I promise I'm not crazy

It's important to know that no one can give you self-confidence; nor can you give it to someone else. You can't inherit it or hand it on to your heirs. You can't borrow or steal it; nor can anyone take it from you. Confidence is something that only you can give yourself.

- The Confident Woman by Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz

How do you fit training into an incredibly busy schedule? Well, you incorporate it into your daily commute (okay, not every day but once a week?). J meets me at Mt Eden and we run the rest of the way together. The best thing is some times I get to pass traffic. That's enough to keep you buzzing the whole way home.

Of course, with all that training you've gotta have some good food to fuel you up. Training often doesn't leave us that much time to cook anything exciting during the week so nights with takeaways or eating out are always exciting. There's a food court near J's work in town that has claypot.

What could be in here I wonder?

It's spicy tofu and vegetables on rice - one of my all time favourite dishes to have when we eat out. I love how the rice goes crispy on the edges of the pot!

Pizza is also awesome. Though nothing beats homemade pizza, Hell is not too bad. Plus they do kumara chips which I can never pass up.

Here is their vegan pizza, with the enticing name of Sinister, with added mushrooms and cashews served with kumara chips and sweet chilli sauce on the side. Awesome (and quick)! Of course, this only shows about half of what I ate. It's pretty easy to devour an entire snack-sized pizza especially when you've had a hard day.

Of course, I have been concocting the odd thing in the kitchen...cupcakes!

These are based (very loosely) on the hazelnut cupcakes from VCTOTW. They're more almond and coconut cupcakes with mocha vanilla mousse filling and a plain vanilla icing. I've never seen hazelnut meal in our shops and I didn't have the time to make my own so almond it was.

Above is a terrible photo of the inside. We now have a whole lot of mousse in the freezer waiting to be eaten. Don't you love how battle-worn our kitchen bench looks?!

It's only a couple of days to go until the Taupo Relay and I'm already lacking in sleep. Since the grade we're entered in starts at 2am on Saturday I'm not exactly hopeful of catching it up before the race. I can't wait but it sure could get interesting with a tropical cyclone on its way!

Anyway, for those of you interested, we spent our Valentines day putting in some mountain bike training. Funny that!