Banana cookies

Date	Place of run	Duration (min)	Pull-ups	Long sprint downhill	Short sprint downhill	6 flights	Start time
1 Feb	Up Kavaja around town	30	16	1:01.66	41.21	33.06	8:52

Date	Place of run	Duration (min)	Push-ups	Pull-ups	Classic Park	6 flights	Start time
31-Jan	To park	61	25,25	15,15,15,5	55.36	35.56	7:37

            Yesterday, the last day of January, in the morning, I ran to retrieve something Maxim had forgotten from his mom’s house.  On the way, I did the ‘classic’ sprint in the park.  During the sprint, I genuinely felt like I was “pulling the (proverbial) plow.”  This phrase harkens back to my days playing high school baseball when we would accuse other players, especially those on the other team, of running like he was pulling a plow on the way to first base. 
It was a handy little “chatter” that kept us interested and showed a bit of irreverence without being obscene.  It was also mildly funny, and a very “Iowa farmboy” thing to say. 

              Today, Sunday, I ran a shorter route.  I usually just run on Sunday, with no extra push-ups, or sprints, or stuff.  Today, though, was only my second run after an entire week off, so I was itching for more action.  I had been sick, and there was a lot of rain.  Last Saturday, I wrote in here that I was over my sickness.  Well, the week cut me down.  Now, however, I think I’m truly crawling out of the basement. 
              The typical long sprint downhill was a thing of utter calamity.  I was truly running at full speed, giving it all the effort I could, pumping the legs, throwing the arms, etc.  But the plow from the day before just wouldn’t become unhitched.  As is evidenced in the results above, I was more than 1.5 seconds slower than my standard goal of one minute—simply shocking!  1.5 seconds!  This may not seem like a lot, but in James Martin’s world of competitive micro-sprinting, the magnitude of this failure is shameful.  From the end of the sprint, I secured a pan from the office and dutifully endured my punishment as I sprinted the final short jaunt.

              This year, from time to time, I have been buying bananas from a dude not far from my apartment.  Sometimes, I simply give him a coin or two (Albania's highest-value coin is worth nearly a dollar), and he gives me as many bananas as he wants. Last week, he gave me a huge amount of extra-ripe specimens.   These may not have been super-desirable, but I think it made him happy, and I’m never one to look askance at food—especially bananas.  The pan that I got from the office was lent to me by my teaching colleague.  I was hoping for a 8”x4” but got a flat pan typical of those designed for brownies.  I thought I’d try it. 

              This morning I was able to buy the ingredients for banana bread just a short walk from the apartment—one of the few advantages of life in the city.  Liquid vanilla extract was not available, so I bought some packets of something called Vanilla Zucker (sugar—one of Albania’s problems is one shared by many small countries; they don’t produce things like small packets of baking ingredients so they have to import them from places like Germany. Thus, the package needs to have an extra sticker printed in Albanian, but the package itself is proudly adorned in German). The fount of all knowledge, the internet, had information on dry vanilla, being nearly equal to the liquid sort.  You can see below that not only was vanilla in such nifty, little packets, but also baking soda. 

              At any rate, Maxim and I enjoyed making the banana bread batter.  As I poured the stuff in the pan, I commented that we were going to have some mighty thin ‘bread.’  Maxim quipped, “We’re going to have banana cookies.”  He wasn’t too far off.  In the end, the food turned out to be delicious. In a recent post on this blog, I told how I was trying to get some respect from the ladies in the office.  These banana brownies brought be a couple steps in that direction.

Delightfully cute packets of baking soda and Vanilla 'Sugar'

Maxim adding a small amount of elbow grease to the banana batter.

The pan-bread, banana cookies