Rob and I have decided we need to do a race a month in order to keep up our interest in training. We’re not particularly interested in doing a marathon—I want to do a marathon, just not right now. Right now, I want to run regularly and have a good time at it.

So this morning we went to do the HP Up and Running race, which is a good-sized fun run (you don’t get trampled by thousands of people). The downside in a race like this is, when you’re the back of the pack, you’re the back of the pack. There may have been people behind us. I steadfastly refused to look back to confirm or deny. We did the 10K in about 80 minutes, which comes out to about 13 minutes a mile (strangely, the 10K has mile markers; go figure). Not great, but it’s the longest distance either of us has run in a while, and we both felt tired but pretty good at the end. And I felt a hell of a lot better than I did last year, when my foot started hurting something awful around mile 4 and I basically had to hobble in to the finish.

Or we did. Rob and Laura were supposed to come over after the race, but Rob said he was feeling exhausted. Combination of a lot of running and a lot of late-night World of Warcraft, I suspect. I can definitely understand the tiredness: I’m sitting here feeling tired. Not as bad as the first time I ran the Bay to Breakers, when I fell asleep on my mother’s couch immediately upon sitting down. But tired.

The up side of Rob and Laura not coming over was: more cinnamon rolls for us! I made cinnamon rolls, mostly to prove that I could do it. The last time I tried to make cinnamon rolls at home, I didn’t know what I was doing, the dough was too soft and puffy, and the entire process ended up in a stupid doughy heap that I threw away. This time: I know a little bit more, and last night I made a brioche dough that sat in the fridge all night and was nice and cold to work with. I rolled the dough up into its spiral, but then forgot to seal the edges, so all of the rolls opened at the ends. Well, this is how you learn.

I used Nancy Silverton’s brioche recipe from Baking With Julia and the cinnamon sugar recipe from the Sur La Table class I took a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the SLT recipe makes about 8 times too much, so I sealed the remained in Tupperware for the next roll-making occasion. The roll dough was perfect. I need to add more butter (yes! more butter!) to the interior next time to make the roll soft and gushy, but it was pretty damn good as it was.

Yum.

A number of years ago I heard a call-in show on NPR—something having to do with food; might have been Talk of the Nation or maybe a segment of The Splendid Table with Lynne Rosetto Kasper—on which the guest was World Famous Beer Expert Michael Jackson (one gets the feeling he introduces himself that way a lot) answering questions about beers. One caller asked, “What do you think is the best light beer?” After which there was a long pause and Mr. Jackson finally said:

“Drink less good beer.”

Another anecdote: some celebrity who had lived a good long time—Tony Randall? my memory is total crap these days—was asked the secret to his longevity. His response was:

“Eat only food that can spoil, and eat it before it does.”

These are two pretty good rules for life.
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Right after we got back from Thanksgiving, I bought a doctor’s scale much like my in-laws’ (you can see it here). I haven’t used it much, since I started attended WW every week and I use their weigh-in as my official weight. But the scale at home agrees remarkably well with WW; in fact, on Wednesday I was warned ahead of time not to expect miracles at my weigh-in.

I decided to start weighing myself once on the weekend, just to check in, make sure I hadn’t swallowed a cow unexpectedly or anything.

This morning? 3 pound loss.

Heh. Heh. I see.

Given that I haven’t had any surgery and no limbs have fallen off…I guess I was just retaining water.

I’ll shut up now.