A couple nights ago I made the best meal I've ever prepared for myself. I don't feel too arrogant saying this because my standards for home cooking are not terribly high; I generally don't like to put too much effort into making food for one, and I'm more concerned about consuming nutritious meals than gourmet ones. That said, if I can achieve low maintenance, healthy, and delicious, I'm pretty wowed. This particular meal was inspired by a black-eyed pea dip I had at Fodder & Shine  recently. I wanted to make my my own, which really is just hummus with black-eyed peas instead of garbanzo beans, but I also wanted use it in a way that felt more like a meal than a snack. I also remembered some vegan tacos I'd recently had at Bartaco , which included cauliflower and almonds in the filling. The carrots and onions just seemed like a nice complement to the roasted cauliflower. Then I needed something green, and the collards helped bring everything together (lite...

This past year was one of the most challenging years of my life. It started out with a loose foundation: fresh out of a long-term relationship, living in a new space, still new at my job. I had some early successes with running, but that changed abruptly when I developed pain in my left foot that would keep me from running for the rest of the year. Running was therapy for me. It provided me with a physical outlet, a meditative space, a constant cycle of challenge and reward. It gave me confidence and kept me healthy—except when it didn't. So without a lot of stability to begin with, my world as I knew it was shaken, and I had little to fall on. And rather than reach out to loved ones, I wanted to fall apart. I was lucky to have some close friends and family members help pick me up. I was able to end the year on a good note, spending lots of time with family, dedicating myself more to swimming, and appreciating whatever abilities I had in a given day, even when it wasn't running...

Okay, I know that's a bad wordplay on what is already an eggcorn , but I couldn't help myself. The allusion, of course, is to swimming, which is something I am able to do right now. In addition to laying off of running, I've decided I need to give biking a break, because, if I'm being honest with myself (which I sometimes hate doing), it aggravates my foot—and my pelvis, but that's another issue. While the impact of biking is minimal, I still use my foot to push down on my pedal, which creates enough pressure that it could be delaying healing. So there's my first confession for the day. Confession #2: No activity I do is pain free. So even swimming sometimes exacerbates pain I've been experiencing in the medial (inside) arch of my foot. Frustrating, right? (Right!) But it's mild and its level of irritation seems to be directly related to how long and hard I swim. So when I went to a coached group swim last Tuesday, I swam harder than I normally do on ...

It's been more than seven months since I've had to step away from running . While I've been able to do other things during this time, I've experienced strong and varying emotions every day that I haven't been able to run. It occurred to me only recently, while watching an episode of Jane the Virgin  (an excellent show that I was pretty skeptical about initially), that I've been grieving the loss of running. In the episode, Jane recaps how she went through the well-known Kubler-Ross five stages of grief in one day, over the loss of a relationship. But it was her highlighting of these stages that made me realize I'd been going through the same thing—except over months, and over the loss of running. It may seem trivial, especially given the grave and tragic world events occurring daily, to make such a big deal out of running, but we all still have our personal challenges to deal with each day, and I in no way mean to minimize the suffering of others in this ...

After four steady months of swimming and biking, I decided I should go ahead and get a multi-sport watch. I really wanted it for swimming, as I'd had no real method for tracking my progress, and even my laps I 'd been counting in my head, hoping I didn't skip a number. So I went to the bike shop to check out what was available, and the choice was pretty much made for me after I looked at the prices. I "opted" for the Garmin Vivoactive , which seemed perfectly suited to my needs for a starter multi-sport watch. I was still just amazed that I could wear a watch under water! FYI, I'll probably never use the golf function. I've used it for two rides and a swim so far--but I noticed something was off on the first two summaries: The coolest feature is that I can see my strokes per lap, which are pretty consistent! 5,606 calories burned on a 20-mile ride--pretty amazing, no? As much I wanted to believe it, I knew there was no way I was burn...

I'm going on six weeks in the boot. I recently had a follow-up appointment with my orthopedist, and it wasn't the happy-making experience I thought it would be. I have a tendency to put all of my hope and faith for recovery in one appointment, when really healing is a months-long process, which I've been reluctant to accept. I thought I'd be able to go in to the appointment, convince my doctor of my  self-diagnosed neuroma , and get myself a cortisone shot. But that's not what happened. First, I don't think he was convinced I had a neuroma, but even if he had been, he wouldn't give me the shot. He said it could interfere with the healing of my fracture. Oh yeah,  that . Probably responsible doctoring, but I wasn't satisfied.  He had me get an x-ray to see what we could see. He said everything looked normal (which doesn't mean anything for my fracture), except that I had a sesamoid bone in my second metatarsal head. We all have them naturally emb...

I've been wearing my fracture boot for nearly 14 days (minus the 1.5 days I didn't have it during the Great Flood of '15 ), and I'm having a hard time with it. Not just the boot itself--its clunkiness, stuffiness, heaviness--but I'm reminded of how much longer I have to wear it and, more than that, I'm afraid the fracture isn't my only problem. I feel pain where I don't think I should, based on the location of my fracture (first metatarsal). More and more, I'm concerned that I also have a neuroma . I feel pain very specifically on the ball of my foot, around the third metatarsal head. My doctor said this could be "referred" pain from the fracture, but I'm not so sure. It's hard to know the timing of everything; I avoided getting a new MRI for weeks and weeks after initially feeling the foot pain in April, so I don't know how old (or new) the fracture was at the time of diagnosis. My hope is that, at my follow-up appointment in...