- Easy Seasonal Recipe: Nettle Soup
- Fitness and Nutrition for Cycling Holidays
Welcome to your new, shorter fitness newsletter. Still big on content, but with less words for you to digest. So without further ado, here’s what’s happening in the studio.
Personal Training: if you’ve been meaning to get fit but are not sure where to start, or even if you’ve plateaued and need a fitness MOT, Personal Training can help you. I specialise in training folk with very little time, looking at ways of fitting in fitness to a hectic routine. Currently evenings are fully booked with a short waitlist, however I do have off peak availability during the day weekdays. The first off peak session for the day is 9am, and the last is 4.30pm.
Studio Space for Hire: On many Saturdays over summer June the studio will be hosting a pop-up shop. Whether it’s home-grown produce and plants (21 / 22 May), to our craft special for Leith Festival (18 June), come down and say hello. The bright and spacious studio is available for hire each weekend for workshops, pop-up shops and therapies; moreinfo on my website – £30 per half day / £50 full day.
Easy Seasonal Recipe: Nettle Soup
Wearing sturdy gloves and long sleeves, chop the new heads and leaves from stinging nettles, which are popping up everywhere at the moment. According to wiki “nettle tea is well known in indigenous cultures as a power house source for vitamins and minerals improving immunity, and can best be described as “Nature’s Multivitamin”. I personally prefer making this bright green soup with them. Who says healthy eating is expensive?
1 onion, chopped
garlic to taste, chopped
olive / rapeseed oil
½ kg potatoes, we used up our old allotment potatoes from store
carrier bag of nettle tips, washed
1 L vegetable stock
– In a large pan, sauté onions and garlic in a small amount of olive or rapeseed oil.
– Add potatoes and stir around to avoid sticking.
– Add stock and nettle tips and cook for around 30 minutes.
– Cool slightly, then zizz.
– Serve with natural yoghurt and a good dash of Tabasco.
Fitness and Nutrition for Cycling Holidays
Cycling is one of the best ways to see a place – it’s cheap, easy, environmentally-friendly, means you can interact with the passing environment and easily stop to admire the view whenever you wish. For our tenth wedding anniversary, husband Andy and I returned to the Cuban beach we got married on. As it was a special celebration, we added a week long cycle tour onto our holiday, and it was arguably our favourite bit. There are many international cycle tours out there, and Cuba is relatively new territory for tour providers, however we felt we saw bits of Cuba we were not able to see last visit (a decade ago).
A bus would drop us in interesting locations, and we had the chance to cycle the day away on quiet roads through lush tropical landscape. The bus followed the slowest cyclist, so there was also support, extra water and mechanical back-up if required. My favourite day was through the mountains and finishing on a near-deserted beach drinking the juice from a fresh coconut. Cycling, sun and the sea. Bliss. Obviously being fit and prepared for a bike tour is key to the enjoyment, and part of my job as a PT is to help prepare clients for their holidays.
I want to share the knowledge so my workshop for the annual Edinburgh Festival of Cycling is on how to prepare for a cycle holiday. Whether you have a cycle holiday planned, or if it is a daydream of yours to one day cycle around a foreign country, there will be something for everyone. It’s a small interactive workshop with a Q&A at the end, and free healthy nibbles…
Fitness and Nutrition for Cycling Holidays workshop
6.30pm – 8pm on Tuesday 14 June, email me for tickets, only £10.
More info at www.edfoc.org.uk/events/event/fitness-nutrition-cycling-holidays
Have a fab May,
🙂 tracy