Jim Willis

The Red Bank farmer’s market is building up to its annual colorful crescendo right about now. The variety of fruit and vegetables available is pretty good and the prices are reasonable.

The popular stuff abounds — tomatoes, zucchini, peppers — but you can also find some a few examples of strange-looking, less-widely available varieties of eggplant and even daikon and other veggies that you don’t often see available fresh and local at the grocery store.

In past years my trips to the farmer’s market with my youngest son in tow were too frenetic for me to really spend much time shopping so I’d end up spending about $10 on produce that I would be using in the next couple of meals. 

As my son’s patience improves (that, and I bring a backpacking chair so he can sit and watch for trains, brilliant!), this summer I’ve got more time to walk around at the farmer’s market.

With the luxury of time to shop, I’ve constructed a bit of a challenge for myself while shopping: I bring $30 cash with me and make myself spend the entire amount on produce. I just buy whatever looks good or interesting and stuff that isn’t already growing in my garden. Then my challenge is to figure out something to make with it during the week.

So as I walk around the market on Sundays, I still don’t know what i’ll be making for dinner for the next few nights. Even as I leave with my Xtracycle bags or my car’s backseat fully loaded with vegetables (it is amazing how much produce $30 gets you!), i have no idea what I am going to do with it.

I just make sure not to waste it.  So far it has usually all been used up by Wednesday night, which is fine since Sea Bright has a farmer’s market on Thursday if i need to restock.

Over the past few weeks we’ve done pretty well and have had a several amazing dinners that came together as a result of random stuff in the produce drawer:

grilled fingerling eggplants and sliced tomato with shaved parmesan with grilled sausage

beets/balsamic vinaigrette with goat cheese and basil

breaded and fried zucchini served at room temp with fresh moz and sliced tomatoes and basil from the garden.

All amazing stuff that i probably wouldn’t have thought to make were the produce not staring up at me from the produce drawer of the fridge.

A side effect of all of this is that the sheer volume of vegetables we are eating in a given week is just massive right now (and, btw, our grocery bill is a bit lower as we seem to fill up faster on veg and serve it with smaller portions of cheese/meat/protein).

So the first part of the challenge for me was just making myself spend some percentage of our weekly grocery bill on produce from the farmers market. ($30 works out to roughly 12% of our weekly grocery bill for our family of four, in case you’re interested.)

The second part of the challenge occurred to me as I walked around last weekend — namely, to try to buy with that budget the widest possible variety of produce I can e.g. as many different items as possible.

SO instead of blowing $30 on the usual suspects (eggplant, zucchini, spinach), i’m buying smaller quantities of those items and more of the less common items like different varieties of radishes or fresh garlic or squashes.

Now, this is purely non-scientific, gut-level intuition speaking here but maybe i’ll try to find some research to back it up: It seems to me that eating a wide variety of produce has got to be a good thing.

Good for us as eaters because, well, variety tastes better and i wouldn’t be surprised if there is some relationship between the diversity of vegetable intake and gut microbiota diversity.

But also good for the planet because — as plays out each summer in my garden where some tomatoes get diseased and others don’t — diversity of crops is key to healthy farming.

When i get home and lay the bounty out on my kitchen table my head immediately starts to combine the stuff I’ve bought with items out of my garden and cheese and meat that I can buy downtown.

It’s a blast and i’ve really enjoyed make dinner for the past few weeks as a result.

Also, and i’ll try to detail this at some point, maybe try taking some fraction of what you’ve bought and just ferment it right away. I’ve got some killer red cabbage and hot pepper kraut bubbling away right now from my trip to the farmers market a couple of weeks ago.

Last week I supplemented my garden’s anemic kirby cucumber output with 2 pounds (for under $3!!!!) of kirby cukes from the market and now have an enormous crock of cukes getting pickled on my counter.

that’s a gimmicky title. sorry. 

but i’ve got this cool little bit of data that is worth having a look at.

So, what does that show?

Well, since January of this year my heart rate variability as represented by the blue line which is a natural log transformed RMSSD (the beat to beat interval of my heart) shows a steady increase. As HRV increases relative to a baseline it can be an indicator of improved vagal health (less stress, better recruitment of the parasympathetic nervous system). Basically, since January I’ve been feeling better and less stressed out. 

Working out hard can cause your HRV to plummet the next day or two after  hard workout, that’s a sign that your body is repairing itself from the workout. In my case, it also plummets for the next day or so after I play a gig out til 2AM and don’t get good sleep. But anyway, according to the blue line above, even with the gigs and workouts my HRV is increasing!

So note that even though that blue line doesn’t look like it really went up that much, because it’s a log() the increase over time in this case is about a 40% increase in my HRV as measured by rMSSD from January to August.

But what’s more interesting here is that MAF 1 mile test showing a steady DECREASE since January. (Those little green and yellow dots).

The idea behind Phil Maffetone’s training philosophy is to do a lot of long, really low heart rate workouts to better condition the aerobic system. The MAF 1 mile test numbers here show how quickly I can run a mile keeping my heart rate below 135bpm. (obviously, as one would expect, if i go flat-out i’m much faster than the times represented here :-)

Not only does this low heart rate training do good things for conditioning but -- as seems to prove out here in the graph of my little N=1 study -- training at low heart rate (in my case 135bpm max) seems to allow me to train and get faster without causing the kind of stress response on my body that would cause my HRV to reduce over time. 

Of course, there are about a gazillion other reasons why my HRV could have been increasing since January: I’ve been way more consistent with meditating every morning, I’m eating more carbohydrates (and putting on the pounds to show it :-) and have been outside more because it’s summer time. All of those things could also contribute to the increase in HRV.

What’s interesting here though is that i’ve got fitter (or at least faster at the same heart rate) over the past few months without incurring much of a hit on my vagal tone. Prior to 2016 i was tracking my data in different applications and it would take me too long to put up a graph but basically I was working my ass off with a lot of high intensity workouts or long rides/runs with my heart rate at around 70-85% of max and i was getting a bit faster but the trend over time was a reduction in my HRV. meaning while i was getting faster i wasn’t necessarily getting fitter. 

Since the beginning of this year i’ve reduced my workout intensity a lot and either go very hard for short workout (90-100% of max HR for a few sprints) or very easy for long ones (135bpm for an hour or more), not too much in between. This seems to be making me both faster and, perhaps more importantly, fitter.

Heart Rate Variability is a big deal -- greater variability correlates strongly with cardiac health, low variability correlates strongly with depression and anxiety*. The rabbit hole at scholar.google.com on HRV is deep and fascinating.

I’ve been tracking my own HRV for many years using a stand alone device called the EmWave. Now though with the advent of bluetooth heart rate monitors and iPhone apps, you can get a whole lot more info pretty easily.

Here’s the deal though: you need to use a really high-quality bluetooth heart rate monitor to get decent data. I had been using a cheap Jarv heart rate monitor for years to track my heart rate while running, riding, doing intervals, etc. And it works just fine for that stuff (if a bit flakey at times and does seem to run the battery out pretty quickly, but, you gets whats you pays for).

I paired up my Jarv with an HRV app on my iPhone though and it reported my variability as wicked low. At first I was concerned that maybe I didn’t have high HRV I thought I had. Then I tried the HRV app with the much more expensive Polar H7 and my HRV #s were way up there. 

It appears that the way the Jarv reports the intervals between beats (R-R) is not quite reliable when compared to the way the Polar does the same reporting. I only found one other link on the inter webs that noted the Jarv under-reported HRV and since not everyone may have multiple monitors around to test with, I just wanted to note here that if you start tracking HRV and want reliable data, don’t use the Jarv heart rate monitor. Spring for the Polar one.

On Saturday the Tour de France will kick off and I’d like to try to suggest/convince you that it’s worth watching. I’ve been watching it on and off for several years now and watching it more and more closely the past two or three years. There are a huge number of reasons why it’s a difficult event to watch and understand but I’m going to explain here how if you’ve got just a couple of hours to kill you can learn about a truly fascinating event that requires a physical and mental toughness from its competitors that rivals any other sporting event past or present.

First though, let me say that i’m not a huge fan of road racing, especially team-supported road racing (like the Tour de France) where the competitors have a  crew that follows them along with spare parts/bikes, etc.  To me, self-supported overland racing like the Tour Divide is a much better measure of a cyclist’s moxie. But anyway, that doesn’t diminish the fact that the TdF is still awesome to watch. 

What makes the Tour de France (and other pro road cycling races) so difficult to comprehend is that it is an individual sport played by teams. You think you understand this. 

For years I thought I understood what that statement meant. Then I watched Slaying the Badger. If you do one thing before watching any of the Tour de France stages, watch this movie. It’s about Greg LeMond’s nasty rivalry with his teammate, Bernard Hinault (aka the Badger).

LeMond is the only American to have won the Tour. His victory predates (just barely) the point at which cycling became a sport of drug-enhanced bullshit artists like Lance Armstrong. The movie is awesome, it’s on Netflix and in under two hours you will come to understand the meaning of the phrase “an individual sport played by teams” in all of its complexity. I implore you to watch this movie. Even if you’re not that into cycling. I bet you will enjoy it. You can’t make up a character as complex and slippery as Bernard Hinault. He’s fascinating to watch.

Which brings us to the whole performance enhancing drug thing which really destroyed road cycling’s image.

Where Slaying the Badger is a vivid picture of total dysfunction at the team level, a new movie that follows around a bunch of younger, (purportedly) drug-free cyclists called Clean Spirit is really a great look at how members of a cycling team can support one another while still pursuing individual victory.

The movie follows around the Argos-Shimano team and its star, Marcel Kittle in last year’s Tour de France. If you watched last year’s tour at all you may recall the moment when British cyclist Mark Cavendish gave Argos-Shimano rider Tom Veelers a shoulder bump and knocked him off his bike. The filmmakers do a really excellent job of capturing how the team responds to Cavendish. Marcel Kittle makes for a great hero in this story that tries to recast cyclists as athletes instead of drug addicts.

Both of these movies are on Netflix. Watch them. Even if you’re not into cycling they give you an awesome background into team and individual dynamics and you also come away with an understanding of just how grueling of an event -- physically and mentally -- the Tour is for these athletes. 

It’s not just the cycling though. The scenery is awesome and NBC does a good job with zooming out to place you at each stage. Kelly and I really enjoyed the footage last year from Arles and Aix where we road bicycles several years ago.

We watch it with our kids and our oldest always has questions that lead to us looking up some town or city or region on Wikipedia. 

And then of course, there’s the food.  Each stage presents a new opportunity to try a regional wine/cheese/something delicious so that if you can’t ride like the cyclists in the tour, at least you can eat like them.