Traveling as a lightweight

Any kind of traveling is tough as a lightweight, but air cross-continental travel can be brutal.  Airports are littered with calorie rich goodies.  If you talk to any rower they will tell you that most lightweights have  a serious sweet tooth.  I, from experience can tell you it is a mental challenge to not inhale sweets all day. 

To avoid this predicament I have learned to travel prepared.  If I do not bring some food along I WILL end up snacking on trail mix, candy or tuna salad sandwiches (tuna salad in airports is mostly mayonnaise).  Trail mix may sound great too, but it is loaded with fat that does not make weighing in 2 hours prior to racing easy.  So I bring fruit, vegetables and premade sandwiches.  This trip was a pretty good one.  I had an apple, a crown of broccoli and baby carrots.  Obviously, I don’t think many people could last an entire trip on those foods alone so I do eat some of the airplane food.

Airplane food can be very dangerous.  It’s mass produced food, which I’ve had plenty of while in the navy, meaning it’s probably not healthy.  However, there are healthier versions.  I choose to not eat quite a bit of it as well.  Last night’s flight was a choice of bbq chicken and vegetable pasta.  I went with pasta.  The meal came with pasta, salad, bread, crackers, cheese, ranch dressing and a brownie.  I ate most of the pasta, the salad without the dressing (Tim McLaren would be proud), a little bread and of course the brownie.  There are a lot of bad calories in ranch dressing and the cheese that I don’t need.  The brownie is not the healthiest choice, but everyone needs a vice ;-). 

The best part about this entire process is the looks you get from fellow travelers.  I happened to be traveling by myself this trip so I didn’t have numbers of other lightweights to reinforce my “odd” eating habits.  I was sitting in the Atlanta airport and pulled out a ziplock bag of raw broccoli.  A family, just 5 ft away began whispering and giving me odd looks.  I almost stood up and bought and icecream cone to raise my self-esteem (j/k), but I stuck to my guns and nibbled on the greens.  On the plane I pulled out some baby carrots and received similar looks from my neighbor. 

There are some hazards to this healthy eating.  In Munich I caught up with the LW2X of Julie Nichols and Kristin Hedstrom and the USA M1x, Ken Jurkowski .   We took a flight together to Ljubljana, Slovenia.  We arrived, waited for a bit and took a van to Bled.  During the ride I was eating some broccoli and Ken made a joke causing me to laugh.  Well the laughing caused me to inhale and small bits of broccoli flew to the back of my throat and I began choking.  Headline:  Rower Dies Due to Broccoli Inhalation.

Thankfully, like parting my hair down the middle, this is just a phase in my life.  It seems to come and go in conjunction with my race schedule.  Weird, right?  Needless to say I won’t be eating this way on the way home!

P.S.  We had our first row today.  Bled is beautiful and the course is pretty amazing