Actually, two things.

First: the Mindbender review I mentioned last week has been posted. There’s a good chance you already follow iRunFar so there’s a similarly good chance you already knew this. As a longtime fan of iRunFar, I’m very pleased to be working with them and have every reason to think the Mindbender review is just the first collaboration of what will be longer term relationship. An unanticipated development is that Vasque has offered to give away two pairs of the Mindbender in support of the review. So, if you haven’t already, check it out, and leave your name in the comments to enter the drawing.

Second: if there is an activity I find as inherently meditative as wilderness running it might be listening to the music of Sigur Rós. A few years ago, at the conclusion of a long world tour, they played a series of free shows in mostly small, unique venues (an abandoned fish factory, for example) all across their native Iceland. They also made a beautiful film called Heima that splices footage from these shows with lush videography of the people and landscape of their homeland. Lately, I’ve frequently been watching excerpts of Heima in lieu of reading before bed. Guaranteed to slooow my heart rate. I had been thinking of posting a clip as a One Thing for a few weeks; the events of last week sealed it. So, below is a trailer for the film. Committed aesthetes – and Sigur Rós fans – can stream the whole thing here.

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A quick rundown of some of what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks:

• Just wrapped up testing the new Vasque Mindbender. Liked it quite a lot, even though it isn’t really built for my foot type (I have normal arches, the Mindbender is optimized for flat feet). The full review is forthcoming in short order. Concurrent with the publication of the review, we’ll announce a new collaboration we’re very excited about.
• At long last, we’ve received nearly all our new warm weather gear. We’re still learning the business — I’ll spare you the details — so our inventory has consistently been about a month behind where we wanted it to be this spring. We are still missing a few straggler shipments, but only a few.
• Our two primary brands of warm weather apparel this year are Salomon and Sugoi. As usual, both companies have some very strong offerings. Among other things, we are carrying a bit more compression wear by both brands.
• We also have replenished our stock of two very popular Sportiva models — Crosslite and Raptor.
• We are running a nice end-of-season special on our remaining stock of Icebreaker base layers. All items in the Bodyfit line are discounted 30% or more from MSRP. (Does not apply to the GT line.) Owning Icebreaker is a long term love affair not a fling, so shopping offseason is a pretty smart play. Selection is still pretty good. As usual, the discounts may get deeper as the selection gets smaller.
• Speaking of deep discounts that get deeper as our stock gets lower, we’ve put additional items in the Screaming Deals category. Mostly the new additions are cool weather accessories like caps and gloves. We do have a current DA, which you can always find in our Twitter feed (viewable at Twitter or in the blog sidebar).

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Out like a lion. A spring storm rolled through the night of March 31 – April 1, spitting rain down low and snow up high. I noticed as I was leaving the house Thursday morning that the Pine Valleys were still trying to shake off the last of the clouds.

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In my review of Racing Weight, I said I’d make a follow-up post or two covering specific topics relating to implementation. So let’s take a look at the chapter entitled Improving Your Diet Quality (Chapter 7).

The first sentence of the chapter is: “The single most important characteristic of your diet is its quality.” No word-mincing there. By this point in the book, you probably assume Fitzgerald will not only provide additional evidence for this claim, but also resolve low-grade scientific disputes on the topic and ultimately boil it all down to implementation. You would be correct in this assumption.

Cutting to the chase, Fitzgerald’s implementation advice on this topic consists of a very helpful tool for calculating your diet quality score (DQS). This is what it looks like:

The matrix above is as straightforward to use as a first impression might suggest. Every serving of food consumed during a day is converted to a score. Good stuff adds to your daily tally, bad stuff subtracts from it. The number assigned to a food item also changes from one serving to the next. In this way, your final score will emphasize the “bang-per-buck” of more nutritious fare without losing sight of the importance of balance and moderation. I find it to be a really a nice approach, very intuitive and easy to implement. Here’s a one-day snapshot from a week-long food diary I recently kept.

6:30    Gel pre 1.5-hour trail run
8:30    2 slices multi-grain toast, 1 hard-boiled egg, 10 oz. pineapple/orange/banana juice
11:00  1.5 cup fat free yogurt w/ granola
1:00    Sandwich on multi-grain bread: turkey, provolone, lettuce, tomato; 1 apple
5:30    Gel pre 1.5-hour mountain bike ride
8:00    Large plate (~4 cups) wheat penne w/ chicken, mozzarella, tomato, pesto

This was obviously a pretty good day on its face. Pretty good balance. No meals of shame. (But that’s kind of how food diaries work, right? If you’re writing it down you’re more likely to stick with your plan.) Anyway, let’s go to the judges’ score:

DQS Points: Servings/Category

4: 2/fruit
4: 2/vegetable
5: 3/lean protein
4: 6/whole grain
1.5: 1.5/low fat dairy
-1.5: 1.5/full fat dairy
Total DQS: 17

So the score indicates that this was indeed a pretty good day, although there is room for improvement (the maximum DQS is 29). A bit more fruits and vegetables and a little less whole grain is probably the main thing I would have changed on this particular day.

You might have (correctly) inferred that the hard-boiled egg counted as a lean protein. You might be wondering whether this “correct.” As it turns out, it is. In fact, Fitzgerald singles out eggs as a somewhat exceptional food in the way they support a lean body composition despite their relatively high fat content. With eggs, the principle of moderation is even more key than usual: Fitzgerald says to count the first two eggs of a given day as lean protein in calculating your DQS (by implication, additional eggs count as full fat proteins).

Like any metric, the point of figuring your DQS is to uncover strengths as well as areas that could use improvement. I like the approach because I find it quite a bit easier than counting calories and/or calculating carb/protein/fat ratios.

Speaking of which, Fitzgerald doesn’t really pretend most of us have the time or inclination to track every calorie or keep a food diary 365 days per year. Instead, he advocates careful record keeping during key periods — upon reading Racing Weight for the first time as a benchmark, during short periods around efforts to reach racing weight for a peak event, etc. — and relying the rest of the time on broader guidelines and principles. Like pretty much all the advice in Racing Weight, that strikes me as rigorous yet sane.

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