Monthly Archives: December 2013

Monkey Evolution

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Luna Trail Sandals L-R - Original Leadville, Leadville w/ATS, Oso

Luna Trail Sandals
L-R – Original Leadville, Leadville w/ATS, Oso

Reading Born to Run years ago for the first time I was pretty shocked to hear that the Tarahumara people ran in sandals, and ran in them for dozens if not hundreds of miles.   I was intrigued but figured I’d never be a guy who ran in sandals.  When I got back into running after a stress fractured foot I decided though to take up minimalist running and transitioned from regular running shoes to Nike Frees to Merrell Trail Gloves.  I made this transition with the help of the Born to Run store in Bellevue where I would run with the owner, Dan Fairbanks, at least once a week.   One day Dan was running in a pair of sandals made by Barefoot Ted.  I thought he was kind of nuts at the time but he told me how Barefoot Ted had set up Luna Sandals in Seattle and that they would soon be carrying their sandals in the store.

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Our 30-Day Cleanse

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Our supplements for the month

Our supplements for the month

A few months ago I had to take a round of doxycycline to get rid of an infection.  Previously doxy never bothered me too much but this time I ended up with almost every nasty side-effect of the drug by the end of the two weeks.  Mostly my gut was destroyed and my mouth very sore and full of a horrible taste.   After a bunch of pro-biotics and one trip to Urgent Care it started to ease up a bit but still was not right.  A bit of research showed the problem was most likely a Candida overgrowth (here’s a handy self-test) thanks to the doxy killing off the good bacteria in my gut as well as the bad bacteria it was sent to go after.

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2013 Review

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Skagit Steel, Islamorada Gator Trout, Rattlesnake through hike, Yakima Tenkara

Skagit Steel, Islamorada ‘Gator’ Trout, Rattlesnake Traverse, Yakima Tenkara

Its that time of year again, time to look back over the past year and see how things stacked up against the initial goals.   In 2012 I did pretty well with my 2011 goals but 2013 sure had other plans for me, mostly due to an injury I sustained running early in the year and caused us to change a lot of our activities for the year.

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Breakfast Millet

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Breakfast millet with seed topping.

Breakfast millet with seed topping.

As part of our 30-Day cleanse I had to give up my usual breakfast staples – oatmeal with berries or, my favorite, homemade Cranberry-Ginger Granola.  Both contained oats and fruit where were off the diet plan.  I panicked, what was I going to eat for breakfast?  We were allowed to have millet, amaranth and quinoa so I began experimenting with each.  The amaranth was just too much like cream of wheat for me and the quinoa just didn’t have the creaminess of oatmeal.  What I discovered though was millet and now millet with seeds is my favorite breakfast.   I make a big batch of seed topping every 7-10 days and then start the millet in the morning and have 25 minutes to read Flipboard before it is ready.

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Adventures with Coconut

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Cocunut baking products. Coconut-Almond Balls, Coconut/Ginger Cookies and Coconut Bread.

Cocunut baking products. Coconut-Almond Balls, Coconut/Ginger Cookies and Coconut Bread.

Today, Catherine and I are on day 24 of a 30 day candida cleanse, more on that later.  This is a pretty strict cleansing regime which put a lot of limits on what we could eat. The diet was primarily low-glycemic vegetables, quinoa and millet for grains, nuts and seeds, lemons/limes and good fats like olive oil, avocado and coconut oil. Coconut oil was highly recommended, especially virgin coconut oil, since it contains caprylic acid, a natural anti-fungal substance. In fact, the diet recommends just eating up to 5 tablespoons per day and I began doing so, a pretty yummy source of calories that I’d never really considered munching on before.

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Seward Solstice 4.2 Miles

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Father & daughter day for the Seward Solstice Run.

Father & daughter ready to run the Seward Solstice Run.

It had been way too long since I’d actually participated in a trail run event.  I’ve done a lot of setup/registration work and quite a bit of photography this season but have scarcely run since early March aside from one 5-miler in May that proved I couldn’t really run.   For the last month or so my hamstring has definitely begun really healing and I’m not in pain much any more instead of being in pain most of the time.   I started building up some miles indoors with no impact on an OpenStride machine and also began taking advantage of nice days and doing fairly long 4-6 mile trail walks at around a 15:00/mile pace.  In the last weeks I’ve begun very lightly trotting for about 1 minute per mile.  While I’m a bit sore the next day it goes away and doesn’t feel like a re-injury.

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