Taper is awesome because for a week or so you have all this time on your hands where you’re not supposed to be working out.

I always say I’m going to use this time to get all the things done that I haven’t been able to do because of training and being tired, but then I end up just watching a ton of tv and packing for the race.

On Tuesday, the stars aligned and I had a day off from workouts AND a day that I was working at home. Amazing. So I decided to embark on a cooking adventure. Nate had picked up short ribs from the farmers market and I figured I’d try to make a meal. Or at least something that took a little more time than frying eggs and steaming vegetables. The recipe I used is here and it was a amazing.

The cooking though didn’t exactly go off without a hitch as I almost lit my house on fire before any food touched the pan. Or should I clarify, I lit my pan of oil on fire.

This was the biggest fire I’ve ever caused and as I stood paralyzed staring at the flames all I was thinking is, “now I know how people burn their houses down”. I felt completely overwhelmed by how big the fire was and how ill-equiped I was in fighting this fire. I couldn’t find the fire extinguisher, so I made a lame attempt at putting baking soda on the thing, but tell me how this works with a three foot fire and this little paper box? Next I tried tossing the lid back on the pan which didn’t really work. I ended up getting a bunch of towels and just covering the whole thing up, like a big heap of trash. I do not recommend this, but it actually worked, although I sacrificed a bunch of towels. Luckily I found the fire extinguisher later, right below the shelf of towels. Yup.

This was really the most exciting thing I did all week. Having a ton of extra time actually begins to have the reverse effect. As you start getting used to the extra time it starts to feel like you have no time at all.

Now I’m sitting here, two days before I leave for Whistler and I still haven’t packed a single thing. So I better get to it.

Oh by the way, if you actually made it this far in the blog post, I had a small article published in my alumni magazine about how my experience at Bucknell University has continued to influence me today. So you can find that here on Page 72.