Warm and fuzzies

By: Matt Frazier

Saturdays have been my “personal post” days recently, as opposed to the more useful, entertaining info that isn’t about me that I try to post during the week.  That’s been working well, so I’m sticking with it.  Let’s get personal!

Helping people

An email I got from a reader named Bridget this week:

I just wanted to let you know that I completed my FIRST marathon today (the Austin Marathon!!) with no injuries and a smile the whole way. I began training in October and had become a vegetarian in August; your website was INVALUABLE to my training (both the practical advice and the nice mental breaks). It’s nice to know other “no meat athletes” are out there when everyone else is questioning how you can run a marathon without eating chicken!

So thank you and your beautiful wife (and soon to be baby!) for putting the time into this website-it’s changing lives!!!!!!!

I was a little scared when I decided at the beginning of this year to change my blog’s content and start posting only WHAT I felt like posting, WHEN I felt like posting. But thanks to Bridget and a slew of other readers who have recently taken the time to drop me a line and let me know they appreciate what I’m doing, I no longer have any doubt that it was the right decision. As I’ve said before, helping people accomplish impossible goals (without eating animals) is absolutely the thing that keeps this going. So thank you, readers. And congratulations, Bridget.

Helping animals

By my calculation, traffic to this website during the month of January raised just over ninety dollars for the Humane Society of the United States. This is on pace to exceed my goal of donating $1,000 to help save animals this year, and I can’t tell you how proud that makes me. Better still, February is on pace to be even bigger. And you should feel good too, since it’s you whose daily check-ins actually earn that money. (Feed subscribers: don’t forget to visit the actual site every once in a while to help those animals.)

I’ve emailed the Humane Society about setting up some sort of page where you can keep track of how much we’ve raised, and donate more if you’d like. Haven’t heard back from them yet. (Hmm, if someone were emailing me wanting to give me money…oh well, maybe they have lots of people doing that.)

New: Featured Cookbooks

Rather than continuing with the the haphazard cooking and random adaptations of recipes I’ve done for most of this blog’s life, I’ve decided to clean up the cooking around here.  Now that I’m a big-boy blogger, I’ve found most authors eager to let me share some of their recipes (completely unbastardized!) on No Meat Athlete.

So here’s what I’m going to do: Each week or month, depending on how many recipes I’m allowed to share, I’ll feature a certain cookbook that I really like in the sidebar.  And while it’s featured, that’s where most of my recipes will come from.  You dig?  This week it’s Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen, a cookbook whose recipes are a little more involved than what I usually cook, but always worth the extra effort.

50K’s fate hangs in the balance

It’s been about a week and a half since the second blizzard hit us, and finally some of the snow is starting to melt.  But there’s still well over a foot on the ground in a lot of places, and I can only imagine that the trails aren’t any prettier.  So my 50K next week at Hashawha Hills is in serious jeopardy.  I heard that the race directors are making a decision this weekend about it.  Seriously, if we’re going to be running through eight inches of snow, I’d just as soon have them cancel it.

That’s all the random hodgepodge I have for today.  Lots of great posts in line for this week, including the recovery-drink follow up to 5 Keys to the Pre-Workout Meal Everyone Should Know, and that major interview I mentioned that I’m over the moon about (hint: Born to Run, not the author, or The Boss).  Assuming nothing falls through, that is… fingers crossed.