It’s been a wonderful week.  I had the privilege of traveling to the Hawaiian island of Oahu for this past week and loved every minute of it.  Living in Washington, everyone talks about going to Hawaii like people in my home state of Ohio talk about going to Florida:  everyone’s been there.  ”This is your first time going to Hawaii?” people would say to me.  I wanted to reply, “How many times do you guys go?  Is this like a trip to the tanning booth for you people?!”  Cheap tickets out of...

Summer has just begun in Seattle.  No, really.  There was a depressing article written about how there had been very few days of summer “so far” in 2011 and that article was written in mid-July.  It is fair, then, to say that the last two weekends–which I have not taken for granted!–have been some of the first actual full days of summer in Seattle.  And now it’s Labor Day, which means summer is over. Do not lose hope!  Everyone loves fall!  I, however, would love for the summer sun to stay just...

As I packed my backpack before the long, hard hike I took yesterday, I found myself downplaying my needs.  I should preface that statement by saying that I really didn’t know it was going to be a long, hard hike.  I do go hiking sometimes and I certainly grew up going hiking at least once a month or so with my family back home, so I have plenty of experience doing the physical sport of hiking.  People up here in the Pacific Northwest, though–they don’t mess around.  If you’re going to hike around here,...

I completed my first aquathon last week–you swim for a quarter-mile and then run a 5k–and I lived to tell about it!  The most hilarious thing to me is that it was such a small group competing (only 40 people), so it was quite clear that I was not, ahem, an expert with these things.  Moments before the race started, I was nervously texting my sister things like, “I can’t let them get to me” and “I’m just here to finish” and “I believe in myself.”  All this in the face of...

Let’s play a quick game of Never Had I Ever, shall we?   Until today, NEVER HAD I EVER…   1)  Run a 10k. This morning, I ran the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Shore Run.  It’s a race I had been planning to run for a couple months and had started to train for a bit last month.  The event offers both a 5k and a 10k, and I had decided I wanted to do the 10k to get ready for the other events I am planning to do this summer.  In the past few weeks, I threw all training efforts out the window...

Getting back into climbing is like getting back into anything, I suppose.  You decide you’re going to do it and you throw yourself back into it.  You lower your standards for your performance and you cut yourself some slack and you just try.  Or at least that’s what I do. A new bouldering gym opened near my house and it’s changed my Seattle life for the better.  Climbing is a sport that has challenged me to get over myself and truly just try.  I had gone climbing several times in the last several years, but I really started...

There’s only one way to say it, folks:  I’m nervous.  I am now one week away from the Black Diamond sprint triathlon and I’m nervous.  I’m very excited, of course, but excitement is a familiar emotion for me.  I think I’ve grown increasingly excited since the day I printed off my training guide.  But now I’m getting nervous. I just have to get it out there in the open and say that I had a really horrible run yesterday.  Here it is, a week before Race Day, and I had a horrible run.  I’ve been getting faster and...

This morning marks two weeks until the Black Diamond Multi-Sport Weekend here in the Seattle area.  I decided to participate in this sprint triathlon about two months ago, after attending the Sports and Diabetes Group Northwest summer workshop.  I was so inspired by the people I met that evening and so determined to overcome my own feelings of fear that I jumped on my computer and found the infamous Course Description page.  After reading and rereading the paragraphs of euphonious terminology describing the planned course, I was...

Every person I have met who has diabetes has a diagnosis story.  And every person I have met who has diabetes has vivid memories of this incident.  Since I was recently diagnosed and am just entering the diabetes community, I feel as though I’ve told my diagnosis story more often than any other story I’ve told in my life.  The people I meet are often eager to share their diagnosis stories with me and our connection is made over the shared experience of the simple blood test and doctor’s statement.  Focusing on my diagnosis...

View from the top of Norumbega Mountain In terms of health, vacation means different things to different people. Some people see vacation as a time to indulge their food cravings and not worry about exercise. Others use the break in routine as a stimulus to change unhealthy habits. When I went with my family on our annual vacation in Maine last week, my goal was to get exercise (which I figured would somewhat counterbalance any unhealthy eating I did end up doing). I didn’t think this would be a challenge. Where we stay, on Mount...