Seasonal Effects On Food And Training

Well… I’ve had a curious week, with a lot of flip-flops energy-wise. Some days, I’m training my heart out. Other days, I’ll just sit around. I think it’s the shift in the season, actually. What’s bizarre is that the warmer days tend to be my lazy ones. Yesterday was a comfortable eleven degrees above, and I pretty much passed the day watching movies. This morning was five degrees below zero with light snow, and yet I was excited to get out and run…

One of the sessions I did this week was an impromptu forty minutes or so in the basement, just to see if I would enjoy practicing down there if for some reason I didn’t want to be outside. It was good, but definitely not the same…

I prefer the outdoors, for sure. But the days are going to get pretty short up here real soon, and sometimes I won’t have access to daylight during the time I have to train, so there may be more of this indoor work on those kinds of occasions. Also, during my basement session, I started breaking in the used heavy bag I bought. Unfortunately, every time I hit it, my birds have a fit upstairs. It’s just not going to work in here. I’m going to have to find a different place to train with it

Of course, while I continue my physical practice, I’m giving equal if not more commitment to my engagements with nature, which I see as a large part of my spiritual training, including the continued incorporation of natural foods in my diet. The other day, I came across a recently roadkilled deer on my way to work, still warm and bleeding. I opened it up and took a fair share of meat – the back loins, and some of the larger muscles around the hips. This practice also helps the birds, coyotes, and others clean up the carcasses quicker, because I’ve opened it up for them. And of course it gives me and my wife plenty to eat. So we’ve been having venison stir fry, cooked with seasonal veggies like apples and corn (pictured above). In addition to the venison, I’ve been drinking about a litre per day of unfiltered water collected from the mountain streams, and am looking forward to melting snow for my drinking water soon. We’re also in the midst of the last real fruit and vegetable harvests, so this week I brought my students to dig a root we call niistsikapa’s, which is a kind of wild carrot, and I made my first bulberry run for the year…

I’ll be getting my students involved in gathering much more of these berries this week, if the weather allows us enough access to the good picking sites. But I’m expecting a decent snow this week, our first big one of the year, which is always sticky and wet, dangerous, and best not to be driving around in