Duke City Fit 14 Winter web

Winter 2014-15

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Duke City Fit Winter 2014-15 Rio Hondo

Winter 2014-15

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From the Publisher

s n o s Les

n a m fro d n e i r Old F Ken Orth

“Tell me a story, old-timer,”

I urged him, saying the words slowly and distinctly. I wasn’t sure how well he could here me. Indeed, I wasn’t really sure if he was hearing me at all. He’d been sitting here for quite some time without moving.

I sat down beside him then, quietly, for a spell. He was the kind of guy who enjoyed the simple things, like peace and quiet. When he could get it.

Like today, for example.

A cool, sunny winter morning in the foothills of the Sandias. The sun felt wonderful, even as low as it was down there towards the south. It was brilliant, though, a shining diamond in a crystalline sky.

We both appreciated it immensely. Its warmth was a gentle thing, like a soft blanket laid delicately upon his aged shoulders by a loving mother.

“There, there,” I could imagine her murmuring softly to her tired son as she tucked the warmth in around him. “You just rest, now. You don’t have to go anywhere today, or do anything.”

I wondered, as I looked over at him, if he was envisioning something like that. He seemed so contented. Did he feel the warmth? I was sure that he must, for I often found him sitting in this very spot. Usually in the morning, when the first tentative rays of the sun came spiking over the mountains.

I could almost hear him singing, there, before I arrived… “Good morning, star shine, the earth says hello…”

Perhaps, back in the day when he was young and rambunctious.

I didn’t know him back then. Heck, I wasn’t even a twinkle in my daddy’s eye. But I do know that he’d lived quite the rambling life. He had moved around quite a bit over his lifetime. Often spontaneously, or so I’d heard. He never gave the moss much time to gather beneath him, if you know what I mean.

Looking at him, sitting there so quietly, I could only imagine what his life had been like back in his youth. He didn’t talk about

Duke City Fit Editor: Ken Orth

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it. But from the stories I had heard, it seems he’d had quite the tumultuous childhood. His father (a Babtist minister of some sort, I was guessing) had been all full of fire and brimstone and the gates of hell. It was tough.

He’d been cast out somewhere along the line, maybe in his teens, for iniquities that were ever unclear to him. And to me. But thrown out he was, in a big scene that scared the neighbors and scared him and sent him tumbling into the real world unprepared and innocent.

Homeless and friendless, it is no wonder that be became a rolling stone, then, flitting from place to place, and never remaining in one spot for very long. He never really had a home after that, just a place where he currently existed.

Sometimes, it had not been a peaceful life. Often, in his travels, he landed in a place where he was not wanted. He was urged, rather impolitely, to move on. There were many scuffles and fights. Some were pretty darn serious. Once, he showed me a long wicked scar on his left side… a souvenir of a run-in with a much bigger guy.

“Well, that was kinda stupid,” I’d said to him. “What are you doing tackling a bigger guy?”

He never really answered that question, rhetorical as it was, but did the long, slow shrug of his as if to say, “Whatcha gonna do?”

I gathered that he hadn’t really had any choice in the matter. The confrontation was not of his making, and he had tried to get out of it with as little damage as possible.

That episode, I think maybe, is a pretty good example of the story of his life. He often felt, and still feels, as if he has never really been in control of his life. That he isn’t in charge. That he is more like a pawn of something bigger. He has always been on a path not of his own choosing. A child of destiny. Or fate.

“What is this? You playing the victim card? I’d wondered cynically for a moment. That didn’t seem like him. Not at all. He’d always seemed quite solid to me, and sure of himself, at least in the short time that I’d known him.

It is not victimhood, he assured me. It is simply that there are forces out there… mighty forces… that are way beyond our control.

Way beyond our poor power to add or detract.

The world, the cosmos… these mountains even… they move as they will. They grow, they breathe, they change. And we, my friend, you and I, we are but a part of that massive changing. Of that growing. Of that force.

Of that plan, or lack thereof, whatever it may be.

You are not a victim. Not anymore than, say, than your kidney is a victim of your brain. That kidney is a part of a much bigger something. An important part, even, maybe. But, it is a part of a bigger something of which it may be entirely unaware. And which may be unaware of it. (Until something goes wrong, presumably.)

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I didn’t buy it. It still sounded like he considered himself a victim to me.

But he’d had a hard rocky life, obviously, and I certainly wasn’t going to begrudge him the belief that he was part of something bigger. Not if that is what got him through the long cold nights. Not if that is what gave him solace in the twilight of his life.

“Twilight?”

“Whatchyou talking’ about? Twighlight?”

I didn’t realize I’d said anything out loud. And I don’t think he said anything either, but I’d heard him nevertheless. From the way he looked. The shoulders that had once been slumped and forlorn, now looked squared and proud. Suddenly… smoothly… beneath the ever brightening rays of the mid day desert sun, he’d transformed himself, almost magically, from an aging has-been into a stoic soldier.

A veteran. A survivor. A man among boys. He made me feel small, suddenly, for having thought, even briefly, that he was a victim or a doddering old fool.

I blushed and looked away… ashamed… sinking within myself and finding there a pride and vanity that was not pleasant to see. I thought I knew so much. I thought my thoughts were important and more real… they were more virtuous because I thought them. That my perception of the world was more valid than any other.

Than his.

Who was the old fool?

I looked again at him and patted his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said, though he wanted no apology. He had taken no offense whatsoever. He had said nothing, done nothing, that had in any way caused my inner turmoil. It was entirely of my own making. He was, as he had always been, stoic and solid. A rock upon which I could lean. Not the other way around, as I had mistakenly assumed.

Watching him, I realized that this was why I came and visited him, though nowhere near often enough. He had an inner peace, did my old friend. He had a strength that that characterized his crusty, weathered exterior.

He had a knowledge, I felt, that I could never have. A wisdom. He had been places where I could never go, and he had felt things that I could never feel.

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I had originally begun visiting him, I thought, to console him. To comfort him.

I’d come to realize that this was not the case. He was quite secure with himself and his place within the grand scheme of things, whatever that might be.

“If the world is like a big body,” I finally said jokingly, “Then you just might be the kidney.”

I’m not sure if he smiled at that. It seemed like it. Imperceptibly almost.

“You’re a tough audience,” I said.

I knew, then, looking at him admiringly, that he was nowhere near done. Not yet. He felt, and I felt it too, that he had not yet achieved his destiny, whatever it was. He was still on the path. Still rolling. Though he was old… very old… he still had some traveling yet to do.

“Spontaneously again?” I asked, smiling.

“Maybe you’ll get thrown out again, against your will… more fire and brimstone, huh?”

I got another imperceptible shrug that said, who knows? And I realized that getting thrown out again might actually really be a possibility, and not just a joke. But it didn’t seem to bother him one little bit, that he could be uprooted and tossed out once again.

“You’re a better man than I am,” I said. Meaning it.

We sat there in silence then, for a while. Comradely silence. We watched a couple of deer watch us. Feeling the sun and the warmth of our friendship. A calmness and a strength seemed to emanate from him, and I was so very glad that I’d made it up to see him again. I vowed to myself that I’d not wait so long before the next visit.

“I gotta go,” I finally said, standing up.

“I have promises to keep.”

I patted him again on that rough old shoulder of his, holding it for a moment. I would have hugged him, but he really wasn’t a hugging kind of guy.

And besides, it’s kinda hard to hug a twelve-ton granite boulder. They can be a little bit aloof in that way. A farewell pat would have to do.

“You take care of yourself, now, you hear?” I said as I ambled on down the arroyo, looking back at him one last time. But I don’t know if he heard me. He might have been snoozing already.

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Dr Elaine

Chiropractor ?

Dr Elaine Adams

Dr. Elaine Adams has been practicing in New Mexico for 25 years. She has a bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in behavioral psychology and she spent her early career in the field of autism. She has served on the Board of Directors of the New Mexico Chiropractic Association for most of those years. You can contact her office for a consultation on the services available or for an appointment with Dr. Adams. www.lifetimechiropractic.com

I have the most amazing view out my office window. I see the Sandias and watch them change with the season. Even day to day the changes are noticeable. But it would be easy to miss those changes or to assume that those beautiful mountains never change. As I watch those mountains I reflect on how my profession is going through changes.

These changes are things that someone outside the profession might miss. You have to be an observer to see the things that are changing around you.

I am excited about the changes in the chiropractic field. For those of you who have a chiropractor, you may be seeing some of the new things that the doctors of chiropractic are doing. For those of you who don’t have a chiropractor, you are missing out on some seriously wonderful health benefits.

First let me give you a little history and tell you what chiropractic is all about.

It has been my experience during my twenty five years of practice that the public doesn’t usually know when to seek out chiropractic care or what our education and training includes. The exposure that chiropractic usually gets in the media is either as the butt of a joke or as the criminal in an insurance scheme of one sort or another. Neither of these portraits fits anyone that I know in the field.

Many of the chiropractors in the field are people who have been helped by chiropractic and so have taken it on as a career to pass it along. Children of chiropractors often enter the field. (I’m a third generation chiropractor and my sister is also a chiropractor.) Many chiropractors have advanced degrees and training. But what is chiropractic and why does it have such a funny name?

Chiropractic is the art and science of healing with your hands which is where we get the name. Chiropractic is a health care profession that focuses on disorders of the musculoskeletal system and the nervous system and the effects of these disorders on general health.

It was founded by Daniel David Palmer a little over a hundred years ago. DD was as astute in alternative health care as a practitioner could be at that time. He had read everything that there was to read in anatomy and physiology and was a very educated man for his time.

He was called a magnetic healer. Remember that medical doctors at this time were not washing their hands between patients because they

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didn’t know about germs and barbers were our surgeons. So the healing sciences were a little different than they are today.

DD had a janitor working in his building by the name of Harvey Lillard who had been deaf for 17 years. DD also noticed some sort of distortion on this man’s spine.

He pushed some area in the man’s spine and completed the first chiropractic adjustment.

The specific segment he adjusted is a matter of debate within the profession, but it was nevertheless the first adjustment. Over the next three days, Harvey Lillard’s hearing came back.

So the profession was born. Dr. Palmer established the first chiropractic college in Davenport, Iowa and this school continues to educate chiropractors today.

Chiropractic addresses healing with the recognition that the nervous system is essential to perfect health. An interference with nerve supply to any part of the body, no matter how large or how small will lead to a problem.

When a chiropractor adjusts your spine, he or she is releasing an impingement on a spinal nerve that is contributing to the decrease in your optimum health. It has a profound effect on the very structure of your DNA. It changes the relationship between the brain and the spinal cord and effects the neurology of the whole body.

This may mean that your gait is altered ever so slightly when you run so you are not as fast and you may be sore or more tired at the end of your run. It may be the underlying cause of those nasty headaches that you get. It may be why you can’t get good nights sleep or why you don’t digest your food well. It may be why you get dizzy or have ringing in your ears.

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Chiropractic adjustments can turn your brain on. I know, I know. A cup of coffee is what turns your brain on.

But chiropractic adjustments are even better. They fire the circuits to your brain and wake it up and make it pay attention. It can help stop various forms of chronic pain by reprogramming the brain maps that you have. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.

coordination of care. Chiropractors can often help with the struggle to know what to do next.

There is a chiropractor and a chiropractic technique that will fit everyone. Chiropractic is much like medicine in its diversification.

Some chiropractors specialize in

Educational requirements for doctors of chiropractic are among the most stringent of any of the health care professions. The typical applicant at a chiropractic college has already acquired nearly four years of pre-medical undergraduate college education, including courses in biology, inorganic and organic chemistry, physics, psychology and related lab work.

Once accepted into an accredited chiropractic college, the requirements become even more demanding –four to five academic years of professional a certain type of patient or a certain study are the standard. Because of the treatment. If you don’t like the first one you find, try another.

Some chiropractors in the state of New Mexico now offer bioidentical hormone therapy, trigger point injections, and even prolo therapy for damaged joints.

We offer nutriceutical therapy for many internal conditions.

Just like DD Palmer, we treat things other than musculoskeletal complaints. Don’t assume that each office is alike. There are more gentle hands on nature of chiropractic, and techniques and more aggressive the intricate adjusting techniques, a techniques; you have to pick the ones significant portion of time is spent in that work best for you. And chiropractic clinical training.

Doctors of chiropractic – who are licensed to practice in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and in many nations around the world undergo a rigorous education in the healing sciences, similar to that of medical doctors. In some areas, such as anatomy, physiology and rehabilitation, they receive more intensive education than most medical doctors or physical therapists.

Curriculum Requirements Comparison

Doctor of Chiropractic Degree (DC)

Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree (DPT)

Average Program Length

Average Classroom & Clinical Study Hours *

Chiropractic Curriculum

4 years

4,820 hrs

Yes

Medical Curriculum

4 years

4,670 hrs

Yes

Physical Therapy Curriculum

3 years

3,398 hrs

Yes

When do you seek chiropractic care?

Well, chiropractors can be consulted about any health condition.

Our training gives us the ability to diagnose... and therefore we can guide you in your path to wellness very effectively.

I tell my patients to tell me everything and I will help them sort out which health care provider might best serve their needs. We work in conjunction with their medical practitioners as well as other providers of complementary medicine. Patients often find themselves in the position of shuffling between specialists with little

Winter 2014-15

Doctor of Medicine Degree (MD)

Advanced Certification Available

* Does not include hours attributed to Post-Graduation residency

is a very safe choice for health care.

There are very few complications from chiropractic treatment despite what the media might portray and the benefits are amazing.

If you haven’t got a family chiropractor yet, now is the time to check us out.

Many chiropractors accept insurance and offer a variety of convenient hours.

Ask your friends and relatives for a referral or you can contact the New Mexico Chiropractic Association for a recommendation. And, of course, I am happy to take care of you, too.

Lifetime Chiropractic Our offices offer - Full Exercise Rehabilitation Programs, Nutritional Counseling, Massage Therapy, and Homeopathic Trigger-Point Injections.

24 Hour Emergency Care Appointments Available!

Most Insurance Accepted • We do the Paperwork Dr. Elaine Adams

Dr. Lonnie Peets

Serving Albuquerque and Rio Rancho for nearly 25 years!

Lifetime Chiropractic (505) 822-0306 Albuquerque (505) 891-3111 Rio Rancho www.lifetimechiropractic.com

The Lifetime TEAM of Professionals are ready to help you feel great again!

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My Big Bad Dog Ken Orth

Why in the world did I eat that?

I was lying on my back, sprawled out on a motel bed, staring up at the walls and ceiling. Glassy-eyed and semiconscious, the remnants of the day lingered in my mind even as my cast-off clothing lingered on the green-vinyl chair in the corner. I had tossed myself onto the bed as haphazardly as I had tossed my clothes.

Bad move.

The prone position apparently agitated the volatile contents of my stomach. A mini-mart Big Dog, with onions, from somewhere down the street. The clerk there had smiled at me in a way that I now saw as a fore-shadowing. She knew. You either have a cast-iron stomach, she’d said with her eyes, or you shall surely pay the price.

“You might want to grab a tube of rolaids with that tube steak, “ she might have said. But didn’t.

Lying on my back now, my eyes finally focused on a painting on the wall. It was a print. It was a faded pastel print of a faded pastel painting. On a faded pastel wall. I’d hit the trifecta, by God. It was an ocean scene, of a rocky coast with cliffs and clouds and a pounding surf. But something was wrong with it. It was way too serene, I thought, in its pastel blandness.

It lacked the violence and energy of the real thing. It was as if it was being viewed through the pink tinted windows of a tour bus.

It was much more conducive to slumber, I supposed, than a realistic portrayal.

The picture, I realized, was like my recently devoured Big Dog… it had been all pink and serene there on its heated rollers. A picture of blandness. But that picture had belied the fire and energy that had lurked in reality beneath the surface.

Behind its cool facade.

What was I thinking?

Just mere days before this trip, I had spent time with my health advisor and naturopath, Dr Michael James, and we had discussed this very topic at length… processed foods.

“Processed food is NOT food,” he’d said in no uncertain terms. “Food products are NOT food.”

Not if your definition of food is that it supply nourishment.

Nourishment being what is necessary for life, health, and growth.

A Big Dog does not nourish. This I knew. It is a food product. But I had consumed it anyway, as do millions and millions of my fellow Americans everyday. Food products.

Junk.

“You are what you eat,” I said to myself. And right now

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I am becoming pig-entrails and chicken feet and sodium nitrite.

It was no wonder my stomach was gurgling. What to do?

“Whole Foods”, that is the key. So said Dr James, and so I believed. Get as close to the source as you can get. Eat the apple, not the processed apple juice.

But why?, I’d wondered. Isn’t it the same darn thing? Isn’t apple juice just apples that have been put in a bottle and sterilized so that it won’t spoil for a decade or two? Without refrigeration, even. Lord knows, it is easier and more convenient. And it doesn’t have brown spots or worms. At least, not so’s you can see.

“It is processed, and that is the problem.”

“Processing” or “refining” changes the very nature of the food. The refining process involves heat or chemicals and it usually removes everything that makes a food a “food”. That is why refined food can last so long… there is nothing left there that even a bacteria can eat. Think about it.

In the case of apple juice, without the skin and the pulp and having been heated, it has been rendered into sugar water. With apple flavor. It really has little or no nutritional value… not in any meaningful definition of the word.

Our digestive systems are incredibly complex. They are built to take the foods we ingest and use them effectively and efficiently. They didn’t get that way overnight. They evolved over millions of years.

Consider.

Our ancestors in the way back… in the WAY back… back when we were just becoming humanoid… well, they ate what they could eat. And what they could eat was mostly fruit. And vegetable matter. Over hundreds of thousands of years their digestive systems developed the ability to absorb and utilize these foods. They developed the acids and enzymes and processes that could break these foods down, properly… not only to survive, but to thrive.

Then maybe bugs and grubs and worms started working their way into the diet. Lizards and salamanders and maybe an occasional egg of some kind. These foods, however, were significantly different from plant matter. They were proteins, and they required different enzymes and more acidity to digest. Early on, it was mostly a waste of time. They didn’t digest, they just took up space.

Evolve. Change things in that digestive tract. The ones who could do it better, thrived better.

Over time, fish got into the diet. More protein. Then meat.

Raw meat. Some anthropologists believe that adding meat proteins to the diet was a major step forward for man’s evolution, especially for the growth of the brain.

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But again, it didn’t happen overnight.

Different enzymes and more acids and a lengthening small intestine, these things were kind of tacked onto what was already a fairly sophisticated system. It was like taking an old wood-burning stove and modifying it so that it could work with gas, too. It wasn’t built for that, but by golly we’re gonna make it work somehow. And it did, and we do.

So far, so good.

And then what?

Fire. Fire is what. In another monumental change to humankind, we began changing our food before we consumed it. We cooked it. We grilled it, boiled it, baked it. We changed the very structure and the chemical nature of our food before we shoved it down our gullets. For some foods, like meat, this was advantageous. For other foods, like fruit, not so much. But cooking, though late in the game, started us into refining our food. Late in the evolutionary game, true, but still many, many tens of thousands of years ago.

The final, or at least the latest step, in our dietary evolution has just happened in the last century. Refining. What cooking began, high heat and chemicals have lately taken to a whole new level.

Take sugar for example. Refined sugar does not exist in nature. In no way has our digestive system been built to handle raw, refined sugar. It never evolved a way because it never encountered it. The sugars it was built to digest were all parts of complex starches. Like fruits. It could handle them quite nicely, thank you.

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But when you break the sugar out, from the sugar cane or the sugar beet, or from the apple into apple juice, you short-circuit the system. It causes a malfunction. Not only in the digestive system, but in the other systems downstream. Those systems, evolved over millions of years, have come to rely upon the digestive system to supply them with the proper nutrients in the proper amounts and ratios.

Whoops.

Other refined foods, to varying degrees, are like sugar in that regard.

Take refined flour, white flour… we’ve taken a fairly nutritious food, ground up grain, and we’ve pretty much removed everything nutritious about it, leaving a high-octane carbohydrate that our digestive system simply cannot handle properly. It was never built to handle it. It slips things through in ratios that are all out of kilter.

And the other systems… well, they pay the price.

It is, by definition, a poison. Poison: noun; a substance with an inherent property that tends to destroy life or impair health.

“Gluten intolerance,” Dr James said to me, “Is mostly a reaction to refined flour, pure and simple.”

We’ve taken everything out of the grain, including the germ, the springboard of life, and left little but the glue and the sugar.

And don’t go for that “enriched” line. By enriched, they simply mean that they are synthetically putting back a very little bit of the what they just took out.

Then we inundate ourselves with this stuff. It is no wonder the body reacts poorly.

“Stop feeding me this stuff. What are you thinking?”

This same basic concept is true for nearly all processed/refined foods. Our digestive system, and all of the other bodily systems downstream from it, have evolved to run on certain kinds of fuel. And now we are saying, “Screw you. I’m putting this stuff in the tank, lots of it, and I I don’t care if you like it or not.”

The healthy course forward, according to both Dr James and to common sense, is to get away from these processed foods. Stop putting poison in the tank. The closer we can get back to whole foods, natural foods, the better our body’s systems will function.

Period.

Be clear about this, though, this is not a “back-to-nature” thing for the sake of hugging trees and dancing in the meadow with flowers in our hair. Nor is it a refutation of science or technology.

It IS science. It is logical. It is common sense.

My body was designed to run on certain fuels. It isn’t that way by accident. I need to give it the right fuel and see what it can do. I mess with it at my own peril.

Which brings me back, via a somewhat circuitous route, to my rumbling, gurgling innards on a non-descript motel bed… a Big Bad Dog wreaking its holy vengeance upon my stomach.

Unfortunately, the consumption of that bad dog was not an isolated event, but

rather the culmination of a series of poor eating choices I’d made during my days on the road. Had it been alone, my systems, digestive and otherwise, may have been able to overcome it. But I had poisoned the well a bit too often.

Shortly thereafter, finally back at home, I found myself run down and beat up. I attributed it to the effects of travel. For a few days I was lethargic and tired.

Depressed, even. I couldn’t get going. I had no motivation. I moped. I wallowed.

Finally… desperately… I forced myself to the produce department of our local Sprouts Market. There, I stocked up on fresh vegetables and fruit. I mean, I STOCKED UP. I built a salad fit for a king. I put everything under the sun onto and into that thing. I put a salad on a platter the size of Cincinnati and I consumed it. I cleaned the plate. And I swear to you that within hours I was pulling out of my slump. By the next morning I was back to my bouncy, jouncy self.

My verbose self.

And this story is the result.

And the other result is that me and the boxes and the cans are having a parting of the ways. I’ve learned my lesson. My engine runs WAY better on the proper fuel, this I know. So, I am making a concerted effort to get the refined foods out of my diet as much as possible.

It ain’t easy, though. They are everywhere, those imposters.

Everywhere.

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Dynamic Fitness Lifestyle “Some Very Special ‘FATS’ for Living Dynamically” It’s estimated that more than 5 million people in the United States have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). And unfortunately that number is expected to increase significantly as us baby boomers enter our senior years.

Alzheimer’s disease is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer who discovered the disease in 1906. AD is a disease in which you lose your mind, literally. It gradually impairs your memory, behavior, thinking, personality, judgment, language, movement, and coordination. It is the most feared of all dementias.

from brain cells becoming insulin resistive and unable to process glucose, leading to cell death; a condition that has come to be called Type 3 Diabetes.

However the brain can use another source of fuel: ketones, produced by the body from MCTs. Ketones are easily accessed by brain cells for energy so even if the cells can’t absorb glucose, if there are ketones available they don’t die off. And check this out… Some of the most promising experimental Alzheimer’s disease drugs being tested today are nothing more than MCTs derived from coconut oil.

Once thought to be irreversible, cutting edge research is finding that ketones derived from the medium-chain fatty acids in coconut oil may slow the progression of Alzheimer’s and may even prevent it.

Most coconut oil contains about 60% medium-chain fats (MCTs) whose fatty acid chain length ranges from six to 12 carbon atoms long, compared to the longchain fatty acids (LCTs) found in regular fats and oils, which range from 16 to 24 carbon atoms in length.

MCTs are a very special class of fatty acids. Normal fats and oils contain the long-chain fatty acids (LCTs).

Compared to these fatty acids, MCTs are much shorter in length. Therefore, they resemble carbohydrates, and are processed in the body more like carbohydrates than fats. As a result they are more easily absorbed, digested, and utilized as energy than conventional fats. Its structure accounts for the ability of MCTs to stimulate the thermic effect of food and increase body temperature. That’s right, MCTs Mega-BOOST our metabolisms in an all-natural fashion for muscle building and fat loss.

Supplemental MCT Oil is obtained through lipid fractionation, the process in which MCTs are separated from other components of coconut oil. Medium-chain triglycerides were originally formulated in the 1950s as an alternative food source for patients who are too ill to properly digest normal fats. The long chains of LCTs require a lot of bile acids and many digestive steps to be broken down into smaller units that can be absorbed into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, they are absorbed by fat cells and stored as body fat. In contrast, MCTs are more water-soluble and are able to enter the bloodstream quicker because of their shorter lengths. Once in the bloodstream, they are transported directly into the liver. Thus, MCTs are an immediately available source of energy and not stored as body fat.

It is now widely believed among the medical profession that some people with neurodegenerative illnesses - including Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis can benefit by adding consistent amounts of ketone producing fatty acids to their diet.

Coconut oil will work to supply MCT’s but it also contains long chain saturated fats which you may not want in your diet. I have been teaching my clients to incorporate short and medium chain fatty acids into a balanced diet of lean proteins, complex carbs, fibrous carbs, healthy fats and medium chain fatty acids in the form of our very own Metabolic Support Oil which contains pure 5-12 carbon chain fatty acids that your body will use to produce ketones without including the unwanted long chain fats.

The recommended amount of MCT’s for dementia patience is roughly 4 teaspoons per day.

Medium Chain Fatty Acids are processed quite differently by the body than regular fats. They are actually digested more like carbohydrates and proteins and the liver processes them into ketones which your body can very easily use for energy. The latest research suggests that Alzheimer’s disease may stem

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Metabolic Support Oil has a naturally buttery taste that enhances the flavor of pretty much anything you put it on. Turkey breast and lean grass fed beef and buffalo can be very dry, however basting in Metabolic Support Oil makes your meatloaf juicy and flavorful. You can also add a tablespoon in your oatmeal in the morning and a tablespoon on your vegetables or on your baked potato for dinner to meet the requirements for dementia. You can even use it to make salad dressings, sauces and condiments. Like the ones in my Dynamic Fitness Lifestyle Cookbook.

MCTs are also used as a ketone producing energy source for adding lean muscle and burning off body fat. There isn’t enough space in this article for me to write about everything that I personally love about supplementing my diet with MCTs. So for more information you can either Google MCT’s and do some more research on the benefits of Medium Chain Fatty Acids or you can call me to schedule a complimentary consultation to determine how MCTs can be incorporated more specifically into your own personal eating regime.

Until next issue… Merry Fitness and may God bless you with abundant health and prosperity in the New Year!!!

Dwain Kindelberger has been a Personal Trainer since 1981. He is a graduate of The National Academy of Sports Medicine, and is the owner of Designer Bodies Exclusive Personal Training and Nutrition Management Center.

Visit us on the web at

www.designerbodies.com

The information contained in this article is not meant to treat, diagnose or cure any ailments or diseases. Please consult your physician before starting any exercise or nutrition program.

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The

Big Ship in the

Desert Ken Orth It is called El Morro and it stands in the desert.

It is a big rock. A very big rock.

It is the size of a cruise ship… a cruise ship stranded amongst and towering above the sagebrush and the yuccas. It stands in western New Mexico not far from the blackened lava fields of the El Malpais, as if it had cruised the flowing lava back in the day. Then it finally beached itself here in the high desert when the devilishly hot lava had eventually stopped, receded, cooled, cracked, and broke apart.

The comparison to a cruise ship, however, ends with its size and the beachfront lava, for El Morro is not a ship and she is not made of steel. She is made of sandstone and she never floated. Never. In fact, she was born at the bottom of the sea, eons ago. She was formed by century upon plodding century of settling sediment… ever settling, more and more of the sand and the ash and the grit. For a long, long time.

But not forever.

Eventually the land rose and the water receded.

Somehow, somewhere along the line some harder rock had come to rest upon the top of a portion of that incredibly thick layer of sediment. Heavy rock, it pushed down upon the gritty stuff beneath it, compacting it further and making it just a little harder itself. Sandstone.

Meanwhile , the land continued to rise and it all became exposed. It was attacked by the weather, then… by the wind and the rain and by the blowing sand. It eroded. For 50 thousand years. 60 thousand. It wore away under the relentless attack.

Erosion.

Except… except for the bit which was capped and compressed by the harder rock. It was protected from above and compacted, and it better withstood the ravages of the weather.

Until It stood like a ship in the desert. A sandstone edifice standing tall in a flattened land. A landmark. A monument.

And a monument it became. A real ship in the desert.

The people who came here created a city upon its flattened, hardened top. Nearly a thousand years ago they came and they built. Using blocks of rock cut from the malleable sandstone they built a city of over 800 rooms on the top of the big rock in the desert.

There they lived and there they died. And there they thought philosophical thoughts. Some of them carved some of those thoughts upon the sandstone walls of the massive ship. Bighorn sheep, they carved. Lightning bolts and esoteric hands reaching for the heavens.

Was it journal of sorts? A history? A simple work of art?

A passing fancy.

They were gone then, the passengers on this desert ship. Suddenly and completely gone. Sometime in the 1300’s the people living atop the big rock abandoned it.

The buildings of sandstone blocks were left behind like stale bagels left on a granite countertop… to weather and crumble and turn back into sand. Buried and forgotten.

In the decades and centuries that followed, more and other peoples came by the big rock in the desert.

Travellers. Native peoples. Conquistadors. Wandering, and lured by the massive monument and the reed-lined pool of sweet water at its base, they came to the desert ship.

There, inspired by the numerous existing inscriptions, many of them added their own carvings upon the soft sandstone walls. Names, now, and dates. Words alongside pictographs. Over time, the massif became known as Inscription Rock. It was carved upon, again and again… a form of ancient graffiti upon the decaying hull of an old derelict ship.

When I made the decision to visit El Morro, it was not without a fair amount of waffling. I had a couple of extra hours to spend while on the long drive from Albuquerque to Flagstaff and I figured to detour south of the interstate at Grants into the lava fields of the El Malpais. Discussing my options with the lovely lady at the Western New Mexico Visitor Center (Exit 85), she and I decided that El Morro was to be part of my destiny that day. I had not been there before.

Driving past the El Malpais lava tubes, caves, and trails tested me sorely. Storm clouds, too, gathered darkly to the west… hovering, it seemed, right over the area to which I was headed. Looking at them, it reminded me of a Charlie Brown strip where a dark cloud hovered over poor Charlie alone and the caption read “It always rains on the unloved.”

Foreshadowing?

As I approached the Big Rock in the Desert, the world beneath the dark clouds had transformed itself into a land of black and white and a hundred shades of gray.

El Morro looked to have been painted there, or drawn perhaps, with charcoal. Stark and straight-walled and shadowed, it stood out ominously against the swollen, billowing curtains of gray.

It is a two mile trail… around, up, over, and back down the Big Rock. Alone. With a threat of rain and the looming specter of ghostly ruins and weathered words carved into the worn walls of a foundered ship.

“Steal yourself,” I muttered, squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath. “And try to keep your imagination under control.”

Good luck with that.

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The

Big Ship in the

D ese rt

Continued From Page 12

Descending the trail at the outset from the deserted Visitor Center toward the pool at its base, the first views of El Morro shock my senses. It is not just a big rock. It is… hell, I don’t know what it is. It is huge, with straight walls reaching straight up, reminiscent of the fortress to be assailed by Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings, but in colors of cream and white and gray rather than black.

And it is guarded not by orcs and trolls, but by yuccas and chollas.

And ghosts.

The pool is a total misfit in this fortress-like environment. It is a placid place, and cool, lined with reeds and cattails, and occupied by singing birds. It is as if the original design for the castle had included a fearsome moat, but it got waylaid by the queen and transformed instead into this lovely oasis. As I gaze across the pool at the steep walls on the far side, I can almost hear the soft sounds of a flute whispering across the water, and a woman’s laughter from amongst the hidden reeds.

Was it an Eden here, at the foot of a fortress? Did you carve a bit of the story into the soft stone walls?

The carvings start in earnest just past the pool. It is rather like a guest book of those who have visited this place. The aft sandstone proved to be too much to pass up. Someone started it… perhaps the player of the flute, with a carving of a broken heart. Then the others followed his lead.

Big horned sheep and lightning bolts and ambiguously spiraling spirals followed by names and dates and poetry and prose.

Railroads came, and wagons, and Jesuit priests with heaven on their minds. And a carving tool of some kind in their hands.

It boggles me to look upon the many, many carvings. Some are documented as to the who and when. None explain the why.

I tarry and study some of them, though the clouds say no. I can almost see someone crouched there, a sharp rock in his hand, carving for posterity… or immortality… or love. It is mesmerizing.

In numbers beyond counting.

Eventually I work my way around the desert ship and I ascend the switchbacks on the back side. Or is it the front side? Was this the trail they took? I wonder. Now it is paved with asphalt and a handrail. Is that blasphemy?

“You pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”

I try to force the song out of my consciousness as I work my way up. Unsuccessfully, I might add, until I finally reach the top and everything else gets pushed back into obscurity.

Now, this is a trail! This is a view. This is what I came here for, though I didn’t know it until now.

It is no wonder that they wanted to build a city up here. What IS

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a wonder, though, is that they were able to do it. On this flat-topped rock in the desert.

The trail over the top is like no other trail I have ever traversed. The borders of the trail are etched into the rock, vague and weathered in places. There are stairs here and there… staircases, carved into the solid rock. With bloated gray clouds hovering above, it makes for a surreal vision as if I have stepped sideways into a Salvadore Dali painting… or perhaps an Escher, with stairs that go neither up nor down but wind around back into whence they came.

I stand and gawk. Again and again. I cannot help myself. The ruins, partially excavated, remind me somewhat of Chaco Canyon. The ever-present round room is there. The kiva.

Looking down into it I wonder again why they chose to make it round. Were decisions made here? Did they want to be constantly reminded that choices and destinies rarely move along straight lines… but that they curve, often back upon themselves.

If there be ghosts in these ruins, they are seemingly contented ghosts. Not clanking chains, but tour guides. Like an open house on a Sunday afternoon, they show me where they used to live. Happily, it seems. Atop the grand ship in the desert.

“So where do you live?” I expect to see carved into one of the sandstone blocks. A challenge to the world.

“I don’t live here,” I mutter . The only one who hears it is a lone raven who has just joined me on top of the world. He stands on the wall of the kiva, like he owns it.

“But I bet it was a darn good place to live.,” I say, looking right at him.

He makes a raucous squawk and cocks his head, his beady black eyes staring back at me.

You have no idea.

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Dr Jason Karp

Six Things You Don’t Know About Running Ever been told to stretch to prevent an injury? What about taking deeper breaths to get in more oxygen? From stretching to lungs and injuries to estrogen, there are many mythconceptions about running. And then there are things that few people know. Here are six interesting things that you don’t know about running that can unlock the doors to your running success.

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1. Stretching is not going to prevent you from getting injured.

Have you ever run with a dog or watched a horse race? If you have, you probably noticed something interesting—none of these animals stretch before or after they run. Stretching before a workout seems to be something that only humans do.

Whether stretching can prevent injuries depends on the type of activity you’re doing and the type of injury you’re trying to prevent.

If the activity includes explosive or bouncing movements, like those in volleyball, basketball, and plyometric exercises, research has shown that stretching can reduce injuries by increasing the compliance of your tendons and improving their ability to absorb energy.

However, for low-intensity activities that don’t include bouncing movements, like running, cycling, and swimming, research has shown that stretching doesn’t prevent injuries because you don’t need very compliant tendons for those activities.

In regard to the type of injury, stretching can prevent muscle injuries, such as sprains and strains, but not bone or joint injuries. Bone and joint injuries, which are common among runners, are caused by increasing the training load too much too quickly.

The only documented benefit of stretching is to improve functional range of motion—flexibility—which is best accomplished when you stretch apart from the workout.

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2. You need to run more than you are.

Dr. Jason Karp is one of the foremost running experts in America, 2011 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year, 2014 recipient of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition Community Leadership award, and creator of the Run-Fit Specialist certification.

He holds a Ph.D. in exercise physiology. A prolific writer, he has more than 200 articles published in international running, coaching, and fitness magazines, is the author of five books, including Running for Women and Running a Marathon For Dummies, and is a frequent speaker at international fitness and coaching conferences. Follow Jason on Twitter @drjasonkarp and Facebook at DrJasonKarpRunFit.

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If you want to become a better runner, the first step is running more.

The number of miles (or amount of time) you run each week, every week, is the most important part of becoming a better runner. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Running more stimulates many physiological, biochemical, and molecular adaptations.

It increases blood volume. A greater amount of blood circulating in your body means a greater number of red blood cells, which transport oxygen. Inside the red blood cells is a protein called hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to your working muscles. These changes to your blood improve your blood vessels’ ability to transport oxygen.

It also promotes better fuel storage. Running lots of miles stimulates the storage of more fuel (glycogen) in your muscles and increases your

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body’s use of fat so that your muscles spare your reserved glycogen.

Running promotes more efficient transport of oxygen. When you run a lot, your body creates more capillaries surrounding your muscle fibers. More capillaries mean a more rapid diffusion of oxygen into your muscles.

Running also improves the ability to produce energy. Through the complex activation of gene expression, running increases how many mitochondria you have in your muscles and the number of aerobic enzymes contained within them. That combination increases your muscles’ capacity to produce energy aerobically.

Running more also allows you to see and experience places and things you wouldn’t normally get to and gives you a chance to discover things about yourself, including discipline, courage and the ability to meet a challenge.

Always increase your running mileage systematically and with reason behind it. Be careful because you can easily get injured if you increase your weekly mileage too quickly.

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3. Running injuries have little to do with the shoes on your feet.

Unless you’re wearing a shoe that is completely wrong for your foot type and running mechanics—for instance, wearing a cushioning shoe when you should be using a stability shoe—your shoes are not causing you to get injured.

The main reason why injuries happen is because the physical stress from running is too much for your body to handle at that time. The human body is great at adapting to stress, but only when you apply that stress in small doses. When you apply the stress too quickly for your body to adapt, something breaks down. So don’t train stupidly by training haphazardly or by increasing your mileage and intensity too quickly and you won’t get injured.

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4. Long races are best run at times of the month when estrogen is high.

Estrogen is a runner-friendly hormone. It influences many aspects of a runner’s performance, including a shift in metabolism toward a greater reliance of fat when running at a submaximal pace. Relying more on fat means your muscles’ limited store of high-octane fuel— carbohydrate—is conserved.

When male rats are given estrogen, they rely more on fat when running on a rat treadmill and can run for longer periods of time (for obvious reasons, this research can’t be done on humans).

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5. Your lung capacity has nothing to do with your ability to run.

At first glance, distance running seems to have everything to do with big, strong lungs. After all, it’s through our lungs that we get oxygen. If the size of our lungs mattered, you would expect the best distance runners to have large lungs that can hold a lot of oxygen.

However, the best distance runners in the world are quite small people, with characteristically small lungs. Total lung capacity—the maximal amount of air the lungs can hold—is primarily influenced by body size, with bigger people having larger lung capacities. There is no relationship between lung capacity and how fast you run a 10K. I’ve measured this myself in the lab.

Studies show that the lungs don’t adapt to training or limit the ability to perform endurance exercise, especially in untrained people. That limitation rests on the shoulders of the cardiovascular and metabolic systems, with blood flow to and oxygen use by the muscles the major culprits.

Apart from lung volume, there are other aspects of the pulmonary system that affect running performance, gas exchange being the most important. However, in healthy people, the lungs are more than adequate for this gas exchange to occur.

Winter 2014-15

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If you’ve been told to take deeper breaths when you run to get in more oxygen, don’t listen. At sea level, your blood is nearly 100 percent saturated with oxygen, even when running fast. Taking deeper breaths doesn’t get more oxygen from the lungs into the blood. At sea level, the main stimulus to breathe is the partial pressure of CO2, not O2. In some elite runners, there is a diffusion limitation between the alveolar wall and pulmonary capillaries because of a very high cardiac output, which leads to a desaturation of oxygen on hemoglobin. However, in non-elite runners without pulmonary pathology, the lungs do not limit exercise performance.

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6. Your muscle fiber type will dictate which races you’ll be best at.

Humans have three major muscle fiber types, with gradations between them, the proportions of which are genetically determined.

If you have lots of slow-twitch aerobic muscle fibers, you’ll be good at long-distance races; if you have a lot of fast-twitch anaerobic muscle fibers, you’ll be good at sprints. If you have a 50/50 mix or 60/40 mix of slow-twitch and fast-twitch, you’ll be good at middle-distance races, like the 800 meters and mile.

Since it’s impossible to know what your dominant fiber type is without getting a muscle biopsy, the only way you can gain some insight is by running many different races and doing different types of workouts over a number of years to see what you’re best at. But once you know, train according to your fiber type. If you have 70 percent fasttwitch fibers and 30 percent slow-twitch fibers, you could get through a marathon if you really want to run it, but it’s going to be tough road to hoe. You always want to train to your strengths; you’ll be most successful when you listen to the genes your parents gave you.

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Athens in New Mexico Arroyo Piedra Lumbre East Isabel Isabel Bearman Bucher

Athens in New Mexico Arroyo Piedra Lumbre East

I remember sitting below the Acropolis, in Athens, Greece. Robert, my husband, and I, had spent three carefree, adventuresome weeks wandering around Crete and Rhodes, not on a tour, but on our own, and were now homeward bound that next day to life and jobs. We’d drifted around in the Placa, an old neighborhood of Athens, full of shops, noise and traffic jams, finally emerging onto a quiet cobbled street on an upward slant. Colorful tablecloths beckoned to us from the outdoor tables of a restaurant. Waiters in white, with towels over their arms, smiled. Seated with Greek red wine poured in glasses, we toasted our adventure, each other, and then raised them to the massive, fabled structure, the Parthenon, built of marble, honoring Athena, its patron goddess, that stood a mere few hundred feet above us. To be so close to such a famous landmark, built in the 5th century BC, was the true meaning of “awesome.”

Just a few weeks back, I stood in the Ojito Wilderness near San Ysidro, in the Arroyo Piedra Lumbre East, and felt that awestruck feeling once again. How can a person live for so many years in a state, and not know about such beauty? It far surpasses humankind’s Parthenons. The Arroyo Piedra Lumbre East, with its epic geologic story and bedazzling rock columns is a part of the maze of canyons, slots, abandoned Hispanic and ancient pre-Columbian Asian nomads that go back so far, that humans can’t get it.

Moving in bits and pieces backwards, there in 1979, Seizmosaurus, the largest dinosaur ever discovered, was stumbled upon by hikers. This big guy goes back 120 million years, was 84 feet tall, 128 feet long and weighed 200,000 pounds - and - it roamed the Piedra Lumbre and all parts of the Ojito.

Move back more time now to Mount Taylor. It’s a volcano, and geologists estimated that maybe 3.3 to 1.5 million years back, when it was formed, along with the rest of the over hundred others, it was from 18,000 to 25,000 feet TALL! Life does have a way of wearing us all down to nubs, does it not?

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MtTaylorQuadrathlon

www.mttaylorquad.org “The Quad” is a 43-mile race to the top and back down of 11,301 foot Mt Taylor. Start out at 6,500 feet biking 13 miles out of town and up into the ponderosa pines. Run 5 miles on gravel turning to snowpack.

Cross-country ski 2 miles, including the infamous “heartbreak hill”.

Top it out with 1 mile to the top on snowshoes. The race is only half over. Now reverse the events and make the 21 miles back down!

Do it solo. Do it as a team. Do it because you can.

So the Mt. Taylor field was truly “Rocks of fire,” which is what Piedra Lumbre means, and it kept that fireworks show going for almost two million years. Now, looking out over the landscape, Cabezon, big head, dominates. There’s maybe a hundred plugs in that field, that remind this writer of silent gnomes, giving the mental images of the once, long ago wild fire, smoke and lava blows. Over the years, oceans covered it, a huge under ocean river carved it. When all the waters receded, wind began more sculpture designing efforts on the sandstone that was deposited so long ago.

Today, it is an area where one cannot go ten feet without exclaiming, “Oh, just look at that!”

There’s melded pebbles of many colors, pottery shards and folded over rocks of such intricate beauty, the cameras cannot stop zip-clicking. For any winter blahs, pack the lunch, plenty of water, and the layers - and go backwards in time to the Parthenon of the Ojito and New Mexico. But ... repeat - if there’s rain or snow in the forecast, then pass it up for another day - because ... you don’t want to become a part of the strata to be discovered 10,000 years in the future!

Thoughts on the Trail The van bumps over the narrow dirt track.

“This area was ranched out maybe a hundred years ago,” says someone, as we all look out on the huge landscape.

“Too much cholla.”

Someone explains that Cholla is the opportunistic cactus that takes over after the grasses have been eaten down to the nub.

Cabezon, the head of the giant, appears, and grows larger.

It’s the super volcanic plug that stands supreme taking over the whole landscape. We cross the Rio Puerco, and Red Mountain Ranch dots the winter brown landscape. Old

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abandoned adobes melt into the earth as we take the right on the Piedra Lumbre Road #1102. Struggling juniper shows brown needles and twisted branches, hanging onto the earth.

Smashed beer bottles glint under the Cholla. We’re shake, rattle and roll now, reaching Naciemento Ridge. Brown roads curve to nowhere. Electric androgynes spread their arms and transport energy on thin wires from Farmington to Albuquerque.

We’ve parked and are walking down a ditch, heading north.

We see a post that says 0.3 Mi, and we bear north again towards the beaconing hills ahead. We’re climbing rills and rolling hills. The great carved and eroded mesa looms, as shadows paint false dark hiding places on the weathered jutting stone that rises 400 feet. It’s brown on brown - a million years of Michelangelo sculpture.

I’m standing in front of a ridge of columns, carved for a million years, topped by red rust iron. I know why humans designed the great Roman and Greek columns - they copied them from the great formations on deserts which surrounded them thousands of years back. Vertical lines plunge downward, straight and clean, no calculations from humans.

Wind whispers through the beige grasses with semi-curled heads - they wave, and take human cares and worries, blowing them into the big nowhere. I send a few of mine that way too just for this moment in time. Freed, the landscape takes me to it, and I become a part of it all - ancient, everlasting, eternal.

I look down at my pants and see they are covered with winter travelers - bugger lice, tumbleweed bur, and whatever else wishes to have winter transport at no charge. How smart is evolution - meant to survive at all and any cost.

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Isabel

Continued From Page 21

The hikers discuss insurance issues, kids, grandkids, then, quiet, a reverence descends on the group. Heads rotate, eyes wander recording thoughts, forming memories. Swallows visit the skyscraper rock walls doing perfect acrobatic circles and curves, spreading wings, finding food in the air.

A perfect tilt of wing and iridescent green blue blazes for a second from the seemingly drab bird.

“Like an idea,” I muse. “A realization. A memory.”

All bio-forms around us are in a constant state of change, evolution - doing their duty of because there is no choice.

“I’m doing the same thing,” I think. “I’m constantly changing, doing my duty, because I have no choice.”

We’re passing the valley of the gnomes and the giants.

There’s large lakes of water because we’ve had so much rain this year and everyone celebrates this. It’s being New Mexican. It’s calling many to be sustained, not just cows.

Rocks are topped with red - a mixture of oxygen and iron.

We’re navigating the bubbles and the bumps that’s seen their share of trouble, like us all - flash floods, dryness, wild winds, tumbled rocks, slab rocks, balanced rocks, all suspended for this moment in time on a pinnacle - a hat that has perched for a thousand years?

In the end, we see the van in the distance. We’ve walked 4.3 miles.

“It seems so much longer,” says a hiker quietly.

“We went behind time, to forever,” I respond. “I let my troubles blow away in the wind. Did you?”

She smiles and nods.

TRAILHEAD DRIVING DIRECTIONS: • I-40 to Unser (the 1-25 to Bernalillo - #550 - is down to ONE LANE, due to road construction) Unser wanders around, but it will eventually dump out on Bernalillo’s 550 to San Ysidro, past all the construction and one lane traffic.

• Drive 18 miles, past SR 4, and US 550 to San Louis Rd. • Turn left for 8.5 miles to Torreon Road - it’s after the cattle guard, where it turns to dirt • Turn right onto the PAVED Torreon Rd. SR #197 • Drive 3.6 miles to the top of the rise • Go LEFT onto a dirt road for 4 miles • Park below a low hill • Hike the low hill to the ruin on top enjoy the view GETTING TO THE HIKE • Bring a compass or a GPS • Cross the road to a low man-made ditch • This leads to the MAIN DITCH 0.1 miles • Walk the animal trail on the N. Side • Head NORTH to a post 0.3.

• Bear NORTH - cross a side ditch at 0.4 miles.

• See cliffs ahead.

From here, there are wonderful formations, and you can wander around

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Ken Orth and Dr Michael James

Together again in a titillating story of nutritive intrigue and culinary chicanery

You Are . . .

Something or Other I used to program computers. Big IBM “mainframe” computers. I started programming back in the day when it was all new. Don’t ask how long ago that was.

“Data processing” is what they called it then, because that is what we did.

We fed large amounts of data into the machines which then processed it into meaningful reports and graphs and charts… way faster and much more accurately and more creatively than had ever been done before.

No one knew for sure just how much we could do or how far we could go.

It was new and exciting and very much untested. The sky was the limit.

There WERE some problems along the way, though. One major one that popped again and again was the inconsistency of the data we were getting in. Sometimes, it simply did not match up with what the program expected to get in. Where a date was supposed to be, there was a phone number. Or zeros, or nothing, or a mother’s maiden name.

Sometimes these errors were trivial and went largely unnoticed. Other times, they could wreak total havoc… from rendering invalid results (which might or might not be caught, and which might or might not be major) to bringing the whole machine to a screeching halt. “It crashed” is what was said about the program.

Whose program?

Most of the time, though, the results of errors were somewhere in the middle. Something came out, but it didn’t really matter, it was garbage. The output was garbage.

A phrase was coined, then… Garbage In, Garbage Out. The results, we knew, could only be as good, as reliable, as what was being fed in. This was a given. If you had troubles with the end product, whatever it was, the first place you looked for a culprit was what you were feeding in.

It was the way of life, that mantra. Garbage In, Garbage Out. It got us through the trials and tribulations of the fledgling computer industry. That industry grew and prospered, and eventually over the decades it evolved and morphed into the totally unrecognizable personal computing thing with which we are all now inundated.

Sorry about that.

But one truth, through it all, still remains. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The definition of just what constitutes “garbage” these days may have morphed along with the technologies. It may not “crash” the system anymore, but it still can be wildly wrong, very bad for you, and/or very difficult to detect.

The output may well be pure, unadulterated garbage.

It is not surprising to me that the old mantra has stuck with me after all these years. It was pounded into me through some very formative times.

What is kind of surprising, though, and something that I have just recently come to realize, is how applicable that old saying is to another area of my life today…

“You are what you eat,” is what I have been told many, many times, and I have come to believe it. The truth of this is obvious.

Now, though, I have a corollary to that wisdom. An addition.

“Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

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It has brought this whole concept of what I eat into a better perspective. It has clarified the “you are what you eat” saying.

I may not be “exactly” what I eat. No. I’ll take it in, and process it, and hopefully turn it into something useful, healthy, and reliable. If I can. Just like the old days.

If it is garbage in, though, how I process it and what I build with it… well… what I build with it will be less than what it could be. What it should be. What it is supposed to be. And what I am building with it, is myself. My heart, my lungs, my brain.

Garbage In, Garbage Out. What am I doing?

“You’re eating too much processed food,” Dr James told me.

“I know, I know,” I said. “I believe I’ve even written a story about it. I don’t want to talk about what I shouldn’t eat… sugar and flour and big, bad, dogs… I want to talk about what I should eat.”

“Whole foods…” he started to say, and I interrupted him again before he could get any farther.

“What? Nuts and berries and organic stuff and vegetarian junk and we’ll sit around the table singing Kum-ba-yah while I sip carrot juice and slowly wither away?

“Shoot me first.”

Fortunately, Dr James has a good sense of humor and has been around me long enough that he was able to take this tirade right in stride. He’s been over this territory before.

“You don’t want to eliminate good food from your diet. Tasty food. Healthy food. You just want to eliminate the food that has been significantly altered. And the reason for this, as you well know, is not so that you can finally learn the words to Kum-bayah or go vegetarian… It’s because your body needs proper fuel to run properly.”

Winter 2014-15

Period.

We call these proper foods “whole foods”. Foods that contain a whole package. Foods that are often a complex combination of the nutrients you need… Vitamins, enzymes, fibers, proteins, minerals, and the like. But these things aren’t there just willynilly, like marbles in a bag. They have been constructed. They are part of a living organism. This is critical. They are part of what we call a “synergistic whole”. They have been combined and constructed in unique ratios and relationships that have produced that something that is so very special… life. The energy of life.

This energy, this potential for life and growth, is very much a part of what your body was designed to consume and to utilize, along with the constituent parts of the food. In this way it is a “whole” food. The whole is more, way more, than the sum of its parts.

A very good example of this can be found in sprouts. (The food item, not the grocery chain. Although, to be sure, the food item can be found in the grocery chain.) Anyway…

“Sprouts” are freshly sprouted seeds. In my mind, they are magic, pure and simple. I will never forget how amazed I was the first time I “grew” sprouts. They come from almost nothing… a spoonful or two of tiny seeds that resemble nothing so much as a sprinkling of sand. Just gritty sand.

But water them and give them naught but air and sunshine and in a few days you have a luxurious carpet of healthy, green growth reaching for the sky. Bursting forth. Magically. A whole lot of something from a little bit of nothing. How can it happen?

It defies the laws of physics. It is growth. It is energy. It is palpable and you can see it. You can feel it.

You can eat it.

Continued on Page 26

25

You Are... Something or Other And trust me, when you do, you are consuming more than the constituent parts of baby plants. You are also consuming the raw, bursting energy of life and growth and health. It is a package. A whole package.

Gram for gram, it turns out that sprouts are one of the most nutritious things that you can eat. And it is no wonder…. they contain all the pieces in a construct that is proven to be successful for spontaneous and energetic growth. Health. Your body can use that, big time.

In much the same way, other whole foods, all whole foods, are complex structures… organics… that are built to live. And to grow. It is no accident that many of the most nutritious foods are seeds, or the carriers of seeds. Seeds contain a huge potential for growth. In a tight little package.

And speaking of seeds, grains are seeds.

Wheat grain for example. Wheat grain is highly nutritious. As is. It is a whole food with healthy energy potential. But when it is torn apart, refined, it loses not only most of its constituent pieces, but its life and growth potential. That potential was very much of the construct itself, and that construct no longer exists.

So, bread made from whole grains, is a “whole food”. Bread from refined flour is not. Simple. To take it a step further, if you make the bread from “sprouted” grains, you have actually upped the nutritional value of that bread significantly. The sprouted grains have already started tapping into that potential growth energy.

But “whole foods” are not restricted to seeds and grains. A whole food, a nutritious food… is a meat, a vegetable… a fruit, a fish, a fowl…

a living organism that is as close to its original unaltered structure as can be had. This is what we can best digest and utilize because this is what we are built to digest and utilize.

“So wait just a minute here,” I interjected again. “When you say ‘as close to original as can be had’, are you talking raw? Look, I’m not really into sushi that much. And don’t get me started on potatoes. Raw potatoes? That’d be an ix-nay on the aw-ray.”

Whole foods does not mean raw foods. You’re not eating potatoes raw. Or steak. Or even peanuts. Many whole foods need to be cooked in order to be digestible. Or to be palatable.

Many are enhanced by cooking.

Legumes, for example. Say, pinto beans. Or cashews. Many legumes have, built in, what is called an “enzyme blocker”. This is to keep the seed from decaying prior to its appropriate time. Which might well be a few seasons away.

Anyway, this enzyme blocker makes the legume difficult to digest. However, the blocker can be deactivated… by soaking or by heating. And brought back into the digestible “whole food” field.

There is a catch, however. Once that blocker is deactivated, the nutritional value begins to deteriorate. The legume should be consumed relatively soon. So, boiling pinto beans and consuming them within a few days is a-okay.

But getting those pinto beans out of a can after they have been in there for who-knows-howlong? Not okay.

Same thing with cashews. Roast raw ones yourself and eat them within a reasonable time (say, a week), and you’re doing yourself proud.

But get ‘em already roasted out of a jar or a can

Continued From Page 25 and… well… how long they been there? You get the picture.

The point is that while cooking is actually a form of processing, it is very much a part of eating whole foods. But it can be overdone and misused.

Green beans steamed lightly to a brilliant green are oh so nutritious. And good. But green beans boiled all day in grandma’s pot are pretty much devoid of any nutritional value. In fact, you might be better served to drink the liquid.

But don’t.

In the end, the switch to whole foods is more common sense than rocket science. The more the “food” item has been processed, the more you should avoid it. The two biggest culprits in our culture today are refined sugar and refined flour. And all of the products that contain them. Which is many. You must actively and aggressively avoid them. As much as possible.

The other side of that coin, which will then follow quite naturally, is to incorporate more whole foods into the diet. Avoid the white bread and incorporate the whole grain bread.

Dodge the canned beans and go with the fresh ones.

Try it as a test. Give it an honest shot for a couple weeks, and see if your body doesn’t respond positively.

It will.

Because no matter how far we have come, there are still a couple of truths…

You are what you eat. and Garbage in, Garbage out.

Believe it.

So, How’s It Work With These “Whole Foods?”

• Whole Foods are split into 3 groups based on how your body digests them: Concentrated Proteins, Concentrated Starch, & Neutrals Proteins: 8 hours, Starches: 4 hours, Neutrals: Up to 2 hours (Proteins take longest to get through & require more acidity) For best digestion, proteins & starches should not be eaten simultaneously... many digestion problems can be resolved this way • Eliminate processed/refined foods as much as possible. Every little bit makes you healthier. Many common allergic reactions come from these.

Most of the “white” foods are bogus... sugar, flour, white rice, white pasta, white bread, etc. Ditch them. Use honey, whole wheat, brown rice, etc.

Packaged/boxed/canned foods gotta go... they have been refined too much, and/or they include undesirable additives • Fresh fruit is a starch & excellent nutrition source. Cooked fruit, however, has become almost pure sugar.

Fresh fruit goes through the system quickly. Some of the times are in the chart. Eat fruit BEFORE other foods (proteins & neutrals) • Legumes and nuts are wonderful, especially nuts. Get them raw & cook/roast or soak them when you consume them, no more than a week ahead.

Include more legumes & nuts in your diet and less proteins. Nuts and dried fruits are particularly nutritious • More Fresh vegetables! Cooked lightly or raw. Not canned. Brocolli is king. The more fresh vegetables you eat, the healthier you will be.

• Oils. Your body NEEDS fats & oils, particularly the brain & nervous system. But NOT Canola oil or Soybean oil or Supermarket vegetable oils.

Use UNREFINED oils... cold pressed or expeller pressed. Use UNREFINED coconut oil, olive oil, butter.

• Dr James offers free clinics with LOTS of information about using Whole Foods. Contact his office & tell them Duke City Fit sent you.

26

www.dukecityfit.com

Winter 2014-15

27

Uncle Uncle KC’s KC’s Corner Corner

Something From Nothing Impress your friends. Impress your family.

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Somethin’ from nothin’, that’s what it looks like to me. Or at least, a whole lot of something from very, very little... and in this day, in these times, that’s a rare enough thing that I look upon it with more than a little amazement.

Imagine. You put about two tablespoons full of tiny, gritty little things in a tray.

Then, you do nothing but get ‘em good and wet and rinse ‘em once in a while.

The original volume we’re talking about here is less than the amount of sand you dump out of your tennies after a stroll along the river.

In fact, when you first put them into that tray, that’s what it reminds you of... it’s as if you’re dumping in sand, or fine-grained gravel. But it’s not, of course. It’s seeds.

The similarity is there, though, eerily, and after you’ve done it a couple of times you start feeling a bit like a magician who is about to pull a rabbit out of thin air. There is a certain familiarity about it, a kind of kinship that you feel with what may have happened back at the dawn of time when a few grains of this mixed with a few grams of that and voila, life sprang forth.

And spring forth it does, in just a matter of days. A lush carpet of burgeoning life appears, healthy and vital and so obviously full of energy. This, where days before there was naught but grit. It is magic, like a haloed moon is magic, or the pink glow of the Sandias at sunset.

It brings a smile to my face nearly every time on that fifth or sixth day when I see what the world has done. I’ll show the

28

tray to whichever of my boys happens to be nearby and I’ll say, “Look at this! Isn’t it amazing?”

They’ll look, dutifully, and say something like, “Yeah, dad, that’s nice.”

Then they’ll give me that look that I’ve come to recognize over the years. The one that says, “I don’t know how he can get so much pleasure out of something so simple.”

They’ll smile, though, and that’s good enough for me.

At that point, which is to say, about 5 or 6 days into the life cycle of my primordial sprouts, it is time to take them out of the darkness in which they have grown and prospered and bring them into the light.

They have a place of honor in front of a kitchen window.

There, they will begin to turn eagerly, in just a matter of hours, toward that light... stretching, pulling, yearning. Their little leaves, little tiny leaves, begin a transformation. They paint themselves from the inside with a green color that grows by the minute, it seems. It’s an iridescent green, a green that fairly sings.

It is wonder and it is magic.

It is about to become a part of a salad.

Or a tasty ingredient in a sandwich.

Truthfully, in that last day or two, when the sprouts are exposed to the light and the world in all of their growing glory, I find it hard to walk by without noticing them. I kind of pat the growing carpet of green, as if to assure myself that it is really there and it is really that thick.

Often, I’ll pull out a little pinch and pop it in my mouth. It’s a “taste test” I say to myself, like a vintner sampling his wine.

And very much like him, I’ll pause and savor the flavor... right there in the middle of the kitchen floor.

The sprouts, all the different kinds of them, tingle on your tongue. There is chlorophyll in them there tiny little leaves. Hot off the presses chlorophyll.

Fresh out of the oven chlorophyll. It is the secret to life and growth, and it just sprang into being in my kitchen. Its job is to manufacture energy, and that is exactly what it is doing. Right there, in that tray.

It’s reaching for the sky, for the sun, and it will not be denied.

All right!

I pinch off a second little bite, just because I can, and now there is a noticeable little gap in my carpet of green.

A little hole. But not to worry, for in another display of their magical, energetic powers, that gap will be gone by the end of the day. No kidding. They’ll fill the hole with their expanding growth. It’s like the bottomless cup of coffee, but they refill it themselves. No waitress needed.

We started growing sprouts, off and on, many years ago. It all began, simply enough, because we liked sprouts on sandwiches, instead of lettuce. We’d buy those little, plastic, see-through boxes of alfalfa sprouts for 59 cents. Occasionally, we’d get a bad box... they’d be old and dry or they’d be soggy and stale. How old

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are these things, anyway? A friend in California (of course) was growing his own at the time in a mason jar, and we learned from him.

Did I say learned? Well, there’s really not much to learn. You need a wire mesh lid for the mason jar and some sprouting seeds, and you’re off and running. The basic plan is to soak the seeds for a half a day or so to get ‘em started. After that, you keep them in the dark under a dish towel and rinse ‘em twice a day.

Somewhere around day 5 or 6 you bring them out into indirect sunlight to get the green going down the homestretch. That’s it. Nothin’ to it.

So that’s where we started about two decades ago, and believe it or not, we still have that original mason jar and lid. Along the way, though, we discovered that there can be more to this sprout thing than just alfalfa sprouts.

For one thing, there are many other types of sprouts and they can bring many other flavors and textures to the party. While alfalfa sprouts are the “lettuce” of the sprout world, there are others, like radish or mustard, that can bring a nice spicy kick.

Or how about a little more crunch?... broccoli or lentils. And what about those old standbys from the Chinese stir-fry, bean sprouts?

Winter 2014-15

Aside from the flavors and textures, though, the fact is that sprouts are good for you. Really good. When you get organic seeds and grow them yourself, you’re getting as good and as pure a food source as you can possibly get.

And as fresh as you can get. Unless you’re pulling stuff out of your garden and popping it into your mouth before you step away, you can’t get fresher. And even that would be a toss-up.

Greater still, though, than the freshness and purity and vitality of sprouts might be their nutritional value. That value, simply speaking, is unmatched elsewhere in our food world. Ounce for ounce, they cannot be beaten. The list of their plusses and the studies that support them would fill another page or two. I’ll just condense it all into a paragraph.

Sprouts are rich in vitamins, trace elements, enzymes, minerals, and fiber. They are low in calories. They contain proteins and anti-oxidants.

But no cholesterol. They’ve got amino acids and chlorophyll. Ounce for ounce, they provide more of these essential things than any other food you can eat. Period.

You know what, though? All of that is fine and dandy, but the proof is in the pudding. That plastic box

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of sprouts that used to cost 59 cents now goes for a buck and a half. And it was an iffy investment at best. If you grow it yourself, well, you’re talking about something in the neighborhood of 25 cents. That and losing about 2 minutes a day.

Our family recently expanded our sprout-growing technology from the mason jar to a more modern, larger capacity tray system. The trays nest inside each other and allow us to grow a greater volume of sprouts in less space. Also, we can stagger the begin dates of the trays in order to maintain a steadier supple of fresh sprouts.

The 3 tray kit cost $26.99. But since I’ve already pumped out well more than 20 trays in 20 weeks, I’m already ahead of the commercial rate, costwise anyway. Throw in the freshness and the variety we’re experiencing, and it’s absolutely no contest.

Right now, we’re growing a threeseed, salad-mix of sprouts... radish, broccoli, and alfalfa. It is a great combination of spice, crunch, and leafy green. My “pinch-offs” are very hard to pass up. I’ve found that I can simply take a half cup of them and add a raspberry-vinagrette and ooh-lala, I have a salad fit for a king.

They can last for a week in the fridge, but they very rarely make it

that far, they’re gone right out of the tray.

Strangely enough, I really like sprouts on a peanut butter sandwich, too, though no one else in the family will go near that.

My favorite, though, is to spot ‘em there in the kitchen window, lush and thick and reaching for the sun. I pat ‘em gently, pleased that they look so vibrant. I pinch off that little mouthful, and I lean my head back and I close my eyes there in the soft glow of another New Mexico morning and I think, “I just got somethin’ from nothin’. It’s magic.”

Ain’t life grand?

Growing sprouts is so easy, even I can do it. We got our sprouting trays and sprouting seeds online at : www.wheatgrasskits.com Look under “Products” for Sprouters.

The process is incredibly simple. The sprouting trays and seed packets have good instructions, but the basic plan is to soak them for a half day then rinse them twice a day. They’re ready in about a week.

I have found it’s best to leave them out on the counter where I’ll see them and remember to rinse them.

Start a new tray every couple days and you have a continual supply.

29

Calendar of Events

December January February

2014-2015

Events in red require pre-registration

Ongoing Yoga With a View, $15 ($5 first time), 9-10:30am every Sunday morning, Open Space Visitor Center 6500 Coors NW, Yoga in a beautiful setting Info: 897-8831 Qigong in the Park, Saturdays & Sundays 9-10am: every Saturday at Altura Park located at Hannett & Morningside NE, Every Sunday at 11am at Robinson Park at 8th & Central; Qigong practice for all, Loretta 681-1924 qigonginthepark.com

Water Exercise Classes, Weekdays, $2.50, City of ABQ Indoor Pools at Valley Pool 761-4086; West Mesa Aquatic Center 836-8718, Morn & evening classes Los Poblanos Fields Community Farm, Free, City of Albuquerque, 6804 4th St NW, 345-4580 Tower Skate Park, Free, City of Albuquerque , 7am-11pm, 86th & Tower on west side, brand new state of the art skate park

Botanical Gardens River of Lights, A Holiday Light Festival since 1997, $8 adults & $4 kids, 6-9pm, walk-thru dazzling light display, 2601 Central NW, runs through Dec 30, 768-2000 Calvary Skate Park, Free, 9am-10pm, 4001 Osuna NE, Parent must sign waiver, bladers & skateboarders only, adjacent game room, 344-0880 x201, ww.calvarysk8park.org

December 13 Backyard Composting, Free, 10amnoon, Open Space Visitor Center 6500 Coors NW, Basics of Backyard Composting Kim Selving 897-8831

Rio Grande Nature Center Bird Walks, Free, 8:30am, Saturdays & Sundays, join a naturalist for a quiet bird walk, preregister, 344-7240

Partner Printmaking, $15 for materials, 1:30-4:30pm, Open Space Visitor Center 6500 Coors NW, Learn to make monotype prints with a friend Kim Selving 897-8831

Rio Grande Nature Center Nature Walks, Free, 10:30am Saturdays, an insightful nature tour of the bosque, preregister, 344-7240 High Desert Bicycles Group Ride, Free, 9-10:30am every Saturday, 909 36th Place SE in Rio Rancho, bring bike (or rent one) & join the group, 896-4700

Jingle Bell Run/Walk, 5K run/ walk to benefit arthritis foundation, 6:30pm, tie bells to your shoelaces, at Old Town Plaza, Katie MvEuen 200-1924 email: kmceuen@arthritis.org

NM Volunteers for the Outdoors, Save a trail in the NM outdoors, learn new skills with cool tools and “rub shoulders� with forest rangers.

Enjoy the camaraderie of new friends and be part of preserving outdoor recreation by helping to build and maintain a wide variety of trails.

884-1991 www.nmvfo.org New Mexico Touring Society Bike Rides, join together with other recreational bikers of all ages for daily planned rides, 237-9700 nmts.org

30

REFLECT by the LUNA Project, Free, thru Dec 28, Open Space Visitor Center 6500 Coors NW, A group show of art by a collective of women artists, reflection is a conversation between world and image Jodi Hedderig 897-8831

Festivus 5K fo the Rest of Us, run/ walk to benefit UNM Cancer Center, 9am, around the Academy perimeter loop, 505-269-7394 nsutherlin@Hotmail. com

Rio Rancho 896-4700 909 36th Place SE

Albuquerque HighDesertBicycles.com

842-8260 8110 Louisiana NE

December 13 & 20 City of ABQ Learn to Ski & Snowboard, youths age 11-17 discounted packages including lifts, lessons, & transportation to Sipapu contact 768-5328 www.nmxsports.org

www.dukecityfit.com

December 18 Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, Free Day, 5-8:30pm, 2000 Mountain Road NW, A free evening at the museum! Do a lot of walking.

243-7255 www.cabq.gov/museum

January 11 Superstars 5K Fun Run/Walk, around the Academy perimeter loop, 505-835-4663 homesbytabitha@ gmail.com

Open Space Volunteer Orientation, Free, 10am-1pm, Trail Watch and Adopt-An-Open-Space training, Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 Coors NW, pre-register Jolynn Maestas 897-8831

January 16-17 Albuquerque Aquarium Overnighter, $30, 6-30pm to 8am next day, Sleep next to the sharks at the ABQ BioPark Aquarium! Learn about ocean species and their fascinating nighttime behavior, Education Clerk at (505) 848-7180

January 15 Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, Free Day, 5-8:30pm, 2000 December 20 Farolito Trail of Lights, 5K run/walk, Mountain Road NW, A free evening at the museum! Do a lot of walking.

5pm, 9th annual holiday favorite, at 243-7255 SW Indian Polytechnic Institute, www.cabq.gov/museum www.irunfit.org

Holiday Build-A-Bike, Free, 10annoon, build a bicycle for your child & learn how to maintain it year round, City of ABQ Esperanza Community Bike Shop 5600 Esperanza NW 224-6668 December 21 Winter Solstice, shortest day of the year, the sun is directly over the tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemishpere, days will be getting longer from here on out

January 17, 13th Annual Sandia Mountain Snowshoe Race, 10am, $30, iconic event, 3.2 mile traverse from the Crest thru Cibola National Forest, proceeds go to the Friends of the Sandia Mountains for preservation and maintenance of trails Register: www.sandiasnowshoe.com

Pajama People Pizza Run,5K Run/ Walk, Grab and WEAR your favorite Pajamas and bring the kids o benefit Holiday Build-A-Bike, Free, 10annoon, build a bicycle for your child & the Youth Mentoring and Fitness Programs at First Nations Community learn how to maintain it year round, Healthsource, City of ABQ Esperanza Community www.pjrun.com Bike Shop 5600 Esperanza NW 224-6668 January 17 & 24 City of ABQ Learn to Ski & SnowWinter Solstice Mandala Creation, board, youths age 11-17 discounted Free, 11am-1pm, Help construct a mandala made of seeds to feed song- packages including lifts, lessons, & transportation to Pajarito contact birds and other migratory wildlife, 768-5328 Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 www.nmxsports.org Coors NW, pre-register Kim Selving 897-8831 January 22 Twilight Hike on a Full Moon Night, Free ($3 Parking), Dusk, tentative date - Call for time & date, Rio Grande Nature Center 2901 Candelaria NW, 344-7240

January 1 Egg Nog Jog 2015,12 noon, $25 includes t-shirt ($15 no shirt) , 5K run/walk, noncompetitive iconic annual Albuquerque event, Run or walk through Los Poblanos field, contact Alan Overmier 254-2218 January 10 Winter Bird & Bat Festival, Free ($3 Parking), 10am-4pm, Rio Grande Nature Center 2901 Candelaria NW, Shows/crafts/walks/animals, 3447240

Winter 2014-15

February 14 32nd Annual Mt Taylor Quadrathlon, Grants, NM, See ad pg 21, New Mexico’s premier winter sports event, www.mttaylorquad.org 2015 Cupid’s Chase, 10am, $30, Balloon Fiesta Park, to benefit Community Options, www.comop.org/ cupidschase 505-265-7936

February 20-21 Albuquerque Aquarium Overnighter, $30, 6-30pm to 8am next day, Sleep next to the sharks at the ABQ BioPark Aquarium! Learn about ocean species and their fascinating nighttime behavior, Education Clerk at (505) 848-7180

February 21 Great Backyard Bird Count at the Botanic Garden, Free, 8-11am, Sweetheart Run 2015 10K/5K, 9am, ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden 2601 a loving run along the Rio Grande, go Central NW, Grab your binoculars to active.com & key in “Sweetheart and head to the Botanic Garden for Run” 299-3521 the second day of the nation-wide Great Backyard Bird Count, contact: Full Moon Run by Heart n Sole BioPark Education at 505-848-7180 Sports, Free, 7:00pm, Kit Carson Park February 19 Twilight Hike on a Full Moon 1744 Kit Carson Ave NW Night, Free ($3 Parking), Dusk, February 22 HnS info: 884-7653 tentative date - Call for time & date, Kids’ Fishing Fair at Tingley Beach, Rio Grande Nature Center 2901 Free, 10am-2pm, Tingley Beach Candelaria NW, 344-7240 1800 Tingley Drive SW, Children, ages 4-12, are invited to learn all Full Moon Run by Heart n Sole about fishing by visiting fun and inSports, Free, 7:00pm, Kit Carson Park teractive Discovery Stations contact 1744 Kit Carson Ave NW 768-2000 HnS info: 884-7653 March 19 Albuquerque Museum of Art & Twilight Hike on a Full Moon February 1 History, Free Day, 5-8:30pm, 2000 Night, Free ($3 Parking), Dusk, Superbowl “Touchdown for the Mountain Road NW, A free evening tentative date - Call for time & date, Homeless” 10K/5K Run, 11am, $25, Rio Grande Nature Center 2901 Valley High School, celebrate the big at the museum! Do a lot of walking.

243-7255 Candelaria NW, 344-7240 day & back in time for the game, www.cabq.gov/museum www.irunfit.org 505-217-4774

31

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