Month: May 2008

Couch to 5k

Running has got to be my favorite form of exercise. But I was not born to run. All through high school, I had nasty posterior shin splints all through cross country season and right on into track season. I think I understand now more the causes of shin splints and how to deal with them. They are a repetitive stress injury, where stopping the painful activity will make them go away. Also, there some things that can be done to help treat and prevent them. With all that in mind, I have decided to start running again. Slowly this time. Well, not actually _running_ slowly, but rather starting with a slower regimen. I read that one common cause of shin splints is to start up too fast in the spring. My schedule is one I heard of from a friend, called Couch to 5k. It is a nine week program that starts you running in intervals, interleaved with a brisk walk. The first week, you only have to be able to run for 60 second intervals. The second week it is 90 seconds, and so on. Each week you run more and more until you are running for a full half hour. I think this is certainly a reasonable pace. I remember starting cross country and track like we were coming out of a cannon or something. We didn’t waste any time there. And I think this may be part of the problem in that kind of training. Sure it gets you whipped into shape really fast, but your body suffers for it. Or at least mine did.

Len pointed me to the Couch to 5k website, which is a great resource of links to running information and stuff. It takes the interval information from a program hosted by Cool Running. They also have a wealth of other information for runners. One of the links I found was a bunch of ‘pod intervals’, mp3 podcasts of music that is timed to help you stay on track with your running/walking intervals. The one that I chose was Podrunner Intervals: First Day to 5k. It uses mostly word-free music with a good beat to help you keep rhythm.

Hopefully I will be able to get back into this running thing. Walking doesn’t cut it. I can’t imagine that a treadmill would either. I have a deep-set need to move across the ground and see the world moving by; to feel the wind on my legs, arms and face; to lose myself in the run. It is really more than just the exercise that I think motivates me to run.

Practically perfect chocolate chip cookies, my foot!

Our oven is slowly dying. When we bought the house, the inside glass panel on the oven door had one crack that extended from the top to the bottom of the pane. After I started baking bread, I wanted to get some steam action from the oven. One day, I accidentally dripped a single drop of water onto the open door. Sizzle, sizzle, POP! another crack was added to the pane which now has a triangular shard ready to pop right out if you pressed on it.

This is all in addition to the bad prognosis that the doctor oven gave us last time he visited. The igniter died and we had it replaced. We asked him how much a new window for the door would cost and he said it would not be worth it—just replace the oven. Oh, I almost forgot, when the house was still under the ‘homeowner warranty’, the oven went on the fritz and we had to have the front control panel replaced. The oven light still bugs out on us now and then, but hey, it’s getting old.

Now we are faced with a real dilemma. Do we buy a new oven now or should we wait until we can afford a remodel. I normally wouldn’t bother replacing the oven since it isn’t completely dead yet. But we haven’t been able to bake a decent chocolate chip cookie since we moved here. We really want to say it is the oven’s fault. Then we would have an excuse to get a new oven. But the current remodel plan calls for a double wall oven and a separate gas range, so a new oven just before remodeling the kitchen would be a waste of money.

In the mean time, we have been trying very hard to isolate the problem. We have done everything we can think of to get the cookies to turn out. The problem is that they end up flat and pockmarked on the top. We have tried using butter instead of margarine. We have tried soft butter, butter straight from the fridge, different recipes, varying the cooking temperature and time, a little bit more flour, and even refrigerating the dough. Our great lengths have gone as far as asking our neighbors to use their oven. Of course, theirs was a gas oven too, so gas ovens are somewhat suspect in my head. But the cookies never seem to turn out.

One day I recall reading about some chocolate chip cookie recipe that was supposedly created and tested by Consumer Reports. I figured if it is good enough to pass their quality testing, it should work for me. I searched for this fabled recipe and found The Practically Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie. I printed it out and figured we could give it a shot. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. As we are following the recipe, we notice that it looks somewhat familiar. Wait a minute… This is the EXACT SAME RECIPE as the Original Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies. The only difference was that the recipe I found was tailored for use with a stand mixer. Harrrumph! The cookies still turned out flat and pockmarked.

We are inches from making up a batch of cookie dough and taking it over to our local Standard TV and Appliance showroom and telling them that the oven that cooks the best cookie will come home with us.

In the mean time, I will just have to settle for another kind of cookie. Oddly enough, only chocolate chip cookies and lemon sugar cookies seem to be affected by our oven this way. I swear it is the oven….