I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

I exercise every day because I lack the discipline to take a day off.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’d love to hear your comments.

Image: zirconicusso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1. Before you begin. Find a training schedule, courtesy of Hal Higdon. (Thanks, David B., for the link.)
2. Think about how long it will take to work through the training schedule. Allow a couple of extra weeks to sort out the dodgy hamstring.
3. Identify a target date for the race, then look for a half marathon in a beautiful place that you’ve always wanted to visit. Don’t register for it just yet. Are you sure you can do this?
4. Start the training schedule on a cold, windy day, and don’t stretch or warm up enough. Be joined by a friend who runs a little too fast for you, then try to keep up with him. Quit running after a couple of miles when that hamstring seizes up.
5. Decide it might be prudent to spend the two spare weeks walking, stretching, and rehabbing that troublesome muscle.
6. Take advantage of the extra two weeks to read the training schedule more carefully. Learn some new stretches.
7. Start the training schedule again, determined to do it right.
8. Week 1, Day 1. Head in the general direction of the park with a plan to walk three miles to warm up and then work through the “stretch and strengthen” regimen.
9. Stop to meet a friend for coffee first, though, and arrive at the park in pouring rain. Adjust the plan to start with the weight training.
10. Discover that you don’t have the $1.75 for admission to the fitness center. Berate yourself for never carrying any cash.
11. Think about rearranging the week’s schedule, but decide that Week 1, Day 1, is a little early to start playing fast and loose with the regimen.
12. Drive to a nearby convenience store with an ATM.
13. Spend $4.25 in ATM fees and bank service charges to withdraw some cash.
14. Buy a pack of gum and a scratch-off lottery ticket at the convenience store to get some change, because you know that the fitness center won’t have change for a $20 bill.
15. Win $2 on the lottery ticket!
16. Drive back to the fitness center.
17. Work out, trying not to look like too much of an idiot for not knowing what half of the machines are for.
18. Do some stretches.
19. Go for a 3-1/2-mile walk, more conscious than ever of how much you prefer the walking trail to the gym.
20. Go home and do some more stretches.
21. Week 1, Day 2. Stretch as if your life depends on it. Then stretch some more.
22. Walk half a mile to warm up.
23. Run three miles, paying careful attention for the first sign of trouble with the hamstring, and stopping a couple of times for water breaks.
24. Walk three miles.
25. Stretch again.
26. Go home thinking that you might be able to do this.
27. Week 1, Day 3. Wake up relieved not to be racked with pain.
28. Stretch even more than you did the day before.
29. Walk a mile to warm up.
30. Run two miles.
31. Take a moment to enjoy the fact that you ran two miles without any complaints from the hamstring.
32. Walk 3-1/2 miles.
33. Stretch again.
34. Week 1, Day 4. Wake up knowing that you can do this!
35. Register for the race.
36. Post it to Facebook and bask in the admiration and encouragement of your friends.
37. Meet a friend at the park. Do all of your stretching even though you know your friend is eager to start running.
38. Walk half a mile to warm up.
39. Run three miles. Delight in having kept pace with your much-younger friend!
40. Go to the fitness center. Work out, feeling slightly less like an idiot than you did last time.
41. Walk back to meet your friend at the stretching area, feeling like some kind of superhuman.
42. Stretch again (because you’re not).
43. Enjoy thinking about Week 1, Day 5: Rest.

We talked about writing. Since that topic encompasses everything else that we both live and breathe, the conversation covered a lot of ground.

She talked about inspiration and the nocturnal activities of her particular muse. There was a voice that came to her one night to dictate notes for years’ worth of writing projects. I speculated about the creative unconscious, the unknown workings of the mute machinery of our brains that collects, organizes, catalogs, and stores images, sounds, smells, emotions, and abstract ideas and then assembles them into dreams, long-term memories, and all the wonders of fantasy. I wondered why she was so eager to give the credit for her brilliance to something outside herself.

I told her about the lessons I was learning from helping other people figure out how not to hide their lights under bushels. She remarked that I seem to get better and better at giving advice without wasting a lot of time listening to what I’m saying.

I told her a long-winded story about losing weight and finding discipline, and of my endless quest to apply what I’d learned to my writing practice. Simple rules. Do something every day. Everything counts. And the new mantra that I’d picked up from a fitness podcast called Fat 2 Fit Radio—If you want to be fit, emulate the diet and habits of a fit person. Don’t promise you’ll eat better tomorrow or that you’ll go back to the gym next week.

There’s a broader lesson in that axiom, I think, for the writer, the artist, or anyone who aspires to do more, to be better, to claim his gift and follow its implications. When do you want it? Someday, or now? I gave her a homework assignment—write 400 words on the topic of our lunch date. She dared me to do the same. I carried the assignment home, took it for a seven-mile run around the park, and tucked it under my pillow when I went to bed. When the next work day was nearly done, I wrote this blog post. But I could have written only this:

Start living your life TODAY as the person that you ultimately want to be.

View of the patio at Thai Spice Asian Cuisine, Houston, Texas, through a frosted, textured, interior glass door and exterior door and windows (May 3, 2011).

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Frittata is the perfect kitchen-sink dish for using up leftovers, for impressing your brunch guests without a ton of work, or for reheating out of the freezer for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I suggest accompanying it with some spring greens or arugula that you’ve dressed lightly with vinaigrette.

Ingredients

• 15 eggs (see below for notes on scaling)
• 1½ c half and half, whole milk, or cream
• ½ t salt
• ¼ t dried chervil
• ¼ t dried basil
• Generous grind of black pepper
• Generous grind of fresh nutmeg (or a large pinch if you’re using pre-ground nutmeg)
• 3–5 cups of various filling ingredients of your choice (see below)
• 3 T chopped fresh parsley, cilantro, and/or basil
• ¼ c grated Parmesan (or Romano or Asiago cheese)

Basic Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 325° F. Grease the bottom and sides of a 13 x 9 pan with unsalted butter, or spray well with nonstick cooking spray.
2. Break all the eggs into a big bowl. Add the half and half, milk, or cream, nutmeg, salt, pepper, chervil, and basil. Whisk until the eggs are well homogenized, then set aside while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
3. Scatter all of the filling ingredients in the bottom of the 13 x 9 pan. Give the egg mixture a little more whisking, then carefully pour it over the fillings. If the fillings don’t seem to be evenly distributed through the eggs, stick your fingers in there and swish things around.
4. Scatter fresh herbs over the top of the dish, then sprinkle with the grated Parmesan.
5. Bake on middle rack of the oven until the moment the center is no longer jiggly, anywhere from 35 to 55 minutes, depending on which cooking method you use. (See below.) Do not overcook! If you like your eggs soft, you can even take the dish out of the oven while the center is still a bit liquid, because it will continue to cook for a few minutes and then firm up as it cools.
6. Cool at least 20 minutes before slicing. Serve hot, warm, or cold.

Cooking Methods

There are two ways (at least) to cook this dish:

1. Place the 13 x 9 pan directly on a middle rack of the oven and bake, checking frequently, until the center has just stopped being jiggly, about 35 or 40 minutes.
2. Cook the dish in a bain-marie (water bath). Place a larger, deeper pan in the oven and put enough water in it so that the water will come about halfway up the sides of the 13 x 9 pan when you place it inside. (Hint: Take a few moments to figure out how much water will be required before you place ingredients in the smaller pan or place either pan in the oven. You will be glad you did.)

   Put the larger pan in the oven before you turn it on, and pour in the pre-determined amount of water. Then preheat the oven to 325°. When the oven is hot and you’ve assembled the dish, very carefully place the filled 13 x 9 pan inside the larger pan containing the water. Bake until the center is no longer liquid. It will take considerably longer with this method. Start checking it for doneness at about 45 minutes, then every five or 10 minutes thereafter until the center has just stopped jiggling.

   Take both pans very carefully out of the oven, then very carefully remove the 13 x 9 pan from the larger pan. Allow to cool before slicing.

Both cooking methods have their merits. If you bake the dish without the water bath, you’ll get chewy edges and more browning on top. You may end up with some bubbles of cheese and lighter and darker spots. The center pieces will be more moist and tender, while the outer pieces will have more caramelization, but may tend to be dry.

If you cook the dish in a bain-marie, you won’t get as much browning, but the entire dish will be extremely moist, tender, and delicate, and it will look very smooth and lovely. It’ll also be more uniformly moist, which makes it ideal for freezing and reheating in the microwave.

Filling Ingredients

Potatoes. Take two or three potatoes, dice them, place in a saucepan with enough liquid to cover the potatoes, and simmer for 8 to 10 minutes. The liquid may be salted water; chicken, beef, or vegetable stock; milk, buttermilk, half and half, or cream. After poaching, drain the potatoes well.

Cheese. Use anywhere from eight to 16 ounces, according to the desired level of cheesiness. I like gruyere, fontina, sharp cheddar, Irish cheddar, asiago. Any reasonably hard, flavorful cheese will work. Grate the cheese coarsely, shred with a food processor, or cut into small dice. I made one recent batch of frittata with three kinds of cheese left over from a cocktail party: aged gouda, sharp cheddar, and some other hard orange cheese.

Vegetables. Try spinach, kale, blanched broccoli florets, green peas, sauteed peppers, onions, or garlic. If using firm greens, toss them with few pinches of salt while still wet, then wilt them in a skillet over medium-high heat with a small amount of olive oil or stock.

Mushrooms. Use white button or Cremini mushrooms, or any of the “wild” types you can get all over the place these days. Saute them in a little butter first. You can even use canned mushrooms. Just don’t tell me about it.

Meats. Try cooked, crumbled bacon or pancetta. Chopped leftover ham or pork chops. Shredded chicken or turkey. Cooked ground beef. Cooked, drained bulk sausage, or cooked sausage links that have been cut into bite-sized pieces. For one recent batch, I even repurposed some Armour frozen meatballs left over from a Christmas Eve spaghetti feast. (See details in the notes section below.)

Various and Sundry Notes

On Scaling

For smaller batches, adjust as follows:

• 8 x 8 pan:
  8 eggs
  ¾ c half and half, milk, or cream
  ¼ t salt (scale back other seasonings as appropriate)
  1½–2½ c filling ingredients
• 9 x 9 pan:
  9 eggs
  ¾ c half and half, milk, or cream
  ¼ t salt (scale back other seasonings as appropriate)
  2–3 c filling ingredients

On Milk

You can substitute two percent milk or skim milk, but the finished product won’t taste as rich.

On Nutmeg

Nutmeg is one of those spices that’s far better if you grind it right before you need it. It’s easy enough to do by buying whole nutmeg cloves (or whatever they call them, whole seeds, whole nuts) and then grating them as you need it using the finest screen of a box grater. Or you could use a fine microplane, maybe.

But nowadays you can buy nutmeg that’s crushed into small chunks and sold in a pepper-grinder sort of bottle. That’s the way to go, because then in an instant you can have freshly grated nutmeg without any hassle or cleanup.

I put nutmeg in almost any egg dish, or anything else that is going to contain cream as a major ingredient, like a béchamel sauce.

On Meatballs

I bought a big bag of Armour frozen meatballs to put in the spaghetti and meatballs that I made for Christmas Eve dinner. I made the sauce from scratch, but I didn’t have time to make meatballs, so I gave in to the temptation to buy frozen ones. They were kind of bland, but they tasted pretty good once they’d simmered for a few hours in my delicious marinara sauce. But I digress….

The bag I bought contained more meatballs than I could use in one batch of marinara, so I’d been trying to think of something to do with the leftovers. I decided to try putting them into a frittata.

I didn’t want to put the bland meatballs straight into the frittata as is. They needed some flavorizing first. So I placed them in a saucepan with enough water to cover, then added a packet of caldo de tomate (tomato bouillon), a teaspoon or so of Italian seasonings, and about a cup of red wine. I simmered the meatballs in the liquid for half an hour or so while I prepared the other ingredients. Then I transferred them to a colander with a slotted spoon and allowed them to cool for a few minutes. When they were cool enough to handle, I sliced each meatball in half and placed the pieces in the bottom of the 13 x 9 pan with the other fillings (three cheeses and diced potatoes).

The meatball cooking liquid ended up very tasty, so I also used it to poach the diced potatoes before I added them to the 13 x 9 pan.

Today was one of those golden days when the line between work and play completely disappears. I spent part of the morning gathering ideas for two new projects an old friend is preparing to launch. I set up wikis for him at PBworks.com so we can collaborate on brainstorming and building web sites that will showcase his humor, creativity, and spirit.

Then I worked on preparing for a meeting to review progress on a web site I’m redeveloping for a client I hadn’t met until today. The meeting went well—the client is doing work he loves, using the medium of song to teach people to transform their lives and express themselves authentically. His infectious passion made it easier than ever to share ideas that will make his new site appealing and effective. His assistant also took part in the meeting. She’s an enthusiastic student of his programs who brings lots of energy and expertise to the project. [3/21/11 update: The web site mentioned is Living Your Voice. Take a look!]

Later, I had coffee with a prospective client who’s getting ready to launch a new business venture. Ideas were flying back and forth so fast, it was hard to catch them all. (That’s okay, though, because if they were worth keeping, we’ll find them again.) He’s eager to find new ways to engage people by combining traditional marketing channels with innovative online tools. He’s curious and open-minded, and I think we’re both going to learn a lot from working together.

I finished up the day with a phone call to a self-employed colleague who’d met today with her consultant at the UH Small Business Development Center. She wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged or discouraged by what the consultant had to say: “Don’t feel bad. Everyone is struggling right now.” After spending my day in the company of these excited, passionate people, I wanted to add my two cents’ worth of encouragement.

I told her that to my way of thinking, the best we can do when the economy is faltering and we have no idea where our next project or our next client will come from is to keep working hard at things that make us happy. Create something. Teach someone something. Learn something. Share your best ideas with anyone who will listen. Give something away. Organize your resources. Resolve to manage as long as you can with what you have.

This evening, I went for a late walk, and I got to thinking about victory gardens—those plots of vegetables and fruit that people planted during the world wars to build morale and reduce pressure on the food supply system. Green thumb or not, there are things that we can all plant: ideas, enthusiasm, hope, creativity, energy, hard work. And then my iPod—whose shuffle function sometimes seems to operate by Providence, or maybe by feeding off my cheerful moods—played “The Promise of Living” from the opera The Tender Land. It’s one of my all-time favorite choral compositions, and it supplied the perfect lyric to crown my golden day:

“We plant each row with seeds of grain, and Providence sends us the sun and the rain….”

—from Aaron Copland’s “The Promise of Living,”
lyrics by Horace Everett

Thirty-one days of talking about fitness and eating better are all well and good, but we must not neglect life’s simple pleasures. I have a busy day scheduled—a meeting with my business partner, two meetings with clients, and a big project that’s ready for finishing touches before it goes to the printer. But in the interest of setting a joyful tone for the day, I reserved half an hour this morning to get a batch of scones into the oven.

With the encouragement of my friend and coach Gika Rector, I’ve been giving some thought lately to cooking as an art form. I’m overdue for grocery-shopping, so today’s performance started from the concept “What’s hiding in the pantry?” A can of yams and the last bit of a bag of crystallized ginger became my inspiration. (I also found some vacuum-packed salmon, but my artistic vision wasn’t bold enough for fish scones…yet.)

(Start with the basic scone recipe and instructions.)

Additional Ingredients

• 1 t cinnamon
• A dash each of allspice, ground cloves, and/or nutmeg (or more to taste)
• Optional: 1/4 t ground ginger (or more to taste), but only if you want the scones to be really spicy
• 3/4 c canned yams, drained
• 3 T crystallized ginger, minced
• Cinnamon sugar for sprinkling

Instructions

1. Proceed with the first four steps of the basic scone recipe, adding the cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, and ground ginger (if desired) to the dry ingredients before sifting.
2. At the point where the basic recipe calls for adding the dry and nearly-dry ingredients (step 5), add the crystallized ginger. Toss lightly to distribute through the dry ingredients.
3. Dice the yams into small chunks, or pass them once through a coarse slicer or a large-mesh cooling rack. The object is to break them into smaller pieces, but without smashing them into a paste. Add to the dry ingredients and toss very gently to distribute.
4. Continue with the basic recipe through the forming and cutting of the scone dough.
5. Sprinkle the tops with cinnamon sugar and bake according to the basic recipe. The yams contain a lot of moisture, so you may find that these require an extra two or three minutes in the oven.

It took me 33 days, but I’ve made it to the end of the July Project. The main objective of this month-long blogging initiative was to devote time and attention every day to thinking and writing about my efforts to move more and eat better. Even on the three July days when I didn’t post anything, the subject was always in my thoughts, so I’m calling that goal substantially accomplished.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Another stated aim was to collect ideas that I can reflect on at some later date when I find myself struggling to move forward, and to share those ideas with anyone else for whom they might be useful. A few people have told me that these posts inspired them to work harder on their own fitness or writing goals, so in that respect, the project has been an unqualified success. Many thanks to everyone who’s been reading!

Will I return to these posts later for reflection, to see how they’re holding up over time, to check whether their lessons still feel true? I don’t know. Here at the end of the project, looking back seems much less important than looking forward. So here’s the last message I’ll offer for the July Project:

When you reach one of your goals, take a moment to enjoy your accomplishment. But after you’ve learned whatever there was to learn from this chapter of your life, keep moving forward. What you can still do today contains more power than a whole month that’s over and done. On to the next thing!

Yeah, I know it’s not July any more. The month ended in a flurry of activity during which I was too busy to complete any posts, so my first job for August is to wrap up July. Bear with me!

A few years ago, I started thinking of my daily walk as a crude analog to the wandering of our African savannah ancestors in pursuit of game and other food stuffs. They probably spent several hours every day chasing after or rooting around for their next meal, and the one after that, and the one after that. There are three grocery stores within a half a mile of where I pitch my tent, so I don’t have to wander in search of food. But evolution optimized my body and my mind for this movement; walking makes me alert and curious, ready to chase after whatever prey appears on the horizon.

Here in the Information Age, the object of my foraging is ideas. I make my living by collecting, arranging, curating, packaging, explaining, and selling ideas. I need fresh ones every day, and I often capture them while I’m hunting and gathering at the park. While I was taking the 50/50 writing workshop a couple of years ago, I discovered that if I read the day’s prompt before heading out for my evening walk, I’d often come home with a story or essay ready to write. During the present month-long blogging project, I spent many walks turning over post ideas in my head, then came home to write them out.

If my primitive metaphor isn’t enough to make you feel like moving, then take a look at a few headlines I scavenged: Aerobic Exercise Grows Brain Cells; Exercise Grows New Brain Cells; Mental Benefits of Walking; Stronger, Faster, Smarter. We’ve always known that working out was good for the body, but there’s a lot of new scientific evidence pointing toward the benefits of exercise for the brain.

Do you use your brain? Do you want to keep it fit until you’re done using it? Do your 21st-century lifestyle and career require you to trade in ideas? Get your body moving, and your brain will get stronger. And don’t worry—the Information Age will still be here when you get back to the computer.