Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie

Week 2 of half-marathon training is going just swimmingly. I did some speed work today so that I'll be able to finish in my goal time of 2 hours. The plan was to do a short warm up and then eight repetitions of 0.25mi. at 6.0mi/hr and 7.5mi/hr which seemed really daunting. If you add up the 8 repetitions alone without the warm-up that's already 4 miles, but I guess I was working off of some runner's high because I breezed right through it!

I usually go to a 60 minute Hot Yoga class Sunday evenings to sweat away anything stressful I encountered throughout the week. It's a great way to start fresh and be ready to dare Monday to give you its best shot. If you haven't tried hot yoga before, you must; the first time I went it was, sort of, life altering. It's like I had never felt so peaceful in my life before, really. But my schedule is doing funny things again so I went tonight instead.

The problem with that is that it means that I'm burning through a lot of calories today and need some way to replenish them. That would be easy except I coincidentally had a protein-full omelette for breakfast and wasn't all that hungry today so I needed another way to refuel. At least I know a delicious ingredient that will do the trick, peanut butter of course!

Peanut Butter Banana Smoothie
Yield: 1 ~16oz. smoothie

• 1 frozen banana, peeled and broken into smaller pieces
• 3/4 cup 'milk' of your choice (I like soy)
• 2 tablespoons peanut butter
• 1 tablespoon ground flax seed (optional but it adds some nice texture and is full of omega-3's and fibre)
• water to adjust consistency

1. Blend until smooth and add water as needed

378 calories | 21g sugar | 18g fat (mostly healthy fats!) | 14g protein