Week 1: We’re so back

Antarathon, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu edition

I’m training to compete in the New Jersey Fall International Open IBJJF Championship! What this newsletter is: a casual, weekly recap of the highs and lows of training and my best efforts to stay mentally and physically healthy through it all.

If you’d like to hear about how it’s going — the good and the bad — I’d love to have you follow along. This is week 1/33.

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springtime, new beginnings, etc etc

Hi, hello, welcome back! I’m getting back into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu this year, a sport I started and fell in love with in 2018, but was then rudely interrupted by 1) a global pandemic 2) a cross-country move and 3) finding a new gym I felt at-home in. I’ve competed one time before, in 2019, when I got second place — in a weight bracket with two other women, one of whom got injured before our second round, so, let’s all set some very realistic expectations here, ok?

How I’ve Been Training

• Sunday: 8.5-mile long run

• Monday: Vinyasa yoga class

• Tuesday: 5.5-mile easy run

• Wednesday: Women-led gi BJJ class

• Thursday: 4-mile tempo run

• Friday: “Body Sculpt” class

Getting a couple things out of the way: First of all, I’m training for a half-marathon at the end of April, so my running mileage is up right now, but we’ll hit the taper soon. Second, “Body Sculpt” was everything that I hate about group fitness classes (a lot of jumping up and down, a lot of crunches, and a lot of swinging around five-pound dumbbells.

not pictured: the absolute wall of tourists I barreled through on the bk bridge

Women-led gi jiu-jitsu was so much fun, and I’m so excited to get back it in a dedicated way. I need to start by admitting that I have a lot of internalized misogyny to work through when it comes to “women-led” classes.

The few I’ve taken before always centered self-defense, not competition or athletics. Men never attended, and there was always a sort of paternalistic, condescending tone to it all. I really do think that more women should do martial arts. But it irked me that the way in for women was always self-defense and not the joy of the sport itself.

Anyway, all of this hand-wringing was for naught because the gym I’m trying out right now is a woman-owned gym — and the vibes are impeccable. It’s so refreshing to see women of all belt levels and to be with other women who have similar ambitions to compete and get stronger. And it’s such a change in the dynamic of the class to have a woman as the instructor and actually see men show up to the class too. Really looking forward to the next one.

What I’ve Been Eating

I was running a boxed brownie mix taste test at work which meant, well, a lot of brownies. I ended my long run on Sunday at L'Appartement 4F in Brooklyn to meet a friend over coffee and a tahini chocolate chip cookie. Friends came over on Monday to watch Inglorious Basterds and we were feeling “healthy” in our food choices so I made these marinated cukes a la

Christina Chaey

and we ate Chopt salads for dinner.

An excellent meal at Crevette on Tuesday — a lot of seafood, but my favorite dish was a salad that had both pickled fennel and cooked fennel and shards of salty Paremsan cheese. My brother came over for lunch on Friday and we ate bánh mi the size of my face.

ratatouille, sole bonne femme

On Saturday, in cooking school, we were doing “wet and moist heat” cooking which meant a lot steamed, braised, and poached proteins, like sole bonne femme, a frilly little French dish that involves steaming fish under parchment and then finishing it with cream, butter, and mushroom sauce. (I may have set some parchment paper on fire in this process.) And then ended the night at a friend’s birthday party, where I drank sky juice, ate sourdough focaccia, candied olives, and whipped feta dip.

What I’ve Been Reading

I’m reading The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones, the writer and editor who is widely known to be responsible for ushering two very different books, The Diary of Anne Frank and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking to publication.

What’s been the wildest to read about so far is her upbringing in a home that treated food with the sort of puritanical derision that I’m grateful to have never been exposed to. Jones writes that as a child, “one wasn’t supposed to talk about food at the table (it was considered crude, like talking about sex).” Garlic and onions were verboten in her mother’s kitchen. I could never.

What I’ve Been Writing

For Best Food Blog (readers of Antarathon get a month free with this link!) I wrote about how I’ve been turning cooking school scraps into some semblance of a meal, and then wrote about the wild new frontier of boxed baking mixes.