Pacing

Good afternoon!

We have been enjoying our day off. We've spent the time tidying the house and taking advantage of the time to make lots of nutritious food. We have been doing a little experimenting with our diets and we're tracking our intake (by putting everything into NutritionData at the end of the day) for a couple of days to check for any obvious deficiencies/excesses and then tweak accordingly. I'll post about the results, but so far my Vitamin E seems to come out rather low, and we're both eating more carbs than we though, even though we're trying to eat more protein.

Today's run was to determine MrPeskyRunner's pace for the 10k we're doing in April. We ran exactly 10k in 59:50 so he is hoping to maintain this and keep his time around an hour for the race on April 10. I am still aiming for sub-45; going on last year's results, this will probably mean I'll finish in the top 20 women! I only have two proper week's of training left, the week of the race I'm just going to do a bit of aquajogging. I'll probably run another 3 times this week and 3 times next week, with plenty of pacing work and two long slows.

Today's munches:

Breakfast- banana stuffed with PB, set yogurt with oat bran and cinnamon. + coffee, obvs.

Lunch- leftover brown rice with Quorn, spinach, pepper and a few olives, a spoonful of yogurt. I mixed it all up to eat. Mr PeskyRunner had extra rice, some mango chutney and a slice of bread with sunflower spread.

Afternoon snack: low fat plain yogurt, 1/2 cup raspberries, 1 T cocoa powder. So yummy! I love cocoa powder:D I only really started eating with without sweetener this month. I'm quite happy with sugar free eating and don't think it should be too hard to keep it quite occasional in my diet. I'm going to treat myself to a bucket of ice-cream if I finish in the top 20 women on April 10 though!

I'm away to do the last of the tidying, maybe some Bodyrock (although I don't know if I can be bothered with a second shower) and then fix dinner. I'm thinking socca pizza...

Banana Bread Pancakes

I had two really black bananas that needed used up and pancakes on the brain! Really ripe bananas are so sweet that all blended up I would say you can do with no other added sweetener.

The recipe:

2 very ripe bananas, smooshed with a stick blender

2 eggs

1 cup flour of your choice (not tightly packed)- I used organic self raising

1/4 tsp baking powder, maybe 1/2 tsp if you use flour without raising agent

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup unsweetened soya (or other) milk

Blend it up, either with a stick blender or in the food processor. I think I fused my food processor after making a banana berry smoothie yesterday:( Need to get that fixed.

Spoon the batter onto a hot skillet/frying pan, using the oil of your choice. I used a total of a tablespoon of coconut oil for the batch.

The stats:

This made 6 good sized pancakes- a very generous breakfast for two (comes out at 450 calories before toppings for half the batch) but it would happily stretch to serve 3.

I had mine with a spoonful of set plain yogurt, sugar free raspberry jam and cinnamon.

This would be a far more ideal breakfast after some sweaty cardio but I haven't done any since thursday as this cold is pretty bad. I've just done a few sets of strength training stuff here and there. Still, you've got to treat yourself when you're sick! I would like to make a slightly healthier version next time- use a combo of oat flour and protein powder instead of the self raising flour and eat 1/3 of the recipe (as it would be much more filling with those modifications). They would be nice with brown rice flour, buckwheat, almond, whatever you fancy:)

I have been sneaking chilli in where I can to drive the cold out of me, as well as munching away of protein.

Yesterday's lunch:

Multiseed bagel topped with Quorn slices, pineapple cottage cheese, very hot hot sauce and two carrots chopped up (went to grate them but the food processor isn't working). I had two clementines to start for some vit C :)

On the training front, I had been thinking of topping up my swimming package at the gym so I could use the weight room, but we are probably going to invest in a barbell/dumbell set and a bench to use at home so we can both weight train and not have to stand around waiting for free space. We are both really loving doing as much as we can with what we have at the moment; for me it will be a great way to build strength and muscle to support my running, for MrPeskyRunner, he wants to regain some lost muscle. Although he used to run marathons, running isn't great for him as he just loses mass- he has, like, no body fat. He loves his carbs but he is coming round to the idea of shooting for a higher protein (vegetarian) diet. I will keep you updated with our first steps into weight training!