point I was ever forced to give one up, I would probably have to bid farewell to my running shoes, but I hope never to have to retire my bike.

And just this past weekend, we both participated in our first cycling time trial. Neither of us knew quite what to expect, but we went in hopeful that we’d do well. Although we’ve done charity and group rides before, those don’t really concern themselves with speed as they are more endurance-focused. In the race, we’d be cycling 12 miles in an out-and-back loop on the Silver Comet Trail north of Atlanta, along with a couple hundred or so other cyclists.

For our first race, we didn’t do too badly. I finished in 35:36, with an average pace of 20.3 miles per hour. That put me 24th in my category, out of 65 racers. Mike finished about 30 seconds faster than I did, but again, gender was on my side and I placed higher in my category than he did in his. To give you an idea of how close the times are, the woman in first place finished in 30:10, the woman in last place finished in 46:02 and the woman in front of me beat me by 3 100s of a second. My next goal is to increase my average pace to over 21 miles an hour.

Here’s a short clip of me at the start of the race. It was a little nerve-wracking to be clipped into my bike and not moving, trusting the spotter to hold me up. I kept praying I wouldn’t fall over, so my “Woohoo!” as I took off was a mixture of excitement and relief!

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes about running, from Jeff Corwin of all people, as he says so well what I think whenever someone asks me why I enjoy running and don’t I get bored by it?

“I look at running as meditation. It allows me to decompress, download, and get rid of a lot of negative stuff. That’s my secret. I go inside myself.”

Although I read and cherised L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series (and in fact, still have my boxed set of mass market paperbacks given to me by my older step-brother way back when), I’d never even heard of  a stand-alone novel she’d written called The Blue Castle until a few years ago when I read about it on a book blog. Since then it’s been on my wishlist, but not until a recent spate of mentions on current book blogs did I decide to buy a copy. And not only that, but I read the book within days of receiving it – a rarity for me! I was sick with a nasty cold a couple of weeks back, and the forced bedrest allowed me to spend a good deal of my time reading. Between extensive napping, I think it took me the better part of a day and night to read The Blue Castle.

The novel itself was apparently written with an adult audience in mind, although it is suitable as a young adult book, particularly today, when the subject matter and writing style is so mild in comparison to a lot of what is written for modern teens. Most of the reviews on Amazon appear to be from adult readers who profess their sentimental attachment to the book. It tells the story of Valency, a spinster who, in her 29th year, learns that she has a heart defect that will kill her within the year. That discovery kindles a latent spirit of rebellion and desire in Valency, who up to this point has led a quiet and demure life with daydream fantasies about her Blue Castle her only means of escape. Valency finds independence, love and herself in the course of a year, and a few other surprises as well.

I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read it by giving out any more details, but suffice it to say that The Blue Castle is a delightful and nostaglic romance, one with a spirited and endearing heroine. It deserved all the accolades it has received – I only wish I’d read it years ago. But I can see myself rereading it again in the future.

There were quite a few passsages or words spoken by characters that I loved, and you could just see Montgomery’s personality shining through. To wit:

“It was permissable, even laudable, to read to improve your mind and your religion, but a book that was enjoyable was dangerous.” (p. 38)

“Fear is the original sin. Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something.” (p. 59)

“People who don’t like cats … always seem to think that there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.” (p. 100)

“He hadn’t the least idea what she was up to, but he was sure her motive was not commendable. When he could not understand a thing he straightway condemned it. Simplicity itself!” (p. 139)

I do have one quibble, but it’s not with the book itself. Rather, it’s the introduction for this particular edition. By now, I really should know better than to read them before I finish the book, but why oh why do the editors and writers of introductions insist on giving away major plot points and dissecting the book before the reader has even had a chance to find out for themselves? Wouldn’t that kind of discussion be more suitable as an afterword? It’s so annoying and does a disservice to the book and the reader, in my opinion.

Reading The Blue Castle also counts as a Canadian Book Challenge 4 selection.