The Slog: The Salting of America and other LAHP Musings

Life is happening again in the Pataky household and that is how I like it. Matt is making progress in his recovery and we are learning how to live with the necessary changes. I’m slowly relinquishing my temporary claim on the most sexy of tasks – dog-walking, front yard dog crap clean up, trash take-out, and designated driving. I really have no stories to relate or bits of wisdom to impart to others, so I’ll leave you with my list of random thoughts compiled over the past few weeks of pondering life, making changes, and indoor training:

- Salt (the compound, not the Angelina Jolie movie which I highly recommend, by the way) has invaded America. This substance is quite pervasive. Morton’s probably even salts its own freaking salt. SERIOUSLY. Matt is on strict orders to eat low sodium as he continues to heal, and me, being the chef that I am, thought it would be easy to avoid salt. This is not easy. One Chipotle chicken bowl with no salsa or cheese crap or rice has over 1000 mg of sodium. Innocent - looking cottage cheese has over 500 mg of sodium per serving. Our favorite pre-cooked Trader Joe lentils are bathed in salt! Most gluten-free food in a box is also quite salty. To solve this problem, we’ve had to resort to cooking that which we find at the farmer’s market and throwing in a bunch of rogue spices. Imagine that.

THIS salt

NOT this salt

- Team Pataky competitiveness knows no bounds. We are competitive meat shoppers and recently beat out all the other organic, earth-lovers at the hormone free, grass fed, better than NIMAN Ranch pork and lamb sale at our local farm. Oh yeah.

- I suck at driving. Especially when Matt is in the car and judging me. Especially when he is not allowed to drive.

- Dogs generate a ton of crap.....and do it to spite me...and only do it when I’m the one in charge of cleaning up.

- CAFFEINE should be a regulated drug. This substance is in everything and I've recently learned that it is not necessarily the best thing to overdose on while participating in endurance events. I calculated that in a normal Ironman I probably consume upwards of ONE THOUSAND milligrams of caffeine in a less than 10 hour period of time. PERHAPS THIS IS WHY I HAVE HEART PALPITATIONS FOR WEEKS AFTER AN IRONMAN? "They" don’t tell you this in Living 101, though. Anyway, if I happened to have some latent heart condition, this caffeine consumption could become extremely problematic. I'll lay off the 2x caffeine gels at my next race and supplement with some vanilla.

- Being in the not on but not off season is mentally taxing – a physical purgatory of sorts, but one that I shall overcome.

- The internet is a wealth of information on heart health but all of the research seems to contradict. Endurance sports cause heart issues yet sitting on one’s ass and eating Chik-fil-A (what corporate person chose that spelling?) causes heart issues. Cholesterol is bad. Cholesterol is really not so bad. Eat no fat. Eat all fat. Eat low fat. Avoid grain. Eat lots of grain..especially Cheerios because it has the heart healthy label on it. Avoid sugar (you know, the main ingredient in said Cheerios). Eat a small baby wolf at each full moon to ward off heart issues. WTF is a person to do?

- Have you taken your CPR course yet? Mine will be the first weekend of 2012.

- Mountain biking alone while the Sherpa is down is quite possibly the scariest thing possible. I think the local mountain lions know something is up and that I’m temporarily flying solo. This has increased my speed considerably.

- When you have little time for training due to life circumstances beyond your control, I have found that doing all your swim and run training in Zone 4 does wonders for your fitness.

- Similarly - training without a powermeter for 3 months has been quite liberating. I finally strapped on ye old SRM the other day in all its wired glory, mentally preparing myself to see some abysmal numbers. To my surprise, my HOUR OF POWER cycling training plan has yielded good results. If you are worried about losing cycling fitness, I recommend riding zone zillion intervals or just "all out" whenever you have the time to ride. This is also a great way to eliminate stress. (Note: I am not a coach, even though I do read Slowtwitch. Don’t follow my advice.)

- Before making decisions on where to go clubbing (because we are such huge clubbers), we must consider Matt's ICD (defibrillator). I think it almost went off at the club where his holiday party was hosted, due to the "approaching shuttle launch level" decibels being thrown from the speakers.

- Being able to ride one's bike is a beautiful beautiful thing. Matt's first ride back: