Learn by Doing - Enter: The Juice

I've been considering juicing for a few days now and had been back and forth on whether or not to try it.  Yesterday I thought I had more or less decided to shelve the idea after seeing what a quality juicer costs, and suddenly thinking, 'why juice at all, just eat more raw vegetables', which seemed to make sense, right?   But this morning that answer didn't really sit well with me, I was missing some, I mean juicing has been around for a long time and the market is well developed for niche industry.  So I searched for an answer to my question, 'why not just eat more raw vegetables', and when I saw the answer I immediately saw the truth of it, 'because you won't'.

I'd been looking at different models of juicers and there appear to be two basic kinds, centrifugal and masticating, and of the two the latter seemed to produce a far superior juice.  The disadvantage of a masticating juicer is it takes longer to juice with verse a centrifugal juicer.  With this in mind I had more or less decided on a masticating style juicer.  If I had not talked myself out of it yesterday I probably would have selected a vertical masticating juicer, which is a relatively new take on masticating juicers, over the more traditional horizontal masticating juicer.  The vertical is a faster masticating juicer than the horizontal and takes up a little less counter space, but from what I could see those were about the only advantage.  The horizontal model is a proven design, can juice leafy greens better, appears to extract more juice and produces a drier pulp, is actually cheaper than the vertical, easier cleanup, is more versatile (you can actually make your own pasta with it), and is far more forgiving making this ideal for a beginner.

This afternoon I purchased an Omega J8006 Juice Extractor - it'll be here tomorrow.  I was hesitant about spending the money without learning more about it, but as I continue to search around online I realized the only way I was really going to learn was to jump in and try it for myself.  We have a local Farmer's Market every Saturday during the summer so I plan to pickup lots of veggies tomorrow to toss into the machine and start experimenting as soon as the machine arrives.  I honestly don't know where this will take me, but my gut tells me I'm on the right path to a healthier me.  While good nutrition is certainly a major component of running, I'm not yet sure how much time I'll spend writing about it on this blog.  I suppose it'll depend on whether I see a direct correlation between juicing and running.