Re-Introduction:
It has been a while since I last wrote, and quite a lot has happened. My absence has been largely due to family issues and a Masters degree, but I have been coaching through it all and the lessons I have learned are worth sharing. I will be trying to update this blog on a monthly basis and I will concentrate on the improvements I have made on my own coaching over the past two years. I will also provide some commentary on nutrition, health, and finding balance as an athlete and a coach.Health and Family
My wife and I are both runners. We ran in high school on Cross Country and Track teams and we met on the Cross Country team at Humboldt State University. As is the case with most runners, we thought of ourselves as being generally healthy; at least healthier than most people we met. We ate our veggies and stayed away from too much fat. We ate a lot of ice cream, but we were always told it was OK because we would run it off. Our concern when it came to nutrition was not getting fat, which, to this day, seems to be the societal norm. We never really put eating into the same category as health, other than the obvious rules of not eating too much sugar, not drinking too much alcohol, and not eating large amounts of fat. We were a healthy couple... or so we thought.In the winter of 2009, our whole concept of health was flipped on it's head when my wife was diagnosed with stage-3 Hodgkin's Lymphoma. She had a tumor the size of a football crushing her right lung and starving her body of resources. When we first got over the immediate devastation of the diagnosis and looked at treatment options (there was only one offered to us: chemotherapy and radiation) we began to ask the obvious question: How the hell could this have happened? There was no family history, no drug abuse, not alcohol, no exposure to a toxin, and no warning sign. We thought about all of the possibilities and any possible radiation source and then it finally dawned on us... it had to be the food.
We are both scientists by trade, so we started to research. In all fairness, she did more than me, but I was trying to hold our family together and make sure our two young children (1 and 4 at the time) were not going to be too traumatized. All of the research pointed to the simple fact that "you are what you eat." That sounds cliche, but it is very true. We began looking at the nature of preservatives versus the benefits of eating fresh, local produce. We explored GMO vs. Organic. We even looked at ionized water and the importance of maintaining a proper internal pH.
I will share some of our findings in future posts, but for now, let me just say that it was worth it. The changes we have made due to our reeducation in nutrition have changed our lives. We are healthier than ever and we have two sons that we feel are headed toward lives where they will not be subject to the lies and malnutrition championed by our country's leading food producers.
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