Been Trying

I’ve Been Trying for a While

I started cooking when I became a mother at 20. I was young and pregnant and, in a sudden panic to figure out how to mother, I took out my tongue ring and started calling home for recipes. I was going to be somebody’s mother, therefore I should know how to feed people.

So I learned to cook, and I kept cooking. For my kids, for friends, for partners. Big dinners, weeknight dinners, holidays, whatever was in the refrigerator. Eventually, when I became an empty nester, I had to learn how to cook for one. Which was much easier than the lore presented.

After my first child was born, I started running. I want to say it was never part of the plan, but I have these memories now of being five or six months pregnant, driving down the upper highway on Maui and seeing a woman who was likely my age running several days a week. My eyes would lock in on her brunette ponytail swinging back and forth with each step, the sun hitting her skin, and this determined yet almost satisfied look on her face. I wanted so badly to be her. To feel whatever she was feeling. But running wasn’t an option, so I put it out of my mind and stuck to walking and prenatal yoga.

I was also recently reminded by my roommate from when I was 19, living in Seattle and pretty strung out, that I insisted on trying to run along the water one morning. It all feels a little like subconscious behavior now.

And I haven’t stopped running since.

But a few months after my son was born, I went for a walk and somehow ran two miles straight. I couldn’t believe it. I walked in my door that day and announced I was going to run the Honolulu Marathon at the end of the year.

And I did.

It was a disaster.

Through motherhood and marriages and heartbreak and different houses and different cities and different versions of myself. Sometimes I was training for something. Sometimes I was chasing a time. Sometimes I was running because I desperately needed to get out of my own head. And sometimes I was in a town I didn’t know very well and wanted to see what happened if I just kept going.

Running also became one of the ways I learned I could do something with all those miles. Over the last two-plus decades, I’ve used running and cycling to raise money and awareness for causes I care about, most notably Every Mother Counts, who I’ve run and fundraised for twice. Long before that, in my twenties, I started a little nonprofit called On the Run in His Name and raised money for an orphanage in Cambodia.

I don’t think I ever thought of cooking and running as having anything to do with each other. They were just things I did. Or maybe, at first, things I thought I needed to do.

Which is funny, because my work for years has been about bringing women back into their bodies. Helping them pay attention to what they want, what they desire, what actually brings them pleasure instead of looking outside themselves for it.

And somewhere over the last few years, I started noticing this in my own life too. Some of the things I once thought brought me pleasure weren’t the only things that brought me pleasure. In fact, when I really started paying attention, two of the places I feel it most are incredibly ordinary: I’m in my kitchen or I’m running.

Hands in food, music on, something on the stove, making something up as I go. Or completely in my body a few miles into a run, when my brain finally gets quiet and I stop thinking about what I need to do or fix or figure out.

It’s kind of funny that this is also how I spend so much of my time when I’m not working with women on essentially the same thing—coming back into their bodies and figuring out what makes being in their lives feel good.

Then, eight or so months ago, I started eating plant-based.

This was not something I saw coming. I didn’t do it to lose weight. I wasn’t looking for a new diet. I wasn’t trying to clean up my eating or become a healthier, more disciplined version of myself. God knows I have spent enough of my life turning perfectly enjoyable things into opportunities for self-improvement.

It started almost accidentally. My boyfriend asked me if I would try eating differently and I begrudgingly said yes. So I started trying things, and then I started learning things.

The more I learned about factory farming and the animals inside that system, the harder it became to pretend I didn’t know it. Which was inconvenient, frankly, because I liked meat. I liked cooking it. I liked eating it. I knew what to do with it.

Suddenly I was standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what the hell I was going to make for dinner and, more importantly, how I was going to get enough protein because apparently this is the first question everyone asks when you’re in perimenopause and you stop eating animals.

So I started trying that too. Tofu. Beans. Lentils. Restaurants. Recipes. Things I loved. Things I absolutely did not love. Things that I could digest. Trying to make food that didn’t feel like a substitute for the thing I actually wanted to eat.

And somewhere in all of this, I realized I was having fun.

Not because I had found the perfect way to eat. I hadn’t. I was curious again.

Not because I had found the perfect way to eat. I hadn’t. I was curious again.

Curious about what I could make in the kitchen with ingredients I’d barely used before. Curious about what I needed to eat to feel good in my body and support all the miles I was still asking it to run. Curious about whether I could have the protein and the pleasure without turning meals into a math problem.

And because I’ve always run when I travel, that curiosity started following me there too. Get up in a city I don’t know, put my shoes on and start running. See where I end up. Notice the neighborhoods change. Find the water. Find the park. Get a little lost. Come back hungry.

Only now I was also curious about what I was going to eat when I got back. Where are the really good plant-based restaurants? What are people doing with the local vegetables here? What can I order that isn’t a sad wrap or a mock meat alternative? What did I eat that I’m going to go home and try to make myself?

Food made me more curious about running and travel, and running and travel made me more curious about food.

It occurred to me recently that maybe this isn’t a new project at all. Maybe I’ve been trying versions of it for 25 years.

Trying recipes, running routes, cities, restaurants. Trying to take care of people and trying to take care of myself. Trying to figure out what I believe and then, occasionally, having the courage to change my life a little when what I believe changes. Trying to pay attention to what actually brings me pleasure now instead of assuming I already know.

And trying to enjoy all of it without immediately turning it into another fucking goal.

So, Been Trying.

I don’t really know what it will become yet, which I think might be the point. There will be recipes here. Mostly plant based. There will be running, restaurants, travel, and probably a disproportionate amount of conversation about protein.

But mostly I’m interested in what nourishes us and what moves us and what makes us want to be here for our own lives. Pleasure without quite so much pressure. What happens when you stay curious long enough to surprise yourself.

Anyway, I’ve been trying.

Might as well write some of it down and share what I find along the way.