I had the worst school lunches growing up.
Apparently, my mother had been raised in a somewhat affluent home, surrounded by a doting mother and sisters, which meant that she got to grow up indulging her bookwormish tendencies and became an adult who didn't know how to pack a lunch for a neurotic kid. (Now, some of you may, validly, point out that my father could just as well have learnt to pack a frickin' lunch, but it was a different time, children, a different time.)
She tried at various times to pack a lunch of Korean food. However, as a child the last thing you ever want to do is stand out in a crowd, and the unbelievably rank stank that exploded out of my CHiPs lunch pail was the olfactory equivalent of a 6 foot tall drag queen belting out Ethel Merman in Times Square, only instead of high Cs there's garlic. Korean lunch not the way to blend in.
God bless her, the woman tried, she tried other stuff, like sandwiches. Only, for some reason she decided to toast the bread, which to this day I hate, toasted bread on sandwiches, because that stuff will cut up the roof of your mouth unlike a Michael Jackson video knife-fight, and then all you'd taste for the rest of your lunch was blood. On top of that, mom would wrap the sandwiches in aluminum foil, so everything tasted sort of metallic. And on top of that, her sandwiches consisted of, no joke, an inch of lettuce leaves and then one slice of bologna on the bottom. And then on top of that, instead of packing Kool-Aid or juice as a beverage, she'd include an 8 oz. can of V8 - listen, kids hate V8 (and if your child loves it, then he or she might be suffering from a condition called pica). So, day after day at lunch I'd glumly sit with my mouthful of blood-lettuce-V8, watching the other kids with their perfectly non-garlic lunches.
Everything changed, however, when the federal government stepped in, because then the school was required, nay, mandated, to give us what every child loves: chocolate milk. Every lunch period, a lady would walk by the classroom with a milk crate full of little cartons of white and chocolate milk which we'd buy; white milk was for suckers, chocolate milk was for those who needed solace - ur, for winners. Bliss! Finally, something to look forward to every day, something to take away the taste of blood and metal, the taste of shame and alienation, something besides rhubarb pie, which I also happen to love. Chocolate milk - savior of my grammar school lunches!
Graduating from elementary school (and my parents' divorce) meant that I'd graduated from those crazy lunches. Becoming an adult meant replacing chocolate milk with whiskey. Until now!
Because as it turns out, my old down gustatory homie chocolate milk is the best sports recovery drink around. So, the idea being that if you've had an arduous enough workout you've got to replace the glycogen in your muscles, as well as the other nutrients you've lost; although there are a host of recovery drinks available on the market it turns out chocolate milk has better levels of glucose, protein, fat, sodium, potassium, etc. etc. than any of the commercially available ones. You can find some of these articles here, here, and here. It turns out that you need to have worked out for at least 45 minutes before you need a recovery beverage, so now I manufacture reasons to keep going until I hit three-quarters of an hour, and although you're really not supposed to use food as reward or punishment, I figure it's a drink, which technically isn't a food, just like whiskey, right? Right?
Long lost friends, chocolate milk and me, reunited and it feels so good.
A Run That Earned Me Some Chocolate Milk
5.34 mi. 43 min.:41 sec. 8:11 pace.
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