Tag Archives: cooking

Bake and Run: A quick run while dinner bakes

I’ll preface this by saying the timing’s a bit weird because this isn’t really a thing I’m doing at this time, though I did it quite a bit during training: As of this writing I’m in the middle of a pretty specifically outlined marathon taper plan.

Let’s say you haven’t been able to run on a given day, or you ran earlier in the day and could be up for a recovery run or to work in some extra miles.

You’re home and you’re baking dinner. Once everything is prepped and your main dish is safely in the oven, you’ve got about 20-30 minutes to kill.

Often I’ve found this is the perfect time to throw on running shorts and some shoes and sneak out for a quick run. I can get in a quick couple miles around the neighborhood and get back in the apartment before it’s time to pull dinner (or stir or turn over dinner, whatever comes next).

Even when I wasn’t on my current run streak, I found going out for a quick run while dinner baked was a great way to sneak in a run, even if I didn’t necessarily plan to run that day.

Perhaps I had an easy day, and more energy than expected. And I didn’t want to risk not being able to get to sleep because I wasn’t particularly active.

Or maybe I did plan to work out, and for various reasons the day got away from me. Or the weather didn’t cooperate and I couldn’t get a planned run in. Or so on.

Either way, the run also provides an added benefit: Having just exercised, my body is in that primed within-30-minutes window to take in carbohydrates, protein and other nutrients, adding value to the dinner I was cooking.

There’s a variety of reasons why I could use a quick, easy 2 mile run in the evening. And often when cooking dinner, I have time to kill while dinner bakes.

So why not go outside and get a quick run in?

P.S. “But what about showering?” So the run actually led to breaking a sweat and you need a shower? Just shower after dinner and clearing the table. Easy.

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My cooking principles

This past weekend I experimented with an old childhood staple: Hamburger Helper. I cooked the Cheeseburger Macaroni blend, using a pound of ground beef and whole milk. I housed the whole thing and eating it felt equal parts good and disgusting. It was a great way to get a bunch of beef in me quickly, but I don’t think I’m going out of my way to do that again.

Part of that is I don’t eat as much processed food as I used to, let alone not nearly as much as most people. So my system doesn’t agree with a lot of it as much as the next gut.

On average I eat clean from food that’s whole and/or prepared at home at least 80% of the time. While I’m not opposed to delicious processed food like pizza, hamburgers, donuts, chips, etc, I mostly cook whole food from scratch, or eat food that’s lightly processed… like a can of sardines in oil or frozen meat in a bag (i.e. the food had to be cut and then processed into the can, but it’s basically in its native form rather than blended with 75 chemicals).

I have cleaned up my diet gradually over the last few years. Even now I can say there’s room for improvement, and if I want to move into that room I’ll give it a shot. I have a set of rules that I settled into following over the last few years: Whether or not I set out to follow them on day one, I found over time that they suited me well as habits, and so they became rules to live by.

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