Solo

Since I've been living alone for most of the summer, I've learned a number of interesting things about life, mainly cooking. I've never had to cook for myself day in day out for any extended period of time. My only experiences with any large amount of cooking have been my old Wanapitei trips, and those were quite different from my current situation. Firstly, a group of 9-14 eats a lot more then just one person, even if that person is me. Hungry trippers will devour massive amounts of food and still want more, so accordingly we had a lot of food. A couple kilograms of pasta per meal, for example. But that cooking was done on a firebox, with only what we had. If we ran out of food, we couldn't saunter over to the local grocery store and stock up. But with Wanapitei, everything was set out beforehand, so all we had to do was make it. But since one person really doesn't eat that much, up here it's a lot harder to tell how much food to make. The meal I'm eating as I write this has enough pasta for two people and vegetables for one and a half. As a result I won't have to make a lunch tomorrow, but it really didn't look like a lot of food when I made it. The meal is spaghetti with canned sauce, two cut up small chicken breasts and an assorted beans/carrot frozen veggie mix. The pot I made the pasta in was small, and there was a lot of room left, I just dumped the remaining carrots and beans into a dish, and the chicken breast looked so small and lonely in the frying pan, so I gave it a friend. I'm compassionate like that, but it means I have the honking plate of pasta in front of me and no real motivation to eat it. And it tastes fantastic, that's the worst part. I've put Parmesan cheese and pepper and hot sauce on it, and everything just looks so tasty, but I can't eat it. That may be because all I did to today was ride to work and back, and that doesn't use a lot of energy. If I had some big distance thing today I'd have eaten this plate of pasta with gusto, then finished off the ice cream in the freezer, then made myself a smoothie to repent for the ice cream. But I guess that's what happens on easy weeks. I eat the way non-racers do.

And so I'll leave you with a quote from a fantastic book by Tim Krabbe, a book called The Rider, a kilometre by kilometre account of an amateur bike race, which covers not only the race, but the history of the rider and of the sport of cycling in general. Krabbe is a cycling and chess enthusiast who based the book on his own experiences. If you're a competitive athlete, you will appreciate this book, and if you know a competitive athlete, and everyone does, The Rider will help you understand why they do it. So, without further ado, the second line of the The Rider:

"Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me."