Recipes For A Well-Fed Triathlete

After the Washingtonian put up their photo spread of some of our favorite adventures in cooking, we received a lot of questions about recipes for the featured items. I’ve written up about half of them below, and I’ll try to do the other half soon. Katie has described my approach to using fixed amounts of ingredients as ‘haphazard” or “what do you mean a handful? How much is a handful? Your hand or my hand? Argh!”, but I have tried to formalize things a bit in the recipes below. I would encourage you to play with the proportions a bit, though, until you get a result you like.

I would not recommend messing around with the temperatures on the yogurt, though. That is more science than art.

Peanut Butter

Takes 30-40 minutes. Quantity produced depends on how many peanuts you use. 1 lb of peanuts makes a goodly amount.

Required Items:

Food Processor - We use (and love) the Ninja. The old standby 2-blade Cuisinart might or might not work for this one.

Oven

baking sheet

Ingredients:

• (shelled) peanuts. We have used roasted and unroasted, salted and unsalted. All will work.
• salt
• 1-2 TBS oil per lb of peanuts. I use olive oil, as we like the taste, but if you don’t love the taste of olive oil, you could use any neutral oil instead.
• (optional) cajun spice and honey

Process:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Spread peanuts out on a single layer on an ungreased baking sheet.
3. Roast peanuts until they look “sweaty” - usually takes 8-12 minutes, depending on what type of peanuts you are using, but can take longer with dry-roasted peanuts.
4. Remove peanuts from oven and pour into food processor.
5. Add 1-2 TBS oil per lb of peanuts.
6. Turn on food processor and find something else to do for about 5 minutes. Do not watch the food processor, or the peanuts will not turn into peanut butter. I have tested this.
7. Check food processor and scrape down sides. Depending on any number of factors, you will have a substance that is someplace between peanut chunks, peanut powder and peanut butter. If the former, have faith, trust this unfootnoted recipe you got from the internet, and turn on the processor again for another 5 minutes. If the latter, proceed to step 8.
8. If you have something that looks like peanut butter, taste, add salt if needed, and decide if you like the consistency. The longer you process it, the less chunky it will become. If it looks soupy, do not despair; it will thicken as it cools. If it still seems powdery after 10 minutes of processing, add a bit more oil every 2 minutes until this is no longer true.
9. (optional) If you are bored with regular peanut butter, and ready to have your mind blown, add spicy cajun powder and honey (start with 1 tsp cajun/1 TBS honey, and go from there). Or add a handful of chocolate chips. Probably not both, though.
10. Refrigerate until cool, and eat. I don’t know how long it will keep in the fridge; ours has never lasted long enough to find out, but at least a couple of weeks.

Yogurt:

Takes 15 hours of total time; requires 20 minutes of attention at the start, then a burst of activity an hour later, then sits unattended overnight.

Required equipment:

• candy thermometer
• stove
• large (1-gal+) nonstick cooking pot
• sous vide heater (optimal) or an oven that holds heat well (not optimal)
• 1 gallon glass jar (if you are using the sous vide option)
• very large stock pot for the sous vide water bath
• metal strainer or colander
• cheesecloth

Ingredients

• 1 gallon milk (any store-bought milk is fine; does not need to be raw or hippie)
• ½ cup of plain yogurt with active cultures

Process:

1. Heat up milk in cooking pot to 185 degrees, then turn off stove. Be careful when stirring, as a scorched layer of milk will generally form on the bottom of the pot. This is fine, but you don’t want to scrape the bottom when you stir as this will bring the scorched layer back into the milk, altering the flavor. It comes right out of a nonstick pot afterwards.
2. Set up sous vide heater to 105 degrees and start the water bath. If you don’t have a sous vide, turn on the oven to 150-200 degrees for 10 minutes then turn it off. We had very mixed results with the oven method, so I don’t really recommend it.
3. Allow milk to cool back down to 105 degrees. If left unattended, this takes a little over an hour in our house; if you are impatient you can dip the cooking pot in a larger bowl of ice water and stir.
4. Add ½ cup of yogurt and mix.
5. If using sous vide, pour the yogurt/milk mixture into the glass jar, and set in the sous vide water bath. Do not cover the jar. If you are using the oven method, place the cooking pot in the oven and pray.
6. Go to bed, or let sit for at least 6 hours.
7. When you return, lay two layers of cheesecloth over the colander, and pour the mixture from the jar into the cheesecloth. It should resemble very soupy yogurt.
8. Let sit in the cheesecloth, stirring occasionally, for 1-3 hours, depending on the desired consistency of your yogurt. Save the whey that drips out for breadmaking.
9. Pour the resulting yogurt out of the cheesecloth into a storage container, and refrigerate. This should make 1.5-2 quarts of yogurt per gallon of milk. Higher fat milk makes more yogurt per gallon than lower fat milk.

Pairs nicely with bloobs.

Standard Loaf Bread:

This is a variation off of the recipe in Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese, a book that has been our starting point for many of these adventures.

Required Items:

• Oven
• mixing bowl (a stand mixer is great for this recipe, especially with a dough hook)
• 2 loaf pans

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp yeast
• 3 ½ cups whey or water at room temp
• 5 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 ½ cups wheat flour
• 2 TBS honey or molasses
• 4 tsp kosher salt
• neutral oil for greasing
• any or all of the following:
• ⅓ cup flaxseeds
• ⅓ cup wheat bran
• ⅓ cup chia seeds
• ⅓ cup hemp seeds

- (optional) 1 C raisins, 4 TBS butter at room temp, 1 tsp cinnamon, ⅓ TSP ginger, ⅓ TSP nutmeg,  1 TBS sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix dry ingredients in a bowl or stand mixer.
2. Stir honey or molasses into the whey/water, then add to the dry ingredients (helps prevent clumping).
3. Stir until a dough is formed. I usually use the dough hook on the mixer for a minute or so.

Option 3a. If you want a sweeter, richer bread, add 3 TBS of butter to the dough and mix. Then put the dough on a floured surface, and stretch/roll into a rectangle with a  short end the length of the loaf pan. Spread the surface with the remaining 1 TBS of butter, and spread the raisins evenly on the surface. Mix the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and sugar, and sprinkle evenly over the surface. Press the raisins lightly into the dough so that they stay in place, and roll up the dough from one of the short ends.

4. Grease loaf pans.
5. Put dough in loaf pans (should fill them about ½ to ⅔ full) and cover with a towel or plastic wrap for about 2 hours, or until it is near the top of the loaf pans.
6. Preheat oven to 450.
7. Bake loaves for 30 minutes.
8. Remove bread from pans, and return to oven for another 15 minutes. Bread is done when it sounds hollow if tapped.

More to follow. Happy eating!

Giant Acorn International Race Report 10/6/12

Coming into the Giant Acorn International, I was fairly confident and excited for the event. Due to a lighter fall work schedule, I was able to get back onto the swimming horse, and my (still very questionable) swim form felt like it was improving. Cycling was going well, though without much interval (read:any) interval work, and I was getting in short runs every morning, though nothing at the 5 mile or longer distance.

        Conditions were fantastic at the course. Temp was in the high 60s/low 70s, and the start time was a gloriously late 10 AM. Check in was quick and easy in the morning, transition setup was fine (though my rack was at the swim end of the area, about 100 yards from bike out), and nothing felt rushed or weird. Breakfast at 90 minutes before wave start - bagel with lox and cream cheese as always. The water temp was 79 - felt fantastic without a wetsuit, and there was an open warmup area, so I ended up staying in the water for about 20 minutes before the start, floating and swimming a bit. Given how chilly people looked on-shore, I think this was the right call.

        Clydesdales went with the 50+ men this time, in the 2’nd-to-last wave. Right from the beginning, swim form felt strong - after a bit of a revelation at the National Harbor 3K swim a few weeks back, I was feeling much more confident with kicking effectively, and I felt like I was much further to the front of the pack than usual for the swim. After going stroke for stroke with another guy for a hundred meters or so, I decided to not be an idiot, drop back 5 feet, and draft off of him instead. This worked out great, and I never felt particularly taxed during the swim. My head working the way it does, I would occasionally get concerned that I wasn’t working hard enough, pull out of draft, and try to move up in the swim pack, only to find myself going stroke-for-stroke with my draft buddy. I finally reigned in my idiotic need to do more work to go the same speed, and settled back into draft for the rest of the swim.
Steps with rubber matting and volunteer support coming out of the water were nice, I felt very stable, though I saw some folks slip a bit.
Swim Time: 30:03 - 2’nd fastest non-wetsuit lake swim
Rank: 45/293

T1: Apparently, I moved so fast in T1 that I warped time and space. This is my only explanation. It was a normal T1 - shoes/socks on, helmet/glasses on, grab bike and sprint - but somehow it took 3 minutes. No clue on this one, but it’s clearly a weak point that I need to fix.
Time: 3:00!
Rank:207/293

Bike: I was looking forward to this bike course, as it is a fairly flat 2-loop ride, and I was hoping to push the pace a bit. I felt more rested and less dizzy than usual after the swim, and my legs were ready from the get go. This... might have led me to overdo things a bit. The Garmin beeped at the 5 mile mark, and I looked down to see an 11:47 split. That seemed a bit quick, and I tried to throttle back a bit. I never really got my body to buy into the new plan, though, and when I got passed at around mile 11, I slipped back into cyclist-knucklehead mode (even though it was a relay guy, so it didn’t even matter. Argh). I ended up chasing him for the next 5 miles, following just behind draft range, and occasionally passing him on the upslopes. He would blow back though me on the flats. As a side consequence of this, I was not keeping up well on nutrition, though I did work through two bottles of gatorade on the ride.
Ride time: 57:01
Rank: 3/293

T2: Transition again seemed fine, again went long. This is something that has to change before next year.
Time: 2:00!
Rank: 217/293

Run: By the time I had gone a mile, I knew I was going to pay for being a nitwit on the ride. Heart rate was very high for my effort level, and it felt like it was 100 degrees out on the road. (It was, in actuality, maybe 80). The course was 2 times through an out-and back, mostly on the same road as the bike course, with a long, gradual uphill at miles 2 and 5. The first lap was fairly unpleasant - I walked 30 seconds at each of the mile markers, to try and get my HR back under control, and walked through the aid stations. The second lap was much worse. I started to feel chills at mile 4, and made the decision to throttle back as much as necessary to not become a medical DNF. Even with that, I could feel cramps threatening in both quads and calves, and I knew that if they hit in force, the sprint on the next day would be difficult at best. I ended up walking about ½ of the uphill, and jog-walking even on the downhill back to the finish line. The only bright spot on the run was that the multiple turn-arounds let me run by my [teammate/girlfriend Katie] multiple times, and that always perked me up a bit.
Run time: 1:03:12
Rank: 207/293

Final Time: 2:35:17
Rank: 80/293
3/13 Clydesdale
      After the finish chute, I found Katie, who was still feeling the effects of her 70.3 the week before, and we staggered around and drank gatorade while waiting for results. As it happened, we both did better than we had thought, each picking up 3’rd in category. If I had matched transition speed with the 2’nd place finisher, I would have taken him by a comfortable 30 seconds. Argh.
Lessons learned:
1. Swim drafting is good. Don’t get impatient with it.
2. Better control of bike speed/pace.
3. FIX TRANSITION SPEED!

Rev3 Cedar Point Race Report: 9/9/12

Cedar Point was actually the first triathlon that I signed up for, back in September of 2011. Yes, going directly to a 70.3 as a first race seemed like the proper procedure. No, I did not have a clue what I was doing at the time.
It’s amazing how plans change. Almost a year (and 6 races) later, I’m driving to Ohio straight from 5150 Nationals in Iowa, getting set to race my A race, and the one that got me started on the triathlon path. I’m...concerned about this race. Due to my 80-90 hour/week summer work schedule, my training plan has taken some hits. I have not done the long runs that I would have liked, and I had to more or less abandon my swim training with the Masters group due to a time conflict. My cycling baseline is ok, but that only gets you so far. To add to my concern, my last 70.3 was less than stellar - the Eagleman sweatfest where I started to cramp 4 miles into the run.
On the plus side, 5150 Nationals went quite well, and the run felt solid throughout, if numerically unimpressive. So the plan is to address the issues of Eagleman - more salt in my ride nutrition, and more control of ride pace, in order to set up a decent run.

    Parking at Cedar Point is incredibly easy - it’s an amusement park, and there is no competition for close-in spaces at our 5:30 AM arrival. Bikes were racked the night before - they use wheel holders instead of the bars at seat-height, which I really liked. Not having to get the bike, with water bottles, out from under a bar seems much more efficient to me. Setup goes smoothly; the only annoyance is that the full rev starts first, leaving us with nearly two hours of dead time before our start. We retreated to the car, laid back the seats, and napped for a bit, then fixed breakfast about 90 minutes before start - bagel, lox and cream cheese, as always.

   The swim is in Lake Erie, and the weather, despite severe storms the day before, is beautiful. I read other race reports that complained about the choppiness of the water, but I didn’t find it to be bad at all - a few waves, but nothing too disruptive. The start was a bit odd - the water was knee-to-thigh deep for about 50 meters, and a lot of people chose to wade instead of swimming at first. I swam from the beginning, but it didn’t seem to be faster than the waders. Dolphin dives would have probably been the way to go; add that to the list of swimming skills I need to learn. Looking at my time, though, I did significantly better relative to the field than usual. I wonder if the waders burned more energy at the start than usual? Sighting wasn’t bad; the size of the lake and the small wave action made buoys a little tough to spot, but on the return leg, the park itself provided plenty of sighting points. The swim in general felt comfortable, but my lack of time in the water was apparent in my inability to hit a consistent pace and find someone to provide a draft.
Swim Time: 39:08
273/715 Men
8/46 Clydesdales

T1: The run to T1 was on a sandy beach, so I took a few extra seconds to towel the sand off of my feet before I socked and shoed. Totally worth it. Otherwise an unexceptional T1; still very, very slow by any competitive standard though.
Time: 3:11
Rank - not listed, but leaders were through in 1:30-1:45, so bad.

Bike: The ride is a flat-to-rolling-hills lollipop through some secondary roads in rural Ohio. Road quality was fine, except for a stretch of normal-looking road that set up a crazy vibration in the bike  - very jarring, almost tooth-rattling. That was only a mile or so each way, however, so it wasn’t bad at all. I had an early scare on the bike - I felt an odd hitch to the pedal push less than a mile out of T1, and I determined that the back wheel seemed to be rubbing a bit. I could not reach the release tabs easily from a seated position, and I didn’t want to make the news as the guy who cut off his finger in the spokes of his back wheel, so I stopped for a few seconds to hop off and open the brake release. With the extra room, the wheel seemed to be fine, so I headed off along the course. At Eagleman, I made two errors: I went out too hard on the bike, and I drank mostly water, neglecting to get enough salt. Today, I planned to go a touch easier overall, and to back off significantly in the last 10 miles. Coming into the 15 miles to go, I was sitting at about 23.5 mph avg, and I decided that I would try to cross the line at around 23 even. Given that the return leg had some decent downhill segments, this let me back off significantly to set myself up for the run. On the nutrition front, I picked up a bottle of Salt Stick to help with salt intake. To store it, and to make sure I took it on schedule, I took 4 cubes out of a sleeve of Shot Blox, inserted a Salt Stick pill, then replaced 2 cubes, added another pill, and finally replaced the last two blocks. This meant that every time I took nutrition from that sleeve, the pill was ready to go. Coming into T2 I felt pretty rested, HR was under control, and I was generally ready to go for a run.
Time: 2:25:33
Rank: 17/715 Men
          1/46 Clydesdales

T2: Nothing remarkable, except that I am remarkably slow at transitions.
Time: 2:04. Argh.

Run: Right out of the gate, I felt like the changes to the bike had paid off. I felt controlled, comfortable, and I was moving at the general pace of the herd. (With the exception of the tiny, fast people who dashed by, doing their tiny-fast-people things. I have learned to accept this.) I was anxious to maintain pacing, and while things were going well off the start, I was anxious to avoid digging myself into a hole. I decided, therefore, to walk 30 seconds at each mile marker, in order to keep HR down. I also decided to take liquids every two miles instead of every mile, as digestion on the run had been a problem previously. All of this worked as planned. The run - a very flat run which looped up and down the streets of the nearby town - went by quickly and easily, and the miles wound down. The only issue I had with the run is that the race organizers did not issue Clydesdales with a “C” tattoo, so identifying my competition was tough. (In Clydesdale culture, asking every largish man who comes by “Are you a Clydesdale?” is considered rude). I had a bit left in the tank, so if I had known who I was racing, I might have been able to pace one of the two racers who apparently passed me on the course.  Coming into the finish chute, I had enough juice left for a solid sprint to the line.
Run Time: 2:08:21
Run Rank: 132/715 Overall
                  11/46 Clydesdale




Even though I could not be certain, I was confident that I had only been passed once or twice by Clydesdales on the run course, and checking the results, I confirmed that I had nabbed 3'rd in division. Katie also made the podium, with a fantastic 2'nd overall finish in the aquabike. The podium medals for this race are enormous, and are designed to fit around the finisher medals - a very neat touch. Overall, I could not have asked for a better A race - great location, great race, and a great relief to get a handle on the 70.3 distance.
Overall Finish: 5:18:17
                      132/715 Overall
                          3/46 Clydesdale