On Monday, February 18th, the group walked up to La Chispa, as far as the private property sign where we posed for this picture. Stephanie took the picture, which she immediately declared “Hot”. Eating this way and doing a lot of hiking will definitely start to clear some fat from your bones.
Phillip and Thomas took lots of pictures, and it was a great hike, but alas I didn’t feel like writing much when I returned in the evening, so, moving on to Tuesday…
On Tuesday. the group walked past Herradura, a little town up the road from the hot springs. These walked are getting tougher, we keep going further and higher. The group’s fitness level is improving to accommodate it.
I felt like I needed a rest day from running and/or walking hard, but Dr. Graham challenged Simon and I to run up a “little” hill on the side of the road on the way. Somebody’s driveway, apparently. Well that was some driveway. It took us a good 10 minutes or more to run up that very steep dirt road. Beautiful views though. So much for taking a “rest day”. We then had to run down so we could run up the road to catch up with the rest of the group.
Once we’d run back to the bottom of the hill, however, we stopped to talk to an older local man (or a “Tico”, as the locals call themselves in Costa Rica). I said “Beunos Dias”, which he took to mean I understood Spanish., and proceeded to tell me about his swollen thumb. I got the impression that he had stuck his hand somewhere and a spider or other insect had bitten it. But that’s just my best guess at what he said. The tropics are a bad place to put your hands or feet into places you haven’t looked into first. After a moment, he figured out I wasn’t completely understanding him and instead switched to trying to learn a little English. What a friendly guy!
The rest of the group were waiting for us at a bridge, where they’d probably been doing push ups, knowing them. Indeed they informed me when we arrived that were were behind on the push ups. No rest for the weary!
Celery tastes good with banana smoothie, incidentally, but not with an unripe pluot. This is something I learned when we got back for lunch on Tuesday. Between us, Phillip and I finished off 25 bananas worth of banana smoothie and individual bananas that day. That’s more like it!
Wednesday, February 20th was the last, long, hard walk of the trip. We walked up part of the Mt. Chirripo trail, used recently in the annual race up and back down the mountain that starts in nearby San Gerardo. We made it as high as about 5600 ft. in elevation (hike started at 4000), before we came down a connecting trail we could use to make the whole walk into a loop. We did pull ups at every soccer field we passed, and we stopped at every bridge to do push ups. Doug managed a total of 100 pull ups for the day by the time we were done.
I thought I would take a moment and thank the talented kitchen staff at the retreat, on the right. Pictured: Kevin, Lennie, Danielle, Stephanie, Thomas, and Robby. Victoire and Samara are not pictured, perhaps one of them is the one taking this picture with Thomas’s camera. They were all so helpful and the food so consistently good, it made it easy to eat raw food. Thank you all!
I’ve been asking Doug questions about how much to eat or drink during my upcoming marathon. I want to know to survive it on raw food. He guessed that I probably have about 1800 calories of glycogen store to start with at the beginning of the race. I will use about 2400 calories during the race, and I should try to replace the 600 - 800 calories difference.
He suggested raisin water. Soak a pound of raisins in a quart of water overnight. In the morning you’ll have a pint of water remaining, in addition to some well-hydrated raisins. The water will have absorbed about 3/4 of the sugar from the raisins. Use the water, without the raisins in it, during the race, taking a swallow of it every 1/4 or 1/2 mile.
This is in addition to the meal I will eat two and a half hours before the race. Those calories should be coming online before/during the run as well. If done right, apparently you need never hit the wall during the marathon. The key seems to be to consume simple sugars slowly enough that a lot of energy does not go towards digestion during the race. After the race I get to refuel (and eat those raisins.)
Today I got to do my long run. I’m training for the 
It felt great, it’s hard to believe all I had for breakfast was cantaloupe and watermelon at 7am, yet I could make it all the way to noon with that effort in between and feel fine. In fact, at certain times, the running felt nearly effortless. I had to slow down when running down at one point, because I was going so fast I placed myself at risk of spraining my ankle. That would be no good! After 3 hours had gone by though, some of the running started to feel like work, as I was getting tired.
We’d been talking about going to the beach today earlier in the week. Doug organized it for us, ordering a taxi for the group of folks heading out. It would be about a 2 hour ride, from the Rio Chirripo Retreat in the mountains above San Isidro, to the beach near Evita. We hoped to see a little more of the country, and experience a Costa Rican beach.
On the way, we stopped at a fruit stand to pick up some lunch. I love grenadias, so I bought a dozen of those and around 16 bananas. They had watermelons there too, but I’d had those for breakfast already.
I ate all of the grenadias, most of the bananas and half of one of Phillip’s papayas for lunch. That was satisfying, and defintely held me through to dinner, which wouldn’t be for another 6 hours.
Back at the retreat, dinner was buffet style, with whole, cut up foods: romaine lettuce, pineapple, tomatoes, mango cheeks, heart of palm. It was delightful to be able to choose the ingredients that appealed and apply the provided mango and tree tomato dressing.
I got up early this morning and did a run before breakfast. I feel like I am acclimatized now to the altitude here at the Rio Chirripo Retreat (about 4000 feet in elevation). This makes the area cooler and less humid than lower lying areas in Costa Rica. The weather is quite variable, since sometimes clouds come in and cool things off quite a bit.
The walk today was to the Blue Mountain waterfall. A long walk up past the village of Los Angeles. It was a pleasant swim there, the water was cold again, like yesterday’s swim at the “Ol’ Swimming Hole”, but very refreshing after such a long hike. It seemed to take ages to get back, and so bananas at lunch were highly welcomed.
At Karen’s request (thanks for your comment, two posts ago), I’ve included a pictures of Dr. Graham playing ping pong with Stephanie (Faychesca is watching), and one of his wife Roz, with their daughter Faychesca at the table. Ironically, Stephanie is in both pictures (nice work Stef!) Faychesca is 3 years old and when she talks she’s absolutely adorable.
The only disadvantage to a delicious meal of tomatoes and celery, is that although these vegetables have a lot of minerals and vitamins, they are low on calories. Thus I find myself not getting enough calories from the meals. It helped a lot to add some mangos (I think I ate 4 of them), and at the end of the meal I felt satisfied.
I ate all watermelon for breakfast this morning, I didn’t mix it with cantaloupe. But I ate too much, too fast and got painfully full again. Ug, I think I will try eating cantaloupe instead tomorrow. I love the watermelon, I just need to eat it more slowly and carefully. Apparently I understand folks find it easy to overeat watermelon.
Dinner was special. They arranged tables for couples for Valentines Day. What was served for dinner? Orange juice, tomato and pineapple soup, and the final course, sun-dried, whole, red peppers stuffed with mango, cucumber, and tomato chunks on a bed of lettuce with a red-pepper, tomato and orange juice dressing poured over top.
We walked up to the hot springs today. A beautiful, but steep walk. We were ready for a break by the time we arrived, and getting in the water felt great. There is no sulfur smell to the water here like other hot springs I’ve seen. Two rustically finished off pools, provided a couple temperatures to choose from. Time passed surprisingly quickly. We got back a little late for lunch, and we were hungry.
This afternoon I had a chance to ask Dr. Graham questions about bananas, receiving tips on how many to buy and how to stage them. He and his wife go through a case of 100 bananas (about 40 pounds), in about 3 days. At any particular time they might have two to four cases in the house in various stages of ripeness.
Sleeping 8pm to 6am felt pretty good. Everybody goes to bed early here, because once it gets dark, it gets really dark, and there’s not much to do on an evening like last night where the power was out. Outages seem to happen for a few hours every few every day here.
Our walk was a longer one, and I think it was hotter and sunnier today. We did the same loop as Monday, but added an extra loop around the village of Los Angeles. That was quite a bit of extra climb, but we saw a small soccer field, some extra river tributaries (some of us decided to do push ups at each bridge, so I remember all the bridges), and many more cute houses. This seems an idyllic place to live.
At dinner they had rearranged the tables again. I asked about that. They had noticed in the past that if they left the tables the same all the time that people would tend to sit in the same place and interact with the same people at every meal. This way gets everybody talking to everybody else better.
The rest of dinner was based around tomatoes and mangos and started with a delicious soup. Tomato and mango blended together with little chunks of mango in it. Phillip and I both loved it. The third course was a cabbage and mango slaw on top of tomato halves in a bed of lettuce. Nice combination and the cabbage made for a different taste than the other parts of the meal.
Ah, breakfast felt great. Cantaloupe and watermelon. Hanging around in the kitchen beforehand, I learned a new way to cut these fruits. You can cut them like I was already cutting kiwi fruit. Cut the ends off, place them on an end and cut the peeling off in strips down the sides. The watermelon is easier to do this with if you also cut it in half first (in a plane parallel to the cuts you made on the end.) Watermelon is an excellent thing to eat before going on a hike (think of this comment as foreshadowing…)
The bus ride to Rio Chirripo Retreat took a little over 5 hours. As we left San Jose, the cityscapes turned into landscapes and the country around us became so much more beautiful. We stopped a couple of times, the first at a great spot on the mountain with a view to which the pictures here don’t really do justice. At 10000 feet, the air smelt and felt great.
After lunch Dr. Graham led an orientation session. We each had an opportunity to introduce ourselves, and it was pretty special to hear other people’s reasons for coming to the retreat center for the walking tour. It’s a great group of people, and I like everyone here.
He came into the lobby shirtless, tanned, and unmistakable. He’s a smaller man than I imagined him to be, and very fit. I suppose when you are reading books and seeing pictures of people on the internet you don’t get much idea of their relative size. I have to admit that I had probably built up a larger-than-life image of him, since I have enjoyed his writing so much (he wrote 
Phillip and I were really tired, however, so after breakfast, rather than try to go to the farmers market in San Jose, or some other touristy thing, we decided to take a nap. We met our temporary roommates, Cam and AJ, who were on their way home after interning (Cam), and fasting (AJ), at the retreat during the last 6 weeks. They were headed back home that day or the next morning. I was impressed by the vibrancy of them both. Lots of energy and enthusiasm.
Our friend David drove us to the airport (Thanks David!) and we got through security with 15 minutes left before boarding began. In the time we had remaining, we decided to buy veggie burritos to take onto the plane. We figured we’d get pretty hungry during the upcoming 9 hours of travel. Not exactly an auspicious way to begin a trip to a raw food retreat, with rice and bean burritos, but hey, it’s better than many things we could have had.