Tip of the day: How to use The Pear to keep you from fainting

(Note From Ray – Quick Last Minute Heads Up: Today, Friday at 1PM the Washington Post will be doing a live Q&A chat with Columbia Triathlon Winner Lindsey Jerdonek.  You can quickly and easily submit questions now, so let’s show support for both triathlon and our local athletes and get lots of good questioned added to the queue! Go!) It’s well publicized that the first 15 minutes after a workout are key to getting some initial form of recovery nutrition into your body – to enable the fastest recovery.  Beyond that, roughly the next hour is ideal for the larger pile of nutrition, to again, speed recovery. Sometimes though, I find that after I workout I’m incredibly lazy.  Or rather, just easily distracted.  I glance at my phone to see if any work emergencies have gone ablaze, and then maybe I’ll check Twitter, perhaps some e-mail (ok, always some e-mail), and before I know it I’m sitting down replying to things and it’s 30 minutes later…without any recovery food/drinks.  Not to mention still usually drenched from that tough workout. And while in most cases my body just ‘deals with it’ (and I do realize, not in a good way), the same can’t be said for The Girl.  After a long hard workout we’ve discovered she has a very finite time period before she basically crashes.  It seems like that’s roughly in the 30-45 minute range, even including a quick recovery drink.  She just needs food.  Real food.  Substantive food. But despite all our best attempts, sometimes the whole cleaning up/distraction process just takes longer than it should, and soon we’re 45-60 minutes later and she’s on the verge of fainting. So, I instituted The Pear rule (capitalized, because I can).  The Pear is simply a little egg timer that I bought her earlier this year for some of her baking endeavors.  The problem is…it turns out that she pretty much hates The Pear.  Mostly because it makes noise – both while it’s tick-tocking away, but also when it finally rings.  So she really never uses it for baking. Thus it’s the perfect instrument to annoy her into getting to food faster – be it out the door to grab something to eat, or just simply eating whatever’s coming out of the oven. So now when we finish up a tough workout, the first thing I do is grab The Pear, turn it once a full revolution and then set it back to 25 minutes.  The rule of the game (there’s only one rule) is that when the buzzer goes off, we must either be minutes away from eating what’s coming out of the oven/stove, or on the way to grab something quick (of substance) to eat. Thus far, it’s working just great. I picked up The Pear at the local World Market earlier this year, I think about $4US.  Though, you can grab it on online as well.  But in looking, I actually found some far more interesting egg timers.  Like, a Cheeseburger, a Fat Italian Chef, a Cupcake, a Rubber Ducky looking thing, and even a Cheese and Mouse.  Oh, she’s so going to hate me once I’m done shopping tonight… Have a great weekend all! (Oh, PS, for those curious, yes, the Polar RCX5 Review is soon!  The minor beta bug preventing me from uploading my workouts has been solved, and I’m back in business.  Look for the In Depth Review mid-next week. Thanks for your patience!)