Thursday, May 31, 2012

Diets

Women know it all too well, and men know by sitting by and watching females endlessly fret. Diet. There are many different motivations to starting a diet. People start diets to lose weight, lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar, all kinds of things. In my opinion, that's why a lot of 'diets' fail. Most people look at diets as temporary, when to really affect long term change. Then there's the whole genre of 'crash' and 'fad' diets, short sprints of depriving yourself of essential nutrients and calories to expedite short term results. When many people consider diets, they don't think about lifelong change.

I'm no saint in any of this... I've adhered to the traditional american diet almost all of my life and, due to a luck of the draw genetically and a fairly active lifestyle, have managed to stay pretty small in size. Now that I'm in my twenties, the affects of what you put in your body are actually a tangible concept. It goes so much deeper than eating more vegetables, or counting calories. Everyone knows: You are what you eat. In that case, how can you know what you are if you have no idea what's in your food, where it comes from, and what it's doing to your body? Now, this isn't an entry ranting about diets or organics, and the downfalls of modern agriculture... Goodness knows there's enough of those resources out there. This is more of a declaration of starting a new facet of my own nutritional evolution.

Something that I've been hearing a lot about lately is something called Paleo. For a brief overview, check out this site: http://hunter-gatherer.com/blog/get-ready-2011-paleo-challenge . A lot of the concepts behind it are concepts that I've come to really support, and have already integrated into my life. Tomorrow, June first, eill mark the start of an official switch over to Paleo. The hardest part for me will be cutting out grains I suppose, because it's insane how many things grains and grain derivatives are used in. Everything else should be pretty straight forward. After the first month, I may make a few changes, because I have a feeling that when July rolls around, I will be sorely missing cheese. I've been looking, and there are a lot of ways to make bread out of almond and coconut flour(two products I've never even heard of, but cannot WAIT to try!). There are so many new avenues of cooking and some fun ways of recreating dishes that I'm excited to learn.

Overall, I think I'm most excited to see how I feel after a month of this. I'm excited to make a shift that makes sense on every base level of my understanding and beliefs in nutrition. There's no doubt in my mind that this will be hard. I'm going to get frustrated, and I'm going to want to cave. Hopefully I can find some delicious new recipes to help keep me distracted. Take this as a little bit of a disclaimer... Food will be a common subject I touch on in entries over the next month, so I apologize ahead of time... Bear with me :-) I promise to only talk about food and complain about cravings at the end of posts with awesome content about hiking, skydiving, and maybe even a little rock climbing! Later gators.

-Steph

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Tracking


So this last weekend officially wrapped up the 2012 high school track season. Overall, when the points were tallied and the vans to State were being loaded, it wasn't a highly successful season. Five total competitors this year. Less than half of what we've taken in the last 10 years. As always though, I never really rely on scores by the end of the season. Being my third year coaching with this team, there are kids graduating and leaving high school that I have had the pleasure of watching grow and mature both as athletes and as people. In my book, that's always a success. I had no seniors at the pole vault this year, but that won't stop me from missing the other graduating kids from our team.

Saying goodbye to the Seniors is always bittersweet, but it's the circle of life as a high school track coach. Every year we introduce new freshman, and do our best to shape them over a four year period. All the ups and downs of this season are in the past now and the next step is to look to the future. Time to take a little space for myself, and reset before next season.

Skydiving is always a little slow in the Spring. My hours at work are a little cut back due to track, but mostly in the pacific northwest, it's due to the weather. Springtime is yucky and cloudy. I love the rain because it gives western Washington the lovely green landscape that I get to fly over every weekend, but I hate that it mostly comes out of clouds that sit below 3000 feet. I was able to do a skydive a little while ago called a 'tracking dive'. Normally, tracking is used to create separation between skydivers that have been flying in formations. Creating distance is very important for safety before deploying your parachute. Everyone and their brother nowadays have seen videos of wingsuiters and base jumpers, and marveled at how they soar around the sky with ease; like a bird or more commonly, 'flying squirrel'. Tracking requires the same body position, but without the suit. Forward drive is incredibly enhanced, and jumpers flock together, akin to birds. I did my first one, and it went a lot better than I had expected. It of course wasn't perfect, but I didn't screw it up... which is all one can hope for when attempting something new. I can't wait to do more! Here's two pictures from my tracking dive. No doubt, I will have a lot more to come later this summer. I'm the uppermost person in both pictures: Pink parachute container, with the grey/navy/yellow jumpsuit... and hiking boots ;-)



The end of Track couldn't have come at a better time for me. The jump season is gearing up to go into full swing, and the snow is really starting to melt off of all the higher elevation hikes I have been looking forward to all winter. I got a new overnight hiking pack, and hopefully I'll be able to spark some motivation in friends with similar interests to want to tag along into the wilderness with me. I, for one, know I need it. There has been a lot of pressure sitting on my shoulders the past few months, and this week the straw that broke the camel's back was finding out that the person I've been seeing for the past twoish months really felt no emotional connection to me. As hard as it is to hear, all I can do is look to tomorrow. Dwelling on it won't change anything, and as much as it hurts, I need to separate myself from the whole situation. You may call it running, but I call it TRACKING. Create separation to protect yourself, and deploy. Fly your canopy to the ground, and live to jump again. 

In the spirit of summer, I encourage you to do the same. Shake off not only what makes you unhappy, but people that aren't made happy by you. Create some separation, and spend some quality time with yourself. Find out the wonderful things, and feel proud that you know them. Feel sorry for people who can't see those things in you and truly appreciate them. If you aren't what makes them happy, then they really aren't worth your energy because you can't force a blind man to see. So bask in the sun, and soak up every adventure you can muster.

-Steph