When life hands you lemons …

break out the tequila and salt.

Well, okay, y'all know me well enough by now to know that I didn't head for a bottle after my little binge yesterday. After adding in dinner calories the grand total was 1961. It was a very bad day.

One of the recommendations in Marathoning for Mortals is to eat something salty – they specifically mention pretzels – after your race. My run yesterday, though, wasn't particularly difficult: five miles in 60 minutes, and because it was cool and windy I barely broke a sweat.

I don't usually have a snack in the car – there's that pesky little "no food in the car" rule I have for myself. And the road I've been training on is less than four miles from my house, so it's not like I'm going to keel over before I make it back to my kitchen.

My error was in going straight to the gas station – 14 miles away – instead of stopping off at my kitchen first.

Live and learn.

So the weekly totals look like this:

Daily average of calories consumed: 1386
Daily average of calories burned: 583

Pounds gained: One.

Lainey also is training for a half-marathon and experienced a significant drop in pounds last week by limiting her calories to 1100 per day. I'm sure I need to do this, as well. I've been telling myself that 1400 or 1500 per day is okay, since I'm running about 28 miles per week. Anyone who runs that much ought to be able to eat a little more than a normal dieter, right?

Apparently not.

The food I've been eating, as recommended in the YOAD plan, is nourishing and filling and I haven't been hungry. [Let's not talk about yesterday afternoon, okay?] But obviously there's too much of it. I'm not able, physically or mentally, to increase my activity, other than to continue trying to add more strength training. I'm still not consistently doing two or three weightlifting sessions a week. More like one halfhearted one.

After I threw all that food away yesterday, I thought the best thing to do would be to go knit in our office/family room in front of the television. I had about two hours before I had to leave for my art class at the prison. Here's what I saw when I turned on the TV [it makes for much more colorful blog fodder when one has one's camera at hand all the time]:

and here, after a walkoff home run, was the final score:

Can I just say how happy I was to be watching the Yankees play baseball? Even if it was only pre-season and even if it doesn't count, it makes me think spring really is on the way.

My large tins of steel-cut oats arrived yesterday. I didn't have time to get a batch in the crockpot last night, but I do have plenty of time this morning to make some on the stove, and I intend to do just that. I've learned that oatmeal for breakfast leaves me satisfied longer than any other breakfast option.

And I won't be running out of them for a long, long time.

Fifty-three days until race day.