NYC ~ GREAT FOOD – GREAT FRIENDS!

Good Tuesday to You!

Well, I was pretty tired when I woke up yesterday morning. It was as though all the intensive preparations for the last month, the stress of traveling (I really don’t enjoy traveling!), the time zone shift, all came to a halt at once.

I laid in bed as the sunlight shined through the window and thought, “I should get up and go find a gym.” Then I’d fall asleep for a while, look at the sun coming through the window, and think, “I should get up and go find a gym”!and fall asleep again.

That went on until about 10:00 AM or so, which is very late for me to be in bed.

Once I got into a (very) cold New York shower, it was as though someone turned the lights on and I started to come alive again.

Vidya created a nice breakfast of vegetables and salmon. Eating good food is essential when traveling and working on the road unless you just want to burn yourself out and suffer from nagging illnesses.

I eventually went out to find a gym. Fortunately, right around the corner from our hotel there’s a NY Sports Club. I managed to negotiate a good deal on a 30 day pass for Vidya and I; they wanted $30 a day for a walk-in pass and I ended up getting us a month pass for $30, even though we are only here for five days.

The gym has adequate functional exercise equipment for my needs and they have a decent steam and sauna, which I find very helpful on the road.

Once I got through all the paperwork, I went in and did a light workout of lunging (135 x 12 ea.), followed by squats (135 x 12), and followed that with cable wood chops (110 x 10 ea.).

I did three circuits with about 1:30 rest. Then I headed into the steam room for about 20 minutes and followed that with a long cold shower.

After that, I had a small snack to hold me over until Vidya and I got to my friend Jason Pickard’s home. He lives in a wonderful apartment building in the Soho area near the water – great sunset views!

Jason is totally on board with the methods of eating and living I teach. He’s got his whole family on the program too.

We arrived at his apartment to find him and his lovely girlfriend, father, brother and wives waiting for us. My friend Csaba came to join us too.

Jason is really health conscious and his private chef, who created all sorts of an amazing food experience for us by serving us Ethiopian finger food.

We had elk, beautiful home made gluten free flat bread, a variety of vegetables, and the flavors were amazing!

For dessert, we had a coconut sorbet with dried raisins, prunes, cinnamon, and fresh mango.

The chef also brought some very exotic, naturally fermented organic wines made by an Italian winemaker using old-school methods.

I’m not a wine drinker, but I did taste this one and it was certainly something palatable to me. Very tasty actually. I found the wine to be more like a living food than an alcoholic beverage, which was quite an experience for me.

We all enjoyed talking about life, and sharing good food and drink. I got a little carried away doing some healing work and chanting OM with everyone and lost track of time.

It was almost 10:00 PM by the time Vidya and I were flagging down a cab to get home to our hotel.

I had a very long cold shower to reset my core temperature a little low so I can handle being in a stuffy hotel room without a lot of airflow.

I got out of bed a little before 6:00 AM this morning to a nice cold shower yet again and began my lecture preparations for the day.

Thanks to Vidya and Jason, I’m ready to teach for five days now and I’m looking forward to teaching all my HLC 2 students!

I’ll share photos with you all tomorrow.

Love and chi,
Paul Chek