Been Trying

I’ve been trying for a while.

I started cooking in my twenties, when I found out I was pregnant and called home asking for recipes.

At the time, cooking felt like one of the most obvious ways to take care of someone. I was going to be a mother, so I figured I should learn how to feed people.

I kept cooking.

For kids. For friends. For partners. Eventually, for myself.

I started running around the same time and kept doing that, too.

For more than 25 years, running has followed me through different cities, different versions of myself, races, motherhood, heartbreak, travel, and plenty of miles that had absolutely no point other than getting out the door and seeing where I ended up.

Movement also became one of the ways I learned to care about something beyond myself.

I’ve spent more than two decades using running and cycling to raise money and awareness for causes I care about—most notably Every Mother Counts, an organization I’ve run and fundraised for twice.

Years before that, in my twenties, I started a small nonprofit and used running to raise money for an orphanage in Cambodia.

Food and movement have been separate threads in my life for a long time.

I just never thought to put them in the same place.

Then I started eating plants.

Not because I wanted to lose weight.

Not because I was looking for a diet.

And definitely not because I needed another wellness trend to follow.

It actually started much more casually than that. I began eating differently, learning more, cooking differently—and somewhere along the way I started paying closer attention to where our food comes from and what it costs beyond the price on the package.

The more I learned about factory farming and the lives of the animals inside that system, the harder it became to unknow it.

So what began as an experiment became something more ethical and personal.

I’m still learning. I’m still figuring out what this looks like in real life. And I’m much more interested in curiosity and progress than purity.

Mostly, I want to know: Can eating in a way that aligns more closely with what I care about also be abundant, pleasurable, nourishing, and really fucking delicious?

So far, yes.

And I’ve been trying a lot of things.

Different ways of getting enough protein. New recipes. Ingredients I hadn’t cooked with before. Restaurants when I travel. Meals that make plant-based food feel like the thing you actually want—not the virtuous alternative you’re supposed to settle for.

And somewhere in there, Been Trying started to make sense.

Because that’s really what I’ve been doing all along.

Trying recipes. Trying restaurants. Trying running routes. Trying new cities. Trying to take better care of myself. Trying to live a little more closely to the things I say I care about. Trying to understand what feels good now instead of automatically doing what I’ve always done.

This isn’t about getting it right.

You’ll find plant-based recipes here, but I’m not a chef or a nutritionist.

You’ll find running, but I’m not an elite athlete.

You’ll find restaurants and travel, but I’m not interested in influencer lists of the 17 places you absolutely have to visit before leaving Paris.

I want to know where you ate something you can’t stop thinking about.

Where you ran when you had no idea where you were going.

The tiny restaurant you found because you took the wrong turn. The meal worth traveling for. The route you’d run again tomorrow. The places that made you feel something.

I’m interested in pleasure, movement, curiosity, nourishment, connection—and what happens when we stop turning every good thing into another thing we have to optimize.

Sometimes I want to train hard.

Sometimes I want to get lost running through a city I’ve never seen before.

Sometimes I care about how much protein is in dinner.

Sometimes I just want dinner to taste really fucking good.

Both get to exist here.

Recipes. Running. Travel. And other things worth trying.

Welcome to Been Trying.