You know how the Japanese can make a whole ritual out of making tea? Well, that’s how I am with Cheerios and peanut butter.
It’s one of my favorite pre-run meals. In fact, I’d choose a Cheerios-studded spoonful of peanut butter dunked in milk over a Starbucks cake pop any day of the week.
I used to just measure out my Cheerios (anywhere from ½ to 2 cups, using the length of the run and not my highly faulty hunger monitor as a guide), dunk my spoon in the peanut butter jar, and dig in.
Over time, however, this process has evolved somewhat. Now I nibble some of the peanut butter, deposit the rest on the side of the bowl while I savor the milky O’s — which may or may not include banana slices, if I haven’t’ already eaten them all — then finish up with my Cheerios “cake pop.“

This is the route from the White Bridge to Ouabache State Park, with a loop around the campground and back.
This is what I had before meeting Traci yesterday for an “add-on run” at Oubache State Park. We’ve been using an app on her Iphone to map our runs, and our plan was to add a loop through the campground to our current favorite 6.6 mile route.
It didn’t add as much distance as we thought, just a little less than a mile for a 7.5 mile total. What really surprised us, though, was that on a day when we struggled in the heat (after 2-3 weeks of delightfully cool weather), our times weren’t as awful as we expected.
Must’ve been that Cheerios cake pop. J