That's Fit

One Small Step is our attempt to show you all how easy it can be to improve your health, and the health of the planet. Each week, we'll take one more little step and encourage you to take it with us. This week, I've finally agreed to listen to my husband and:

Get ultra-local.

Yes, I love the concept of the Eat Local Challenge, but this isn't just eating -- it's drinking coffee, and going to the dentist, and buying my favorite books. I guess you could call it "shop local." So today, when I went to get my hair cut, I didn't go downtown to the chic Aveda stylist where I got my hair done for my wedding (and the one who usually cuts my hair oh so well). Instead, I went to the corner barbershop -- literally, on the corner two blocks from my house. No energy was expended in getting there, and Tammy (along with "Bip", her partner) lives in the neighborhood. She gets her coffee at my favorite coffee shop -- she's about as local as you can get.

It was my husband's idea. I'd been encouraging him to go to the dentist about a mile up the street, instead of the one several miles away we'd been seeing; we've heard such great things. He went even further.

I ran a half-marathon last October, and I think I slept the whole day afterward, and didn't run for at least three weeks following the race. You deserve it, I told myself. You need to rest, recover.

Then came the Hood-to-Coast, and my far superior conditioning. Remember how I thought I could run six miles every 12 hours, forever? Instead I napped for a half-hour that day, and didn't run again... until Tuesday. And I was running downtown to meet another mama and teammate in the Hood-to-Coast, who was herself running at lunch.

Rest periods: they just don't make 'em like they used to! Our team's brief recovery time made me revisit some truths I've always held dear, like the two-week recovery period after a major competition. I'm not the only one who believes in that truth; several physiologists used two weeks as their hypothesis in a study of Ironman athletes, and found much to their surprise that only three days was needed for a complete physiological recovery.

So the three days Olivia and I took to bounce back was plenty ... and there goes my justification for missing the run on Friday. Drat.

It was 9 p.m., I was a few hours from my second about six-mile leg of the Hood-to-Coast relay, and I was going on seven hours of sleep in the past 48 hours. I thought I was going to throw up. I was headachey and nauseous and poopy and oh, how was I ever going to make it through? My first leg, at 2:30 in the afternoon, had gone very well despite the heat, semi trucks blasting past me as I ran on the shoulder of I-84, and long hill at the end; I'd run a good time, equivalent to my best 10-K time in years, although a bit slower than my goal pace of eight-minute miles. More importantly, I'd racked up eight "roadkills" (passed runners), mostly men. Awesome.

And I was there mentally; I'd done yoga and positive thinking training with my team. I was looking at vertical lines (which makes you perform better), I was repeating my mantra, "light on your feet, light on your feet!" -- even sending my lightweight brainwaves to the runners I passed on the way up the hill.

But now, 12 hours and 80-some miles into the race, I felt awful. I couldn't imagine 12 more miles. I couldn't imagine one more mile. I took ibuprofen, I drank water, I ate two cold potatoes and some mandarin oranges.

Cut to 10:30 p.m. Magically, I've made a total mental transformation. I think it was the cheerleading: a teammate and fellow former cheerleader and I started chanting, "T... T R U... T R U C K, keep on truckin' all the way!" for Olivia. I'm walking to the exchange zone with my teammates and saying, "I'm in the best shape of my life! I feel so incredible," and they're agreeing with me, not sure if I'm truly believing this or just working on the positive-speak. When the runner before me comes in I grab the wristband happily and take off, prompting a stander-by to exclaim, "if you keep up this pace, you'll win the thing!"

My tongue is dry. My brain is buzzing. My stomach, hollow; my shoulders, tense. It's less than 24 hours until I'll take the baton in my first 6.2-mile leg of the Hood-to-Coast relay, only 14 hours until I'll hit the road with five other mamas, headed to the starting gun at Timberline Lodge.

Gulp.

Am I ready? Physically, I think I am. I haven't been running the distance I would have liked -- it's been closer to 12 miles a week than my goal of 20+ -- but my speed is exactly where I want it to be. I ran in Central Park on Friday and achieved my goal pace of ~8-minute miles with ease. But mentally. Ahh, mentally is another story.

I'm freakin' terrified.

The worst of it is, I shouldn't be. I'm a virtual paragon of positive thinking.

I'm fascinated with the idea of the detox, as it seems a concept rooted deeply in the human psyche. My four-year-old, Everett, has been periodically detoxing since he could reach the carrots at our local organic produce store. When he's feeling badly, he'll eat nothing but oranges, bananas, carrots and water -- a sharp detour from his usual diet of toast, hot dogs, ketchup and potato chips.

So I was thrilled when I saw a friend, Jessica Ashley, was delving deep into an Ayurveda detox on her ParentsConnect blog. She's just completed a two-week cleanse; avoiding caffeine, alcohol, refined flour, refined sugar, animal products, raw vegetables, fermented foods, and vinegar. While at first she could only mourn her "creamy, sweet coffee" and insist that she did not eat beans!, by six days in, she was feeling good but overwhelmed by the concept of a liquid diet. "I drank tea and more tea and more tea until water sounded like an extra dirty gin and tonic on a hot summer night," she writes.

It's really fun to accompany Jessica on the detox; I especially laughed out loud at her accidental trip to a raw foods restaurant with her family. ("Raw foods, according to Ayurveda, are hard to digest and leave behind a lot in the intestines.") Way to go Jessica! I can't wait to try that Carrot Subji.

One Small Step is our attempt to show you all how easy it can be to improve your health, and the health of the planet. Each week, we'll take one more little step and encourage you to take it with us. This week, I'm thinking about my prodigious waste generation and commiting to:

Stop taking food to go.

I was on my way home from an errand (walking, naturally), and noticed that new, funky coffee shop on 28th. I'd run for a few miles and needed a cup of water and was entranced with the vegan cupcakes in the pastry case. "I'll take one to go," I said.

A few minutes later, I was walking down Holgate, holding an empty paper bag with a few traces of vegan chocolate frosting (awesome, by the way) and an empty plastic water cup. Suddenly I realized how much waste such a small decision -- to take my food and drink to go -- had generated. Had I stayed at the coffee shop for five minutes, I could have foregone the paper bag altogether and drunk deeply from a real glass, creating far less waste, saving money for the business owner, and even better: enjoying the ambiance for a little while.

I committed then to change my ways, and get it for here whenever possible. Maybe I'll see you at the Funky Door sometime ... the cupcakes are on me!

I'm training with Larissa for the 197-mile Hood-to-Coast relay; our team starts running at 8:45 a.m. on Friday. Yes! This Friday. I'm terrified and exhilirated at once. And I have a question for you:

When do you start carbo-loading? And what should I be eating, and drinking, 30-48 hours before I start my 18.3 miles of torture?

I've been terrible, thus far, flitting from a late-night snack of marshmallow creme and peanut butter to a lunch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes to a healthful dinner of pasta, tomato sauce, cheese and spinach. Now chocolate chip cookies are baking in the oven (for the team, naturally) and I'm thinking, ye gods, this has got to be the wrong stuff.

Cool Running advises that I should stay away from beans, bran cereal, lettuce and broccoli; BBC Sport says I should be loading up on carbohydrates today (and yesterday, too, thank goodness for pasta with pesto last night). With two days to go before a major race, what would you be eating?

I was never really a party animal, but in my early 20s, I would fall into the same trap with every high-powered business trip. When we visited that temporary staffing company in Dallas, I overindulged on black martinis and was oh-so-thankful for the noon start time of the meeting. In New York for the billion-dollar hospital deal, I remember dimly sleeping a few hours after a bottle of amazing French white wine and a few pints of Guinness. In San Diego, it was Scotch; in Cleveland, margaritas. Every time I promised to never drink so much again.

The best cure for a hangover? Don't drink too much to begin with.

Now I'm 32, and a mama. I'm over all that. Right? Umm, not so much. Last week I was in New York for a staff meeting and my boss took us out for Korean barbecue Friday night. I drank Asahi, and lots of creamy sweet sake. Next it was a rooftop bar and Courvoisier (hey, I don't get out much) and the ill-fated bottle of Patron tequila that seemed like such a good idea at the time.

My flight was at 6 a.m. the next morning. No. Oh, no.

"Candace from the whirlyGirlz will be doing a hooping circle," said the executive director of the children's non-profit whose board I sit on. It barely registered, was it sewing hoops or hula? I didn't even know.

Cut to six weeks later, and I'm in the middle of a park, surrounded by hundreds-year-old trees, a variety of adventurous types ages one to sixty, and piles of wildly-colored hoops. And we're suddenly hooping.

Gone are the Hawaiian roots of the hula hoop, and replacing them is a mystical part-Nia, part-power of positive thinking, part-50s zaniness amalgam that emphasizes staying in tune with your body and bringing it. According to Candace's web site, hooping benefits your body through "core isolation, meditative flow, and intrinsic massage in the organs and tissue of the muscles." Basic hooping classes teach how to move the hoop around various parts of your body (the waist, it is just the beginning), how to move with your hoop, and how to interact as part of a hooping circle. For the more advanced, the logical next step is hooping performance and hoop jams.

Hooping is surprisingly easy; by the end of a 45-minute session, even the clunkiest among us had gotten the hoop to spin around us and managed to find at least one hooping specialty to call our own. To find a class in your own neighborhood (San Francisco, LA, Portland, Vancouver and New York are all hooping hotspots), check out Hooping.org magazine.

I know that I breathed a huge sigh of relief this weekend. Phew. My kids have lost their last icons of bad behavior! I thought. Tom and Jerry, that eponymous animated cat and mouse duo, are destined never to smoke again.

Yes! It is sarcasm. Boomerang has chosen to selectively edit the cartoon episodes where smoking in Tom & Jerry is seen as "condoned, acceptable or glamorised," according to the BBC. Turner Broadcasting, which airs Boomerang in the U.S., is considering following suit. Not up for review? The bonking with a frying pan, the falling out a second-story window, none of these are seen as dangerous. But the cat, when it's smoking a cigar while playing tennis, now that's a bad example.

As a commentator on BBC World Service last night said, there's a lot more disturbing on TV. He was more concerned about the plethora of ED ads, while I'm highly uncomfortable that my 15-month-old will stop breastfeeding to watch those pipe people plug bladder control drugs. Do you think cartoon creatures from the 1950s are influencing your children's propensity for addiction; or is it (like in my family) much more of a problem that the beloved Aunt Erin can't give up the nicotine habit?

One Small Step is our attempt to show you all how easy it can be to improve your health, and the health of the planet. Each week, we'll take one more little step and encourage you to take it with us. This week, I'm taking a cue from my four-year-old and commiting to:

Pick up one extra piece of litter every day.

I live on a busy street, and as soon as my oldest son had gathered a repertoire of 10 words, he'd learned "whassat?" Naturally, his attention was drawn to the variety of delightful shiny colorful litter that decorated our sidewalk and we encountered on our daily walks. "Whassat?" he'd say, and I'd wonder if I could just say, "a culture of disrespect." But he saw it otherwise. Can you even imagine something so beautiful as a Gummy Lifesavers wrapper? An empty soda can?

He wanted to pick up these beauties, and though I wanted to rant and rail on the uncaring "neighbors" who left their trash behind, I had a minor flash of brilliance: I'll teach him to do his small part to make our world better. Every time he'd ask about a brightly-colored foil wrapper, I'd explain that it was garbage, and we'd make a game of searching for a place to put it.

When the distance exceeds 200 meters, I've always been a good runner. Notice I didn't say "great" or "fabulous" or even "award-winning." Well, there was that one time when my age group ... anyway. My modus operandi in races is that I start out fast fast fast, I feel great, I run a mile or two at a blinding pace. I can't even believe how well I'm doing. And then, well, it all drops off from there.

Real, great racers have what's called "negative splits." In other words, their last laps, or miles, or kilometers, or however the race is being measured, are even faster than their early ones. I only aspire to be negative. I've never accomplished it, not in any distance.

So for the Hood-to-Coast relay, where I'll be running three legs of about six miles each, I've decided: negative splits will be mine. I've been training for it, and I think I can, I think I can. Here's what I've been doing on my shorter runs:

• First half-mile is slow, warming up
• Next two to 2.5 miles are uphill, somewhat fast but not really pushing it
• Stairs or flat for the next 0.5 to one mile, really accelerating
• Final two to 2.5 miles is downhill, as close as I can come to sprinting.

One Small Step is our attempt to show you all how easy it can be to improve your health, and the health of the planet. Each week, we'll take one more little step and encourage you to take it with us. In honor of this first week, I'll be oh-so-literal and commit to:

Walk, don't drive, to one meeting, appointment, or errand every week.

I could enumerate the reasons. Save gas. Reduce emissions. Save money. Improve your health. Breathe deeper. Stay local. But instead I'll take you on a walk with me.

I'm a recent convert to the cult of knitting, and this requires frequent trips to the various yarn stores around town for just the right silky woollen stuff. My favorites are (naturally) hand-dyed and made from all natural fibers. It makes me feel good, to create something beautiful for my children to wear instead of buying it off a particle-board rack at the Gap. But these excursions to knitting stores? They're a real resource hog, and I'm not just talking about the high cost of Noro Silk Garden.

It was a warm Thursday night, my husband was working late and my boys (ages four and 14 months) had fully converted to late summer bedtimes. They couldn't sit still and I had to have one more skein of yarn for my latest project, a late wedding present for my sister Jenny. The old me would have packed the boys in the car and skedaddled to Mabel's, where they have yarn, a variety of yummy iced teas, and best of all: a toy box. But this is the new me.

I'm training for the the Hood-to-Coast relay along with a group of my best mama friends. The Hood-to-Coast is an epic race: the very most elite of road relays, run from near the top of Mt. Hood to the beach, 197 miles in all. The top runners in the world will be there, along with, well, us. Even amongst our team, we have different approaches: I come from a very competitive running background. In high school and college, I was a jumper/sprinter, and I'm the sort of person who tries to catch other runners when she's out on the streets. It's terrible and silly and probably bad for my karma but when I see someone else running more slowly than me? It only makes me go faster.

That said, I'm a lot slower than some of the other women on our team. We all ran a half-marathon together back in October and I struggled in at just over 10-minute miles. When I started training in earnest for the Hood-to-Coast, I decided my goal was to get back to my post-college speed of 8-minute miles, partially so I could run in the same league as some of my fearsome running mama buddies, and partially so I could regain that feeling I used to have when I was 23 and in awesome shape, when I used to get to the four-mile mark of a 10K and feel great.

I'm very into the mental aspect of running; I've had some "Psych-K" training and more than your average dose of quantum physics "create your day" philosophy, and lots of yoga, soaking into my brain. So last night when I ran I stepped it up a few hundred percent. I ran uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back, negative splits, you know. I crushed my previous time heading into a three-block uphill that's usually the end of my run. And I visualized myself running fast, high knees, clear lungs, energy energy energy and I laid it out. I was as fast as one can be at the end of a 4.5-mile run. I was thoroughly in the zone.