The main thing to understand is that faith is not equivalent to belief. In the scriptures, at times, they will use these terms interchangeably, but for the moment I will give them very specific definitions. Belief is simply that, just something that you believe in your mind, something you think is true. Faith, on the other hand, is belief taken a step further. Faith, quite simply is works. Having faith in something means that your belief is so strong that it causes you to take action. It’s just that simple.

So what this means is, you may believe that you should read your scriptures each day but unless you actually do it you have no faith in it. If you believe in the principle of tithing but don’t pay it , you have no faith in it. If you only pay it when it is convenient then you have weak faith in it.

To drive the point home consider James’s words:

Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. James 2: 14-19

The sobering phrase in this passage is “the devils also believe, and tremble”. It’s clear, if we don’t act on our belief we are no better than the devils.

Unfortunately, as I started this leg my legs were STIFF and DEAD. I’m not sure what went wrong but they had absolutely nothing in them. So I knew from the very beginning it was going to be grueling. But I started up the hill and walked when I had to. Pretty much everyone walks this hill and when you feel brave and it decreases from the 45 degree angle that it is on you run as best you can.

My main objective was to get the last 11 kills I needed to reach my goal of 40 kills total (each time you pass someone it’s a “kill”). Things were progressing quite well toward this goal. But soon enough came the sign that indicated I had one mile left before the hand-off. I still needed 3 more kills.

There was this guy that I had been hunting for most of the leg. He had passed me pretty early on but never made it much farther than that. I would periodically surge and narrow the distance to about 10-20 feet. But I didn’t want to necessarily pass him, not yet at least, I wasn’t sure if I did that I could hold on to it.

I had about a half-mile left and only 3 kills to go. I was exhausted and I wasn’t sure there were enough people to pass before I hit the hand-off. So I was worried but I decided I was going to leave it all on the road like I had told Kimberly to do just an hour before. I was glad I told her that, because now I felt like I needed to follow my own advice.

There came a brief flat stretch and I surged and passed the guy that had passed me earlier and I just kept going. I’m not sure where the energy came from, and don’t get me wrong it was taking everything I had to keep going.

I passed two other people and the girl high-fived me as I went by probably because it was quite obvious that I was really giving it all I had. I kept going past them about 100 yards and I was just so exhausted I started to walk and catch my breath. But then from way behind me I could hear that girl yelling “Don’t stop! Don’t give up! This is why you are here!” and a few other encouragements. It made me smile but I was grateful for her encouragement and so I picked it up again. Soon I had my final kill in my sights.

I kept it up and got my final kill about a hundred meters before the exchange chute. It was pretty epic for me. That’s one of the hardest efforts I have done in a race, but it was very worth it. I found the girl afterward and thanked her for her words. That’s what racing is all about.

30K is 18.6 miles for those you (like myself) who don’t measure distances in kilometers. According to my Garmin (GPS watch) I actually ran just under 20 miles so…that’s unfortunate that I didn’t pick the shortest path but, oh well.

I almost didn’t run the race due to an injury that I was worried about, but I decided to go forward with it the day before the race. And it turned out fine.

The highlight of the race was the end. I had been chasing two guys (that happened to be brothers) up until the last water station where I quickly downed a energy gel, two slices of watermelon and a cup of water and was off. I had 4 miles to the end and I was now about 200 meters in front of the brothers and remained that way until about a mile and half before the finish. I could hear one them right behind me, it sounded like about ten feet behind me, I didn’t dare look back. I just kept up my pace, “slow and steady” is what I kept telling myself. He never passed me and before long I could hear him dropping back. About a half mile from the finish I looked back and he was again about 200 meters or more back. But out of nowhere there was this guy in a teal shirt that was closing fast.

Again I told myself to hold steady and if he was coming up that fast he must be really tired. So I kept my pace and then picked it up with about 200 meters to go. I was poised to match his acceration should he make one and I slowly dialed up my speed as I covered the final meters to the finish line, which, after crossing it, I promptly collapsed onto all fours and panted and then flipped over on my back and laid there trying to regain my breath. My competition never caught me and soon after came by and slapped hands with me remarking that it was good to finish strong. I agreed and later wondered if he had given me the race because he was much less winded than I was. But I don’t think he did, I don’t know why he would have.

All in all, it was a really great race and I surprised myself by placing 14th out of 54. :)

This was my brother and me in a crib that our dad had built, along with Sadie the cougar. We were modeling for his furniture, but who knows whether or not this confusing pic gave credit to his woodworking skills.

I found this on awkwardfamilyphotos.com …pretty funny stuff.

Bell's Canyon Trailhead

I spent quite a bit of time debating what I should put in my 72-hour kit. Originally, I wanted it to be the One Survival Kit To Rule Them All. :) But the thing about that is it becomes quite large and quite a bit more expensive.

Being large was really no problem for me except for the fact that it would take up half my car trunk.

Being expensive was undesirable because I want to be able to make a kit for each member of my future family and it would be good if other people could benefit from my experiments.

Nevertheless (and notwithstanding :) sorry couldn’t help it) after doing the survival weekend I realized what the best approach was. Basically, you create a core survival kit that has things that would be applicable to pretty much any situation and then supplement with items appropriate for the season. For instance, if you were going backpacking in the winter then you would want to take an emergency snow shovel and waterproof snow gear etc, in addition to your core survival kit.

Boulder Field

Anyway, on the last weekend of April Chris Smemoe and I hiked up Bell’s Canyon to the first campground near the creek. This campground sits right next to a large boulder field. The boulder field has some enormous granite slabs in it, it’s kinda surreal. I searched around for a while for the best place to sleep and found a nice ledge right near Smemoe’s tent. Smemoe wasn’t participating in the survival aspect of the trip so he brought a tent.

As night descended Smemoe started making himself dinner while I watched. I had eaten before I came so I wasn’t too hungry, I did eat an energy bar right before bed though.

There was a little mouse that appeared, and was quite brave. It was after Smemoe’s food and was very cute. I didn’t blame him, the food smelled really good. That was my fear actually, that the food would attract more than just Mr. Mouse.

Mr. Mouse

Soon it was too cool for me to stay up and I retired to my spot under the granite boulder. I had purchased a silver emergency blanket sleeping bag from Emergency Essentials. It is basically just like the emergency blankets you commonly see except this was in the form of a sleeping bag. I was basically sleeping in a plastic bag, and as you can imagine, the inside got somewhat wet. I didn’t really realize it was getting wet though because I was wearing wool pants and a wool sweater so they didn’t allow any of the wetness to get to my skin. But I can see why they recommend sleeping in the buff when you sleep in one of those.

At about 3:00 AM I woke up cold. My feet were the coldest followed by my legs. My upper-body wasn’t ever cold because I had a shirt, light pull-over jacket, and a thick wool sweater on. Whereas my legs only had the wool pants (I had taken off my jeans, which I later put back on, and that warmed me a bit). At this point I decided it was time to break out my backup sleeping bag. I had brought backup gear in the event my survival gear didn’t cut the mustard.

Sleeping Area

Once I got inside my sleeping bag I realized I could take some of the hand warmers I had in my survival kit and put them in my socks to keep my feet warm. I did this and it worked like a charm. If I had thought of this when I was still in the emergency blanket sleeping bag then I might have been able to make it through the whole night. But once I was in my regular sleeping bag, there was no leaving it. :)

I woke up pretty early the next morning and began preparations to make a fire. I had a little bit of mostly dry kindling but all the other wood I had was completely soaked and some of it was covered in snow. This particular weekend a storm had rolled in and it was beginning to snow again. It was perfect conditions to test my fire starting kit.

I began by cutting a 4″ solid oak (I discovered later) log into to pieces that I could use for the fire. I then pulled out my fire starters and put what tinder and kindling I could find on top. It took a while, but the fire eventually took hold and I was able to get a solid blaze going with coals and everything.

This was a triumph, because I’ve had a very hard time in the past getting fires started with wet wood.

After I got the fire started to a pretty substantial level I put it out and we packed up and headed home. I had originally planned to stay up there until 6:00 PM on Sunday but Smemoe was taking off and I didn’t think it wise to stay up there alone during a spring snow storm.

All in all, I learned what I wanted from the trip. That is all, the end. :)

I don’t know that there is much interesting to share about the last two weeks of the food storage experiment. I ended up in a system where I would eat either oatmeal or pancakes for breakfast (supplemented with canned fruit). For lunch a can of some type of beans (lima, red, black, pinto, etc.) with some sort of canned vegetable (yams, beets, green beans, peas, etc) and I would bring snacks like cornbread and applesauce. Oddly enough, I don’t remember too well what I ate for dinner, I know I ate spaghetti several times and once I made pea soup.

All in all, it was a good experience and I ended up losing about 4 pounds in the process. Now I have to start actually building a food storage drawing on the knowledge I have gained. :)

I discovered that many canned foods have a shelf life of at least a year, often 2 years. Food manufacturers obviously have an incentive to quote the lowest shelf life possible so that they can get you to buy again sooner and to avoid lawsuits.

I found a website (stilltasty.com) that has an extensive repository of shelf life data. Unfortunately, although the website is really well put together, when I was at the store comparing the shelf life printed on the food packaging with what stilltasty.com quoted, I discovered that stilltasty.com was often wrong. They often quote a shorter shelf life than what was printed on the packaging of the actual food.

Rotation

I realized that you don’t rotate specific cans of food per se, you rotate boxes of food. I will be buying boxes of cans of food, and each box will have the same expiration date. So a whole box goes bad on the expiration not simply the can in the front of the line of your little can rotator shelf thingy.

Greenhouse Food Storage

I am creating a vegan food storage (no animal products, except for maybe fish). In addition, I also wanted to have fresh food available  and I realized that this is possible by growing food year round in green houses. This would be something I would be continually doing, which, is something I wanted to do anyway. So this is great!

Variety

I think variety is one of biggest if not the biggest goal to strive for in creating  your food storage. So I plan having fresh food from the green house, canned food from the pantry, and grains and other staples from long term storage. I’ll also have a month of freeze dried food for some sort of unforeseen emergency situation where nothing else is available.

All in all, everything is going really great. I’m really excited about all of this, and am glad I’m doing this. :)

Oatmeal with Apple Slices

All this last week I was eating only food storage. I don’t actually have a food storage so in an effort to figure out what I should buy for my food storage I decided to eat only food storage type food for the whole month of April.

There are several types of food storage. There is freeze dried food, dehydrated food, canned food, and dry food (grains, legumes, etc). Freeze dried food has a shelf life of 8 years if its packaged in a pouch and 25 years if it’s packaged in a #10 can. Canned food, dehydrated food and dry food have varying shelf lives from 1-30 years. Granola for instance lasts for about 5 years, wheat grain last for 30 years and honey last to infinity and beyond.

After doing a little bit of research and visiting a few food storage facilities I decided that most likely my food storage would consist mostly of freeze dried food and I would supplement it with long term staples and I would also have a few large racks of canned food.

To test out my theory I decide to eat only food that had a shelf life of 25 years for the first week. It turns out not everything I ate had a shelf life that long, like the granola for instance, but for the most part what I ate did. To accomplish this feat I mostly just ate freeze dried food for the first week.

In the morning I would have oatmeal with dehydrated apple slices and freeze dried strawberry slices and for lunch and dinner I would have a freeze dried entree from Mountain House.

Beef Stew with Rice

After eating freeze dried entrees for lunch and dinner for a week I realized it was like have TV dinners every meal. I think anyone who composes their entire food storage of freeze dried food is in for a rude awakening should they ever have to live off it for a year. Due to the salts and whatever other ingredients they are putting in these entrees it put my body’s homeostasis out of kilter. I don’t really know how else to describe it. Even though the meals looked good, smelled good, and tasted good, I didn’t look forward to eating them. I basically told myself it would let me survive, even though I yearned for normal food.

So the whole revelation about freeze dried food was the whole reason I did this experiment. Frankly, I could probably stop this experiment right now and feel satisfied. Because when I was reading the literature on the freeze dried food it sounded magical. It was light and compact, tasted good and was easy to prepare, and most important of all it had a shelf life of 25 years! and hence it never needed rotation!

On paper, it sounds perfect. But that’s on paper. Having lived a week on freeze dried food I would never use it as a major component of my food storage plan. I think it is absolutely perfect for a 72-hour kit and other emergencies but not for long term food storage. Although I will still buy a few months of freeze dried entrees to keep on hand for short term emergencies.

]]> http://benmatz.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/food-storage-experiment-week-1/feed/ 2 kidsalsa Oatmeal with Apple Slices Beef Stew with Rice http://benmatz.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/canyonlands-half-marathon/ http://benmatz.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/canyonlands-half-marathon/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:16:54 +0000 Benjamin Matz http://benmatz.wordpress.com/?p=214 ]]> Correction

First, I just want to issue a correction. I announced in my last post that my pace was 6:20 per mile, and indeed if you go to the Rex E. Lee run website and look up my results it does say 6:20 per mile. But the course was short, appallingly short actually. The distance I actually covered was 5.57 miles and I did it at a 7:05 pace. So pretty good for me but not the scorching 6:20 pace I thought I had. Just goes to show you the Garmin doesn’t lie.

Canyonlands Half-Marathon

Last Saturday a few of us wended our way in a south easterly direction to Moab, Utah to run the Canyonlands Half-Marathon. After my discovery of the my true pace in the Rex E. Lee run my expectations for Moab were somewhat dampened. I revised my pace goal to 7:30 and knew I only had a snowball’s chance of beating Cary to the finish.

Everything went smoothly the evening before the race. We (Jenny Sorenson and I) arrived in Moab around 5:30 and picked up our race packets without problem. The expo was unremarkable for the most part. I ate a few Clif Bar samples and briefly perused the significantly discounted miscellaneous running clothes on sale. There was one company selling a pretty sweet headlamp that was rechargeable, water resistant, had a red flashing light on the back of the head, and some cool other features. They wanted something like $60 for it, so I passed on it. But I was tempted.

After packet pickup we ate dinner at Pasta Jay. That’s the ritual, you eat at Pasta Jay the night before the race and then you eat at Zax after the race. We did not depart from ritual this year. After dinner we headed to the hotel to chill until bedtime.

It was kinda nice (and expensive), but Cary (Cary is a guy :)) and I had a room to ourselves. So we each had our own queen size bed. So something happened that rarely happens the night before my race, namely, I actually had a good nights sleep. I think I could get used to that. :)

The Race

As always, we found ourselves shivering at the start of the race. The race busses everyone up to the starting line two hours before the start. I guess it takes that long for them to ensure everything is in order. It’s kinda ridiculous because it was 44 degrees there and we were standing around for two hours! I know this is coming so I wore all the clothes I had, but alas it was not enough and I was still pretty cold.

The race finally started and Cary dropped me even before we hit the two mile mark. He was just going too fast for me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sustain the pace he was setting so I let him go on.

At the two mile mark I took a goo. At this point I was committing a big no-no, which is, you don’t try out new stuff during a race. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, but I didn’t, and I took the goo. The thing is, at most I take two goos in a half-marathon and usually only one, somewhere around the 6 mile mark. But my plan was to take a goo every two miles. The thing was, Lance Armstrong took a goo every mile during the New York Marathon so I thought it was possible. I was wrong.

It didn’t take long after I took another goo at mile four that I started to feel nauseous. That was my fear, I would get nauseous from eating goos too close to together. Well I knew that the feelingwould go away in a few miles so I stuck it out but it definitely slowed down my pace.

At mile six I walked briefly to take in some water and slow down my heart rate a bit. I knew from other races I wouldn’t loose much time from walking briefly. After the mile six water station I took off and I’m guessing the goos kicked in or something because I totally had a second wind that carried me through mile 10 and I made up all the time I had lost on miles four through six. It was kinda magical to me. I had never felt that good during that portion of the race. It was awesome.

I took half a goo at mile ten to carry me through to the end. As I was coming up on the last mile I saw a girl that had pulled ahead of me earlier in the race. At the time, I thought to myself there is no way she can maintain the pace she was keeping, her breathing was too labored. But it turns out she did a decent job of keeping it up, until I passed her in the last half mile. :)

Later I found out that my pace was officially 7:31 and I was very pleased, considering my goal was 7:30. My Garmin actually showed that I ran more than 13.1 miles and that my pace was 7:27 which I know was my actual pace because, as I have learned, the Garmin is deadly accurate. This means I cut about a half a minute off of last year’s pace. That, is a ton of time. It wasn’t the 7:00 pace that I had set out to do at the beginning of the season but it was great nevertheless. Cary ended up pulling a 7:05 pace which is just blazing.

Tell next year Moab, I bid you adieu.