Alright, first things first. Does anyone recognize this meal? Why does it look like I made eels for dinner? My food photography sucks. Alright, well, this is Juli Bauer's (of PaleOMG) "zoodles and squoodles"--in our house, it's just zoodles. It is the dish that fills the comfort pasta food cravings, and the one dish that everyone in my household, and I do mean everyone (paleo and non-paleo eaters), likes to eat. My teenage son, who is not paleo at all, in fact, he is strongly and vocally AGAINST all things paleo because he hates vegetables, loves his potatoes and junk food and feels like we STARVE him to death every weekend that he comes home—and he ATE THIS WITHOUT A WORD OF COMPLAINT!! So Juli, you are AWESOME. You are my hero. Thank you. For her original recipe, go to http://www.paleomg.com/ , seriously, you'll love it.
Alright, onto my weekend WOD. I had the most hilarious time ever. Don't know what kind of stuff we were smokin' when we thought this one up. Where on earth did we get this idea from? I think Steve was still lamenting the fact that the Warrior Dash has no plans to come to Ontario again in 2012 (at least not yet). See, my husband is totally on-board when it comes to this whole whole primal/paleo thing. We cook together, we shop together, but really, he is totally food-un-imaginative so I do the lion's share of thinking up and planning our weeks' meals. So, I have tasked him with having to come up with new and exciting ways to "take it up a notch" when I say I want to get outside for the day, or go hiking. He's recently retired after 20 years of service in the Canadian Forces, so I figure he knows how to "take it up a notch". This is the army--they're creative! They make men haul logs across soccer fields just for the fun of it!
Now, from there, I don't know what happened. We're just 2 people who never really grew up. We were nearly defeated by this crazy cliff last week when one of the dogs jumped over the cliff and got stuck there, and we thought-eghh, we can conquer THAT. Sure, we'll show that hill! We can run up and down this cliff, or more appropriately, free-climb up and slide down this almost-but-not-quite vertical sand-slide cliff. See how innocent it looks as we came down the hill? It doesn't look all that steep, does it? I even scoffed when Steve suggested we drop our packs at the top--I wanted to wear my lumber load the whole time! Now, for those of you NOT in the Toronto area, on Sunday it was raining. Hard. And that cliff was not sand, it turned out. It was good ole’ Toronto clay and we slid down in mud that was slicker than snot, so to speak, but we still didn't give it much thought. Just kinda surfed our way down at the speed of light, laughing...
And see? Oh so innocent. My duaghter is just wading in the stream washing off some mud, who cares if it's 10 degrees and pouring rain? It's so scenic down here in the valley...
And then like some crazy nightmare we tried to go up-- we climbed on and on without moving upwards. It was like being stuck on an old Stairmaster and you can't get off. Our boots weighed ten pounds per foot, our gloves weighed five pounds each. And then when we did make some progress, our feet would shoot out from under us and we’d slide face-first right back down again.
But this shot on the right--that shows the true angle of the cliff. Almost....vertical.... Every muscle in our bodies were clenched. We were punching our fists into the mud just to get a hold of something.
We must have been making a LOT of noise. We were laughing and screaming and wiping each other out when we lost our footing... We were rolling in the mud, had it on our faces, in our hair (and in Steve’s beard). We’d made it almost back to the top when all of our carry-on noise caught the attention of 3 men who were hiking the trail that day (in the pouring rain). With very thick accents (I believe they were Polish), they decided we needed saving and would not leave until we were all back over the top lip of the cliff on secure soil. So we submitted and we let them give us a hand and pull us up over the top lip of the cliff and we thanked them very kindly and they got to walk away feeling like heroes and it just seemed like it would be rude if we hopped right back over and started that all over again (I was ready to go it again, really wanted to but Steve stopped me--my daughter was looking like she'd had enough at that point), so back homeward-bound we went. Wet and muddy and giggling like school children. Oooh, yea, we conquered!!
The challenge is already on--how do we top this next week? I think it's going to be all of 0 degrees celcius, good chance of "snain" (Toronto-speak for alternating snow and rain). Ooh, yea.
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