Pie are not square

I didn't get a chance to blog yesterday. Went out with my brother-in-law to help celebrate his 40th birthday. The only thing of note that happened yesterday was that I had to bust out the geometry to figure out how many slices of 12 inch pizza were in the one 24 inch mega slice that the local pizzeria serves, so I could eat a reasonable lunch. Answer at the bottom of the blog. I didn't eat all that healthy, but I'm okay sinning for a night with my diet. As the great philosopher William Joel once said: I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.

Today I got up early to run with my friend that I discussed earlier in the week. We are good training partners - of similar height and weight, and both somewhat attention deficit and in need of support to retain focus. His house is the starting point of "the part that really sucks" in my 5 mile run, so I figured if we started there we could get that out of the way first, and finish strong on a nice downhill run.

The weather was a perfect 50 degrees, and I had good energy for my run today. I used to have serious biological problems exercising in the morning, but it seems like I have somehow solved those, which is good. I've been trying to mix up my workout times (a) to keep my body guessing at what madness I am throwing at it and (2) to make sure that I maintain flexibility in my times when work and life demand it.

My friend has downloaded an app on his iPod which does essentially what my brother-in-law's Garmin does, namely track pace, route, distance, and the amount of pain you experience. Well, the Garmin gives you a lot more data, but all I'm really interested in is pace. We made a pretty good pace, never doing any mile over 10:40 (even the uphill ones where we had shoe issues) and we crushed that last downhill mile in 8:49, which was awesome. Just a hair over 10 minutes a mile first thing in the morning, and I had something left in the tank.

I've really come a long way to be sure.

We had a good chat too. We both ran a marathon once in our lives, both in the 4:40 range plus or minus a minute or two. And the pace was right for both of us, so as a training and race partner we should be a good pair. We're running a 10K together in a month, and if we can beat a 10 minute mile pace in that, I'll be quite pleased.

Tonight's dinner was steak. Steak is delicious, not as healthy as leaner meat to be sure, but a good change of pace. To keep it leaner I substituted celery root for a starch (only 60 calories per cup of celery root), and grilled everything (even put a little zucchini on the grill too). Split a porterhouse with my wife, and it was completely delicious and within my 600-700 calorie target dinner range.

One thing that helped the veggies was a good spice rub. I used Penzey's Northwoods seasoning, which has a woodsy aromatic quality that matches great with grilled meat. A touch of oil to coat and get the spice to stick and keep the veggies from sticking to the grill, and you've got a light, flavorful, and delicious side dish.

Math answer: even though pizza pies are round, pi r squared is the way to go here. Twice the radius = 4 times the area, so my giant slice was equivalent to half a pizza. I cut it in half, and added a salad for a 600 calorie lunch.