Booooooot camp!

You may or may not know this, but I am getting pretty obsessed with my fitness classes - I guess if you've been reading this blog for some time you may have noticed my nerdy obsession with step aerobics and to be honest I have legitimately thought about detailing my High Intensity Training classes on here as well. 

But I won't bore you with a revolving list of jump squats, plyometric jacks, flying lunges, mountain climbers, shuffles.. and other ridiculously hard work out combinations. I will however talk about how I have taken my new found love of fitness to the next level... my very own BOOT CAMPS! That's right, I've been kicking my own ass as well as a select few, mostly Duncan, but Anna and her boyfriend Nick have joined us. Nick in fact provided another awesome butt-kicking move, called the TOYOTA! Which I will illustrate soon enough! These weekend boot camps are becoming more and more important as Duncan discovers his skill in crafting delicious breads  and Anna and I perfect the art of Strawberry Rhubarb Pie. (Sorry, no post on our pie secrets, we are still honing our skills as pie bakers.)

Back to camp! Sooo, last weekend Dunc and I took along a camera to illustrate some of the more unfamiliar moves we executed with ease and fitness-awesomeness... not true, these workouts are  still REALLY hard, even though I've been doing them for almost 6 months... Without further ado, I give you a sampling of Betsy's Boot Camp!

First off, you need water, so DRINK IT! Even if you aren't in a boot camp. Also, I use my water bottle to remind me of what sort of butt-kicking plans I have - and yes the last line on the blue tape says "3 Suicides" - also known as "Ladders", "Lines", "Awful, painful sprints", "Why are we doing these agains"... and so on. They are hard and involve sprinting from one point to 1/3 of the way down a line and back, to 2/3 of the way down and back, and finally all the way down and back... or any other variation of sprinting lines multiple excruciating times. 

So other things we did?

The dreaded SQUAT THRUST!

Begin standing with a thumbs up.

Bend over your knees and....

Jump back into plank position... then...

Jump your legs back towards your arms...

Stand back up, and if you love squat thrusts, jump in the air! And repeat, at least 50 times. Just kidding! Maybe like 12...

Mountain Climbers! 

Begin in plank position. Dunc makes good plank.

Then alternate each leg, bringing your knee to your chest. Left leg...

Right Leg! You do not need to look at a camera while doing this exercise, but you can if that motivates you. I wouldn't object.

Plié Squats/Plié Jump Squats

Begin in a plié. Now you can just squat up and down in this position or you can pump it up and...

Jump! Or you can go one step further and...

Click your heels together as you jump out of your plié squat. Your choice.

The TOYOTA! Why is it called the TOYOTA!? You will find out, very soon, just you wait.

Begin crouched down...

And then explode with joy, because you just won a TOYOTA!

The Plyometric Jack (Plyo Jack) - similar move to a Jumping Jack except you squat the whole time and explode between movements - that is confusing... pictures, help?

Start in a narrow squat.

Jump out to a wide squat.

You should end in this position. Except it never ends, ideally you are doing a 30 second, 45 second, or 1 minute interval of this move at the same speed you would do a Jumping Jack.

Up Downs, via Duncan's wrestling career:

Here, I tried to photograph "fast feet" - meaning you run really fast in place while keeping your upper body still.

See, he moved his right foot, then he his left foot... 

Then at any given moment, whoever is in charge (Me, baby... ME!) will yell DOWN! And you stop doing fast feet and hit the ground.

Then you push out of it, like a push up and get right back up for more fast feet.

Dunc tired... he no like up downs. Also I made him do a minute straight. I'm mean.

And there you go, a peek into part of my world of fitness.

Bread time!

One of the most amazing things about the Professor is his ability to read minds and track mutants down across the country, or even across the world! Oh wait, that is the wrong professor - I meant the one in my kitchen, who is extraordinarily accomplished at kneading bread with a handy dandy dough hook:

(The little piece of dough on there is the only proof I have of using the Professor to make bread... too easy, I forgot to photograph.)

So what else would I do with Duncan and the Professor besides bake bread? I mean seriously, give me another answer. When you are trying not to spend a lot of money (because you are planning a kick-ass adventure to Hawaii) what could be cheaper than flour and yeast? Nothing. Maybe something, but nothing that turns into bread or other baked goods. And so we made bread. 

I used a seriously simple french bread recipe, because honestly, bread making intimidates me - all the proofing, rising, creating a starter, the hours of waiting for deliciousness - I just am not educated enough on the science of bread and all its glory. Simple it is... for now...

First, and most importantly for bread making, you need some yeast! In our case, dry active yeast! ACTIVE-y! Fun!

I am curious about the yeast...

IT'S ALLLLIIIIIVE!!!!

Even while Duncan tries to illustrate the letter "Y" - the yeast is still a bit scary...

YEAST!

Okay, enough pictures of yeast... seriously, we are baking up in here! Since this bread is such a simple recipe, all I needed was the yeast, which we let ferment in a warm bowl and warm water (105 - 115 degrees) for 20 minutes. Which consequently means there is not a lot flavor - if you want real tasty artisan bread, you need to let the yeast work its magic for at least a billion hours. Or 12... your choice. Then we added flour, melted butter and salt. That is it, that is all you need. Maybe a bit too simple. Turns out the trick with bread is not the ingredients, it is the time you spend letting it rise multiple times. This recipe is relatively short and sweet because you only need to let the kneaded-dough rise for about an hour in a bowl and another hour after you have formed it into loafs. The most fun was punching the risen dough down. Punch!

Kneaded dough goes in a buttered bowl. Butters? 

No, not that Butters, although he is an adorable kitten. And currently a beautiful cat.

Back to bread!

Look how risey! NOW PUNCH!

After you punch the dough down, you make two loaves by rolling out half of the dough into a rectangle and rolling it up like a jelly roll. (and repeating for the other half)

Very important: remove all pet hair from your baked goods before baking!

Also: remove all flour from your pets before petting! Oly helped roll out the dough.

The next steps: let the loaves rise another hour, then cut diagonal slices on top of the loaves (you are suppossed to use a VERY SHARP knife for this, and we thought we did, but it still made funny wrinkly cuts...), and bake!

Rising on a cornmeal covered baking sheet.

Slicey.

Baked! After 15-20 minutes in the oven, I took the loaves out, brushed them with an egg wash and put them back in for another 5 minutes. It made them look perdy.

No offense to the bread, but it looked a lot better than it tasted... sorry bread, but you are boring. If this is the case with your bread, I suggest letting your cat attack you to liven things up!

See, he may not be the innocent kitten (although he never was an innocent kitten, only while sleeping...) he once was, but he is still beautiful and full of spunk!

Also, if you want to make better bread, which this experience inspired Dunc to do, devote 36 hours to bread making and you can make the most delicious homemade baguettes ever. Just you wait for Duncan to write about his baguettes. He made four and we ate all four within 12 hours...

UPDATE: Bring it on down to Baguetteville!

Professor K creates something!

I say Professor K, because I really didn't have to do much... that crazy prof is magical.

After reading Real Food, I have been thinking about baking with coconut oil, which apparently was super popular back in the days before shortening and margarine, so I hunted some down - and now it is DANG expensive. But alas, I will sacrifice a few dollars for deliciousness. I used Whole Foods (I know, weird! I went to Whole Foods?) 365 organic, unrefined, expeller pressed virgin coconut oil.

Oh wait, what am I making??? Well, Logan and Jody came to town and I had planned to make them cookies before they got here, but instead they had to enjoy them fresh out of the oven, poor them!!!! I decided to make these: Chocolate Chunk Cookies with coconut oil.

So, go there for the recipe if you want to enjoy them, and you will, they were gooood. The coconut oil has a super strong scent, but tastes like almost nothing, yet when baked adds just a hint of coconut flavor... uh-mazing. I leave you with some photos of the action. And now I have to go check on the fresh french bread Dunc and I are making. Homemade bread! WEEEE!

Green Monster and Professor K

Sooo, this post may be completely unappetizing, but I find it incredibly delicious and Duncan does too! That is, the feature of this post, not the post itself. Pondering the taste of a blog would begin a whole technological existential thought process that I do not want to follow.

But I digress... I give you the GREEN MONSTER (discovered here).

First off, I needed some ground flax and all I had was whole flax.

Whole Flax 

PLUS

EQUALS

Ground Flax! WoOOooo!

You only need one tablespoon.

Add 2 cups of delicious, delicious Kale (that is its scientific name)

1 cup of almond milk

1 banana

Et voilà! Un monstre vert!

I have been eating half this recipe for breakfast and Dunc has been adding spinach and crazy superfood powder... his is waaaaay healthier than mine, tastes healthier too. In a good way.

Butters also really likes it. Yes, I had the blender on the ground, I was trying to get better lighting...

NOW, for the big news. I am now officially domesticated. How? Why? What do I mean by this?

Weeeell, I made an adventure up to Target (Tar-jhay) yesterday in search of a food processor (I needed one to make these) and they were fresh out! So I crossed the street to Macy's, naturally, and bought one, plus a KitchenAid and two plates. Oh what? A KitchenAid stand mixer? You mean, my new baby, Professor K? (His bro is Wolverine, the food processor. If you got the Professor "K" - "X" reference without Wolverine, you are officially a nerd, and my new best friend.)

And now I will make bread, and cookies, and cinnamon rolls, and bagels, and whipped cream, and meringue and gain 87 lbs. 

Thank you.

HOT yoga

So for some reason, this Easter (April 12th, not Greek Easter) I decided it would be a REALLY good idea if I spent 90 minutes in a 100+ degree room doing intensive Bikram Yoga. And so I did. With a bunch of other crazy girls.

My friend Suzie bid and won a private session of Hot Bikram Yoga at the Sweatbox and invited a bunch of her girlfriends to join in. And so we did.

I have done yoga in the past, mostly Hatha, but I had never done anything like Bikram. In Hatha yoga, a lot of it is focused on flow where you do a series of poses and try to move seamlessly through them. Bikram has a lot of similar poses as Hatha except that you do them in an entirely different way - there are 26 moves and 2 breathing exercises and you go through them each twice and much quicker - Pose, Hold, Switch! Also, you do these poses in a very humid hot room.

Let me tell you, I have NEVER sweated this much. Check out our before and after photos...

BEFORE

AFTER

Okay, so you can see the sweaty abs on some of the ladies, but check out a close-up...

Do you see the sweat-matted hair? Do you see that GIANT sweat spot on my stomach? See how shiny Suzie is? And this is all after we have left the hot room and toweled off a bit. Impressive, no? Well let me tell you, on a cold blustery Easter stepping into that "Sweatbox" seemed like a wondrous event. Until I started moving, and voila! I lost every single drop of sweat my body can produce. Hooray!!!!

And then there was Greek Easter... I think Dunc wants to write about that on his blog, so I will let him... oh the tension! Oh the anticipation!!!!

CLAMS!

Well lookee here, someone is blogging with only a few days between! I'm improving!!! This blog will be significantly shorter than the last. All I have to discuss is our FABULOUS dinner last night.

Our wonderful friend Ashley, and former roommate, rejoined the Ole' Brown family for an impromptu, but totally delicious dindin. None of us were craving anything and the only thing we could think of was pasta. Boring. After some discussion we decided on pasta with veggies and clams. Ashley has some great skills in the kitchen and came over to help prep and brought some wine for drinking and cooking. She had the fabulous idea of heating up some garlic and onions in wine than adding that to the water which we would steam the clams over... SO GOOD.

Banana (aka Anna, our roomie) provided some great linguine from Trader Joe's - two different types, Garlic & Basil and Spinach & Chive. We tossed the linguine with sauteed zucchini, bell peppers, onion and garlic, fresh tomato and topped it off with our delicious clams and some of the steaming liquid (onion/garlic/wine) and VOILA:



The dish in all its glory (in a dish from the Momlette, we love our wooden bowls!)


A lovely freshly steamed Manila clam.



My delicious bowl of goodness.



Blurry Ashley enjoying the food deliciousness.

Today, while cleaning the kitchen, I decided to reorganize some drawers, and look who helped! He is sooo helpful!





He is so beautiful.

Worst Blogger EVER.

Just in case you all didn't get the memo with my lack of blog-activity, I AM BAD AT THIS. If you are ever curious about the day-to-day goings on at Ole' Brown (the casa where Duncan, Oly, Butters, Anna, Fran and I live), Duncan is much better at keeping up to date. He just blogged about his AMAZING work in the backyard, seriously, huge improvements. Also, he added some photos from our weekend adventure in the quad on campus (famous for its springtime cherry blooms, for all you out-of-towners), followed by a visit to Central Cinema for some dinner and for our viewing pleasure, Arnold in Predator - GET TO THE CHOPPA!!!!. Regardless, Duncan is by far better at this whole blogging thing, so if another month passes by and you don't hear from me, I am alive and well (sort of, more on that in a bit), and check in with Dunc to see what we've been up to.

As far as adventures in Betsyland, I continue to be REALLY good at hurting myself. To give you some perspective on my current injury, let me tell you a little story.

Waaaaaay back in March of 2008, I embarked on the journey of losing the "Office 20" - aka, the lesser known weight-gain phenomena, and "weigh" (oh puns, I am hilarious....) more dangerous than the "Freshman 15" because you are older (slower metabolism) and it is less talked about. So I signed up for step aerobics, started running again and began to bike more often. Oh and also focused on portion control, thanks to the advice of an MD and one Mr. Paul McKenna.

It was awesome, I had totally missed step aerobics from my days of stepping in high school and would come home after each class and show Duncan and Anna my routines - they would just nod their heads and smile politely - nerdy, I know, but I loved it.

(See? I even created tables of our two-week routines...)

Then one day I was struck with an insane(ish) idea - my step instructor was subbing for a Total Toning class and invited me along, so after step I jumped right into toning. Now let me preface this next portion with the fact that I suffer from a problem called "being Overly Competitive" - when I run on trails, I always hunt down someone in front of me to beat, even walking to work I do the same, in my fitness classes I have to be the best, lift the most weight, have the best form, you get the idea, I have a problem. So in this brand new class, I decide that I don't need to stay on "Level 1".... pssshaw, I am going all out. Whenever my instructor pumped it, I followed.

Bad idea. This was only a few months in to a huge increase in activity for a mostly sedentary body. The onslaught of activity from running (Dunc and I trained for and ran a 10K with Logan), biking, stepping and now high intensity toning pissed my body right off. I began having pain in my left knee walking up and down stairs and god forbid, I had to take all the risers off my step in class (EMBARASSING, for me...). So I sought out the medical advice from one of UW's Sports Med doctors. He and his resident could not diagnose the actual issue, and decided the best thing to do was to stop training for a week or two and take some high strength anti-inflammatories. Great. Stop working out and take some drugs. NO THANK YOU. I kept going, just at a lower impact and took running out of the picture. Although, I did add in a Cardio-Kicks class over summer quarter, I figured it was better than working out on a step?

I was fortunate enough to visit Mamz in Tacoma for a day at a market where her chiropractic office had a booth. They had a sign out talking about knee pain, among other things, and I thought I would stop by. I did, and lo and behold, there was a REASON for my left knee pain, my right hip is a bit wonky (technical term) making my right leg shorter than my left leg, thus I put more pressure on the left side. TA DA! So when I came back north, I found myself a local chiropractor, Natasha Whittaker Ayers, who started taking dang good care of me and got my knee back into tip top shape.

Fall of 2008, I had Natasha advise on which classes I could take at the IMA. She let me stay in Cardio Kicks, but had me take a weight-training class to strengthen my quads and hamstrings to help prevent future knee problems. Unfortunately, she never could have forseen that I would go hiking in terrible shoes and sprain my ankle! Whoops. If that weren't enough, I did the same thing a month later, in the same shoes in my cardio kicks class. Freakin falling apart over here!!!

I was injury free for the past 4 or 5 months and working out a lot between High Intensity Training, Total Toning, weight training and running... until last Sunday I got a cramp at the end of a 5k run. The cramp seemed a bit different, but crampy nonetheless and was located around my right hip area. But this cramp did not go away and later that evening made walking almost impossible. I, the minor hypochondriac that I am, thought it was my appendix until I consulted with Duncan and Web MD. The pain did not resemble it at all, so I held off on the ER and got an appointment the next day with my doc. She figured out pretty quick that it was a muscle issue and got me in with a physical therapist within an hour.

My physical therapist is awesome and diagnosed the issue pretty quickly - I had pulled my hip flexor. Turns out this is a pretty important muscle, the ole' psoas connects from your groin/abdominal floor, around your hip to your lower back. I told my therapist that the pain went away while I slept, and she told me that meant my body needed rest.... Boo. She told me that I needed to stay off my feet as much as possible for A WHOLE WEEK. The worst part is that my injury especially hurt when I engaged my abs, so the only thing I could possibly work out was my arms. Boo. She did however provide a number of great easy stretches for my hip, and after staying out of the gym and following her suggestions, I am healing fine.

The good news is, I had my second session with her and I CAN GO TO THE GYM!!! I am cleared for a few cardio exercises and she provided some strength training. I don't know if anyone else is as excited as I am right now to get in the gym, but I am super excited to get working again!!!!

I bet this was way too much information about my medical history of sports-related injuries, but hey, its all I got right now. Duncan covered the fun stuff! I promise to try and provide less medical information in my next blog and plan on doing it in less than a month... probably...