So Durty!

Yesterday, after a great workout and a very healthy lunch, I did the smart thing and decided to go have beers with my buddy at some Irish joint called Durty Nelly's (pictured above).  Having a few beers and watching football is one thing, but having a few beers and onion rings and chicken nachos and a bowl of peanuts is quite another.  Needless to say, taking that kind of leap after several weeks of relatively healthy eating has left my guts in a state where I shouldn't be more than ten feet from the thunder mug at any given point.  FIRE IN THE HOLE!

Back in the day, when I ate crappy food all the time, my night at Durty Nelly's would have been no big deal. Back then, I would have eaten and drank beer to my heart's content, ripped some class 7 paint peelers all night long and then woke craving a huge stack of pancakes or something.  This is no longer the case and I'm glad.  Sure, when you're on the beers constantly, it's good to have a cast iron stomach that is just a quick stop in the constant chain of digestion that is your eating style.  But when you're doing good, you know you're doing good because a night at Durty Nelly's can catch up with you in a hurry and leave you feeling like two ferrets are fighting it out in your stomach and a healthy batch of hot lava is always in the on deck circle.

Side note...I went on Yelp, the most useless site on the planet, to see if there were any good pics of Durty Nelly's to post on the blog.  There were 11 pictures  nearly all of them blurry, some of them were of some amateur band, and then there was this one:

Nothing gives you a better idea of what to expect at an Irish pub than a photo of some chick who is drunk, clearly not Irish, apparently under age, and dressed as an angel singing karaoke.  Once again Yelp, top quality work.

Gnome Beer

Beast Mode was slightly modified last night when I went out with some friends and had more than a few of these little babies.  The good news was, I ate lite and kept it together.  The crazy part is, when I had my cab driver drop me off a couple blocks from home so I could walk through the hood and enjoy the night air, a whole bunch of cats came out of nowhere and started following me.  I'm not sure if this Belgian ale with the farting gnome on the bottle makes you smell like catnip or something but it was freaking odd.

I did decide to get up and weigh in this morning.  To my pleasant surprise, I'm down seven pounds so far this week.  Beast Mode rules!

Beast Mode Still in Effect

So far so good on Beast Mode activities.  I got up bright and early this am and did a four mile run so I could get it out of the way.  This is a photo of me, in pan, sweaty, and hot....but satisfied.

This afternoon, I'm meeting a friend for a 'quick beer' (10) at a Mexican restaurant.  I'm already psyching myself up for this.  Beast Mode is also about balance so I'm not worried about the beers too much but I am struggling with those free tortilla chips they give you.  Normally I can down about four or five bowls of those babies myself but I want to keep it under control.  I just checked with my friends at Nutritiondata.com and apparently a one ounce serving of tortilla chips is 137 caloires.  That isn't so good considering I probably eat 30 or 40 ounces in one sitting.  Hold me.

Fear and Loathing in San Antonio

Ahh yes, there she is, the breakfast of the business traveler.  Lonely, sad, not nutritious, lame.  It's bad enough that I have to eat such a breakfast (its free for a reason), but what makes it worse is that I had to eat said breakfast in San Antonio.

The city of San Antonio may not have invented excessive ball sweat but they've sure as hell taken it to a new level.  Virtually all of my day yesterday was spent on my feet and a good portion of it was spent outside in 90+ degree heat with more humidity than a hyper-active steam room.  So essentially, my day yesterday was spent standing, or eating bad food, or having beers, all while working up the sweatiest set of balls in the history of humankind.

Now that we've established my level of ball sweat in this city, let's look at my nutritional intake yesterday as a fine example of why business travel is so incredibly unhealthy unless you seriously plan ahead.

Breakfast - same as the breakfast I had this morning pictured above.  Coffee and raisin bran

Between breakfast and lunch - about 40 cups of coffee and two litres of water (hoping to reduce ball sweat)

Lunch - Thai food and a giant Thai iced tea.  Lunch order was as follows:

Me:  "I'll have the pad se yew with chicken"

Waitress:  "How ha yoo lie"

Me:  "Hottest you've got...five stars, a ten, whatever the scale is you use"

Waitress:  "We go wan to fie.  Fie very ha"

Me:  "Five"

Waitress:  "Ooohhh NOOOOO!  Fie very ha mista.  I think three goot fo yoo"

Me:  "I'm fine, just go with the five, I can handle all you've got"

Waitress:  "Fie very hot mista...I think you no like"

Me:  "I'll worry about that...I want the five"

Waitress: "Okaaaaay.  I try to tell yoo"

Me:  "Gotcha, I understand, let's make this happen baby!"

Waitress:  "Whaa??"

Me:  "Nothing."

Waitress:  "Ok...fie ha"

Me:  "Understood"

Waitress...walking away shaking her head

For the record, 'fie' wasn't very hot but it was a greasy plate of noodles with some sort of meat that resembled chicken

Between lunch and dinner - cappuccino.  Then around 6:30pm at an event I was at, I had three heavy hors doovers and a couple of beers (five).

Dinner (10:30pm) - After walking two miles and generating even more ball sweat, we stopped for Italian food.  I had shrimp scampi which, even though its pasta in cream sauce and shrimps cooked in butter all with cheese on top, was one of the healthiest things on the menu.  I also had a glass of wine (three)

There you have it folks...even though nothing in and of itself felt all that bad at the time, when you put it all together, yesterday was a calorie-fest that was only offset by excessive sweating and roughly five miles of walking throughout the day.

Point being, fuck this place and I'm glad I'm going home today