It doesn't take much to rock my world

I decided to take a rest day today after running 42 miles in less than 48 hours this past weekend. Truth be told, my legs didn't really feel like they needed it, but this is the last week of JFK training before I begin my taper and I'm not taking any chances.

I was giving myself all sorts of pats on the back for running so many miles and then I checked out Kristin's blog, who is also training for JFK, and saw she ran TWO freaking 20 milers this past weekend. I'm reaching that point of training where it's almost over and I'm panicking about the race  and comparing myself unfavorably to every other JFK hopeful, so I nearly convinced myself to run another 8 miles Sunday night after work, but I talked myself down.

Since I didn't run today, really the only thing I have to talk about is food and upcoming races. I made a new recipe for dinner tonight, Coconut Milk Lentil and Wild Rice bowl. It's been firmly established that I'm a major weirdo in terms of my palate, so Eric is my gauge when it comes to evaluating recipes. He is chowing it down happily right now. No picture, because I didn't make it for looks.

I like to find new recipes to cook every week, but during the school year I get busy and that ends up actually happening more like once a month. I used to abide by a strict rule when searching for recipes: if I didn't instantly know what aisle an ingredient would be in, the recipe was dead to me. I'll spend hours chopping vegetables but I'll be damned if I'm going to visit customer service at the grocery store.

This recipe not only had things that I didn't know what aisle they'd be in, but it had an ingredient (Mirin) that I had to Wikipedia just to find out what it was. Normally I would have immediately rejected the recipe. Once again, Wegmans came to the rescue. I used their app for the first time. It tells you what aisle to find things in, AND includes a picture. Obviously I'm living a sheltered life and need to get out more, because this rocked my world.

I may not have bothered to check the elevation map for Fire on the Mountain, the 50K I'm running on Sunday, but of course things were ready to go on the dessert front. I found a recipe for candy corn ice cream weeks ago, and since that combines two of my favorite things on the planet, it was a done deal. 

When I sign up for races, I always googlemap the location first to see how far away I'll have to travel. I don't know what went wrong for Fire on the Mountain, but I just realized that it's two and a half hours away, and I need to be parked at the finish and on a bus to the start by 6:30 am. This means that my wakeup time has crossed the line from "super early in the morning" to "bedtime for college students and people my age who aren't lame like me". Some people have wisely suggested getting a cheap hotel room, but I really hate to sleep anywhere but my own bed, so I'd rather just get a few hours of quality sleep instead of a full night of tossing and turning. 

How often do you make new recipes, and are you willing to seek out strange ingredients?

Do you get training envy/regret after seeing other people's workouts?