Food = Energy

Food = Energy

Monday, July 14, 2014

Beer City, USA

Man oh man! What an incredible week it has been! Val and I decided to visit Asheville, North Carolina which is also known as Beer City, USA for all of its local breweries. I stopped drinking beer about 2 years ago after gaining so much weight during my early years of college, but I decided I couldn't visit Beer City without trying one.


 Val had to capture the moment.

We decided to visit Asheville, which my dad kept thinking was Nashville (as in Tennessee), because of a seed that was planted in Val's head after reading about the city on NoMeatAthlete.com This vegan, ultrarunner, blogger is a pretty big name in the plant-based world and Val and I are certainly part of the platform that supports his work and his message.




We reached out to him (Matt Frazier) and he invited us to a music fest that was occurring Friday night which was such a cool experience. We thoroughly enjoyed the vegan (not quite healthy) food, the music, the beer (yes, more beer) and the company of Matt and his friends and family.

I think Val summed up the trip perfectly when responding to a question Matt asked us Friday evening:

           Matt: So what have you guys been doing so far in Asheville?
           Val: Eating!

Yep. That's how I would sum up our experience. There were so many restaurants (Laughing Seed, Rosetta's Kitchen, Plant, Mellow Mushroom) and pubs for vegetarians and vegans to dine at we kind of went a little food crazy. I'm pretty sure about 40% of the pictures we took are of us eating!


 
Here I am at Mellow Mushroom about to share with Val the best vegan and GF pizza we've ever had.

 And here, I couldn't help but convince Val to share a Tofurky dog. I mean when are we able to get a tofu hot dog from a hot dog stand??!!


Even both the B&B and the AirBnB hosts offered up vegan breakfasts (The Lion and the Rose B&B) and vegan snacks.

We really did have a great time in and around Asheville. After soaking up the main city, we went out about 40 minutes to Brevard to stay there for two nights. There I had an awesome black bean burger on the best white bread (baked in-house) I ever did eat and Val got to meet a Naturopathic Doctor (her career goal) for the first time.  We got to check out Dupont State Forest where part of The Hunger Games was filmed and saw, climbed, and hiked around beautiful waterfalls.


Beautiful High Falls in Dupont State Forest


There's Val being Val.

I hope those reading this who have a chance to vacation somewhere new and different would consider checking out Asheville. We really did have one great vacation and even talked about moving down there one day. Even if we don't, we will definitely return to Asheville and certainly make our way to Brevard to see one of the best surprises of the trip: a Corgi that lived where we AirBnB'd. We have talked about getting a dog and settled on a Corgi long before this dog, Riley, surprised us in Brevard.



Now quickly onto the running ...

If the trip can be summed up in "Eating", then the running can be summed up in "Hilly". Not only were we thousands of feet higher than I'm used to running at, but I was climbing elevation that I definitely was not used to. It's all in my head I'm sure, but I feel like my quads are 5x bigger just from the 25 or so miles I ran and hiked in the 5 days we were there.

The running and hiking on the trails has me sold on leaving NJ and living in a place where I can take a quick drive or bike ride and run mountains and trails as much as I want. This is going to happen.

As far as fueling goes, I'm pretty sure all the food we ate was enough to fuel me for days of running so I didn't have to worry on that matter.

I guess that's all for now.

It's kind of hot out, but still....get out and do something!!

Happy Running!










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