Why I Run, Day Twenty Two: I ❤️ Chocolate!

It is quite simple, this one😃 It involves me and a thing that starts out in life as a minuscule bean. I wish I could tell you as much about chocolate as I can about 🐧 penguins! I have never, however, eaten a penguin. Nope. But PLENTY of 🍫 good chocolate. I think Hershey's milk bar is just wax. But I have been known to befriend foreigners just to sample their native chocolates!

Shawn Askinosie was the first chocolatier I recall being someone I might have known - he is a friend of my second cousin. I secretly wanted to work as a chemist for him developing better chocolate blends and brands. Oh well. If I had known thirteen years ago what I do now (how sad it has been so long!), I would have gone to culinary school or gotten a degree in food science and worked for Nestle or Girhardelli or Milka or Theo or Toblerone or any of some two hundred small chocolatisery suitor companies. Maybe not MARS and only Nestle for their evil NwO big fat paychecks. But alas, no PhD. Interviewed with Simplot a couple years ago due to my love of potatoes. Ya know, I have an ethical conundrum over the interview. When they extended that one I told them my home fries are organic and we grow our own nonGMO, organic. I wanted to lobby against them. Oh well. It was a truly free lunch. And they didn't offer me chocolate.

Wait, what a strange tangent😁. Eeeerch!

Running and chocolate. My favorite post race drink is chocolate milk. I like fudge power bars. Or rather, a fudge power bar wrapped around a vanilla crisp power bar! Beats the heck outta GU shots.

My favorite pre-race meal of Flying Pie 🍕 Pizza is topped off great with a small bowl of chocolate pudding. My daughter will support running and 🛴 riding with me in order to make chocolate brownies and drink hot chocolate. In winter. I tie the kids round my waist and we make mommy MUSH for chocolate!

In summer, I Freeze my Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate PB Cups (holy grail, hello!) and have one or two a week after my longer run day. And we love to melt Endangered Species sea salt dark chocolate on a s'more.

I don't like chocolate infused drinks. But one triathlon a very long time ago at Lake Taneycomo, I carried a water bottle full of Hershey's Syrup.

I want to run the Philadelphia Marathon for my mom, who has a heart murmur and would otherwise be the same unstoppable spitfire and fury. And I want to take her with me after the finish to Hershey, PA. They have a chocolate themed Disney-like experience. I don't like Disney....not the new Disney. Because I don't much care for Sheryl Sandburg or Googletron FacebookCIANSA.

I want to buy an entire BTC worth of chocolate, just in case the Eclipse gets us - we are weighing its 70 or so mile swath of influence. My Efoods supply came with the mother load of hot chocolate drink mix. I would run to keep warm and melt and boil snow on Borah Peak just to have that satisfaction in an SHTF situation.

I wish that chocolate were all as pure and old school as Granddaddy BITCOIN. But many chocolates are just like ICOs. Here today, crashed tomorrow, but some somebodies out there like those other mini Chocolates, so they always have a market.

This is good stuff. I need to log an extra half mile tomorrow just for having overthunk this far too much. Because inevitably, I am going to indulge. But at 110 lbs, I will keep it up. And enjoy running forever, never regretting each step!

Photo courtesy fanpop.com