Learn | Make | Fix | Run

I decided to take a rest week from running for my quad pain to resolve. I ran a base 5K on Sunday to determine if the time off helped. Initially, I did not feel any pain in my quad. I had a sand-in-the-gears feeling for the first mile but no pain. However, I felt stiffness in my quad when walking around on Sunday night and Monday morning. I feel this is not an overuse issue or a pulled muscle but rather a strength issue. I plan to take another week off from running, but I will substitute some strength work on my run days and see if that helps. Taking this short time off is frustrating, but looking at the long view, it’s only a drop in the bucket.

The other day, I made a sheet pan sausage and potato dish. The recipe calls for boiling the potatoes for 15 minutes, allowing them to cool, and smashing them with the palm of your hand to about 1/2-inch thickness. I was short on time and couldn’t let the potatoes cool enough to smash them with my bare hand. I considered wrapping a pot holder in a clean plastic bag or plastic wrap. Then I remembered we had a pair of silicone pot holders. I quickly washed the gloves; they had been sitting idle for years. Then I smashed away without burning my hands. It worked well. The grooves in the palms left an interesting pattern that increased the surface area of the potatoes for oil and seasonings. When I was finished, cleanup was a breeze. When short on time, the silicone pot holder was a big help. I have tried a couple of other methods to smash the potatoes, but all are unwieldy. Using a potato masher on a whole potato creates a situation where you push down with a lot of force on an unstable obj...

It’s been a month since I reduced my weekly mileage and started working on glute activation exercises to combat a quad strain. On Friday, it felt like I had finally made some progress. On Sunday, I thought I had gone backward. I am not sure what to make of it. My Friday run was my scheduled long run for the week. My goal was to run 10K. To my amazement, the run felt mechanically smooth. My heart rate hovered right below the Z2 threshold into Z3. As such, the run felt smooth since I did not need to slow down to get my heart rate back to Z2. The overall pace was slower than my last training block (which is okay and expected), and everything felt good. I was a bullet train floating over the rails. I originally scheduled a four-mile recovery run for Sunday; however, when Sunday rolled around, I forgot and thought I was scheduled for a 5K recovery run. After completing my glute activation workout without incident, I started my recovery run, and my right quad was extremely stiff. It felt fin...

Have you had difficulty keeping your food from floating to the surface while cooking sous vide? This week, I want to share something I learned a while back. I’ll also share a bonus accessory we use when we sous vide. We use Ziplock bags and the water displacement method when we sous vide. For those who may not know, the water displacement method is placing the food in a zipper-style freezer bag and sealing most of the bag. You leave the last bit unsealed so air can escape and slowly submerge the bag into the water. The pressure from the water squeezes out more air from the bag, which makes the bag less likely to float. However, sometimes, the food still likes to float. The best way to keep the food down comes from our metal spoon rest. It’s heavy enough to keep the food down. It can handle being submerged in hot water. Here’s my bonus tip. We found this orange lid that fits our immersion circulator. It keeps the heat in while cooking, so the circulator will likely use less power. It al...

I’m temporarily converting to using my Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) rather than my Heart Rate Reserve Percent (HRR%) heart rate zones as I continue to work on running with better form. There are two reasons for this change. I am unsure how much is grounded in science, but it makes sense for now. Once I get used to the better form, my heart rate will decrease on my easy runs, and I can return to HRR% zones. I have a theory that I am engaging more muscle fibers when I run with better form. I am unsure how I ran three marathons with poor form, but I believe I am recruiting more muscles in my glutes, calves, and quads. I assume these muscles need more oxygen, and it’s one of the reasons my heart rate is spiking at an easy pace. When I run with better form and a slight forward lean, my cadence increases. I’m lifting my legs more. The increase in cadence makes my muscles move more than they would at a slower cadence, which also increases my oxygen demand. Putting these two ideas together...

A couple of years ago, the slight possibility of a public safety power shutoff (PSPS) due to wildfire, combined with the fact that an earthquake could cut off our power for days, resulted in purchasing a portable generator. (I’ll share more about our generator setup in a future post.) Setting up the generator takes time and labor, so I generally wait to see if power comes back quickly before I set it up. The delay in setting up the generator was unacceptable during distance learning and teaching/administrating from home. I bought a small, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for our modem and wi-fi router. Last winter, we lost power for 17 hours starting after dinner. When the power went out, the cable modem and wi-fi router kept working. We did not need to rely on the overloaded and slow cellular service, like everyone around us, to report and learn more information about the outage. My wife was able to continue grading papers in Google Classroom. There were two downfalls with our setup...

Lately, my runs have felt like a large, powerful industrial machine doing its job. When I get my hips forward and my feet to land under my body, I am a stamping machine making punches into sheet metal. My footsteps are not heavy, but they feel very purposeful. I also feel similar to how a large industrial machine moves. Imagine a combine harvester backing up traffic on a rural road. I feel slow. However, I am okay with that since I am running with better form. These days, I wonder how I ran 26.2 miles (three times) with poor form. Last week, I increased my runs to 4 miles and my weekly total to 16 miles. My heart rate while running has been in the lower zone 3, but it has felt like an easy pace and slower than my last training block. The pain in my quad and hip flexor has disappeared. The glute activation warmup is working. On Sunday, I ran without the glute activation warmup to start my run with a drizzle rather than a downpour, and my quads were not happy with me after the run. I’ve ...

I recently needed to patch a large portion of drywall in the garage. I found some neat hacks to fix small holes on Instagram. Basically, the repair person scores the back of the patch to the size of the hole, cracks the patch on the score line without cutting the front paper, and peels away the excess wallboard, leaving the front paper as tape. Then, the back of the patch is mudded and inserted. Finally, the front is mudded. It is a neat trick and a good way to fill the void between the patch and the hole. However, my patch needed much more drywall, and my patch piece was not much larger than the hole itself. I decided to use the power of (a) Lucky Charms (cereal box) for my repair. This is my first time making a template for a repair like this. I made a cardboard template and sized it to fit the hole. Then, I used the template to cut out the drywall patch. I made a mistake and put the template on the wrong side of the drywall. However, since it was for the garage and the wall is textu...