What's Good For Your Body is Good For the Planet

It's funny how we athletes train so hard, look at all of our metrics, try to improve in ways large and small and yet....when it comes to nutrition there we are unwrapping a blob of processed soy protein isolate, fractionated Palm Kernel oil and even the devil incarnate high fructose corn syrup and wolfing it down. No, not even wolfing it down - I'd put a bet that any self-respecting wolf would turn up its nose at such a concoction (just as our family dog once turned up his nose at my offer of a tofu hot dog - HE knew it wasn't a meat substitute!)

So in my ever-ongoing process of synthesizing the various elements of my life into some sort of a meaningful and coherent whole, it struck me that what is good for the planet (there's that tree-hugging side of me) is best for our bodies (there's that triathlete side) and vice-versa. I'm trying to move in a mostly whole-foods direction for nutrition, which has left me strangely deprived of power bars, drink mixes, and gu-like substances for all of my training so far this summer. I'm trying various combinations of dates, sunflower seeds, coconut, and dark chocolate for training fuel and the rest of the time trying to stick to a loosely paleolithic (plus raw milk and eggs) kind of nutrition plan.


Post-workout re-fueling has been supplied by smoothies consisting of raw goat's milk, our own chicken eggs, and various berries that we've picked locally and frozen.

In so many races I just feel sick of eating sweet stuff (especially when downing a drink mix, even one as mild as the Accelerade that I like to use), so for our upcoming Cascade Lakes Relay in a few weeks, I'm going to try out the Slipstream cycling team's Rice/Egg cakes. Here's a great video with their team chef explaining how (and why) he makes these for the team. Don't those sound great in place of yet another sweet gooey energy bar?? I do have to note though that if he was using eggs like the ones we get from our free-ranging chickens, they would look much nicer and yellower in his pan than those pale versions he's got going there. Just for comparison, here's a store-bought egg (and mind you, this is an organic "free range" storebought egg, not just a regular factory-farmed egg) on the left in the pale yellow, and one of our chicken's eggs on the right in the rich deep gold/orange. Notice how the white parts of the storebought egg have run all over the place while our chicken's egg is standing firm. Yep, even when you get down to splitting hairs like buying your organic eggs from the regular grocery or from someone whose chickens you can see running around the pasture, sourcing it locally matters. It may even be the case that to reach your full athletic potential, a few workouts could be swapped with time in the veggie garden.

What's good for our bodies is good for our planet is good for our communities and our farmers.

Proud To Be Wearing This Shirt

Twenty-one years ago, in 1986, I walked into a local bike shop named Collins to buy my first road bike. My college swim coach had dictated that everyone on the team would do a triathlon for cross-training, and the only bike I had was a one-speed Schwinn cruiser that weighed about forty pounds and you braked by pedaling backwards. I had an extremely limited living-on-Top-Ramen student's budget, and I dropped almost 10% of my entire year's income on a maroon Peugot 12-speed. That bike saw me complete my first triathlon, and many others over the years (this photo is from 1989 in The Dalles, Oregon), it saw my love of the sport of triathlon take hold and grow. It took me on my first bike tour down the Oregon coast and through the Redwoods of California. Those of you who wholeheartedly love bicycling will understand the fondness I still have in my memory for that first bike. It took me almost twenty years to get rid of it, even though I'd moved on to a carbon fiber triathlon ride. But eventually I found a worthy place for it to travel on: first a friend who used it in her first triathlon, and then to a teenager who was doing a bike tour with the Superheroes, folks who do long-distance cycling tours in order to do good deeds along the way.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 and I have moved back to Eugene after over a decade of living in the Seattle area. We now have two kids and a primary focus of returning to this area was to ditch all the car-commuting and get back on two wheels again for basic transportation. We all troop down to Collins and they set us up with a Burley trailer for kid-hauling. The next year, we're back to pick up a Burley Piccolo tag-a-long bike for our now four-year-old son to ride on. A couple more years and he has mastered a two-wheeler. We return to pick out his first bicycle, an outstanding moment in any kids' life.

One of the things I like best about supporting your local bike shop, especially if it's a good one like Collins, is that you get more than a bicycle. You get the service and the helpfulness that people who are passionate about bikes can provide. When we took our son there to pick out his birthday bike, they treated him like Lance Armstrong himself had strolled through the door. They made sure he had just the right bike, it was fitted well, and he was looking sharp in his new helmet. He had a grin from ear to ear when he left with his shiny new blue bicycle. My husband got the same treatment when he picked out his Bianchi road bike, and again we were happy to support our local bike shop, knowing the excellent treatment we'd gotten there over the years.













Since then, they've maintained our town and road bikes, and shipped my tri bike off to Florida for me. They've consulted on gear, and didn't even ban us from the shop when our young daughter once accidentally tipped over an entire row of bikes (one of those freeze-frame parenting moments you'd love to forget). So all of this adds up to why I'm proud to be wearing their team jersey in the group photo above. They're not only a nice bunch of folks to ride with, but a place I'm happy to have available to me in our town. With the advent of internet shopping and the big box stores where a "bike" can be had for $100, it's sometimes easy to forget that there's more to buying a bike than just pointing and clicking, or going and picking one out of a rack of hundreds. A bike is a long-term purchase, an important conveyance and even an affair of the heart. It's good to have someone around to help you make a wise choice, and to keep you in good running form. I have a 20+ year relationship with my local bike store, and I'm happy to be sporting their logo.