Twitter Magic, Tempos and Recipes!
One of my favorite easy week night dates is the “Whole Foods Picnic”. Grabbing food to-go and heading to the park for a picnic is much cheaper (and healthier?) than eating out at a restaurant, and allows for a bit more conversation.
Usually I hit up the UWS Whole Foods since it’s closer to my apartment, but since I was coming from an event in midtown, Dan and I headed to Columbus Circle on Tuesday night and took our food down to Riverside Park. We enjoyed the scenery and nice cool river breeze with made the hot temps bearable.
I ❤ Riverside Park
The only downside to date nights is when Dan’s alarm goes off at 5:15 am, since he gets into work around 7. Not so pleasant. I’m usually able to fall back asleep (or half-asleep) until my alarm goes off, but I was just not feeling it. On Wednesday morning around 5:45 am or so, I tweeted:
All the sudden, replies popped up!
It was like MAGIC! I had a longer run planned for the morning anyways since I am going away this weekend, so I was thrilled to have company. I ❤ Twitter for reasons like this. I met up with Susan, Megan, Ali and Kelly for some easy miles, and ended up at 11 miles for the day with an average of around 8:00/mile. Perfect!
Tonight, I headed to Central Park for a CPTC workout. Only my second week of workouts back, I didn’t know what to expect from the 4-mile tempo run at half-marathon pace and wanted to go off feel. I aimed for 6:45-7:00 miles but got caught up with my group and ended up a bit faster than that. Whoops!
It was a tad longer than 4 miles, but an average pace of 6:25. YIKES! This was a pretty hard effort, particularly struggling in mile 3, but the workout was completed at my exact half-marathon pace so I suppose I nailed the task at hand.
I am trying to make an effort to not go too hard in these early weeks of training, as I’m building up my base and I want to have enough in me to rock workouts in later weeks. I suppose it’s a fine line I’m dealing with from not wanting to burn out or peak too early, to really pushing myself beyond where I’ve been to get to the next level.
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Backing it up to the weekend, I wanted to share some recipes I made this past weekend for “cooking club” with my friends. And, they’re healthy and delicious!
Kale Quinoa Goddess Salad
(based off Angela’s Weekend Glow Kale Salad)
- Kale (I used 1 large bag from Trader Joe’s– removing the stems)
- Tip from Angela: massage your dressing directly into the kale before adding other ingredients and let sit for about 15 minutes to absorb!
- Quinoa (1 cup, cooked)
- Feta Cheese
- Diced Red Onion
- Chopped Zucchini
- Walnuts
- Orange Bell Pepper
- Sliced Avocado
- Shredded Carrots
- Baby Tomatoes
Mix it all together, and top with your favorite dressing! I love Annie’s Goddess dressing, it goes perfectly with any vegetable and added a great flavor to the (kinda) bitter kale.
I have only tried to make kale chips, but I’ve never had it in a salad! I never knew what went well with it, until I saw Angela’s recipe and figured it’d be the perfect veggie-packed salad. It was so flavorful with the feta, the quinoa added a bit of substance and texture, and I love tomato and zucchini in anything.
Yum!
I also made dessert this weekend. I’m not going to share the exact recipe since I made some tweaks given what I had on hand and it didn’t turn out as well as I’d like. It was still good, but the original recipe looks and probably tastes better– so make this instead! Deep Dish Cookie Pie by Chocolate Covered Katie
Ready to go in the oven...
This recipe was appealing to me because it uses a secret ingredient: chickpeas! Coincidentally, I’ve had about 6 cans of chickpeas sitting around waiting to be used. This recipe called for 2 cans, so maybe I’ll be making a few more batches.
Everyone really enjoyed the taste of the cookie pie (which I cut into bars), and nobody could guess the secret ingredient! They agreed they tasted ‘healthified’ but not in a bad way. They were super gooey and chocolatey considering I used about double the amount of mini chocolate chips. Yum!
I am headed to my friend’s lake house this weekend, so running may be at a low but fun and drinking will be at a high and I can’t wait to get out of the city and enjoy the great outdoors 🙂
Have you tried any new recipes this week? What do you have planned for the weekend?
Run, Lindsay, Run! 
Hooray! I love twitter too. Glad I got to see and run with your 3x in the last week – I like this pattern!
And the kale salad looks like a winner – I’m never quite sure what to do with kale when I get it from my CSA….
Yum, that salad looks good!
Not to sound creepy (ha), but I’m pretty sure I saw you in the park…I was finishing up my own 4 mile tempo right near some CPTC guys (i think we took the same course?) Awesome tempo – you are super speedy!
Haha not creepy at all! Wave and shout hi next time! 🙂
I’m a huge fan of the Whole Foods date, haha. Also, the Chelsea Market/Highline date is a good one too.
The kale salad looks awesome. When I’ve tried to do things with raw kale, it always tastes too, uhh, kale-y ha. I’ll try massaging, etc next time.
As for the weekend, I have a Governor’s Island picnic date today and a long run tomorrow.
I dig twitter, too, and am jealous of all you UES’s group runs! I’m not too far from ya’ll! (NYU Med Center)
I’m running that 4 mile race tmw, and I’m going to try not to bitch about it, because I know it will be super painful, as all shorter races are. And, then, who knows. I’m probably going to try to do a long (slow) run on Sunday and hoping I’m not too sore from Sat! And, maybe, seeing Harry Potter.
OMG, deep dish cookie pie! That looks amazing. I heart Twitter for the same reasons as you – so glad to run with you this week!! Hopefully we can keep this up 🙂
Also, anything involving Whole Foods and a picnic sounds like such a fun, relaxing date! I heart summer.
Your twitter meetup runs sound awesome! Jealous!! Never thought I would say that about a morning run. I am so not a morning person and need to start practicing running in the morning…I have a feeling my hatred of mornings doesn’t help me on race day (morning)!
Those cookie bars look AWESOME.
Just staying in the city for the weekend and enjoying summer…and doing the 4 miler in the park tomorrow.
I like so many things in this post!! Twitter certainly can be magical…it’s so awesome that you 4 live so close and can meet up at the last minute 🙂
Great job on the 4 miles – those were very speedy! I am trying to keep myself in check a bit and not peak too early as well. Not always easy.
I might do a whole foods picnic for dinner tonight! Hope you’re having a great weekend!
twitter is such a great way to connect with nyc runners! i love it!
OMG that salad and that cookie pie. DELISH!
hope you’ve had a good weekend! xo
I’m sort of jealous of all you NYC runners – you have such a great blogging/Twitter/running community. I don’t usually find running buddies through Twitter but I do end up signing up for a lot of races that way. It’s both wonderful and awful – someone will Tweet about a race, a bunch of others jump on board, and the next thing you know I’m shelling out money on another registration. I do love it though – it’s fun to have people around you who keep you motivated to push yourself in training.
Also, speaking of Twitter…I just saw that you’re thinking about doing B2B this year (yes, I might have Twitter stalked you to discover this information, haha)!? The crazy idea to do it has been brewing in my head ever since I read about Aron and Page doing the challenge last spring. And now that I know someone else is doing it – well, the motivation is that much higher!!! I haven’t signed up yet, though, because I figured I’d just register once B2B registration opened this fall. But do you think there’s an advantage to just signing up now??
The picnic date is a great idea! I love Riverside park, I only wish I lived closer to it.
This weekend I’m going to a family reunion bbq for my boyfriend’s family — they have a pool so I’m looking forward to that!
Am I this behind on my reader that I haven’t read this post yet?? It was great running with you in the wee hours of the morning, hopefully we can do it again soon! (And go to the Boat Basin…I’ve never been!)