“Mom, are you nuts?” she asked. “It’s only two days til weigh in!”

Rowan and Colleen rock out to "I'm Sexy and I Know It" after both lost at least a pound in Thursday's weigh-in.

It’s probably a good thing she intervened, because all four members of the Fitness Protection Program wound up losing at least a pound at Thursday’s home weigh-in — just a week after placing 6th out of 101 teams in the first month’s official standings of Wells Weighs In.

In some ways, there was almost more excitement this week. Maybe it was because of the 2-hour school delay, but I think we’re also feeling some momentum. Colleen’s been adding a lap a day to her gym running and is up to about ¾ of a mile now without stopping. Rowan’s been dutifully working out every day, and on Wednesday she followed up 1½ hours of volunteer dog walking at the animal shelter with an iron-clad display of will power, accompanying a friend to McDonald’s without feeling the need to order anything herself.

Ben’s been swimming and playing baseball, and I’m finally adjusting to Thursday weigh-ins — enough so that (with Colleen’s help) I held the line on Tuesday, my former pigout day, and wound up losing two pounds this week.

We celebrated by carving up 10 quarts of strawberries, on sale for a buck each at Meijer this week. After making strawberry pancake “tacos” with fat free Cool Whip, Colleen and I cleaned out the kitchen freezer and organized all the fruits and veggies so they’re easily accessible for smoothies and stir fries, both of which are extremely popular around here these days.

The other was a pair of dull gray wool Lands End socks like my grandpa would’ve worn.

The rainglo Reeboks were just unwrapped at Christmas (because I’m too cheap to buy myself  anything trendy).

The gray wool socks are about Ben’s age, having arrived somewhere in the late ’90s.

The rainglo Reeboks have a big fat hole in the toe after I’ve worn them running like maybe THREE times.

The dull gray wool socks are still going strong.

Such is my lot in life….

The start of the 2011 Fort4Fitness half marathon in Fort Wayne.

I posed a similar question in a running post last fall, in which I speculated that if everyone on the planet who was capable took up running — as human physiology was apparently designed to do — then a lot of really big, seemingly intractable problems, everything from obesity to stress-related discord large and small, might just go away.

Now I can’t help wondering what a difference it would make if everyone with a computer blogged about their health and fitness goals.

Even if no one read what you wrote, the possibility that they could would surely make you try harder. In the process, you’d discover people out there who are a lot like you — and get inspired by others who are way out of your league.

Bearrunner

I’m referring, of course, to yesterday’s interview with ex-pro footballer and blogger Michael Dobson, and another interview a few weeks ago with a runner-blogger called Bearrunner, whose rigorous training for a triathlon just astounds me. Just yesterday he followed up a 60-minute spinning class with 2000 meters in the pool.

I have no idea why either of those guys sometimes read this blog. But knowing that they do was part of what compelled me to break out of a running slump and challenge myself to a 6.6-mile run on a new course a few days ago.

Blogging obviously plays a huge role in helping me maintain my weight loss. But it also helps me to aim higher with my diet, pushing me to not just eat less but eat better food (most of the time).

But he was devastated that his biggest fan and harshest critic — his father — was too sick with cancer to see him hoist the trophy. Dobson buried his championship medal with his father that September. By the following season, knee injuries forced him to retire.

Now a personal fitness trainer who runs a business called Flexercise, Dobson is training to run the London Marathon in April as a part of a cancer fund-raiser to honor his father. He charts his progress (and runs cool photos of his runs and family life) on his blog, runtilyoudrop.wordpress.com.

Q. You say on your blog that you used to watch the London Marathon with your dad, but that you were never able to participate due to football. Did he have some personal interest in that race?

Dobson with his father and daughter

A. My dad was very much into his sports. He had no personal interest in
the London marathon but we used to watch anything sports related that was on
TV at the time. If it wasn’t the London marathon, it would be
Wimbledon(tennis), skiing, football, golf, rugby, you name it, we watched
it. My dad just appreciated talent in all sports and it made me very sporty
myself. I’ve played a lot of sport over the years and had a professional
football(soccer) career for 10 years but no sports seemed as impossible and
grueling as the marathon, so it become a challenge and a dream of mine
since watching it with my dad at an early age.
Q. What was the championship medal that you buried with your dad?

A.  The championship medal was a medal I won when playing football for a
club called Walsall F.C. I was the captain of Walsall FC whilst they were in
league two and I helped them win the Championship and move up to league one.
I was only the second captain of the clubs history to ever lift the
championship trophy, so it was a special moment for me and my family. My dad
was ill with cancer at the time and too far away to ever come and watch me
play, but as he made me the player I was, I felt like I owed him something
when he passed away later that year. My gift back to him was to bury the
championship medal with him, as it meant nothing to me without him alive.
You can read the full story about our relationship at
http://www.justgiving.com/MichaelDobsonFlexercise/

Q.  How were you able to take up running after the knee injury?

Dobson as a personal trainer

A. My knee injuries are mainly from cartilage(tears) operations but I had one
which was micro-fracture on the medial condyle of my femur, which was a
little more serious, and the last operation I had a small lesion on the
anterior cruciate ligament which had to be shaved away. I had 4 operations
on my right knee and 2 on my left during my career and because of the lack
of cartilage left, it’s left me with grade 3 arthritis and osteophytes in
both knees growing outwards from both medial and lateral condyles. This made
any twisting or turning motion very painful and I was told to retire before
ending up in a wheelchair. Obviously I did but I wasn’t going to lose all my
fitness, so I trained as a personal trainer and kept myself in shape.

I am capable of doing things in straight lines (running) but impact should really
be kept to a minimum. Unfortunately I have this dream to run the London
marathon and it’s even more important to me now I’m doing it in memory of my
dad. Running is not great for my knees and every step hurts but I’ve learnt
to deal with the pain over the years from playing football with it day in
day out. It hurts less to run quick than it does to run slow, so a lot of my
runs are very quick with big mileage!

I try to give myself lots of rest between runs so I rarely run back to back days unless it is a slow recovery
run. After the marathon I will ease back BUT I’m too active to ever be held
down. What happens to my knees in the future will happen…..it’s already
begun so I can’t change it now! Que sera, sera!!!

Q. What’s your favorite place to run?

A. I run the same route whenever I can because it is in a local park. I
hate stopping for traffic so the park is an ideal solution to keep moving
and if my knees are sore I can use the softer ground (grass) rather than the
paths. I do enjoy a countryside route when I’m on a recovery run so I can
take in the scenery but I tend to run so quick that most of my runs are a
blur!

Q. Do you follow a diet or a particular philosophy of eating, or do you
figure that you just “work it off” between your training and work as a
fitness coach?

A. I don’t really follow a diet as such. I went through a football career
being loaded up with carbs for energy to perform at my best and since
retiring it hasn’t really changed. I love meat and chicken in particular,
and with rice and pasta, that is a big part of my diet. I do realize that if
you eat a lot of carbs and don’t burn them off they sit on your body which
is why I exercise all the time.

I try not to eat too much junk but I do have treats here and there and I don’t see the point in not eating them at all. We are put on the planet to enjoy life so I go by the rule that if you eat
bad foods, you need to do more to burn them off. I’m in good shape and I’m
very healthy, with a low bodyfat percentage so it’s fine for me, but not
necessarily for others. Everyone’s body is different so we all need to find
what works for us!

The other problem I have is that I work on my clients
free time (once they’ve finished work), so getting meals in at the right times
is very difficult. Sometimes I just eat when I can but it can be at the
completely wrong time of day. My clients come first!

Q. What do you typically eat for breakfast?

A. I try to eat big for breakfast when I can/have the time, so I’ll eat
some fruit (apple & banana), a bowl of cereal and some toast. Sometimes if
time allows I’ll cook some poached eggs too.

Q. What’s your biggest weakness, food-wise? Does it bug you when you
succumb, or do you not fret about it?

A. My biggest weakness is a Chinese take away! I love it and it is a
regular treat for my wife and I. I work hard during the week so that I can
enjoy a treat like a Chinese take away on the weekend but whilst I’m
training for the marathon, I have cut out treats like this until the race is
done!

I don’t mind having the odd Chinese and it doesn’t bother me. What
would bother me is if I had a few take away’s in the same week. This has
happened before because I have been away and just grabbed what I could get,
but my body didn’t like it and I felt very sluggish, heavy, tired and
lethargic. It’s a sign of too much bad food!!!

Q. What’s your favorite meal at your favorite restaurant?

A. Being a chicken lover I do enjoy a place called Nando’s which serves
chicken, chicken and more chicken, and you guessed it……I have chicken
wings followed by a chicken breast in a bun with spicy rice.

Q. How do you adjust your diet during injuries and periods of less running?

A. During injuries my diet doesn’t change too much but my portion sizes
do. I tend to find I haven’t got quite as big of an appetite so I just eat
less. There are still ways to exercise through most injuries so I’m never
completely exercise free!

Q. Imagine you’ve been deported to the U.S. and find yourself on Death Row.
What would you request as your last meal on Earth, assuming it could be
anything you like, prepared by anyone you choose, living or dead?

A. That’s a tough one! It would have to be a toss up between a Chinese or
a Nando’s (both with chicken dishes of course) and I would love to be served
just one more time by my wife and kids so I could tell them how special they
are to me. I would have said my dad so we could have one last chat and say
things that were left unsaid before he passed away, but if I’m on death row,
no doubt I’d be seeing him soon and would have plenty of time to chat!

Q. Anything you’d like to add?

A. I believe that nothing in life is impossible and if we really want something
and we really want to achieve, with some hard work, WE CAN! Failure isn’t
about not reaching a goal, it’s about not putting in the effort to reach for
it in the first place. Preparation is key to success so I go by the moto….

‘Fail to prepare; prepare to fail!’

Be the best you can be, be a winner!

Follow Michael Dobson and Flexercise on…..

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Flexercise.PT

Twitter: http://twitter.com/flexercise

Amos Hege's tombstone in the old Murray Cemetery in Wells County.

I don’t think so. It wasn’t much of a “visit,” because I didn’t want to lose my momentum on my longest run thus far of 2012. Still, this pilgrimage to a Civil War soldier’s grave was pretty much the whole point.

Starting the year injured and uncertain about race plans, I decided to make destination runs part of my goals for the year. This run wasn’t even on the list. It didn’t occur to me because I’ve only recently begun embracing neighborhood runs as part of a “sustainable living” kick.

The idea of visiting Amos Hege’s tombstone in the Murray Cemetery was appealing because of the family history angle. But it also gave me a 6.6-mile run in our neighborhood, where I’ve never gone more than 4 miles before.

It didn’t hurt that it came on a gorgeous spring-like day with little wind. It was tempting to stop and take cell phone photos — of hoof prints by the side of the road, an old-fashioned windmill, guys harvesting maple syrup in the woods — but I didn‘t want to stop the run. I didn‘t even pause for a photo at the grave, electing to go back for pictures afterward.

I wish I could lay my hands on Great-Great-Grandpa Hege’s obituary, which I’ve got in a file folder somewhere. I know he was born in 1846, died in 1929 and was among the Union troops who burned Atlanta under the command of General Sherman. It seems like his obituary said he was among the last of the Wells County Civil War vets to pass away, but I can’t say for sure, it’s been so long since I read it.

At any rate, it was awfully fun to pay him a brief visit on a satisfying run on a beautiful day.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Just about every recipe, it seemed, started with butter, sugar and flour. But the Rocky Ridge Pudding — a full-bodied, multi-textured Early American dessert named for the Missouri farm on which The Little House on the Prairie author and her husband Almanzo lived for more than 50 years — seemed promising.

Its primary ingredients are corn meal, apples, milk and molasses. No flour, no butter, just a bit of sugar.

The main problem is that it takes three hours to bake. It filled the house with such a delectable aroma that finally we couldn’t stand it and took it out an hour early.

“Those pioneers took way too much time to do stuff,” Rowan said.

The kids felt a bit bait-and-switched on this one, I think, because it smelled so amazing but registered only as subtly sweet on our modern sugar-blasted taste buds. The texture would surely have been better if we’d baked it the full three hours, giving the corn meal a chance to solidify or maybe even get crusty.

I’d make this again — but only if we put it in a crock pot and then left the house so we weren’t tortured by the aroma.

The Recipe:

1/3 cup cornmeal

2 cups scalded milk (see No. 2 below)

1/2 cup molasses

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 teaspoon ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 eggs

3 apples, peeled and sliced

2 cups cold milk

1. Spray a 2-quart baking dish with cooking spray.

2.  The recipe calls for cooking the cornmeal and scalded milk over a double boiler, but we had no patience for this step, electing instead to use unscalded milk and cook the combination in a sauce pan. From what I’ve read, scalding milk was done for purification purposes and isn’t really necessary unless you want to be absolutely authentic.

3. Remove from heat and stir in molasses, sugar and seasonings. Beat in eggs.

4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Arrange apples on bottom of baking dish and cover with cooked mixture, then pour cold milk over top.

5. Bake for three hours. “Milk will be absorbed and pudding will be browned,” says the recipe. Ours was kinda brown on top, but almost certainly still too runny. I liked the old fashioned molasses flavor, but would’ve preferred letting the pudding solidify more — but that’s what we get for shorting the cooking time!

Colleen's first "shiner"

After our team’s 31.5-pound loss yesterday in the first round of Wells Weighs In, we decided to celebrate by sacrificing the chocolate bunny that had been confined to our gym locker ever since last Easter.

Ben, our four-person team’s biggest loser at 10.5 pounds in the first month, got to hold the bunny, offering up pieces to his sisters but gnawing on the bulk of it himself. He was still holding the carcass with one hand and whacking racquetballs with the other when he caught Colleen with an elbow, giving her the first real “shiner” of her life.

Jeez,” responded Bob after I texted him the photo, “can we just arrange for those 2 to grow up in different townships?”

All was forgiven, though, or nearly so, amid the celebration of a team loss that exceeds 5 percent of our collective body weight and likely put us near the top of the first month’s results.

Have I mentioned that there’s $1,000 at stake here?

Ben discovers he's lost 10.5 pounds in the past month -- aided by logging lots of hours in the pool on the swim team.

With three of the Fitness Protection Program’s members age 18 or under, the prospect of potentially winning this contest — determined by percentage lost rather than total pounds — has them taking this project much more seriously than they might otherwise.

Three of us weighed in at 6 a.m. Thursday at the local YMCA. (Ben, who couldn’t drag himself out of bed in time to join us, weighed in after school). Rowan lost 6.0 pounds, Colleen lost 7.0 pounds and I lost 8.0 pounds — a figure that’s a bit misleading because not only did I let myself overindulge a few days before the contest started, but we went out for breakfast before the first official weigh-in.

The girls and I (including Cassie, who’s not on the team but came along to offer support) went out for breakfast AFTER the weigh-in this time. I was surprised how uninterested I was in most of the menu. I’ve gotten pretty particular about how I like my eggs (whites only, with lots of veggies and little or no cheese or oil), I eat very little meat and if I’m going to eat bread it either needs to be 35-calorie-per-slice Healthy Goodness or REALLY, REALLY GOOD.

We all got blueberry pancakes. They were good, but probably not worth the calories — especially because I kept vacillating between the old me, who wanted to soak the pancakes with syrup, and the new me, who  kept wishing I’d brought a measuring spoon.

Rowan and Colleen at breakfast.

Much as I prefer running to gym workouts, I’ve been curious about these 15-minute workouts everybody seems to be talking about lately.

Not so curious that I want to click through endless web pages at  Women’s Health magazine — which would surely gobble up the spare quarter hour I’d hope to devote to a workout. But this boot camp workout I found on you tube seemed like a good candidate, appearing fairly intense yet requiring no gear other than a pair of athletic shoes.

When I tested it out yesterday at the gym — and just so you know, my “gym” is literally an old city basketball court with a workout room and a racquetball court — I was shocked.

The second and third sets of lunges and plank/pushup/mountain climber intervals just slayed me. I guess this exposes my ignorance, but I never realized lunges could actually tax your breathing. Muscle burn, yes — that I expected. But lunges are such a slow-motion movement, I just couldn’t believe it when I started huffing and puffing.

So anyway, now I’m a believer. I’m not going to quit running or playing racquetball to devote my life to 15-minute workout evangelism, but for those days when you just don’t have an hour to really work up a sweat, this mini-workout rocks.

An awesome side benefit: Hard as it makes you work, 15 minutes simply isn’t long enough to build up much of a sweat. So you could conceivably do this without needing a shower afterward.

For the record, here’s the order of the exercises in the video:
1. 3-minute warmup jog
2. 100 meters of butt kicker jog
3. 100 meters lunges with torso twist
4. 10 jumping jacks
5. Plank (like pushup position) — hold 15 seconds
6. From plank, bring knees to elbows 10 times
7. Mountain climbers — 10 seconds
8. 10 pushups
9. 10 jumping jacks
10. Side shuffles with side lunge touch turns — 20 seconds
11. 50 meter lunges
12. 50 meter lunges with shoulder press maneuver
13. Jog 100 meters
14. Butt kickers 50 meters
15. High-knee jog 50 meters
16. Plank position — hold 15 seconds
17. Knees to elbows
18. Mountain climbers
19. 5 pushups
20. Jog 100 meters
21. Buttkickers 50 meters
22. High-knee jog 50 meters
23. Side shuffle/lunge turn
24. Side lunges in place — 15 each side
25. Plank — 15 second hold

Naturally there was a basketball game going on when we got there, so we had to go up and around through the workout room to get there, toting two large bags of Valentine’s treats as if they were gym bags.

The good news is, Grandma got the kids healthier selections this year. There was much less chocolate than usual. Still, Colleen didn’t want to take any chances.

“I know my limitations,” she said.

While we were there, we said hi to the chocolate bunny still hanging around from last Easter, then went over and got in a quick game of free-for-all racquetball.

Annnie Bananie

I should’ve taken her flowers.

It was the day before Valentine’s Day, so I guess I had chocolate on the brain when I went to visit my 99-year-old grandma, Annie-Bananie.

You should’ve seen the look on her face when I walked in the room carrying a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover candies.

“Did you ever get chocolate on Valentine’s Day when you were a girl, Grandma?” I ask. “Did you even celebrate Valentine’s Day?”

She shakes her head no. “We used to have chocolate, maybe at Christmas,” she said. “I liked it very much.”

She takes a piece from the box, but it’s hard to chew and gets stuck in her  teeth and she winds up throwing half the piece away.

“Do you remember taking a lunch pail to school, Grandma?” I ask. “What did you take?”

“Sandwiches,” she says. “A piece of fruit, maybe an apple.”

“Did you ever take lard sandwiches?” I ask, thinking of Rhoda Janzen’s weird discovery about her mother’s school lunches from Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.

“No,” she says. “I never heard of that.”

They got their drinks from the school water pump. While she’s telling me this, her roommate, Frankie comes in. “We had drinking fountains at my school,” Frankie says. She’s younger than Grandma, and grew up in Melbourne, Australia.

“The big city,” she says. “Two million people.”

Frankie

Frankie sympathizes with Grandma, trying to remember things in response to the questions I ask her. She mentions a lecture she once heard in which the speaker talked about memories getting filed away and then tossed in the corner, like so many ping pong balls. “And when you get older, and you have so very many ping pong balls piled up in the corner, and someone asks you to remember some specific thing from a specific year, there are so very many ping-pong balls to sort through to find the right one,” Frankie says in her Australian accent.

Grandma seems irritated at first that Frankie has joined our conversation, but after awhile they develop a pattern in which Frankie talks about something from her childhood, which prompts Grandma to dredge up a memory of her own.

Frankie says that if any of her brothers acted up at the dinner table, her father would throw the salt shaker at them. Which prompts Grandma to remember what her dad would do: Bop the boys on the head with a knife. Of course, there were more of them to keep track of; Grandma had seven brothers to Frankie’s three.

“Did you all fit around the same dinner table?” Frankie asks. There were 14 kids altogether, plus her parents and grandparents.

Grandma nods. She remembers that her sister Leona always sat on one side of her; she can’t remember who sat on the other side.

Frankie talks about wishing for a sister, but never getting one. Which prompts Grandma to tell about she and her sister Minnie took turns going to church, since they were the same size and shared one church dress between them.

That makes them sound poor, and in a way they were, though maybe that was just how frugal farm people with 14 kids lived in the early 20th century. But they never went hungry, Grandma says. “We always had enough to eat.”

Her favorite thing her mother made for dinner was potato soup. And her favorite dessert? Home-canned peaches.

That reminds Frankie of the fruit trees in her back yard growing up: Four plum trees, she remembers, and a pear tree. Her mother made bunches and bunches of plum jam.

“We had fruit trees,” Grandma says. “Apple and cherry. And a pear tree. And a peach tree, too, but it didn’t amount to much.”

Frankie remembers getting milk from a dairy in her neighborhood. Grandma remembers milking the cows on the farm. They kept the milk in a big tub in the milk house. She even remembers some of the cows’ names: Lucy. Betsy. Norman. “I liked milking the cows,” she says. “I liked it very much.”

Frankie notes she was never around horses growing up, whereas that’s the only way Grandma’s family got anywhere, other than walking. Grandma remembers her mom getting the horse and buggy ready to go to Vera Cruz for groceries, and her sister Helen running after her and wanting to go along, but not being allowed to go. “Helen just cried and cried,” she says.

Grandma remembers other things, things she hasn’t talked about in a long time: Being afraid, as a little girl, to light the candles on the Christmas tree. Wearing a little cape to school at Christmastime, and being chased by a dog along the way.

“I was just a little girl. That was a long time ago,” Grandma says, reminding us once again that she’s 99 years old.

“You’re not so old, Anna,” Frankie says. “You’re still in double digits. I can remember being so excited when I turned 10, because I was in double digits.”

And then they discover something they have in common: Both of their mothers loved growing flowers, and both of them did, too. Both of them miss the flowers, like so many other things.

And that’s when I realize I should’ve brought Annie-Bananie flowers for Valentine’s Day instead of chocolate.

I’ll have to remember that, for next year.