Life is Not a Casserole: Recent Episodes
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Here is my race report from the McDowell Mountain Frenzy 50-Mile trail run in McDowell Mountain Regional Park, located Northeast of Phoenix, Arizona.
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Intro poem: “Girls in the Wild” by Nikita Gill Here is my video from this past weekend running the Harder ‘n Heck Half Marathon with my sister-in-law! It was a tough and satisfying race. Hope… More
The Medtronic Twin Cities 10 Mile race, part of the Twin Cities Marathon Weekend, fell during a recovery week of my 50 mile ultramarathon training. This video recapping the race is episode 3 of the… More
My sister Julia, fellow runner and marathoner, ran the Jack 15 Road Race for her second time, a 15.2 mile race from White, South Dakota to the SDSU campanile in Brookings, South Dakota, dubbed the… More
I recently walked the Camino de Santiago with my family, and in this video I’m sharing my Camino Francés summer packing list! If you like it or find it helpful, please consider liking the video… More
A short video from the Afton Trail Run 25k. It was a hard run! I signed up for the Afton Trail Run back when it was still a qualifying race for the Ultra Tour du… More
Here is my June Running Playlist I made on Spotify—roughly 36 minutes long—with many of my current favorite songs to run to! And no, I did NOT include Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves.” The lyrics “late… More
I hope you enjoy our video from running Grandma’s Marathon from Two Harbors to Duluth, Minnesota! Thanks for watching!
Our travel vlog for our recent Black Hills racecation to run the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Half Marathon! Aside from the race, this video also features a relaxed shakeout run in the Black Hills, hanging out… More
Here is what I consumed in May, 2022, à la They Live. MOVIES The Northman (2022) With the warmer weather I spent far less evenings consuming movies. And for the one that I did consume,… More
I recently listened to an episode of The Happiness Lab podcast called “Move More…But for the Right Reasons.” The host Laurie Santos interviewed Jessamyn Stanley, a well-known yoga instructor, about exercising for reasons beyond losing… More
This is an article I wrote in 2015 that was for a health journalism class in the Master of Mass Communications program at South Dakota State University. In light of the baby formula shortage, I… More
Tony and I ran the Get in Gear Half Marathon in Minneapolis, MN this April as part of our Grandma’s Marathon training. The goal of this race within the context of our training plan was… More
What I consumed in April, à la They Live. MOVIES The Mummy (1999) The Mummy, starring Brendon Fraser and Rachel Weisz, is only the most perfect movie that was ever created. Also, how can anyone… More
For the past four months, I vlogged weekly on YouTube documenting my current marathon training cycle. I’ve decided to end the weekly vlogging, but here are some of my takeaways from the experience! Training for… More
A monthly roundup things I’ve consumed this month, à la the film They Live. BOOKS This was the month of finishing books I started months ago! It felt SO GOOD to wrap up these reads! … More
Week 12 of Grandma’s Marathon training! It’s a recovery week with lower mileage, so I’m checking in with a second Magic Mile workout, talking about tempo pace, sharing the busy life events of this past… More
Week 11 of Grandma’s Marathon training! I hope you enjoy, and thanks for following along! (The invalid is doing much better, by the way.) Question: Have you ever been injured in the middle of a… More
I read Train Like a Mother: How to Get Across Any Finish Line—and Not Lose Your Family, Job, or Sanity, by Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea. Both women have written for Runner’s World magazine,… More
Week 10 video! Among experimenting with Clif Shot energy gels and dates for running fuel, we are running along Minneapolis’ West River Parkway, Stone Arch Bridge, and St. Anthony Main area! Thanks for watching! If… More
My first video essay! We’re diving into what people in certain times of certain cultures of Europe and North America wore, or might have worn, while they were running. I hope you enjoy! If you… More
Week 9 of Grandma’s Marathon training! If you enjoy this video and want to follow along with more of my (and by extension, Tony’s) running journey, please like and subscribe to either my YouTube Channel—LNC Running—or the Life is Not a Casserole blog! Or better yet–both! Thanks and have a fantastic day!
Have you ever tried the Jeff Galloway Magic Mile? What did you think? What was your experience? What did you learn from it?
If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to my YouTube Channel: LNC Running! Thanks!
I read Stacy T. Sims’ Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Female Physiology For Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life.
Sims is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who specializes in sex differences for athletic recovery and performance. It’s one of the few books about female-specific running out there that highlights some big physiological differences between males and females in sports.
Here are some of my takeaways from the book, with the caveat that I’ve left out a lot of topics she addresses, like pregnancy, menopause, running in heat and altitude, and most of the nutrition info. It’s honestly an overwhelming read. There’s a lot of information to take in, and I couldn’t absorb it all on either the first or second reading.
Takeaway #1: Strength, strength, strength!
Generally, women have wider hips than men. This means we have a wider “Q-angle”—the angle between the quadricep muscle and the patellar tendon which assists in our knee tracking properly. Basically, the angle between our hip and knee joint.
Page 14 of Stacy Sims’ Roar. What does a wider Q-angle mean for a person? It means they are more vulnerable to knee injury.
What’s the answer? Strength.
Specifically, glutes strength.
Most people are quadricep dominant. Strengthening the quadriceps can support the knees and prevent some types of knee pain, but they aren’t stabilizers. Your glutes are what keep your pelvis in place and allow your quadriceps to track properly and prevent knee injury.
And strength work gets more and more important the older we get for both our muscles and our bones.
In chapter seven, Sims writes, “Around age 30, women begin to lose muscle density. Lean muscle mass slips away to the tune of about 3 percent per decade between the ages of 30 and 80, while strength declines 30 percent between the ages of 50 and 70 and takes a major nosedive after that.” Incorporating strength work into your exercise routine helps maintain muscle mass.
As for our bones: Your bones are not just like boards holding up a house. They’re more like tree branches; living, intelligent structures inside you that are constantly absorbing old bone and creating new bone.
This bone turnover peaks in your 30s, and decreases as you get older. Women especially are more vulnerable to brittle bones and osteoporosis.
But weight bearing and moderate impact exercise like walking, running, and strength training are great for your skeleton. Note: The impact and stress on the bone is important here. For example, cycling and swimming, while wonderful for you, are not as beneficial in terms of bone density.
And runners, don’t forget about your upper body strength work! Our muscles support all of our bones, including the spinal column.
Roar is a female-specific book, but I believe emphasizing strength work is something all genders can appreciate and benefit from.
Takeaway #2: Your menstrual cycle impacts your athletic performance.
You can split your menstrual cycle into two different phases:
The follicular phase is the first half of your menstrual cycle. This is a beautiful time to be a female athlete. Your estrogen and progesterone hormones are lower. You have more energy. You make fitness gains easier. Relish it. Because what follows is…
…the luteal phase. The shit phase. This is your high hormone time. You may have reduced reaction time, weak spatial cognition, trouble handling heat, more at risk of hyponatremia (water intoxication due to low sodium levels) and to top it off, you might have headaches and trouble sleeping from the hormonal shifts!
So I guess…hope that your goal race lands during your period?
A note on Stacy Sims’ stance on birth control: I’m not even going to get into it. That’s between you and your gynecologist!
Takeaway #3: Women have a much shorter recovery window than men after a hard workout.
It is crucial to get a good dose of protein within 30 minutes of a hard workout to help restock glycogen levels and repair your muscles.
Takeaway #4: Stacy Sims comes in hot against energy gels.
She writes that “…the topic that tends to rile people up the most is my stance on energy gels, which in a nutshell is NO.”
Why are they bad? From what I gather, it’s the one-two punch of a high carb concentration and the blend of sugars in gels that make them difficult to absorb, so they sit in your stomach and can cause dehydration and GI distress.
I’ve never had an issue with gels before, so this sent me into a mini tailspin:
I’ve used gels for years! I’ve never had a problem with gels! Should I change my fueling? But I’ve never had a problem with gels! But what if I performed better with something else? But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! But what if it is broken and I don’t even know it? But I’ve never had a problem with gels!
Eventually I came to the conclusion that while what she writes about gels is probably true (I’m not the nutrition scientist, after all), if gels have always worked for me, I see no need to change that.
Maybe if I were someone prone to tummy troubles, reading about energy gels in this book would have caused more of an Ah hah! moment rather than a spiral of self-doubt!
However, reading Roar did encourage me to go out and purchase some new energy gels and chews and do a little experimenting—just out of curiosity.
What she actually recommends as best in the book is making your own fuel at home with ingredients like rice syrup and almond butter. I suppose I could try that too–but who has time to constantly be making homemade running fuel bites at home? And what if they get sticky in your pocket? It just sounds blegh to me!
Takeaway #5: That typo.
There is actually a glaring typo on page 32 stating that “2.2 kilograms = 1 pound.” The correct conversion is 2.2 pounds = 1 kilogram.
I know that typos happen, and it doesn’t mean that every single fact in the book is now false. However, it is such an unfortunate and obvious typo, and calls into question every other formula or recipe listed in the book.
Page 32 of Stacy Sims “Roar.” Takeaway #6: Is any of the information outdated?
Roar was published in 2016, which stands to reason that the information Sims writes about is a bit older. Six years might not seem like that old, but science is ever-changing.
One thing that stood out to me was her language around the lactate threshold. On page six, she writes “…you can push the pace to a higher point before your muscles scream uncle (that’s your lactate threshold talking.)”
However, in my RRCA handout from 2021, the idea that muscle burning or soreness is due to lactate is debunked as a myth. No one actually knows what exactly the muscle burning sensation is. It’s thought it could be a “nervous system protective mechanism”, and “soreness is caused by muscle inflammation.”
A page from my RRCA workbook from spring 2021. If I read any running book from 2016 it would probably refer to lactate and lactic acid like this. But this is one of the only running books about female physiology, and it makes me wonder what other information in the book could be outdated. It would be great if Stacy Sims came out with an updated edition with any new information about female-specific running—and she could correct any unfortunate typos.
Have you read Stacy T. Sims’ Roar? What did you think? What were your takeaways? Did you change anything about your running strategies after reading it? Do you have any other women-specific running book recommendations?
Week seven of Grandma’s Marathon training!
What sort of fuel do you use on long runs?
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Week FIVE of Grandma’s Marathon training!
If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to my YouTube Channel: LNC Running! Thanks!
A fun week of training at Disney World! If you are enjoying the videos, please like and subscribe the LNC Running YouTube Channel!
Week three in the books! Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy following along on my Grandma’s Marathon 2022 training journey!
5″x7″. Scout. For pet portrait commissions, please email elizabethmeyerart@gmail.com or go through the “Submit an Order” page on my art website, http://www.elizabethmeyerart.com.
Happy New Year!
We’re kickstarting the year with training for Grandma’s Marathon. I will be documenting the training for me (and Tony!) on my LNC Running YouTube channel, the Life is Not a Casserole channel dedicated to running, training, and some travel videos as well.
I’m not great at keeping new year’s resolutions, but I read another blog that listed things the writer was looking forward to in 2022, and I thought that was a swell idea instead of writing about resolutions! I’m adding to that, including a reflection of things that made me happy in 2021.
Things that brought me joy in 2021
Getting my RRCA running coach certification. Running has been an important component of my physical, mental, and emotional health since I began training for my first marathon in 2012 when I was stressed out about what the heck am I supposed to do after college??? (Honestly, I still don’t know the answer to that.)
Being with Tony as he ran his FIRST half marathon through the gorgeous Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota! Have you been? It’s lovely.
Spearfish Canyon Half Marathon, 2021 Gardening beets. Gardening in general brings me such satisfaction, but nothing feels better than growing and harvesting a delicious vegetable that is also not the cheapest in the grocery store!
My beets! Lazy days reading the afternoon away. Currently, I’m making my way through Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, which I began years ago. I slogged through book two, which I had trouble getting through and quit a few years ago and now finally have finished it, and am now veraciously reading the third book, Voyager.
Running my first organized 50k. In October I ran–or rather, hiked an awful lot of it–the Wild Duluth 50k–a point-to-point 50k from Jay Cooke State Park to Duluth’s Canal Park that is almost entirely along the gorgeous Superior Hiking Trail. It hurt so much, and I got bit by a deer tick and was put on antibiotics for three weeks, but it was WORTH it. At the time I said never again, but I’m far enough removed from it now that the siren song of the ultra distance is calling once again…
The Wild Duluth 50k, 2021. Deleting Instagram was a lifestyle change for me. You’d think getting a flip phone would have taken care of any addiction to social media. (I’m not one of those people that could “just not check it,” and frankly, I have a hard time believing anyone else is either. I think most people who say “I’m not on it that much,” or “I only look at it when…” are just lying to themselves.) But I do have an old iPhone 6 that I use basically as a little iPad at home, and is mainly for listening to podcasts and music. That made it much easier to check Instagram. I’m not trying to be a Luddite at all and say smart devices are evil. They are extremely useful sometimes, which is why I still have the little iPhone. But deleting Facebook a couple years ago, followed by deleting Instagram, has helped me learn that what I do, I do because it brings me happiness, and not because I think it would be something worth posting. And if we could be real for a moment, it makes me like other people a lot more. Social media makes people stupid. (Myself included.)
Wait, does YouTube and blogs count as social media? What I meant to say is, I LOVE social media!
Traveling to Catalunya, Spain with Tony. Tony and I had a lot of travel plans for 2020 and 2021, and most of them didn’t happen. But our trip to Barcelona and the surrounding region did. How refreshing to be somewhere different where people weren’t feral. What was different about this trip was that we only booked our flight one or two months beforehand, which felt rather spontaneous to me. The ongoing COVID pandemic makes it difficult to make plans too far in advance, and moving forward into 2022 we may change our approach to international travel. We might set aside dates, have a couple different ideas, and wait to book anything until mere weeks ahead of time.
Driving to Afton State Park for trail runs. Trail running is so much harder than road running, not only because of the terrain, but also because it’s not as accessible. I have to drive to get to good trails, so it takes a much larger chunk out of the day. But it’s wonderful and terrible to be out running among the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.
Running in Afton State Park, 2021 Birdwatching. I’m not a serious birdwatcher, but we have a Minnesota bird identification book. I’ve learned to identify many of the birds I see while trail running or hiking. We also have a bird feeder that we hang outside our house and watch from the window. Watching birds is practically therapeutic.
Celebrating five years of marriage with my husband, Tony.
Things I’m looking forward to in 2022
Celebrating my ten year anniversary of running where I started, training for and running Grandma’s Marathon–a point-to-point marathon from Two Harbors, MN to Duluth, MN. Whether anyone follows along or not, I’m going to have a blast documenting–no, I’m just going to say it–VLOGGING about it! (I heard the aughts were back. Does that mean the vernacular as well??)
Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to Tony training for and running his first marathon! He is also planning to run Grandma’s Marathon with me!
Hiking in Spain with my family. A lot about travel remains tenuous this year, but I hope this trip happens.
Summer camping trips.
Using up all the banked travel credits we have. Like I said, a lot of our travel plans have not happened. But we’ve got to go SOMEWHERE this year!
Disney World trips. Yes, I like Disney World, okay?! Hopefully one of these trips includes a runDisney race.
More gardening.
More lazy days reading.
Happy hours with my husband, and happy hours with my family.
Once more, I wish you a happy new year!
A video from Figueres, Spain, featuring the Salvador Dalí Museum-Theatre, and Castell San Ferran. Enjoy!