Michael & Liz are Bloggable

I'm beginning to wonder how many days in a row I can bike to work. So far I'm up to 14, and I'm thinking I can do it for both September and October but the colder months might start getting difficult. I really don't enjoy sweating in the morning, but I love not having to drive my car everywhere. It really is just empowering. It gives me a good sense of distance and doesn't let me take for granted being able to just get up and drive 30 miles just because I can. I think when the month ends, I'm going to continue to bike to work.

Saturday should be kind of awesome. We are going to bike to the American Tobacco Trail, bike all the way down to downtown Durham and go to the farmers market, and then bike back. Should be a total of about 20 miles round trip. We'll also probably hit up the pool after that. It'll be a nice little Saturday.

Anyone who has listened to The Dave Ramsey Show has heard it before. If you want to get out of debt you have to get mad. You have to get gazelle intense, throw everything at your debt snowball and make every sacrifice to win. You have to eat beans & rice and rice & beans and never see the inside of a restaurant unless you are working there.

Well to be honest, while we were getting out debt, we never really ate beans & rice. We continue to scrimp and save and live on less than we make, but we haven't gone as far as to eat the cheapest meal ever made. This week a friend of mine, Jason, gave us a recipe for a delicious beans & rice recipe and I was intrigued. We tried it tonight and it was AWESOME.

At one point I said to Liz, "you know how much money we would save if we..." and Liz stopped me in my tracks and said "I am NOT eating rice & beans for a whole month." She knows me too well. The brilliance of this meal. It cost us exactly $1.62 in groceries when you exclude the stuff we already had in our pantry (like onion and peppers and stuff). Now that's some good math. It made 3 very full servings.

Here is the picture and followed up by the recipe.


I apologize for the language in the recipe, but that's how it was written, and it does add some humor to cooking. I highly recommend it:

Take a lesson from the Puerto Ricans. Millions of us have managed to survive in one of the most expensive cities on earth with recipes like this:
Find a supermarket that has black beans on sale. Buy as much as you can. Then buy 5 or so pounds of Carolina rice, a bag of onions, a few bulbs of garlic, and a box of Goya Sazon.
Set 2 cups of water to boil
Throw in one cup of rice, turn the heat down to simmer and lid that shit
Slice up a small onion
Smash up a clove of garlic
Throw some olive oil or butter into a HOT pan.
Throw the onions and garlic into the pan and fry them till the onion gets glassy. Throw some salt in there.
Grind some pepper in there for good luck.
Toss in half a packet of Sazon and stir till you get a paste. Now you have a ghetto sofrito.
Dump in your can of beans bean juice and all.
Stir that shit up.
Add a pinch of Cayenne pepper so you remember that you have a set of cojones
Set that shit on simmer
Your rice is done.
Throw the beans on top.
Win
You should get at least 2 meals out of one can of beans, and if your lucky you can get black beans 2 for $1. Adding the cost of the Garlic, Sazon and a small onion and you still eat a tasty, hearty, relatively healthy meal for less than $1.

Jason's modifications:
So, he says HOT pan, I say medium / medium-hot, don't burn the oil / onions. Along with the onion I usually add a green pepper and hot pepper chopped. and I smash / very roughly chop 3 cloves of garlic. I slowly saute the onions / peppers until they are fairly soft.. I also use brown rice, so 2.5 cups of water to 1 cup of rice for 45 min on simmer.

I don't feel like writing too much tonight because I'm crazy exhausted. I decided to run home from church today instead of bike and the afternoon heat just really took my energy away. I didn't leave church until about 11:30 and the 17 miles took me 2:42 so I didn't get home until 2PM. By then it was already 90 degrees and crazy humid out. It was not the smartest move I've made.

Here are the numbers. My buffer isn't as large as I want it to be, I can never be sure what happens on any given day so I still don't feel comfortable with 70 miles. I am going to try and build it up throughout the week and hopefully surpass the 100 mile buffer. We'll see though, after the run today, my energy is shot and I'm worried about starting the week off so exhausted. The document is getting too big so I excluded some of the early days. Click it to see it better.

One entertaining event happened while biking that I have to write about. I had a large dragonfly nail me in the forehead on my way home from work. I stopped the bike a half mile later thinking it flew away but realizing I never REALLY saw it fly away. As I took off my helmet it was laying there right in the middle of the helmet not moving. I dropped the bike and slapped the bug away. As I picked the bike back up, my brakes weren't right. Somehow in dropping the bike, my brakes were completely squeezed so the tires wouldn't move. I challenge anyone to stop reading right now and figure out what they think happened? How could dropping the bike to the ground cause my brakes to be engaged for no apparent reason?

My temporary solution was to get my tools out (that I packed in my bag just in case something like this happens) and spend 10 minutes loosening the brakes so I can bike again. It wasn't until next morning that I figured out what happened. I was pulling out of the drive way and as I turned the wheel, my brake prematurely engaged again and stopped me. That made me realize that when I dropped my bike the day before, the handlebars spun around causing the brake lines to tighten up around my handlebars. I turned the handlebars 360 degrees back around and had to tighten my brakes again to adjust for the changes I made the day before.

Hopefully I have no more stories like that the rest of the month. It's funny now and was a good learning experience diagnosing and fixing the brakes on the spot like that, but I was hot and sweaty having to work that out.

"Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain." ~Author Unknown

"When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

You ever have a craving for chocolate or ice cream? I know Liz always has cravings for our neighborhood Mexican restaurant "El Dorado". There's no doubt about it, I give in every time that craving comes along. I don't usually get too many food cravings, mine seem to come in another form.

For some reason I have a craving every single day to watch a certain random movie. I'll be sitting at work or running on the treadmill and think "OH MAN! I want to watch that RIGHT NOW!" I'd be surprised if I'm alone in this feeling. This week, these were/are my cravings:

• Wednesday: James Bond - Casino Royale with Daniel Craig
• Thursday: The Hangover
• Friday: Avatar
• Saturday: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I usually never indulge my cravings mainly because they come up at the dumbest times and I forget about them. There have been times though and it's been glorious. Usually movies that become regular cravings are movies I have to buy. For example:

• I Love You, Man
• The Breakup
• Knocked Up
  
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
  
• A Knight's Tale
• Rocky (all of them)
• Rudy
• Cinderella Man
  
• Harry Potter (all of them)
• Love Actually

I think the reason I like "Love Actually" is more because it's so Christmas themed and the movie counts down to Christmas. I love that time of year with the coldness and music and atmosphere. The other movies invoke feelings in the extreme, being either humor or action or heroism and I think that's why I always crave them in particular. Like if I'm running and feeling energized and think "MAN! I could totally listen to Rocky right now!" because of how pumped it makes me.

I may indulge my craving later today, we'll see.

I talked to my sister tonight on the phone, and here's her response to my "Me vs. Machine" month:

"Michael! Life is more fun than constantly competing."

It's all about drive. Competition drives me. Setting goals and reaching for them is fun. I don't know why, but I always have a desire to accomplish something more or do something better. I haven't commented on this in a while but I have run about 650 miles in 2010 so far. There's no doubt, assuming no injuries, that I'm going to eclipse the 1000 mile New Year Resolution goal for the first time ever. It's my natural instincts once I get there to then think to myself "Now what can I do?" It's a constant cycle.

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." - Zig Ziglar

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily." - Zig Ziglar

It's days like today when I realize why I have built up such a large buffer for my challenge. I was getting ready to have such a productive night of blogging and budgetting and website building but that all changed when I got called to do some Landlording work. So I headed out and racked up almost 19 miles on my car and thus my night was pretty much spent.

If this was 3 hours ago, the heading would have read "WhoDey's Got Nothing On ME!". Unfortunately, the unexpected took that confidence away from me and my car caught up a little bit. Here are the updated numbers:


One thing I have decided is that for the rest of the month, I don't see any reason to drive to work. That should make for some really good mileage.

I also added another column to my numbers above. The column titled "WhoDey" is the mileage for my car, and the column titled "Car" is for both WhoDey and Liz's car.

I'm starting to get over the fatigue of the month. Maybe I am getting in better shape, but I'm getting over being tired pretty quickly. So that's a good sign because if there is anything that'll stop me from succeeding is exhaustion or injury. So far both have stayed very far away... **knock on wood**.

Headin to bed.

"Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time."

Well it has been 5 days since the start of my challenge and holy cow do I have a lot I want to say about the month so far. I doubt I'll be able to fit it all into this one post since I want to try and keep these updates brief (yeah right, like I can ever keep anything brief). Here is an update on the numbers:

So far the month has been awesome. I've really enjoyed it a lot. It definitely has been hard and I have worked my butt off, but it has been really rewarding. Rewarding is probably the best word to describe it so far. It feels really good to get to work and know that it took effort to do it. It's an awesome feeling to stand at an intersection and get looks like "what are you doing?" I also can't help but laugh as I get on my bike to ride home today after having run 5 miles in the gym. I want to be all I can be! It really is empowering.

So I think the best thing to do now is to break the post into two sections. The good stuff and the bad stuff, because let's be honest, there is definitely a good amount of both.

The Good Stuff:

• My metabolism is through the freakin' roof. The other day I ate 7 tacos for dinner and still lost weight the following day. I have been eating a ton more this whole week and yet my weight is still continuing to drop a little bit every day. I'm still hovering at 170. I'd like to maintain 165 by the end of the month.
  
• I have come to LOVE showering at the gym showers. It is much more private than I thought it would be, the water pressure is nice, and we save on hot water at the house.
  
• I can already tell my legs are stronger and my biking endurance is getting better, and both will benefit my running.
  
• Assuming I keep up this schedule, we are going to save $100 this month on gas alone. That's insane! $100 just because I put in a little effort. I'll take it!
  
• I have to bike on two roads to get to the trails on my way to work, and it's no longer scary for me. I'm still not willing to bike on the busier roads, for those I stick to trails, but I'm no longer nervous at all about traffic.
  
• From the second I close the garage door in the morning, it takes me 45 minutes to bike to work, shower, change, and get into my cube. That's not a bad commute AT ALL.
  
• I really enjoy packing my lunch these days. It's so nice not to have to leave the building and I enjoy catching up with friends at lunch. That is one thing I might do more often even after the month ends.
• My plan has worked out well, between leaving my computer at work and having a locker at the gym, it hasn't really been a struggle coordinating the days.
• To be honest, I sometimes get a small case of road rage when I drive. Stop lights and their stupid sensors really tick me off and I am somewhat competitive when it comes to being passed. But when I'm biking, I LOVE stop lights. It's a chance to rest, I'm not in a hurry and my stress level is extremely low. And I don't have a desire to go super fast. Maybe it's the exercise, but it's so soothing to just get a constant rate going and put out a little effort like that in the mornings.
  
• I am getting up earlier every day so I can still get to work at the same time. If that continues when the month ends, I'll get work even earlier in September when I drive to work more often.
  

The Bad Stuff:

• It has already affected my Marathon Training schedule. On Wednesday I was supposed to run 8 miles but I woke up feeling incredibly sore like I had gotten run over. I think by the time 4PM rolled around, I could have still run, but I didn't pack my running stuff for the day, so it was a no-go. Today I ran 5 miles and felt totally fine and energized, so the soreness and tiredness didn't last long.
  
• I can't remember the last time I went a day without sweating. That's annoying.
  
• We will be doing an extra load of laundry each week to wash the clothes I stink up from biking.
  
• Even though I am not carrying my computer or anything, my bag is still pretty heavy with all the crap I have to bring. Not a big deal though, just a pain.
• Getting to be on time is CRUCIAL these days. I went to bed at midnight on Monday night, and I still got to work on time, but I was dragging in the morning.
  

One thing I've been surprised by is how easy it has been for me to stay ahead of my car miles. I was really hoping that during the month I wouldn't have to go to the gym and just bike endlessly to keep up, and I don't think I'm ever going to have to do that. Tomorrow I am going to bike to work and get 10 more miles, and Saturday I have to run 18 miles for my marathon training. If I don't drive anywhere during that time, I'll be up almost 50 miles on my car by Saturday. Sunday I am going to bike home from church again, and on Monday I took the day off and will bike to the gym and run some more. If that all happens, I really don't see how I can lose this challenge.

I am actually enjoying it so much that I'm starting to dream up other challenges and goals. Could I bike to work half the work days in 2011? What about 3 out of 5 work days every week in 2011? Ideas are welcome!

I think updating the blog on my progress every 5 days sounds good. So look for update 2 on the 10th.


"Those that say it can't be done should get out of the way of those doing it." - Chinese Proverb