Breakfast of Champions

This is the meal Jill had after running the half marathon for the Ottawa Race Weekend: two eggs over easy, bacon, toast, home fries, a little bit of melon, banana and extra bacon. It was her first half-marathon. She did great. (If you look carefully, you can see the ribbon attached to Jill’s half-marathon medal.) We ate at the Arrow and the Loon in the Glebe because we thought most of the breakfast places downtown would be packed by voraciously hungry runners. The eggs at the Arrow and the Loon are pretty standard. My poached eggs were a bit overcooked. The best breakfast eggs for me are the heuveros rancheros at Azteca. It’s true that runners have an amazing ability to pack food into their bodies. I spoke to one of the chefs at the hotel that hosts a pasta dinner for runners before the race and he said that for a dinner where the kitchen expects 300 to 400 runners, they’ll cook enough to feed 600 people. They ordered something like 80 kg of pasta for the meal. The neat thing this year is that the hotel leared how to make special Kenyan dishes for the elite Kenyan runners who come to Ottawa to compete in the marathon. The Ottawa Race Weekend is a qualifier for the Boston Marathon. There's a specific dish made with white corn flour that the Kenyan runners apparently prefer to eat. The chef I spoke with described it as a cross between mashed potatoes and polenta. Apparently, Western food upset the stomachs of some of the Kenyan runners last year.