triathlon training tales: Happy New Year: experimenting with Whole30

The last two months have been pretty busy in the Blanco household. Couple the craziness of the house move (we still have the contractors at our house on a daily basis!) and the holiday season, and it seemed that Rich and I ate out a lot... Which also meant I drank a decent amount of wine. Just seems to go with the territory!

By the time New Year's rolled around, I was craving a cleaner diet and knew that I wanted to and needed to cook/eat at home much more than we had been doing. It's better for our health (and wallet) to control what we're eating to a greater degree. We haven't been eating junk (SF has a plethora of fantastic restaurants that create healthy, organic, local dishes) but I wanted to get back into my routine of cooking most nights. Drinking less wine for a while was also rather appealing.

That backdrop brought me to Whole30. I have been following along with Sonja's journey to eating clean/Whole30 and was intrigued. I don't have ailments such as headaches, low energy or specific bad habits I wanted to fix but I do want to see how I feel when I eliminate certain foods from my diet. My elder sister is on a gluten-free, dairy-free diet for medical reasons and I've always wondered if I might feel better on that diet, even though I don't have the same medical need.

Anyway, January 1st was the launch of Whole30 for Blanco and myself. My husband rocks... He's always willing to try anything and support me, so we're in this together for the next 30 days. Since I do 99% of the cooking he knew he'd be eating Whole30 at home anyway ;) However, he's also committed to sticking with it at the office. He even texted me at lunchtime today from the Apple cafe to check the rules before he finalized his lunch decision... Cute!

eggs, chicken apple sausage, spinach and sweet potato for breakfast

pulled pork with salsa verde, Brussels sprouts and sweet potato fries

I have some concerns about following Whole30:
- so much of our social life is typically wrapped up in drinks/dinner as a couple of with friends and family, so I am guessing it will be a lot more movie dates for the next month and inviting friends over for dinner
- how will I handle travel? The coast ride falls in January
- training and recovery? after emailing with Sonja, I'm thinking this is an area where we'll *need to cheat*. We're planning on eating Lara and Kit bars as well as fruit during training but planning to drink Osmo recovery after workouts for optimal recovery

In other news, the holidays were such a fun and special time. Rich and I headed to Tahoe for a few days over Christmas to "get out of town". We had hoped to skate ski, snow-shoe but had to settle for trail running which was still amazing... We desperately need rain/snow in California. We also dressed up and did a little fine dining while we were in the mountains, discovering Jack Rabbit Moon in Incline Village.

Sunset over Lake Tahoe

Champagne cocktails on Xmas Eve.

Christmas Day dinner - love dressing up!

We were barely back in San Francisco after Christmas before heading south to Monterey for the State cyclocross championships where Rich would be competing last weekend. It's a two hour drive to Monterey and it is effectively day 1 of the Coast Ride (7hr bike ride) coming up this month so it was cool to drive highway 1 and remind myself of the fun to come!

Morning run to Lover's Point - great city trail in Monterey

Yes, that's a single-speed cross bike

We were back in San Francisco for New Year's eve and prompted by some Twitter friends, I persuaded Rich to do a 100x100 meter swim with me on New Year's Eve. We picked a favorite swim set: Monsy 100s, after Monica Byrn. We typically do this as a 4k main swim set but this time, Rich suggested we do a pyramid.

- Pick 4 descending intervals for 100m (1:55, 1:50, 1:45 and 1:40) where you can comfortably make the tightest interval with ~ 5secs rest. Then you swim as follows:

- round 1: 1x 100m at each interval = 400m

- round 2: 2x 100m at each interval = 800m

- round 3: 3x 100m at each interval = 1,200m

- round 4: 4x 100m at each interval = 1,600m

- round 5: 5x 100m at each interval = 2,000m

- round 6: 4x 100m at each interval = 1,600m

- round 7: 3x 100m at each interval = 1,200m

- round 8: 2x 100m at each interval = 800m

- round 9: 1x 100m at each interval = 400m

I hope that adds to 10,000 meters!

Olympic Club selfie before the monster swim

After the monster swim, we headed home to host a New Year's Eve dinner... our first dinner party in the new house. We designed the house with open plan living and entertaining in mind so it was fun to see how the flow worked with our guests.