The simplicity of hurling your body through space on a run through downtown Austin at 4 am on a Saturday morning is certainly something to ponder. The purity of the experience is, however, starkly countered by the messy vignettes of human drama swirling under the cope of intrigue.

On the highway bridge crossing the Colorado River, I’m shocked to see  . . . people. A walker with a backpack holding a phone. A biker. A man carrying a tin cup and a spoon. Nobody says hello, as I suspect we might during the day, because, well, anyone on a city bridge at 4 am is likely to be hiding, or running from, something.

On 6th street, which is Austin’s version of Bourbon St., the curtain has yet to fall on the evening’s theatrics, providing glimpses into the final push of a night that’s been going sideways for many hours. If not plumb wayward.

In just a few blocks—those between I-35 and Congress—I watched a man barrel his pick-up truck the wrong way down a one way street, a woman holding a beer in each hand arguing with two men about her cut of the “stash,” two men who yelled at me “Dude! Dude! D-d-d-d-d-d-ude!” in a rather menacing way, and a guy leaning against a pole staring forlornly into his phone, desperately seeking that text that just wouldn’t come.

At 4:25 am on 6th Street, the evening, the morning, the twisted twilight zone of time–whatever you want to call this time of day—is evidently perceived by some to hold a sliver of potential for a night ending in some form of excess. I ran on.

Mile 4. After the 6th street gestalt, I headed north to the Capitol and then west on 12th. Streets get quieter as rents go up. Public dramas go private, receding behind bedroom windows, unfolding not on the sidewalks but in the dreams and nightmares of the privileged and privatized.

This is the land of clipped lawns and swank boutiques, one-named shops designed for well-preserved seekers of finery: Wink, Underwear, Bar, Galaxy. The neighborhood’s sweet spot of wealth–Pemberton Heights (it’s always something “Heights”)–has broad streets lined with tactless mansions that look down at everything except banks.

The only rat I saw on this run scurried around the garden fountain of a house the size of a cathedral. Better dregs here, I imagine. The only notable sound I heard was Pemberton’s version of gunshots: Wall Street Journals thrown from an old Honda smacking down on long driveways.

Mile 8. I headed back across the Colorado via Mo-Pac and into a West Austin enclave of hills. Rollingwood, they call it. An armadillo crossed the road in front of me, blinder than blind but sensitive to vibration. Upon feeling my footsteps this lump of prehistoric armor ambled off, somehow making a noise like a horse clopping the concrete.

From there down to Barton Springs, where I swam. Indeed, I dove headlong into 68-degree crystal clear water in the dead of darkness and I swam, feeling the heat rush from every pore of my body as if pulled by a magnet. When I got out an older man got in and said “hidy,” which is East Texan for “howdy,” which is Texan for “hello.” I wished him a lovely day.

I meandered a bit, met up with some friends for a few more miles. Then home. The first thing a runner needs after 14 miles in the heat and on the hills is nourishment. Quickly. Before I became vegan I usually chomped down a couple of egg and cheese soft tacos. This was efficient but ineffective.  I’d spend the rest of the day in a dazed and dehydrated kind of fatigue, nauseated and cranky and bloated.

Now, as a vegan, I opt for radically nutrient dense meals after long runs and, not only do I have an excess of energy during the day, I’m ready to go out and run long again the next day. The difference cannot be overstated. It’s truly remarkable. This morning I went for a triple grain porridge with a bunch of good stuff piled atop it:

1. mix 1/3 cup of admixed amaranth, teff, and qunoa with 2/3 cup of water.
2. bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, stir occasionally.
3. after 13 minutes, add a splash of almond milk
4. place porridge in bowl and add dried cherries, blueberries, toasted pecans.
5. top with nutritional yeast, chia seeds, and a spoonful of shelled hemp seeds.

Amaranth, black quinoa, and pearl barley are three of the healthiest and tastiest whole grains in the world.  The first two come from South America and the last from the Middle East.  I’ve been eating these grains individually for years but then it occurred to me that they require the same water/grain ratio and cooking time and might get along well in the same bowl.  So, after a long trail run, I sought rich flavor and nutritional recovery by combining these grains into a single porridge. It was a memorable threesome to which I added a banana, a few blackberries, a handful of sunflower seeds, and sprinkling of nutritional yeast.  In fact, the meal looked so good after I cooked it that I gobbled it up before taking a picture.

Directions for one serving:

1) Measure out 3/4 a cup of mixed grain–proportion them how you wish.

2) Bring 1 1/2 cups of water to a boil.

3) Add grains, reduce to a simmer, cover for 12 minutes or so.

4) Top with seeds, nuts, fruit, nutritional yeast, and a little sea salt.

On a related note, I want to say a brief word about how these nutrient dense meals make me feel. As an avid runner of long distances, I always have my overworked body as a reference point. Before I started eating the kind of meals profiled in Bowls over Plates, it would often take 3-4 full days to really recover from a long run (long being anywhere from 20-30 miles). I’m now at a point at which, as a direct result of diet, that I can recover in less than 24 hours and feel fully prepared to do another long run the next day.  I am a plodding runner, so none of this is in any way to toot my own horn. I simply want to highlight the immense benefits that come from eating nutrient dense foods on a regular basis.

Anyway, give the grains a go!

Why anybody would eat a traditional hot dog, behavioral omnivores included, is beyond me. It’s long been known that most hot dogs are rendered from slaughterhouse refuse that makes pink slime look like health food. “Everything but the squeal” is a phrase that has served to capture this reality with pithy, if tasteless, humor. More pointedly, the claim that a hot dog is comprised of little more than “lips and assholes,” a vivid description many of us first heard as children, remains rather hard to shake. Even when I ate meat I was enlightened enough to avoid these disgusting cylinders of junk like the plague. In a word, nasty.

Leave it to Americans to glorify this waste receptacle as “all-American” food—food that must roll off a grill and adulterate the patriotic palate of every red-blooded American on the 4th of July. Not only that, but leave it to Americans, as our culinary reputation improves, to dress the dog up into something fancier than it really is, hiding its humble identity in clothing purloined from alien emperors.

Indeed, as you have no doubt heard: a hot dog renaissance is underway in the U. S. of A, with top chefs and foodie savants gussying up this bun-full of cruelty into a gourmet creation, selling their wares from food cart windows in hip cities across the landscape. If there’s any hope in this admittedly dubious transition it’s this: hot dog entrepreneurs are hiding the dog under heaps of delicious fruits and vegetables.

Yes indeed, the standard toppings–mustard, ketchup, raw onions, and relish–is slowly yielding to a more sophisticated array of tomatoes, peppers, mangoes, pineapple, kimchee, cucumbers, caramelized onions and sesame seeds. Needless to say, the standard fare is also being adulterated with bacon, cream cheese, and turkey. But still, if my brief survey of the changes underway are at all accurate, my sense is that the good stuff is being piled higher than the bad stuff. A mild improvement on the average, I’d say.

But, you are thinking, so what? . . . Well, here’s so what: what if the dog quietly slipped out the back, leaving behind a mound of plant matter to enjoy?

I realize that a hot-dog-less hot dog sounds quirky, but do consider: The worst and best quality about “American food” is that its endlessly adaptable. Americans have no culinary allegiance; our tradition is to have no tradition. The United States may be the only place where the prospect of a hot-dog-less hot dog could become a reality, however remote the possibility. (It may also—a topic for another post— be the most likely place to embrace veganism as a mass movement.)

Several readers of my recent “fake meat” blog post astutely noted that what lends flavor to animal products are in fact plant-based products, thus persuading me that my analysis was not as convincing as I’d initially thought. It might seem desperate for me to seek hope in a hot dog without the hot dog, but it is in the spirit of plant-based-flavor-power that I ask you to imagine the future of the “hot dog” being a whole grain bun piled with a creative array of fruits, veggies, herbs, spices, and nuts. Dare to dream.

The hot dog could be the American version of the banh mi sandwich (see pic above), open to vegan interpretation, conducive to regional styles, and—most importantly—a hell of a lot more patriotic that slaughtering hundreds of millions of pigs and cows, gathering the offal, making a gross tube of it, and calling it, however inexplicably, a dog.

I’ve been running more than usual lately, and a lot of those runs have been back to back (as in day to day) 10-15 milers. What this means is that there must be quick recoveries between runs. And what this means is nutrient density. Compassionate nutrient density.

Breakfast for me is, by normal standards, an eccentric experience. When I prepare my own meal, I generally raid the fridge of at least five different vegetables, shred or chop them, and sautee them in a sparse amount of oil (maybe a teaspoon or two). When they soften, I pour them into a bowl (or sometimes onto a tortilla or two), sprinkle with nuts or hemp seeds or spirulina powder (or all of the above), chop and add herbs, eat. Sometimes I’ll add beans, quinoa, or bulgar.

The picture above is my breakfast after running 9 miles on trails. Vegetables include brussels sprouts, carrots, parsnips, kale, and shallots topped with cashews. Hiding in here somewhere are a handful of chckpeas. Yum.

Needless to say, this way of eating benefits more than my endurance events. Irrespective of my running, this way of eating improves my moods, my energy levels at work, and the clarity of my thinking. It’s the cliche of cliches, but we are what we eat.  There’s no shame in being a bowl of nutrient dense plants. I find that it provides relentless forward progress.